Catherine Reviews Books: Updated Weekly

10.13.19

I am going to start reading more; my goal is a book per week and my system towards that end is to listen to fewer podcasts and read on my commute instead. I will be posting brief descriptions about each book in this post. It might be fun to look back on in a year and remember all of the books I have read. To build up momentum, I will first discuss books I have read in the past few weeks. After the first two books, it'll become those books I have read since today. 

 

1. The Spiritual Gardener: Insights from the Jewish Tradition to Help Your Garden Grow - written by Andy Becker and illustrated by Abigail Drapkin. 

This book was awesome! 5/5. Inspired me to start a garden in the hypothetical future. A lot of fun stories about garden mishaps, like feeling that your wife is being wasteful with all of her catalogs but then getting into seed catologs so much that you become just as wasteful. 

 

2. The Science of Monsters: The Origins of the Creatures We Love to Fear by Matt Kaplan

This book was wonderful as well. 5/5. It made me remember how much fun learning new things can be. One of the reviews called it a "guilty pleasure," which I object to vehemently, since the book was really educational and entertaining and I don't know why you have to feel guilty about that. Interesting things about how early people would go through underground passages with torches, and then they would enter an area with a lot of methane, and then their torch would ignite the gas and cause a huge blaze that filled the whole room, and they'd run out scared and think that the sound of the blaze was a roar and hypothesized that a dragon had breathed fire and caused it. 

 

3. How to Talk so Little Kids Will Listen: A Survival Guide to Life with Children Ages 2-7 by Joanna Faber and Julie King

This book is absurdly good, 5/5. It's a parenting book that talks about the normal pitfalls that adults fall into when talking to children, and it describes tools to communicate with them effectively. It also has fun cartoons. It made me feel nervous imagining having children before reading the book and talking to them in all the wrong ways. You shouldn't say "Bad girl! You shouldn't hit your sister." You should instead avoid labelling your kid and say "Sisters aren't for hitting!" giving them information. Later you should acknowledge their feelings, saying that it must be frustrating when their sister steals their toys, and then you should brainstorm ideas together for what they can do in the future in a similar situation, like roar into a pillow. You can also help them make amends, asking them what would make their sister feel better. Then they make her a paper flower. 

 

4. But Is It Art?: An Introduction to Art Theory by Cynthia Freeland

This book is really good, really informative. Some of the chapters are make you feel defeated and sad. One was about how private markets corrupt arts, like how there's basically a few really rich people who buy art and control who's famous or not; another was about how women have just been maligned forever in the art world and there was this one textbook used in every arts history course called "The History of Art" that was supposed to be a definitive history and literally did not mention any female artists. For the money chapter, there were some cool artists featured including Ann Hamilton, who created an exhibit called privation and excesses with hundreds of thousands of pennies covered in honey, and J.S. Boggs, who paints really detailed currency with some easter eggs included and then buys stuff with them and then buys back the counterfeit bills and hangs up the recept and original money in the galery. 5/5. 

 

5. 1001 Ways to Take Initiative at Work by Bob Nelson

This is an interesting book. It includes 1001 little stories about people going above and beyond their job duties. It is a little grating at times, just relentlessly valuing the needs of the company and client above the employee's. Like it highlights a waitress whose client ordered an item that wasn't on their menu, and the waitress got it for him ayway from the local Dairy Queen. I've given into unreasonable demands from clients in the past as well, and it doesn't feel great. It feels better than the alternative I guess, but it doesn't really stack up as the pinnacle of life achievements. It's not a feel good moment I look back on, thinking about how a client called up reception and demanded that we make this really dumb change to their document within the next 2 hours, "time is ticking," so I ended up spending the next hour doing the revision myself and uploading it for him. It made me get behind on all of my other clients. The client was pacified, so by this book's standard, this anecdote would be worthy of inclusion. However, it just made me feel kind of demeaned and undignified, like a dancing monkey. There's another story about a governer who announced he wanted to balance the state's budget by laying off hundreds of state workers, saving $460 million, and then this government worker took initiative and uncovered an accounting wrinkle that entitled the state to get reimbursed at a much higher rate than it had been--to the tune of $489 million. So they closed the budget gap and had a surplus of $29 million and the governor was really grateful for her and awarded her with $10,000. And it's like, holy moly, that story needs to be unpacked. 

