Posts about Books (RSS, JSON)

8AM — Journalist scholar Jeff Jarvis walks through the history of printing at breakneck speed, its technological foundation, and its impact on society as books, newsletters, and newspapers circulated across the globe. The reactions to this new technology and forms of publication were a litany of all too familiar complaints we’ve been hearing since the Web became popularised: The spread of lies, controversy-bread celebrities, the flood of mundane content.

We find ourselves at the beginning of a new digital parenthesis in which we move from a world where communication is dominated by print to one where communication is primarily digitally mediated. We are in the first stages of this development and therefore unable to understand what a new digitally dominated world will eventually look like once the dust settles. In print, truth and sanity mostly prevailed, eventually leading to the Enlightenment, modern scientific discovery, and democratic movements. And so, Jarvis’ argument goes, we should let the Web evolve, assuming the worthwhile ideas will win eventually despite all reactionary push-back.

But there is a difference between the early days of print and the early days of the web in which we currently find ourselves. In the early days of print, there were a large number of publishing houses in every country and many cities. The resulting diversity provided a shield from censorship of the church and ruling aristocrats so the better, more truthful ideas spread and prevailed.

On the Web, we have three to five websites, which account for the majority of global web traffic. And the leaders of the businesses behind these websites are susceptible to reactionary ideas and are pro-actively cosying up to autocratic regimes. It’s as if in the early days of print there were only five publishing houses, all of them from Germany, all of them led by associates of the king or the local bishop. How do we think the reformation would have played out in that scenario?

3PM — Investing is gambling, mostly. Sure there are troves of books suggesting strategies on how to pick the right stock and how to time your investments. But if you assume everyone in the market has access to the same information and whenever you buy or sell stock based on that information, someone else does the opposite thinking, like you, they will profit. Whether you make a profit that way comes down to dumb luck.

Yet, investing in shares seems the best way to save for retirement. Bogle’s approach is indeed a common-sense approach, one that doesn’t suggest questionable tactics but is based on hard numbers. It’s based on a few simple principles.

There’s no way you’ll beat the market, so don’t try. Unless you run your own investment business and have the time to track all news and trades related to your investment, there is a very low chance that you can outsmart everyone else in the market and always buy or sell at the right time. Invest in funds instead to diversify your portfolio and spread the risks, and to hover up any gains the overall market offers over time.

Keep your costs low. Costs, like interest, compound over time. The more you spend on management fees and trades and taxes when you sell, the less money remains in your portfolio. Choose index funds over managed funds.

Hold on to your shares. No matter what. Don’t succumb to short-term movements in the market. Don’t succumb to your emotions. Short-term losses are normal and share prices tend to increase over long-enough periods. So even if your portfolio drops in value, it’s very likely your portfolio value will increase in the long run.

Bogle proves all his points with numbers. He demonstrates that even professional managers of mutual funds have a hard time beating the market, that costs compound and how it affects the value of a portfolio.

The Little Book of Common Sense Investing is the first book on investing that made sense to me. The first where I didn’t find myself asking “But wait, what if…?” every other page. It doesn’t try to sell you with advice on timing investments or how to pick a unicorn company. It is common sense advice.

And as a side effect, Bogle’s approach seems almost hassle-free. You pick your funds, and you keep buying. And that’s it.

NOTE: None of the above is financial advice. If you have questions about investing and saving for retirement, you should consult an expert.

9AM — Rick Rubin has worked with numerous acclaimed artists; the Beastie Boys, Run DMC, LL Cool J, Metallica, Red Hot Chilly Peppers and Johnny Cash. Almost everything he touches turns to commercial gold.

Rick Rubin is prolific in guiding artists to channel their creativity and release their best work. “The Creative Act: A Way of Being”, Rubin’s debut book, captures his approach to creative work.

It’s not a groundbreaking book. You likely heard many of the ideas before; from your meditation guru, the self-help book you got from the airport when you forgot your Kindle, or that productivity blog you’ve been reading instead of being productive.

