simplerich

I just finished reading Hatchet: 20th Anniversary Edition as part of my read a lot more than I have been monkey. (Check out my Monkey list from a previous post if you don’t know what I’m talking about.)

‘All flying is easy. Just takes learning. Like everything else. Like everything else.’

When I started Hatchet I was immediately put in mind of Follow My Leader, another book along these lines. At their heart they’re coming of age stories. I read Follow My Leader in the summer of 1976 as part of a bicentennial summer reading program being put on by the town’s public library. Follow My Leader is the story of a boy who is blinded in an accident with a firecracker and how he learns to live with his new blindness. I walked around with my eyes closed for ages afterwards thinking I should learn to be blind just in case… That was a lot of years ago and I still remember how I felt about the kid in that book… that kid who was older than me at the time I read the book come to think of it. It’s a great book. I recommend it to any 8-14 year old boy… or older if you haven’t read it yet. (I’d say girl too, but I’ve no clue what girls that age read unless it’s Little House on the Prairie or My Darling My Hamburger having never been a girl.)

Hatchet is a book I wish I’d read around the same time as the Follow My Leader. It’s the story of a kid who’s little two person plane goes down in the Canadian bush while he’s on the way to see his dad. The pilot died of a heart attack was the problem initially. The only tool he had to survive with was a hatchet his Mom had given him before he left, and his brains. He learns to use his brains and survive until help came.

“I am full of tough hope.”

It’s not a long book, but the distance the boy goes from suicidal to survivor, and not just survivor, but more than he was when he got there is huge. I had a hatchet when I was a boy, and a river we used to camp at that felt about as remote as the Canadian Bush. If I’d read this before going it would have added a whole level to the camping trips as I would almost certainly have pretended to be crashed out there on that river.

One of the things about this book and about Ender’s Game is that it portrays kids as capable and intelligent. When I was the age Brian (that’s the protagonist’s name) was in the book I thought I was pretty smart. I think all kids do at all ages… I still do… some things we never grow out of I guess. I felt I was capable of more than I was allowed, and that’s probably a good thing. The sense that he could not die out there in the bush, that he was capable of dealing with what had happened, and not just survive, but thrive in a way. That’s a big part of both this book and Follow my Leader actually… it’s more than survival or dealing with the hand you’re dealt. It’s about coming out the otherside bigger than you were before. The word “survivor” has an intimation to it…

Survivor: To remain alive or in existence.

That’s not what either of these kids do in either book, or in Ender’s Game for that matter. They’re put in a situation, a bad situation and they don’t just survive. That’s the bare minimum people do every other day to make it to the end of the day. They came out the other side stronger than they were before, tempered like steel by being run through the crucible or forge of a bad experience. They don’t just come out the other side the same they went in but glad to have lived through it… that’s surviving, they came out better than they went in. They came out changed. They overcame. That to me is why Hatchet is such a great book. For a kid to read stories about survival is fine, but for them to read books where mere survival is not enough… where the protagonist can go through something awful and come out better than before, that shapes the reader’s mind in such a way that when they’re, we’re, I’m put in a a situation that looks insurmountable or terrible or overwhelming there’s already an expectation in my head that I don’t have to merely survive, but I can, with some hard work, luck, and tough hope, come out the other side better. It’s not enough to grip with your fingernails and hold on to the edge of a cliff for dear life waiting for help, hoping to get out the other side merely alive… but to pull yourself up  and stand on the precipice and look around you to see what you can do for yourself. That lesson, the lesson that we can be independently successful even in untenable surroundings, that lesson is one every kid should learn.

I’ve been incredibly lucky in my life in that I haven’t ever been struck blind by a fire-cracker. I’ve never crashed in a plane in the middle of the Canadian bush and been attacked by an insane moose. I’ve never been sent to Battle School away from my family to fight the buggers for the existence of the human race. None of that stuff’s happened to me and honestly, I’m OK with that… but the things that have happened to me, that have come along that weren’t all sunshine and roses… those things have helped make me who I am, which is more than a survivor, more than someone who merely “got through them.” I wouldn’t be who I am today if I hadn’t gone through those things, and even though they aren’t particularly pleasant to go through at the time, I don’t think Brian would say his stay at the lake in Canada with the bears and wolves and mosquitos was a vacation… I also don’t think I would want to change any of them. If I did I wouldn’t be me, and I like who I’ve become.

