I read voraciously.
Mostly I have at least
three books on the go at any one time, often four. One I’m currently wading
through is Surfaces and Essences
(Douglas Hofstadter & Emmanuel Sander) and finding it very hard to settle
in to. The sub title is ‘Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking’ and they
hypothesize that analogies are the key, THE key, to understanding human
intelligence. Don Norman, possibly the leading light for many years in the
drive for design simplicity, sums it up as, “The key is to recognize that
analogies and concepts are the same things ...” He says it’s, “easy to read,
but deep to comprehend,” but I think he has his adjectives contrapositioned.
That may be why Amazon have it discounted from $35 to $6.70!
I have books in storage in New Zealand and
Hong Kong, and since I came to Bali 12 months ago I have accumulated at least
another 58. “At least” because I have a weak habit of lending books and then
forgetting who I have lended them to. Goodbye book. It must be too early for my
brain (6.00 am) because I originally wrote “Good buy book”. True, indeed, but
not what I intended. And apologies for the “lended” but I’m writing offline in
MSWord and “loaned” made Bill Gates upset and produced a red wiggly line –
there it is again.
Anyways, ten books, eh? Easy. But wait, not
quite so fast there. Ten greatest books of all time? My ten favorite books? Ten
of the most illuminating, provocative, irritating, stirring?
Do they have to be books? Can they be
essays? Articles from Journals? Speeches? I adore Churchill’s speeches but his
writings fall short, I think. Difficult not to, I guess. Do they have to be
novels? Biographies ? I’m not an avid reader of biographies but I’ve noticed a
trend in my political collection which is disturbingly Conservative with a big
C: Ted Heath (sorry); Enoch Powell (did he really wish he’d been killed in the
War as he said?); and, hiding head in embarrassment, That Bloody Woman.
Another
one which could (and I hesitate to use the phrase given what is coming next), come
back and bite me on the ass, is Big Cyril.
You may know him as the grossly rotund Liberal ‘member’ (can’t resist these
puns) for Rochdale who, it turns out, was a fellow-traveller with Jimmy Savile.
Only with little boys though – Savile was AC/DC I think. Anyways, I like to
think Big Cyril was a friend; in the purely platonic sense, of course. He
signed my copy of his autobiography with something like, “Happy memories …
blah, blah, blah.” (It’s in storage!). Very embarrassing.
Fiction.
Fiction?
Fiction!
FICTION!
FICTION!
I just re-read Pete’s post and it says ten
works of fiction. Bugger. That scuppers my list. Checked back at the original
posts and one says “top ten books”, another “ten favorite books”. What-ev-er. Ke
sera sera. Looking through the titles I see my subjects matter includes magic,
mysticism, prayer, religion, philosophy and fantasy, so I’m sure someone will
interpret those as fiction.
I tend to go for language rather than
narrative. When I’m writing I will often stop and wander around the room or
house to allow the ‘correct’ word to find its way to the surface. If that
doesn’t work I put a place marker of XXXX’s and color them red so that they
don’t creep, unreplaced, into the final version. Invariably the following day
produces precisely the right word. And it has to be precise: I will rewrite
tens of tens of times before being satisfied.
Once, surprisingly, a word literally
‘popped’ into my head and it was precisely, exactly and miraculously the
correct one. I say miraculously because I have no recollection of ever
previously encountering it, let alone using it. If you’re interested, it was
transliteral. I had to look it up and it
was a perfect fit. Peter and Trini are probably its best friends but, for me,
it was a total stranger that serendipitously arrived in my time of need.
Unexpected, and asking no reward save that of being temporarily immortalized in
metaphorical ink.
Peter mentions opening sentences and they
do instantly set the scene, don’t they? Athole Still, who holds the dubious
distinction of being the only Glyndebourne opera singing/Sunday Times sports
journalist/ITV commentator/agent to Sven Goran Eriksson that I know, came up
with this: “One man knelt in prayer,
another vomited silently into a towel.” You’d think that was the opening to a
saga about a terminal event in a prisoner of war camp but, to quote the
immortal Shanks, “It’s much more important than that.” It’s a description of
the ‘ready room’ before the final of the men’s 100m freestyle at the 1968
Olympic Games in Mexico City. If you’re Scottish you’ll realize the import of
that.
Opening sentences are a fair-weather
friend. Sometimes they roll off the keyboard and the rest of the piece simply
follows in smooth step. Sometimes they achieve the dizzy heights of abject
mediocrity and the rest becomes drudgery.