As with many books of this kind, seeing these ideas written down coherently, ordered and cross-referenced, paints a bigger picture of how to channel creativity in art. You’ll realise that all this can be equally applied to your work as a software engineer and life in general.

5PM — I have moments when I think I want to learn about design and I pick up a random book from my very long bucket list of unreads. I did so with The Shape of Design, which I didn’t finish.

It isn’t a bad book. It explores what it means to be a designer and what it means to produce good design. It’s probably more relevant and relatable if you’ve worked as a design for a couple of years, unlike me who just want to make sure his websites not look rubbish.

8AM — “Madvillainy” is the best Hip Hop album ever produced. Its origin story is sufficiently hazy, the stuff of folkloristic legend. A lot circumstance and coincidence led to Madlib and MF Doom finally coming together in a studio, the possibility of them never meeting was very real, and we’d miss out on this masterpiece today. The album was leaked online before it was finished and completely re-worked after.

The production is so otherworldly. It sounded “different” when over-produced tracks from Timbaland or the Neptunes took the final steps to Hip Hop’s full commercialisation. Madvillainy is a collection of short tracks composed of intricately layered jazz samples, perfectly matched by DOOM’s word smithery. There were no hooks. This isn’t music you blast in your Nissan Micra, trying to impress the ladies sitting outside the cafe with a stereo system worth more than your car. You listen to this album at home; alone, sipping whiskey, smoking a pipe.

Once you get past the boring parts of the Will Hagle’s Madvillainy, where he explores how Madlib and MF DOOM met, who introduced whom to whom and who dropped records where and when; and who deserves credit and who doesn’t—once you get past those ego-centric accounts, the book turns to Madvillainy’s music and becomes interesting. The album’s artistic significance is rooted in Madlib’s and DOOM’s interplay and cross-reference between sample, beat and rhyme. One example: the track “Meat Grinder,” in which DOOM never references meat, or grinding, or the grinding of meat.

The opening sample, about a jar beneath a bed, draws from Frank Zappa: a kindred genre-blurring, jazz-influenced weird with an absurdist sense of humor who experimented with Quasimoto-style tape effects. The name of the album from which the sample was taken? Uncle Meat.

Hagle unveils puzzle pieces to many of the Madvillainy’s songs, which makes you appreciate a great album even more.

7PM — Non-fiction is at its best when you learn unexpected things. In a book about a hip-hop producer you’d expect to read about colonialism and segregation but not necessarily about city planning or the economic decline of a city.

These inter-connected topics define the environment for James Dewitt Yancey growing up in Detroit to become one of the most prolific rap-music producers. Going by his stage name J Dilla, he is the mind behind classic rap tunes such as De La Soul’s “Stakes Is High”, Common’s “The Light”, or The Pharcyde’s “Running”.

J Dilla invented a new sound that would not only define the sound of Hip Hop going forward but also find its way into RnB, Jazz, and even pop music. Before J Dilla, there were two ways of musical timing: straight time, where the rhythmic pulse is divided equally and swing time where the pulse is “divided unequally, such that certain subdivisions (typically either eighth note or sixteenth note subdivisions) alternate between long and short durations”. J Dilla combined both these styles; he layered, stretched and compressed them to create a new rhythmic feels. The resulting sound is unexpected, a little off, and very different to the style du jour during the boom bap era—but also more intriguing. Most of the Hip Hop music I fancy today uses J Dilla’s rhythmic feel.

Soon big names started emulating Dilla’s production. Questlove wanted to play he drums like Dilla. D’Angelo wanted his album, though recorded with a live band, to sound like it came from J Dilla’s MPC. Pharell Williams and Kanye West cite him as influences. And yet, despite all of the industry recognition, J Dilla never had a commercial successful pop hit. The closest he came was probably Janet Jackson’s “Got ‘Til It’s Gone.” N’Sync, yes, the boyband, enquired about a remix that could have led to a lucrative contracts, but J Dilla turned them down. Instead Timbaland went on to remix N’Sync, to later produce Justin Timberlake and subsequently built a career by pulling faces in music videos.