My favorite story was this one: 

"While working at Wang Laboratories in Billerica, Massachusetts, Patricia Stimpson, a softward development engineer, longed to find more significance in her life. Says Stimpson, "Life had to have a deeper purpose than my job and raising children. I was feeling a hollowness; part of myself was not feeling fully developed. I was using my brain; I was a new mother, but part of me was not being enriched." In response, Steimpson began to explore her spiritual values--love, peace, oneness, collaboration rather than competition. As a result, while still working full time for Wang, she started a successful new business named Abundance, which taught adults about spiritual living."

The juxtaposition is really striking here: her deep ennui vs. hey, start a business! It's not enough to be spiritually enlightened on your own; you have to also run a successful business to prove that it worked. This happened in one of Dale Carnegie's books as well-- the man found solace in the bible verse about having faith the size of a mustard seeds, but that wasn't enough apparently. He needed to also come up with a bracelet with a mustard seed encased inside and market it and sell it and make millions of dollars. There just seems to be no end goal that's worthy other than money, but money is self-evidently not worthy, since it is not an end in itself but just used to get other things. Maybe it's like the story of Job. In scripture class we learned that in the earlier versions of the story, Job got all his stuff taken from him and is upset at God, and then the resolution of the story is that Job realizes that God has unlimited power, has a revelation about the true nature of God, and that's enough. In the later version, however, it's added that Job gets all of his stuff back and in fact gets 2x as much wealth. So there's an idea that the first and true revelation would be the woman understanding spiritual values. Then, almost as an addendum, money comes from it. So maybe the idea is that it would've been sufficient to have the true revelation, but in order to make laypeople understand that it's good, they need to highlight the money aspect as well. Maybe there's also an idea that once you reach enlightenment, money just flows to you really easily without you particularly caring. To those who have much, more will be given. 

So the book was overall pretty interesting. It wasn't without reflection on the ideology of work, but it wasn't an explicit reflection either. It has to know that all of its endless anecdotes end up provoking questions like, is this what it's all for? Is it really that great that this person took initiative and then became the vice president at the company? What does it all mean? 4/5. 

 

6. Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg

 

This book was awesome. I was expecting it to be bad based on all the criticism it got, but it was just really good and informative. I am glad I read the book because it cleared up a lot of misconceptions I had about working with children and how impossible that seemed. I had previously developed a 10/10/10 plan, for 10 years in the workforce, 10 years at home raising babies, and 10 years back in the workforce (presumably until I die rather than just 10 years, but it's less depressing to round down). But the book made me re-think that plan. It talks about how women often prioritize the future potentialities of children over their current career, so they'll not take a promotion or switch jobs because they're thinking about having a baby soon and are worried they won't be able to handle the extra responsibilities of the job on top of raising babies. However, this makes women less excited about their jobs because they're not stretching themselves and not getting the recognition they've earned. Then, when they have the baby, they're more likely to drop out of the workforce entirely, since they're dissatisfied with their job. If they had taken a position they were excited about, then they would want to go back into the workforce. So they end up clipping their wings pre-emptively. She also talked about just the drastic discrepancies in labor participation rates for women vs. men in their 40s. Some of that is because women who may have taken a couple years off see a real drop off in the quality of opportunities since employers don't like gaps on people's resume, so the women figure they'll just do part-time positions or no positions at all. So it made me think that taking 10 years off would be extremely risky, and maybe the reason I'm attracted to the idea of taking 10 years off is just because I don't like my job. I also think there's an element of just following my mom's model: working, taking 15 years to raise kids, then working again. The book also cites research that you're not damaging your kids if you don't stay at home with them, so it wouldn't be necessary for me to stay home for that reason either. 