John Le Carré does a good opening. In A Delicate Truth he tells us, “On the
second floor of a characterless hotel in the British Crown Colony of Gibraltar,
a lithe, agile man in his late fifties restlessly paced his bedroom.” Just
think about the choice of words: one sentence and the reader immediately knows
that if there is a lift, it’s probably not working. Or, if it is, then it is so
small that it won’t fit the man and his luggage at the same time, and it has
the sliding concertina, diamond shaped, expanding metal mesh doors that never
properly engage the lock and have to be manoeuvred into place. You just know
that the paint on the bedroom walls is old, peeling and beige; that the door
has a loose mortise lock - British standard (large) BS3621, even though that’s
not the norm for internal doors - and that it eschews plastic and demands a
real, metal key. You also know that the man’s clothes are loose fitting, not
particularly deliberately so but because he shops and dresses himself and he
hasn’t bothered to shop for quite some time.
Le Carré is a master.
How about this one: “One thing was certain,
that the white kitten had had nothing to with it:- it was the black kitten’s
fault entirely.” OK, now I’ve started my 10. Lewis Carroll’s second Alice book
is NOT a children’s book. It is a masterpiece of metaphor describing and
explaining nature, philosophy, evolution, religion, society, and, of course,
Carroll being Carroll (or Dodgson), mathematics. The black kitten is the Dark
Side, the white kitten is the Alliance; Evil, as opposed to Truth, Beauty and Goodness.
And the Dark Side is what provokes and evokes, triggers, the spin of the
evolutionary revolution. There are lessons for every profession in every line.
I have always recommended that Through
the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There be the first book swim coaches
read if they want to understand the transmogrification of human performance.
2. The second is Swimming Faster. ‘Ernie’ Maglischo produced a tripartite library
all on his own but this one, the first, was the best. His second book contains
some HUGELY misleading advice (later admitted and recanted by the author) and
the third is just a door-stop sometimes used for reference.
3. Harry
Potter, books 1-7: JK Rowling. The whole tale of the Boy Who Lived. Seriously;
I think it is one of the great literary feats of the last 100 years. The last
few books got longer and longer and tended towards boredom in parts but the
feat of ‘seeing’ the seven-year plot before she put pen to paper on book 1, is
astounding. There are things in book 7 which she set up in book 1. JKR, you
have my admiration and awe. Quidditch deserves to be an Olympic sport. Not sure
about the Robert Galbraith (her pseudonym) trilogy though.
4. The
Curve of Time: M. Wylie Blanchet. This is a remarkable book.
Autobiographical, by a recently widowed mother who takes her children on a therapeutic
yacht adventure off the northern coast of British Columbia, it somehow instantly
evokes the misty and mysterious, grey sense of eeriness that engulfs that
environment of its native-American owner-occupiers. By mid-way down page one
you are transported in both time and place. It’s not the same as Le Carré where
you can visualize the scene, for this book you become the scene. Truly
remarkable.
5. Signatura
Rerum. This book was written by Jakob Böhme (1575-1624). In some of his
portraits he looks uncannily like we think Shakespeare looked; have you noticed
that, across, generations there are people who look unbelievably like someone
from another generation? In other portraits he looks like an extra from Michael
Jackson’s Thriller video. Bohme, Boehma, Behmen hailed from Görlitz - part of
the Holy Roman Empire at the time, which presented him with some problems. His
trade was shoemaking. Legend has it, and I totally see his point, that a vision
of a beam of sunlight striking a pewter dish revealed to him the spiritual
structure of the Universe including the relationship between God and man, and
good and evil. Well, it would, wouldn’t it? If you knew what you were looking
for. Evil things were seen to have rebelled against God and God was intent on
righting wrong. Lewis Carroll would have taken him to his paedophilic bosom and
hugged him.
Böhme financed his writing by selling
woollen gloves. I intend not to read too much into that part of the story.
The title translates as The Signature of
All Things and he examines the very origins of existence, ascribing it to an
essential and purposeful energy permeating the Universe. His most famous books
are The SuperSensual Life and Aurora (shades of Harry Potter right there!) but
Signatura Rerum encapsulates all his other writings.
6. Contributions
from a Potential Corpse: Eugene Halliday. His godfather was Eugene Sandow,
a world famous circus strongman. Remember Bohme looking like Shakespeare? Well
this guy looked just like Galileo. In fact, knowing him as I was privileged to
do, I would venture to say he probably was Galileo reincarnated. Quite simply
the most impressive intellect I have ever encountered with a world model completely
tidied up and neatly stitched at the edges. His interpretation of the various major
and off-shoot religions combined their philosophies and beliefs in such a
simple, straightforward and logical manner that it made obvious that their
differences were, indeed, the black kitten’s fault entirely; a “world-view in
conformity with total reality.”
One of his hobbies was art and he used to ‘channel’
past lives and draw the portrait of the person. One of Jesus, “The Quickener”,
I have framed, as does Tom, and it is such a powerful image that some people
literally cannot look at it. Quickener indeed; the gaze burns straight into
your soul, accelerates your responses and actions, forces rapid emotional and
willful change and provokes the uncomfortable consideration of life-defining
decisions.
