BrockLi Soup

Remember the Very Very Special Summer Reading Club? It never really happened, not even the second summer, and I completely forgot about it last year. I still think it’s a fun idea - anyone interested in trying again this year?

Here’s the idea: pick a couple books to read this summer, tell us what they are, and in August or September, tell us how they were. It’s pretty simple, and you can read whatever you want to. Either post a comment here, or write your own post about it.

I don’t have many unread books laying around the apartment any more, so I’m not sure what I’ll read. What’s popular these days? The Four-Hour Work Week is the only best seller I’ve read in the past couple years - I could probably just go to the best-seller rack at Barnes & Noble and find something good, but I’d rather get suggestions from people I trust. What have you read lately?

Also, if you do much reading, you should sign up on Goodreads - it’s like a Facebook for literacy!

Way back in December, I was reading Dinesh D’Souza’s What’s So Great About Christianity? and trying to keep an open mind about it. Which was tough, because it was pretty awful.

Around Christmas, I finished writing up my notes and rebuttals, but never really got around to polishing it up and citing better references and what have you. After four months, I’ve decided that I probably never will, so I’m just posting what I wrote then:

Ever read a book (required or otherwise) and upon finishing it thought to yourself, “Wow. That was terrible. I totally feel dumber after reading that.”? I know I have. Well, like any good scientist, I decided to see how well my personal experience matches reality. How might one do this?

I came across the Booksthatmakeyoudumb project thanks to Kottke, and it’s pretty entertaining. Virgil Griffith compared the top 10 favorite books for college’s on Facebook to the average SAT scores for those colleges. On the high end, you’ve got Catch-22 and Freakonomics. On the low end, The Holy Bible and “I don’t read.”

I found it interesting to look at the list of schools. RIT is number 183, in average SAT score, but I was surprised to see that The Bible is the top book for the school. If you’re logged into Facebook, you can see all our stats and learn, like I did, that Boondock Saints is the most popular movie at RIT.

I’m starting to think I may have bought the wrong book. I mean, I don’t think there were any elections for it or anything, but is Dinesh D’Souza the spokesman for Christians? I just started chapter seven of What’s So Great About Christianity? It begins on page 67, which should give you some sense of the depth with which D’Souza explores his arguments.

By the time I got through the first chapter, I had made several notes in the margins and on an index card. My plan was to collect my notes and counter-arguments, cite other authors’ arguments where appropriate, and compile it into a sort of supplemental to give to my parents at Christmas - a “this is what I believe and why” package.

It became clear, around chapter three, that I was going to have a ton of writing to do if I wanted to adequately address his flimsy and largely unfounded arguments. I haven’t been taking as many notes since, because really, what’s the point? Here’s your reading supplemental: read The God Delusion first, and What’s So Great About Christianity? will seem absolutely absurd in comparison.

I may post my comments after each of the eight parts of the book, if there’s anything worth mentioning. Like I said in my original post about it, I’m trying to keep an open mind and give the other side their say, but it’s really hard to take any of I seriously. Nonetheless, I soldier on, reading inane crap so you don’t have to. I’ll keep you posted.

This afternoon, I did a little shopping with some birthday gift cards I had lying around. I feel it bears mentioning first that one of these gift cards was for Old Navy, where I bought a couple pairs of jeans TWO SIZES smaller than the rest of the jeans I own - the first time my pant size has gone DOWN in about six years. So, you know, yay me.

Anyway, the other gift card was for Barnes & Noble. I considered a few books critical of religion: Everything You Know About God Is Wrong, Jim and Casper Go to Church, and The Year of Living Biblically, but I’ve been doing a lot of that kind of reading lately: God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, The God Delusion, and currently, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. I like to be able to take both sides of an argument and play devil’s advocate, and it’s always good to know what the enemy is up to, so I decided to get What’s So Great About Christianity. I feel dirty for supporting Dinesh D’Souza with another book sale, but at least it wasn’t my money. Chances are slim that I’ll agree with anything he has to say, but I’m willing to consider his opinions, at least. Let it never be said that I’m close-minded.

I’ll write up a review in a few weeks when I finish it.

For the second time this week, I’m wreaking havoc on my subscriptions in Google Reader, because ya know what? I don’t need this much news, nor the guilt I feel for never reading it. Even so, I feel just a little guilty every time I removed a blog, even though I don’t know any of the authors and rarely even read their posts.