Some fun facts include that Betty Friedan didn't like Gloria Steinem and refused to shake her hand. Also, Sheryl Sandberg talks about how the culture at Google in the beginning emphasized working extremely long hours. She would be in the office 7am-7pm and still be on emails constantly. Then, after she had a baby, she wanted to be home for dinner so she started being in the office from 9-5:30. To prevent people from judging her for not working more, she did her best to obfuscate when she actually arrived and left work. She'd wake up at 5am and send emails from home, and once she'd get to work, she'd wait until the coast was clear before walking across the parking lot so no one would see that she was just arriving, and then towards the end of the day, she'd make sure that she'd have meetings scheduled in different buildings so when people saw that she wasn't in her office after 5:30 they'd assume she was at a different building. But then she got bolder and ended up just telling people she leaves at 5:30. This is an example of setting effective boundaries, since the employer is going to keep piling work on top of you until you say stop, so you need to actively say stop instead of working until you get so burnt out that you quit. She talks about workers who quit from burnout even though they still have vacation days left. Another fun fact is that she and Mark Zuckerberg sought to give each other honest feedback so they scheduled weekly talks where they would speak frankly with each other about what was working and what wasn't working. 

Another detail is that when she was ranked the 4th most powerful woman in the world by Forbes, it made her feel incredibly embarrassed, and when people would congratulate her, she'd immediately dismiss it and say that the article was ridiculous and it was absurd she was ranked higher than x, y, and z. Then a woman took her aside and said she needs to stop diminishing her accomplishments and should just say, "Thank you," when people congratulate her. Another detail is that she would sort of 'boss' her siblings around when she was little, so she displayed leadership tendencies from a young age. When I think about the tendencies I displayed when I was younger, what sticks out is liking to write, so I guess that's what I should pursue. I have been really dissatisfied with the rat race recently and angry that it's so hard to do what you want to do. I was thinking about weird work-arounds that would enable me to read and write without having a career, specifically becoming a nun, but maybe there are other ways. I have thought about this topic a lot and have come up with the following ideas: 1) during my 10/10/10 plan, squeeze all of my reading and writing in during the second part, as my husband supports me, 2) become a surrogate, which pays $50,000 per kid, so I could just birth a kid a year and have enough money to live on without working (the difficulty with that is you have to have at least one kid before the agency will consider you), 3) join a commune 4) become a teacher, and read and write during the summers, 5) follow in Ann Patchett's steps and become a freelance magazine writer, gaining a bunch of interesting experiences to write about, 6) follow in Steve Jobs' footsets and wander around India gaining interesting experiences to write about, 7) start a business, getting interesting experiences to write about. But this weekend, I've allotted more time to reading and writing and was able to finish two books in one day, so I think it is possible to read and write sufficient amounts with a full-time job. I do like reading books and sharing the things I learn with people, so I think it would be cool to do a Behind the Bastards type podcast. I am also aware that following your bliss can also entail going with the flow, so you can pursue one thing one day and another thing the next. It's interesting because school forces you to supress your natural interests in favor of the stuff they make you study and learn, but the rest of your life is just trying to recapture those initial interests in the hopes they'll bring you fulfillment and direction. But then you feel resentful for not having realized that life already started, so if you really liked painting as a kid, you could've probably just been a painter and done it then, and there are a bunch of painters now who are literal children so it's hard to catch up. 

Right now, I think I want to write more songs about how work sucks and crushes your soul. There's a song lyric that goes, "I'm starting to be where I need to be," and I wrote a kind of spin off that says "Why can't I do what I was put on earth to do," instead of finding dumb work-arounds and tricks to hoard money to allow myself the ~luxury~ to do what doesn't destroy my soul. I don't really care about being a female CEO or the president, but I do think writing would be cool and would probably still further the feminist agenda. I know that you should just create really good content of your own voalition without someone instructing you to do so and that's the only way anything happens. But it's hard to motivate yourself to do so and not feel like it's completely in vain. Another interesting thing from the book was about how princess stories instruct women to have tiara syndrome, where they should just passively wait to be rewarded for their work rather than reach out and fight for promotions. The advice that has been given to women of finding a mentor also feeds into this mentality, that they need to find a mentor (Prince Charming) and then they'll be on the path to excel. But really you have to excel first and then a mentorship will happen. 

