#6 ‘Made to Stick’ – Chip and Dan Heath

Tags

2012, books, challenge, heath, made to stick, nonfiction

The Book:
Chip and Dan Heath draw upon their years of research in various fields, to reveal what they have learned about ‘sticky’ ideas, and the principles behind creating them.

Sticky ideas are the ones that linger, the stories you can’t quite shake, the stuff of viral videos and memorable advertising campaigns. The Heaths discuss how to use sticky ideas to get the most out of your workforce, to sell a product, or to get your story heard (and remembered).

I like how the writers mix analysis with anecdotes. The kidney-stealing story that opens the book stays with you (of course), but probably my favourite anecdote is ‘Journalism 101′, the tale of Nora Ephron’s journalism teacher who changed his students’ assumptions about journalism in one sentence.

As well as a host of useful and downright inspiring thoughts, this book also points out and explains the tendency people have to overcomplicate their ideas. ‘The Curse of Knowledge’ – once you know something you can’t ‘unknow’ it, and this stands in the way of communicating with someone who doesn’t know what you do – is a particularly compelling notion. It wasn’t something I’d thought about much before, but now I see it everywhere.

Definitely a book worth reading, whether for practical purposes or simply out of interest. Recommended for anyone who wants to know the steps to sticky ‘SUCCESs’. (Yes, one little ‘s’ – not quite the perfect acronym.)

The Background:
This book was given to me by my boss, at the website marketing company where I work. Definitely full of principles I can use in my working life, and possibly also applicable to my creative writing – knowing how to catch and hold your audience’s attention is important across the board.

– gildius –

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The importance of reading Eliot

Tags

books, eliot, study

I chose to study English Literature at A-level, not because I enjoyed it particularly (English at school was not exactly riveting or profound), but because I was good at it. What I was most excited about was studying A-level Psychology.

As it turned out Psychology became my least favourite subject (well, almost … let’s not even mention Law), and English rose to the top of the list. I studied Literature at university for 4 years, and there are two people I can thank for a significant part of my change of heart: my A-level teacher, Heather, and T.S Eliot.

First year, first term, first poem. ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. We spent ages just analysing the title – I had no idea that a few words could mean so many different things, but Heather picked it apart beautifully. We progressed through the poem, seeing how every word and every line was crafted to carry an enormity of meaning within it.

So when I read the following lines, they seemed to mean so much more than they said (and also summarised exactly what the poem was doing) that I nearly cried.

Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question

I didn’t cry, thankfully: not something for a teenager to do in a classroom full of teenagers. But I did remember the lines and they probably went some way to changing my life.

– gildius –

New Banner!

Many thanks to my friend for creating this fabulous new banner for me – she is a photographer, photo-editor and graphic designer. (I am the model.)

You can check out more of her amazing work on Facebook and on her website.

https://www.facebook.com/jessicaaugardephotography
http://augardephotography.daportfolio.com

– gildius –

#5 ‘The Fall’ – Albert Camus

Tags

2012, auction, books, camus, challenge, fall

The Book:

“May I, Monsieur, offer my services without running the risk of intruding?”

From the opening line, Camus implicates the reader as a character in ‘The Fall’ – which is more of an extended character monologue than a story. Jean-Baptiste Clamence describes in detail his own personal fall, from absolute self-assuredness to the devastating discovery of his own hypocrisy.

It is brutally honest and well-written. The dismal outlook reminded me, at times, of Fernando Pessoa, but it was more deliberate, condensed and therefore readable. Clamence shies away from nothing and, as the story goes on, his attitude goes full circle. His realisation that he is a hypocrite does not redeem him, but takes him back to his desire for superiority. Except he’s not alone – the reader has become entangled with him.

The ending achieved exactly what it was meant to. I felt duped and a little bit hacked off with Clamence. Of course, that’s exactly how I was meant to feel. It is an excellent book, but you probably won’t be very pleased with Clamence or yourself at the end.

Perhaps the best remedy is to give it to a lawyer to read.

Quote: “Today we are always as ready to judge as we are to fornicate.”

The Background:

This is another auction bargain. I had never read anything by Camus before, but vaguely recognised the name. So, when I sorted through the books I’d bought, this one went on my shelves, while books like ‘The Autobiography of Osbert Sitwell’ went to the charity shop.

– gildius –

#4 ‘Pip of Pengersick, A Smuggler’s Tale’ – J.A.C. West

Tags

2012, books, challenge, west

The Book:

Not massively impressed with this, really. Of course, it’s unfair to judge it too harshly – it is a children’s story, written to entertain, and it isn’t trying to be anything more than that. But there’s such a thing as a good children’s book, and there’s such a thing as a bad one.

It could have done with some tightening – the first quarter of the book is set in one day, and the rest is set over the course of years, which is a little odd because it isn’t handled very well. It rambles in places. Sometimes the characters have accents and sometimes they don’t (side note: writing dialect is not as easy as simply using bad grammar).