Any kid out there could stand to learn the lesson that adversity doesn’t have to be just lived through, but can be used as the fire that tempers the soul, turning it from the fragile, brittle thing it can be in our insecurities to a tougher thing, a stronger thing that can not just stand pressure, but spring back, pushing back the darkness, pushing back the tide, holding a light up saying, as Brian did in the book:

Come on, he thought, baring his teeth in the darkness—come on. Is that the best you can do—is that all you can hit me with—a moose and a tornado? Well, he thought, holding his ribs and smiling, then spitting mosquitoes out of his mouth. Well, that won’t get the job done. That was the difference now. He had changed, and he was tough.

I loved Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother. I recommend it to everybody who will listen. So, when I saw For the Win was out at a Borders near where I live I snatched it up in hardcover to donate to a library and I downloaded a copy for myself to read. Cory believes that he can give his stuff away and still make money. He believes the biggest danger to a writer isn’t someone stealing his work and reading it… that it’s nobody reading him at all. So, he gives his stuff away as well as selling it.

Anyway. I donated the book without reading it. I’m glad I didn’t put my name on it. There. I said it.

Here’s the thing. With Little Brother I knew what the problem was. I knew there had to be some resolution. I had some characters I cared about to focus on and I knew the desired outcome and what I didn’t want to happen to them. I was engaged in them and in their story. In For the Win there are a lot of characters. I haven’t really cared about them much at all. I can’t remember the name of the one I cared most about so that’s no good. And the problem? The problem is life isn’t fair. That’s the problem in the story as I saw it. How is that going to be fixed? It’s not. Life ISN’T fair. I’m three-quarters of the way through the book and I shouldn’t do the review until I finish the book. It’s unfair of me to review it before I’m done with it. The thing is. I’m done with it.

I can close the book right now without knowing what happens to any of the characters in the story and I won’t wonder about it later. The book is about the economies in online games. I LOVE online games. I won’t lie. I even bought gold once in Everquest (EQ). I played Everquest 1 & 2, World of Warcraft, Asheron’s Call, Star Wars Galaxies, and another one… I can’t remember the name. I didn’t play long. I played a lot of them. EQ for years! I was guild leader of a decent guild that’s still around I believe, years and years later. I invested five years in that game. Loved it. I got the economy. I understand it and how it worked. Cory didn’t want to step on any IP toes (Intellectual Properties) when he was writing the book so the games are weirdly named, Mushroom Kingdoms and things like that… that’s fine… I get it. Don’t want to incriminate an existing game and get them breathing down your neck.

Except he put them as products made by Coca Cola. Really? You dodge one bullet by making up weird game names, but then you invoke one of the most iconic names in the world as the parent company? It made the made up game names more distracting. Had he simply named them Megacorp it would have been less distracting to me. It really jerked me out of the book, the made up names interlaced with real parent company names served as a distraction, a focal point that shattered my immersion into the book-reality.

Last thing, and this is something I wouldn’t notice in a hard cover book. Cory did this in Little Brother and I read it in dead tree format and listened to it in Audiobook and I didn’t notice it. Each chapter starts with a dedication to a book store. That’s cool. In a novel I can skip that part. In the digital version, reading it on the kindle it was harder to skip, scanning was an issue so I wound up reading more of it than I wanted to. That’s a limitation of the kindle more than of the book. Here’s the thing though. I don’t care. I know that makes me a jerk, but reading about why a particular book store is special to someone is like listening to a guy on the bus explain to you why Freebird is the ultimate in anthems and it really means a lot to him “because of the really wicked shit I was going through when I heard that song for the first time you know what I mean man?” I do know what you mean man… and I still don’t like Freebird! My favorite southern rock song is The Three Great Alabama Icons by Drive By Truckers. (I grew up from ’68-’81 in Southern Alabama around the time the writer’s of this song were in Northern Alabama.)

I love book stores. There’s an excellent used book store in Southaven, Mississippi that I miss deeply, but unless you’re IN Southaven you don’t care about it is my guess. And if you are, and you’re a reader… you probably already know about it. They did a pretty brisk business.

Would I recommend this book? No. I wouldn’t, and I’m sorry about that too. I love Cory Doctorow’s blog and many of his other books. Seriously, Little Brother is in my top 5 and that’s saying something! But this one… it just missed on too many things. I didn’t care about the characters, the gaming part didn’t ring true, 3/4 of the way through I didn’t know what I was supposed to be reading/caring about. I didn’t know where he was going. I didn’t know where the characters were going, and I just didn’t care. And on a stylistic note… what the hell was with the chin waggling? Dear Lord!?!? Everybody was waggling their chin all the time. It was so distracting every time it would happen I’d look up and look around. I’ve STILL not seen anybody waggle their chin except for one guy, in India I think while watching Eat, Pray, Love. I’m not sure he didn’t have something in his teeth.