 

6. Loserthink by Scott Adams

 

This is a really interesting book about the types of unproductive mental traps that we get caught in sometimes. When we get overwhelmed and don't know where to start, we often end up doing nothing, because we think what we will produce won't be perfect. But fortune favors action over inaction, so it's better to make very small easy steps toward your ultimate goal. Adams describes wanting to be a professional cartoonist in 1988, and having no idea where to start. His first step was to go to the store and buy paper and art supplies. That was all he did for that day. A little while later, he picked up the pens and started doodling with them, testing them out. Then he started setting his alarm 30 minutes earlier each day so he could have time to draw. The next year, he was able to successfully sell his cartoon. He says that he did do a lot of work to become a cartoonist, but on any one day, what he did was entirely manageable. I was just talking to someone who said that he ended up running a marathon in the same way. He had extra time one day, so he went for a run in the woods. He didn't overly exert himself; whenever he ran out of breath, he just slowed down and walked. He kept up the habit of running, and he said that once you strengthen to the point that you can run 3 miles easily, it's much easier to run longer and longer distances. The main difficulty with training is finding time rather than the pain of running itself. If you are sore one day, then just run the next day. Don't tire yourself out. 

I do like the idea that things should be fun and manageable. I like being productive, and sometimes I worry that if I'm not hustling 24/7 then I'm doing it wrong. But I also end up not actually begin productive because I'm too scared to start. So if I view it in terms of having fun, then that makes it a lot more appealing. 

 

7. The Happiness of Pursuit by Chirs Guillebeau

This one I read at the request of Nathan, since he wanted to know whether it was worth reading. I would say so! Solid 5/5. This book is about "finding the quest that will bring purpose to your life." It tells a bunch of different stories about people who came up with quests and carried them out. The author's quest was to visit all 193 countries, which he did over a period of a few years. Some naysayers were like, yeah anyone could do that, all you need is time and money. And the author was like, yeah anyone can do any of these goals. The point is not that the goal is impossible but that it's challenging and takes effort. 

The quests ranged in complexity and randomness. There was one man who was upset about an oil spill in the '70s so he started walking everywhere instead of driving. If he had to be somewhere 20 miles away, he would just plan his day around it. People would try to give him rides, and he would explain why he prefers to walk, and the people would say, "Oh, you think you're better than us?" And that wasn't the man's point but he wasn't sure how to convey the spiritual meaning of his quest without sounding like a judgment. He didn't think everyone should walk everywhere; it was just something he felt in his heart that he should do. So then, he added not speaking to his quest, to avoid the conflict that arose. He walked and remained silent for 17 years. There was another woman who protested logging protected forests by sitting on top of a tree for 1 year, and another woman who protested the use of lead bullets for hunters because bald eagles would eat the bullets and die. The hunters were like, "You're against hunting!" but she kept trying to explain, no just please hunt using non-lead bullets. I don't know why that was a hard concept to convey, but there you go. Other quests included knitting/crotcheting 10,000 handmade hats; going on 50 dates in all 50 states; cooking a full meal from every country in the world once a week; visiting every basilica in the U.S.; taking, editing, and publishing one million photos; and walking across the U.S. When the person completed walking across the U.S., they felt kind of annoyed because they liked the journey so much. 

The book was an interesting response to the existential question, "what does it all mean?" Answer: we create our own meaning, and you should pursue whatever random thing resonates with your soul. It also acknowledged that quests aren't for everyone, and lots of people are happy with more traditional lives. But for those that chafe at the limits society has placed, they may feel some relief by pursuing quests. The book notes that after the quest is completed, the usual course is to feel good for a while, rest, regroup, and then start a new quest. So it is a little absurd that the meaning of life is to complete something that isn't ultimately fulfilling once you've completed it, but we must imagine Sisyphus happy. 

 

8. Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? by Mindy Kaling

 

This book was really good. It was clearly in her own voice, so it felt like she was reading it to me as I read it. She quoted Steve Carell at one point and I could hear his voice too. She was saying how he never gossiped about anyone, and when he was with a group of people who were gossiping, the most he would say was, "Wow. If all they say about him is true, that is nuts." And then he'd go back to his trailer. So that's a cool way to avoid gossip, and it's cool to know that you can avoid it and it's fine to do so; it just makes you a nicer person. Another fun tidbit was that she suggested the all-female Ghostbusters reboot before it happened. 

The book did make me compare myself unfavorably to her and feel jealous and everything. She talks about being not popular in high school and says that it's good not to succeed in high school, because then you end up bringing it up and it just makes you seem like you peaked back then. So I was all onboard thinking, yes, okay, I'm still on track for success. And she talks about moving to New York and nothing really working out in terms of getting jobs, so she just worked as a babysitter for a while and then gets hired as an entry-level production assistant on this reality show about a psychic communing with the dead. Since she wanted to work as a comedy writer for Conan, it was a step in the right direction, but still far from what she wanted. Then she wrote a play with her roommate and the play became a huge success and won comedy awards, and from that success they had her write a television pilot that didn't end up getting picked up, and then she got a job as a staff writer on The Office. And all that happened by the time she was 24. So that was kind of demoralizing. 