Based on hundreds of interviews with Dilla’s contemporaries, Dilla Time sheds a light on the musical theory of his sound and how it inspired plenty musicians that came after him. But it also paints the complete picture of a conflicted man: Dilla almost exclusively worked with artists know for their soulful music, spreading messages of love and empowerment. But privately, he loved simple things, money, fancy clothes and going to the strip club. J Dilla had a temper he often took out on the people closest to him. He fathered two children with two women and apparently paid for several abortions.

Dan Charnas wrote a lovingly crafted homage to J Dilla that puts a man at the centre who often worked in the background and rarely got the recognition he deserved when he was still alive.

1PM — I was introduced to Bob Mortimer not long ago by a friend. He does the kind of comedy I enjoy: Slapstick, often on the silly side. I love his show Gone Fishing, which he hosts with Paul Whitehouse, and I inhaled his biography And Away…

Too bad, The Satsuma Complex isn’t up there with Mortimer’s other work. The whole story is flat, and I repeatedly checked how many pages I had left to read. The book is fun and somewhat entertaining. Mortimer writes like he talks, which is why this book would work better as a movie or an audiobook read by Mortimer himself, putting on a different voice for each character.

8AM — In 2010, doctors found a tumour in Wolfgang Herrndorf’s brain; he died three years later. During that time, Herrndorf wrote a diary, first in private to keep his friends and family updated, and later in a public blog. After his death, the notes were published as a book, “Arbeit und Struktur.”

Arbeit und Struktur is a testament to Herrndorf’s most productive period. During that time, he published two books; Tschick, his most successful book, commercially, and Sand his best work, in my opinion. It also documents his diminishing health: Headaches, sleepless nights, epilepsy. But it’s his writing that reveals his condition: Towards the end, the entries become shorter, first less complex, later confusing and hard to follow.

Over time, his circle of friends, the people he interacts with, becomes smaller and smaller. A large group at first, with many well-known German authors amongst them, but towards the end, it’s only a handful.

Writing publicly about his experiences obviously attracted doctors offering alternative approaches to treat his tumour—so many that Herrndorf felt the need to publicly request not to write or call him anymore. To him, it would have been no surprise that some medics in Germany became COVID-denying conspiracy theorists.

7AM — Manton Reece is the creator of Micro.blog, his book Indie Microblogging is three things:

1. A history: It picks up where The Weblog Handbook has left off. Manton continues to write a history of blogging and how it changed with the arrival of Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook. Driven by experiences with failed and dying platforms, the IndieWeb movement designs protocols to build an open Web as an antithesis to today’s siloed social media giants.
2. An IndieWeb design documentation: Manton outlines how these experiences have shaped the design of Micro.blog. These are generic ideas that can be repurposed for your own implementations. As an example, the way Micro.blog displays content of varying lengths in the timeline and posts with or without titles, these ideas can be transferred into a custom solution to post content from a personal website to social media.
3. A handbook for IndieWeb building blocks: Much of Indie Microblogging describes how Micro.blog works and where it sits within the IndieWeb ecosystem. But it’s not only a book about Mirco.blog. It describes the building blocks of an open, interoperable Web that fosters sharing and communication between people using self-hosted platforms and content syndication. It’s a handbook for building blogging software today and the protocols it should support.

IndieWeb Microblogging embodies the very values of the open web: Sharing ideas and knowledge for everyone to build upon and to build a better, Independent, open and more connected Web.

6PM — David Horne must have really hated Australia and Australians. The intellectuals: Not enough bold ideas. The politicians: Mediocre kleptocrats. Business people: Just stealing products elsewhere. The rest: Only interested in drinking, sports, and the beach.

Ironically he never presents any evidence for his claims. He doesn’t cite any numbers or research. It’s just a collection of ramblings by someone who didn’t seem to fit in because they’re too preoccupied with thinking they’re smarter than everyone else. Or he’s just been sarcastic, and I don’t get it.

I’m giving this book two stars because, at least, it’s a great source of insulting zingers that I can use whenever the situation requires it.