Hebrews 7:17 describes the Messiah as being “A Priest after the order of
Melchisedec.” The book is published by Melchisedec Press
so there you go.
Eugene’s purpose was to “make known ... the
results of thought rooted in the sonic geometry of the universe.” He describes
a Supreme Truth which is the “Substantial Formal Being and contents of the
Macrocosmic Logos, [embracing] all temporal and serial possibilities in one
Supreme eternal simultaneous actuality.” It’s heavy stuff but heavy lifting
makes you strong, doesn’t it?
Eugene posits five things for us to do which
will enable us to live the best life possible: exist, feel, think, understand,
and will. They have to be prioritized as written. However, he explains that we,
ourselves, are not our actions, not
our thoughts, and not our feelings so we are essentially free from
all constraints.
He describes a state of higher existence
which he terms reflexive self-consciousness and illustrates that by a drawing
of an archer drawing his bow with the arrow reversed so that the bowman gets
the full benefit of his aim. Lucky archer!
Symbolism formed a strong core to Eugene’s
teachings, and that’s where we go next.
7. One of my interests is graphical
displays and the ‘guru’ of this genre is a former Harvard professor of political
science, statistics and computer sciences, called Edward R. Tufte, pronounced
tufty. I used to have a lovely Persian cat called Tufty but they were not
related. The human Tufte self-published one book every seven years from 1983
onwards and they are masterpieces of information design, graphical display and
the art of publishing. Like most things communicative there was a significant
time-lag between his first book and the ubiquitous influence of his message. I
was in at the birth, buying my copy of his first book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, around the mid 1980’s.
He’s an arrogant s-o-b but also the leader of the PowerPoint is the Work of the
Devil movement so he can’t be all bad.
Good and evil: They have kept cropping up,
haven’t they? Harry Potter, Alice’s Looking Glass, Jakob’s Signature, Eugene’s
decomposing corpse, throw in The Holy Bible for good measure, and, of course,
all of Le Carré’s works, although most of the time you’re not sure which of his
characters are on which side of the moral fence. They all involve a fall from
grace, battle for supremacy, resistance by the good guys in white hats, the
good guys win and the fallen guy sees the light and repents. Someone should
write a screen play about it and call it Star Wars. Or Lord of the Rings. All the great stories contain the same plot.
That’s seven. Now I’m going to cheat. Most
of my books are in storage so I couldn’t search amongst the dusty shelves to
jog my memory. Ten was a hard number for recommendations which may change your
life. The 58 (at least) I bought since arriving in Bali are all business books
related to my University studies (ENDS ON SUNDAY!!!!!). I just counted and
eight of them are Steve Jobs based. Most ‘business’ authors are not actually businessmen
and they re-hash one, reasonably bright idea and recycle it time after time in
order to sell more books (John Kotter is a major culprit here). However a few
are worth considering, but not as ‘top 10 all-time literary efforts’.
Mindset:
How You Can Fulfill Your Potential, by Carol Dweck
describes some eye-opening research she has done in attitude and its effect on
success; Where Good Ideas Come From: The
Natural History of Innovation (Steven Johnson) examines “key patterns”
underpinning innovation and I’ve always had a thing for underlying patterns; Velocity: The Seven New Laws For A World Gone
Digital (Ajaz Ahmed & Stefan Olander) is a simple to read compendium of
a conversation between the authors as they discuss the world and its wife. My
favorite quote on planning and strategy is, “A Smith & Wesson beats four
aces.” True. Sad, but true.
I’ll lump them together as numbers eight
and nine. The cheating bit is, Water:
Elements of Swimming, Volume 1. The author is me. In no way does it achieve
the dizzy pinnacle of wonderfulness that the other books do, in fact it may
give you brain freeze. But I think it goes a long way to describing the
problems encountered by humans when they swim. If it does that job well it is a
first because no other books do. It’s yours for free: here.
Volumes 2-5 are “works in progress.”
-----
My favorite piece of my own writing is a
critique of a report commissioned on my behalf by a government agency in New
Zealand. These bureaucrats decided they could help our Olympic planning effort
by buying the time of a ‘data miner’ who had, “software that cost $100,000.”
How impressed were they! It was about 8-10 years ago and the poor guy took the
raw data I sent him and concluded that “men were faster than women” (I kid you
not), and that, “if you swam the last 5 meters of a race one second faster your
overall time would improve.” Trust me, I am not exaggerating, skewing the
interpretation or making it up. Those are exact quotes with no editing. The
rest of the report was equally worse.
My response took my well-honed sarcastic
skills to new heights. My ability to spy illogicalities and inconsistencies
found new levels of exposure. My cutting barbs slaveringly sharpened themselves
as they appeared on the screen and awaited their turn to be read and inflict
their deep, hopefully fatal wounds. I hope the data-mining guy never went down
his data-mines again. But I doubt that was the outcome. Never actually met him;
probably a good job.