As for the content, I’m sure it was trying to be ‘of its time’ (it’s set during the French Revolution), but I don’t think a children’s book published now needs to refer to French people as “Frenchies”, or associate evil, inhuman pirates with turbans and Muslim names. These stereotypes don’t need to be perpetuated and passed on to children.

On a lighter note, I laughed out loud when the important papers the characters had spent most of the book trying to deliver, were waved aside as “not important”. The story moved on and the papers weren’t spoken of again.

Then there was the line, “the pirate pointed a pistol at Harry’s favourite head.” Brilliant.

The illustrations are striking, but the story means this book is not a keeper.

The Background:

I went to a local garden for my Dad’s birthday and, in the gift shop, I found a pretty little children’s book with a sticker on the front saying ‘Story set in Cornwall’.

I’ve been trying to think about ways in which I can earn from writing – because that’s what I eventually want to do – so I decided to read the book and see what it was like.

Writing children’s stories is not easy – the finished product must appear effortless – but I’d like to give it a go. Besides, writing a short children’s story set in an area of local interest is bound to be marketable (there’s always a gift shop!). At this stage anything that will get me writing, and maybe earn me some money too, has to be a good thing.

So that’s why I bought this book. I read it in one evening and – although it might seem a bit like cheating in terms of the 50 a year challenge – it was valid research into the competition! That’s the story I’m sticking to anyway…

– gildius –

Book Binge

Tags

binge, books, kindle

Pay day + Kindle = book binge.

I went a little bit nuts last night and bought 10 books for my Kindle. Well, at least I don’t have to worry about my bookshelves breaking under the added strain!

I have a long list of books I want to buy, and I crossed a good few of them off last night.

Here’s what I bought:

• ‘The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman’ – Angela Carter
• ‘An Artist of the Floating World’ – Kazuo Ishiguro
• ‘Essays in Love’ – Alain De Botton
• ‘The Master and Margarita’ – Mikhail Bulgakov
• ‘The Year of the Flood’ – Margaret Atwood
• ‘The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’ – Haruki Murakami
• ‘The Monk’ – Matthew G. Lewis
• ‘The Wasp Factory’ – Iain Banks
• ‘The Sense of an Ending’ – Julian Barnes
• ‘The Complete Cosmicomics’ – Italo Calvino

Of these, I have previously read novels by half of them: Ishiguro, Atwood, Murakami, Barnes and Calvino. The others are completely new to me. Can’t wait to get started!

– gildius –

Kindle – the end of books?

Tags

books, e-reader, kindle, technology

I have a Kindle and I love it. It sits on my bedside table, another book among the stack of books I’m reading, and it doesn’t look out of place.  But the hot debate at the moment is whether e-books will put an end to paper books. It’s very easy to proclaim the end of the road for the book – technology is increasingly present in almost every part of our lives – but I hate the tendency to see this as a bad thing.

In many of the discussions around this topic there’s a temptation to see the book as warm, welcoming and personal, whilst computers and e-readers are portrayed as cold and inhuman. Inhuman? The internet is a vast network connecting millions of people all over the world – how can this be called inhuman?

This is not to say that books aren’t all the things people say they are. I agree wholeheartedly that the book as an object can be beautiful, that the feeling of turning a page, or smelling the paper, is part of the experience of reading. And it’s for these reasons that there will always be a market for books – people are always going to want to own them, and hold them, and keep them around the house. Perhaps in future this will happen on a smaller scale.

I have a vinyl collection and an iPod. When vinyl became essentially redundant technology it did not die out and, recently, it has been experiencing a resurge in popularity. Similarly, the people who love books for what they are made of, as much as for what they contain, will continue to buy them. I know I will. And I will also use my Kindle.

E-readers have a multitude of uses. If you have an internet connection, you can download virtually any book you want in seconds. There are no pages to get stained or torn on the daily commute. As the technology becomes more widespread students won’t need to cart around back-breaking numbers of textbooks. Information manuals and other texts that are not desirable as objects, do not have to take up precious shelf-space. You can travel all over the world, with your entire library in your bag, and hardly feel the weight of it.

But in my opinion, the crux of in this whole debate is that – really – the means by which we read is unimportant. What matters is that we read. And we do, in our billions.

The demand for stories has not lessened with the rise of the e-reader. If anything, it has grown. Perhaps people who would not otherwise have picked up a book, are now turning on a Kindle. Children who have been brought up in a technological age may be attracted to reading from a screen, more than a page. And, I think, the e-reader can also be a beautiful object.

So I don’t believe that e-readers spell the end of books, and we need to stop seeing technology as inhuman. This is just one more step towards making all books available to all people, anywhere, at any time. What could be more human than that?

– gildius –