If you read the book and finish it and the ending of the book is worth it… can you shoot me an e-mail? I’ll finish it and edit this to reflect my mistake in stopping too soon as well as issue an apology for reviewing a book I didn’t finish.

The Levity Effect: Why it Pays to Lighten Up by Adrian Gostick and Scott Christopher was sent to me recently to review and I asked people on twitter how they felt about my reviewing books sent me for free. The consensus was as long as I fessed up to it then there was no harm done. This is me copping to getting a freebie and enjoying it.

I’m reading The Levity Effect: Why it Pays to Lighten Up and listening to Brain Rules from audible at the same time and they’re surprisingly related. I’ll cover Brain Rules later. For now The Levity Effect is being reviewed. It was good. I enjoyed it. It’s a book that will be enjoyed, I believe, by people who already believe what it’s saying. I don’t know that the people who don’t believe it will be persuaded by the book. It’s not that there isn’t enough evidence suggested in the book. It’s just that it’s not terribly persuasive. As such I think it will mostly preach to the converted. I can’t, for example, see my boss reading it and embracing it. That’s now how he does things stylistically. That’s not fair. He does try.

One of the things the book does work hard to point out is the difference between fun and funny and it’s a good distinction. It can be fun at work without someone having to be funny. Fun is not the same as funny. It’s been said at my work that if one enjoys their work then their work will be fun, not fun like volleyball fun, but fun as in “I enjoy what I do and feel fulfilled doing it” fun. I totally see that and agree with it, but that doesn’t mean a little silliness doesn’t have its place at work. According to a lot of the research presented in The Levity Effect the bottom line is always better if people are enjoying themselves at work. Morale is up, people are more productive, and turn-over goes down… how is this not persuasive? I don’t know.

My favorite part of the book is where they discuss how important fun is as a measure of the strength of a relationship. Trust, Communication, and Creativity are all increased by the precepts put forward by The Levity Effect. That part was a surprise to me, but the truth of it came to me as I read it. The people I was most comfortable with and most trusted were the people I was most able to joke around with. I’d never put that together before. I use humor to establish relationships and maintain them.

The list of things to do that help introduce levity also look as if they would be good for team building and morale building. They don’t expressly say that, but people who have fun together I think will perform better together. If you’re a person who believes that work is something that we do an awful lot of and so it should be fun because we’re doing it a lot you should read this book. If your boss tries it then leave this book laying around where the boss will see it. Maybe he’ll give it a read. If your boss is a reader let them read it. It’s a good book. I don’t know how persuasive it is, again, it persuaded be because I already bought into it.

If you’re a manager and you want to be a more effective manager this book will help. Please though, don’t forget you have an HR department. Read the back portion of the book. Remember that mean isn’t funny, and the authors are spot on when they warn that if you’ve got to start a joke with “I hope nobody’s offended but…” or end with “just kidding” then you probably shouldn’t say it. Those things are typically not a good idea. This book is a good idea, after the recession we’ve been in lately and the grim news about it and the cost cuts and lay-offs many companies have been through I’d say it’s a book whose time has come.

“I will believe it a good comfortable road untill I am compelled to beleive differently”
~Meriwether Lewis’ Journal via
Into the Unknown: Leadership Lessons from Lewis & Clark’s Daring Westward Expedition.

Into the Unknown by Jack Uldrich talks briefly about Lewis & Clark’s expedition, but the focus is what leaders can learn about Lewis & Clark themselves both from their writings in their copious journals and notes and from their actions. I can say they were interesting men and the book has piqued my interest in them to the point where I will probably read a more bibliographical book to get a more complete story about them. It was published in 2004 and I’m surprised I didn’t hear of it sooner. I discovered it while looking for kindle books. I’m glad I did.

I started with a quote from Meriwether Lewis’ journal. After cresting the first of a range of mountains, and expecting to find a river leading down into a land of milk and honey he saw mountains as far as the eye could see, and no easy going. His response wasn’t to give up, wail or despair… it was to marvel at the beauty before him and to expect the road ahead to be an easy one until it proved otherwise. This optimism of Lewis & Clark’s is credited with being a primary reason they succeeded.

But as optimistic as they were, and they were, in the face of overwhelming odds, they planned extraordinarily and didn’t count on wishful thinking or the power of positive thinking to solve their problems for them. They packed a 200olb steel shell to make a boat with in anticipation of needing it. (It didn’t work out and they abandoned it… discarding ideas that didn’t work when it became apparent they wouldn’t work. New Coke anyone?)