Apparently there are millions of people who want to be comedy writers. I don't know what I want to do. I don't think I want to be a comedy writer; it doesn't appeal to me that much. The environment of the writers' room did seem kind of cool though--a bunch of people talking about funny hypothetical situations that might happen to the characters. But if I've never been super motivated to write fiction in the past, it's probably not my vocation. I don't know what my vocation is. I think it's to be a writer, but I'm not sure what kind. 

The book is from 2011, so another interesting thing that happened since then besides the Ghostbusters remake is that Will Arnett and Amy Poeler got divorced. She talks about their marriage as an example of kind of the ideal marriage, where both of them really like each other and they don't corner you at parties talking about how marriage is work and they're really miserable. Alas. 

 

9. Brida by Paulo Coelho

This book was pretty amazing. I think it would've been a good book to savor, but I didn't for whatever reason. I got this book because I wanted to re-read The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, but the library I was at only had Brida. There was a lot of universe imagery like Undone that I liked. The book was about a 20-year-old girl named Brida in modern day Ireland who wanted to learn magic from a 40-year-old teacher. Turns out they were soulmates, which in this cosmology means that they were once the same soul, and the soul divided during reincarnation. She learned the Tradition of the Sun, which is learning through the things around you, and the Tradition of the Moon, which is learning through occult stuff. There was a good part where she's looking at tarot cards in vain, trying to figure them out, but they aren't speaking to her because she's trying too hard to impose her meaning onto them. So her teacher talks to her about boring stuff over the phone, and her mind wanders, and the tarot cards start opening up to her and revealing their wisdom. 

I got on a Paulo Coelho kick while reading this book and listened to several interviews he did, one with Oprah. I learned a lot of cool stuff about The Alchemist, like the fact Oprah keeps it on her bedside table and how much of a phenomenon it was: Bill Clinton read it, Madonna read it, Will Smith read it, and they all kept telling other people about it and evangelizing about it. A good moment from the interview was when he said that he wasn't sure whether he wrote it or not; he was just a vessel through which the story flowed. He wrote it in two weeks. He's written a bunch of books besides The Alchemist, but he's okay that they're not as successful because The Alchemist was a once in a lifetime phenomenon. Oprah said the Michael Jackson had fears about how popular Thriller was and how he felt he'd always be chasing it, but sometimes you have to accept that a phenomenon happens that's almost outside of you, and it's okay that it doesn't happen again. Oprah says she feels that way about The Oprah Winfrey Show too. 

 

10. Autobiography of Death by Kim Hyesoon

 

This is a book of poetry by a Korean writer. The concept is 49 poems, a poem for each day that the soul is around on earth after death before being reincarnated. I had never heard of the 49 days idea before, but it seems to be a Buddhist concept. The final section had an interview with the author that explained a lot of the poems. I chose this book for this week because it was short and I wanted a quick read, but it really shouldn't have been consumed quickly, I don't think. I'll have to go back over it now knowing the context. For instance, many of the poems described atrocities from South Korea's history that I had no idea about. From the interview section:

"In April of 2014, a ferry carrying passengers and high school students going on a field trip to an island capsized. All of us, the whole country, couldn't take our eyes off the scene on TV of the slowly sinking ferry. The children had their life jackets on, so if they had been told to leave the boat, they could have survived, but instead the crew instructed them to stay in their cabins and then escaped themselves. The police that came to the rescue were helpless, and the government didn't do a thing and never investigated the tragedy."

So that's pretty upsetting. Just re-reading some of the poems opened up their meaning more, so I think I will do that in the coming weeks. 

 

11. Depression and Other Magic Tricks by Sabrina Benaim

This was a collection of poetry by a slam poet. I didn't know it was by a slam poet when I read it, but after I finished the book I watched her videos and they really changed how I heard the voice of the poems. The poems are all in lowercase so I thought they were quiet, but she projects very loudly and passionately in her videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqu4ezLQEUA. It was very relatable. 

 

 

To be updated next week!