I’m down to around 130 feeds now. I know that sounds ridiculous, until I tell you that I cut about 60 earlier this week, and 20 more since I started writing this post. A lot of the remaining 130 don’t update regularly - probably 20 are friends that don’t blog much, and another 30 are other low-post feeds. I can’t believe that six months ago, I managed to keep up on so many of them. No wonder I didn’t go out much.

And as long as we’re talking productivity, I FINALLY started reading Getting Things Done this week. I’ve been reading it on the Metro, so I’m only about 50 pages in, but already I’m feeling a lot more relaxed - knowing that I’m at least taking some initiative to sort out this mess has reduced my stress level a fair bit. Cleaning out my feed reader is step one - I know very little about the GTD system at this point, but I think that getting rid of all that unnecessary distraction will help.

And as long as we’re talking books, I also started The God Delusion last week, and I’m liking it a lot more than I thought I would. Richard Dawkins has always seems kind of dry, and…well, BRITISH, so I was worried it would be boring, but he keeps a pretty good pace. It’s another book I’ve been meaning to read for a long time and finally got around to starting.

And as long as we’re talking about God, I feel I should mention that we decided on Friday that “God” shall henceforth be known as “göd” (pronounced sort of like “gurd,” for those of you that don’t speak German). Just so you all know.

I need to make more time for books. So far in 2007, I’ve only finished seven books, and one of them (the hilarious The Pirates! In An Adventure With The Communists) only took an afternoon. I’ve got two more in the works now, but a quick glance over my book list for the past year and a half shows that my time for reading lately has been woefully inadequate. It doesn’t seem so long ago that I was splayed out on the couch with Everything Is Illuminated or any one of David Sedaris’ books, but I read those in my old-old apartment - the one I moved out of last May. I’ve read so little since then that they’re still relatively fresh in my mind.

I keep hoping that things will calm down soon and I’ll have more free time. I’m back from two weeks in SF, moved into a new apartment, spent this weekend in Buffalo for my buddy Bill’s wedding, and I’ve already spent 35 hours in the office this week. I’ve barely touched my news reader since I left for SF almost a month ago, so I’ve got thousands of blog posts and news items waiting for my attention. There are still a few boxes I haven’t unpacked because I need to get rid of other stuff to make room for them. I got a USB hard drive to store all my crap, but I haven’t even plugged it in yet because there’s a monitor (which also needs to go) on the table I’m going to use for my computer, and I haven’t had any time to fiddle with it yet anyway. The MacBook I got last week (which I LOVE, incidentally) has some 80 GB of crap from my old laptop and desktop sitting in the Documents directory, waiting to be sorted and backed up as necessary. I still haven’t really grocery-shopped since I moved over a week ago, except for a quick trip to grab milk, eggs, apples, and some frozen dinners. I haven’t had time for SNFC - the local chapter I so wanted to start - in a full month, and probably won’t this week either.

And, of course, there’s about 20 books on my book shelf that were purchased in more leisurely times, when their chances of being read were as high as 1 in 6. This one especially bugs me because of the money I’ve invested in my collection and the effort that’s gone into moving all of them from apartment to apartment. That shit’s heavy, yo.

My bowling ball/baby/shark situation has surpassed, “Just get through this quarter,” and I’m not really sure what comes after that. Semi-year? Either way, I just keep chugging along, and hope the train stops before the wheels come off.

Check out this hilarious site for No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July. The images resize to fill the window, so make your browser window narrow or the bottom gets cut off.

(via Justinsomnia)

I’ve been trying to read more lately. Over the past year couple years, I’ve accumulated a couple dozen books that I still haven’t read. As part of my Spend Less Money You Stupid Bastard campaign, I’ve been a buying freeze on literature until I can catch up on the piles of books that haven’t been cracked yet. This is what I’ve read lately.

Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser

The first couple chapters of this were a little dry and slow-going, but it got pretty interesting after that. It’s unbelievable how much power corporations like McDonald’s wield in worker and food safety legislation. I almost never get fast food (unless I’m on a road trip), but this book gave me a few dozen more reasons not to.

Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk

It’s hard to read this book without comparing it to the movie as you go. I really like both the movie and the book, but for different reasons. Obviously, there are things about any story that can be expressed in a book much better than in a movie, but the movie did a great job of telling it. If I had read the book first, I don’t think I would have expected that the movie could be any good.

But this isn’t about the movie, it’s about the book. Palahniuk is one hell of a story teller, and I’m certainly not the first to point this out or get all fan-boy about it, so there’s really no point in going on much about it. We all know the story and most of you have probably already the book, so why bother?

Invisible Monsters, by Chuck Palahniuk

According to Wikipedia, Palahniuk wrote this one first but it was rejected by publishers for being too disturbing, so he wrote Fight Club to disturb them even more. However, Invisible Monsters is, hands down, WAY more fucked up. I’d try to explain the plot if I thought I could. The last quarter of the book is made up almost entirely of weird plot twists that make you think, “I should have seen that coming,” but you really shouldn’t have seen that coming.

I, Lucifer, by Glen Duncan

This one wasn’t as good as I was hoping it would be. Lucifer spends a month in the body of the cleverly-named Declan Gunn (hint: re-arrange the author’s name) and writes a book about the experience as he goes, in a style that loses its novelty in the first couple chapters. Parts of it were pretty interesting, but on the whole, lackluster.

The Pirates! In An Adventure with Communists, by Gideon Defoe

If Douglas Adams grew up on Monty Python, then developed a pirate fetish and a passing interest in communism, this is what you’d get, and it’s absolutely hilarious. It’s a short one - only took me an afternoon - and would probably make a pretty funny movie. This is actually the third in the series - The Pirates have also had adventures with Charles Darwin and Ahab.

Conservatize Me, by John Moe

In the vein of Supersize Me, a liberal NPR host from Seattle spent a month immersing himself in conservatism to see if he could convert himself. He met with a bunch of people and found that there’s a lot of diversity of opinion among conservatives, including several that don’t really want to have anything to do with the Republican party. It’s easy to forget that the Rush Limbaughs and Bill O’Reillys don’t accurately represent everyone on the right (to be fair, we’ve got our Michael Moores). With politics as polarized as they are these days, most of my perspective of the right comes from angry old guys hollering on TV (as Colbert told O’Reilly the other day, “They criticize what you say, but they never give you credit for how loud you say it.”)

He’s also a really funny guy. One of my favorite quotes is about gay marriage:

It was the old reductio ad absurdumm where you take a position for the sake of argument, arrive at a ridiculous result, and then use that ridiculous result to discredit the original position. The same way that conservatives argue that if The Gay is allowed to marry, before long people will be marrying logs and buildings and the 1975 Steelers. It would be ridiculous to marry the Steelers (even though the strength of that defensive line would be an asset to any marriage), therefore it’s ridiculous for two consenting adults in a long-term stable relationship to decide for themselves that they want to get married and register for a toaster.

Jokes aside, it was nice to get a glimpse of the perspective of real people on the right. It’s easy to forget how much we DO agree on when most political discussions devolve into shouting matches about issues that, in the grand scheme of things, are pretty insignificant.

Is anyone else tired of hearing about Mitch Albom? I never read Tuesdays with Morrie or The Five People You Meet in Heaven, but I think I’m going to purposefully NOT read For One More Day just because I’m sick of seeing him everywhere.

I haven’t heard anything this year about the Very Very Special Summer Reading Club, so I’m assuming it never happened. Wanna hear what I’ve been reading? Of course you do.

I’m going to assume that VVSSRC started mid-May - how’s that sound?

• Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Journey into Manhood and Back, by Norah Vincent

This woman pretended to be a guy for a year or so and wrote about her relationships with men and dating women. It’s one of those books that usually sounds interesting and doesn’t live up to expectations, but Vincent delivers.

• Silent Bob Speaks: The Collected Writings of Kevin Smith, by Kevin Smith

A collection of essays from Kevin Smith, many of them from different web sites he’s written for. Smith is a fantastic storyteller, and most of the book reflects that. Check out his blog, too - the stories about his life are always great (the ones about showbiz, not as much).

• Dave Barry Does Japan, by Dave Barry

This was one of those super cheap books I got from the Arlington Library a couple months ago. Dave Barry is always good for summer reading.