My biggest takeaway from Into the Unknown: Leadership Lessons from Lewis & Clark’s Daring Westward Expedition was to plan exceptionally, proceed confidently, and believe unflinchingly in your success. I suspect this was my takeaway because this is how I strive to comport myself in my daily life. I confess to slipping at it at times. Sometimes my optimism bulb dims a bit. Sometimes I tend to see the shadows rather than the light, and sometimes, when I’m tired, I forget that I’m not alone and that I’ve got the help of friends, co-workers, and a support system out there willing to help if all I do is ask and trust them to help me.

The book itself has lots of lessons from the expedition which is exactly what it advertises itself as. What it doesn’t have is concrete, memorable examples of how to directly apply the lessons to real life. OK. That’s not fair what I did there. I added the word “memorable” because I can’t remember any of the examples they gave. I know they gave some. But what they mostly did was talk about the character of the men who were Lewis & Clark and how that relates to leadership on the whole.

Remembering I don’t know much about the men I’d like to stress that this book was written by a person who liked and respected the men. It’s possible they did things that others would like to talk about badly, he didn’t free his slave right away when he returned from the expedition for example, but I’m not interested in hearing about or studying famous men’s faults. I’ll assume they had some. I’ll assume that the men in the party had some. The part where they kept coming down with VD tells me they weren’t saints. I get that. Please… nobody take an opportunity in the comments to post some sort of Lewis & Clark expose of how they were Expansionist White Men who were only great by trampling minorities and blah blah blah. That’s a different book. The one I reviewed made mention of some of this stuff, but it wasn’t the focus and wasn’t intended to be.

Starship: Mutiny and Starship: Pirate by Mike Resnick were books one and two in a series. I’m a big fan of space opera. I thoroughly enjoyed Dune, and include it in my list of books I would take to a deserted island. E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensmen series was hugely influential. The Honor Harrington Series by David Weber is also one of my favorite series ever. I like strong characters and bigger than life conflict. I’m a sucker for lantern jawed heroes who are almost super-human in their abilities.

Starship: Mutiny introduced us to a military man who was too smart for his own good… too smart for the military. He kept getting in trouble and demoted twice for doing great heroic things that showed off his genius while rubbing his chain of command in how much smarter he was than them. I could totally identify with that. After all, I’m a genius right? Just ask me. I’ll tell you. And, as in the book… I will go on to explain over and over again why my reasoning is right, why my compatriots should trust me, why everybody else is stupid, and why, in painstaking detail both before, during, and after, my plan will succeed. Wait. No, that’s not me. That’s the protagonist of Starship: Mutiny, Wilson Cole. By the end of the first book I was really tired of hearing him explain himself over and over again. I get it… you’re smarter than everybody else. So was Lazarus Long and everybody on the Gay Deceiver (Deety, Zebediah, Jacob & Hilda) but Heinlein didn’t constantly beat me up with it. He let them ACT intelligently without constantly blowing their own horn.

Wilson Cole came across not intelligent and witty and urbane. He came across over-bearing and arrogant. That was the first book, which I mostly enjoyed. I don’t mind arrogant that much if there are other redeeming qualities. By the time I got to the second book, Starship: Pirate I was tired of the arrogance and tired of how Resnick used the supporting characters as foils for Wilson Cole. I felt like he, Resnick, could have allowed the other characters to have a brain too. Every time a decision had to be made in book two there was an argument where the supporting characters fought with Wilson Cole only to have him bulldoze them into accepting his way of doing it and in every case he was right. Seriously… if they’re that stupid why would he be friends with them?

The head of security, Sharon Blacksmith, isn’t just a strong woman who is head of a hugely strong security department and who is incredibly competent at her job and amazingly smart at her job is, for some reason whenever she gets around Wilson Cole, a giddy slut who can only talk about the previous night’s sex and their future sex that they may or may not have depending on if they’re getting along at the moment. She does this all the time, in person, by hologram, in front of other members of the crew, just whenever Resnick needs to try and break tension. Instead of coming across flirty or flirtatious it comes across trashy and wrecks her character for me.

By the end of the second book in the series (Starship: Pirate) I was done with Wilson Cole and his supporting crew. I liked the story and really wish I didn’t hate the characters so much. I won’t read books 3, 4, or 5. This is saying a lot since I already bought book 3 on audible.com. I’d rather listen to nothing than subject myself to more of Wilson Cole bullying his “friends” and telling us how smart he is and how blind and unobservant his crew is.