• Urban Tribes: Are Friends the New Family?, by Ethan Watters

I wrote about this one already, but once again, I’d recommend this to anyone in the just-after-college age range.

• Dry: A Memoir, by Augusten Burroughs

I fell in love with Burroughs when I read Running with Scissors back in February. He’s a fantastic storyteller, and with his fucked-up childhood, he’s got plenty of material. This one’s about his journey to sobriety.

• Rejuvenile: Kickball, Cartoons, Cupcakes, and the Reinvention of the American Grown-up, by Christopher Nixon

Again, covered it.

• Magical Thinking: True Stories, by Augusten Burroughs.

I could rave about Burroughs again, but just trust me and read the book.

• The Underdog: How I Survived the World’s Most Outlandish Competitions, by Joshua Davis

I haven’t quite finished this one yet, but I just started it a couple days ago. I think this one was mentioned in Wired a while ago and it sounded pretty good, but it’s been better than I expected. Davis is a fantastic writer, and it’s sort of inspiring to read about these ridiculous competitions he gets himself into and how he does it. I’m half-tempted to try sumo wrestling after hearing about his experience doing it, and I figure I’d be a lot better at it than a scrawny 130-pound guy.

So that’s my summer, so far. I’ve been reading a lot lately - it’s been refreshing.

Your turn.

About a month ago, my buddy Mace recommended Urban Tribes: Are Friends the New Family? It was incredibly interesting and I’d recommend it to anyone, particularly recent (or soon-to-be) college grads, because it’s really about people our age. The whole idea is that our generation keeps putting off the classic signs of adulthood - marriage and baby-makin’. More people are waiting longer to get hitched and have kids, if they do it at all, and many are finding that friends provide the support structure that a family normally might. I especially liked the author’s own story - his tribe is made up of about 25 people, and by the sound of it (though I don’t think he was explicit on this point), they ages range from the mid-20’s to late-30’s. This sort of social construct was incredibly uncommon (if not entirely unheard of) during the early adulthood of our parents, but today it’s happening all over, albeit in smaller numbers.

Just today, I finished Rejuvenile: Kickball, Cartoons, Cupcakes, and the Reinvention of the American Grown-up. This one just caught my eye when I was browsing at the book store just a few days after I finished Urban Tribes. It’s a very different look at a similar trend: adults putting off adulthood and opting to indulge their inner child. It wasn’t as well-written as Tribes, but it offered an interesting perspective on things.

I mention these together because they came along at a pretty good time for me. It’s only been in the past month or two that I’ve come to grips with the fact that graduating college is not the end of life as I know it. For some reason, I’ve always had this subconscious fear that life pretty much stops after that - you get married, have some kids, and fall into a comfortable routine. That’s more or less what my parents did, and seemed to be the trend among the parents of my peers when I was a kid. I really didn’t think I’d want to live past 40, because it all seemed so boring after that.

Obviously, this isn’t necessarily the case, but I’ve never really been able to convince myself of that. I kept trying to figure out what my big project was going to be, how I was going to leave my impact on the world. With graduation looming and no great ideas jumping out at me, I sort of resigned myself to a string of crappy jobs and small apartments. It doesn’t help to look around at the people I went to school with: a couple are engineers for Google, one’s writing his first book, and another is speaking at conferences (still others from RIT, whom I didn’t know, started College Humor and a variety of other successful sites). They’re all off doing exciting and interesting stuff, and I’m trying to figure out whether I even want to be doing what I spent four years training for.

I went into college feeling like I had more time than I’d know what to do with. At the time, I was figuring on spending five years there, which seems like forever to someone who’s only 17. That time quickly dried up, and while I enjoyed it while I had it, some part of me worries that my early adulthood will pass me by just as quickly. I feel like I need to do my big, great thing - whatever that may be - as soon as possible, so that I don’t let time get away from me again.

And now that I actually put it into words, I realize that it sounds just a little insane. I’m enjoying life right now: I don’t have any masterpiece in the works, and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life coding, but I have good friends, I’ve got a decent apartment, I’m not totally broke, and I’ve only been out of college for eight months. I’ve got plenty of time to waste, and if I spend all my time worrying about what’s to come, I’ll just keep on missing what’s in the here and now.

If you want to survive the next zombie outbreak, you should consider grabbing a copy of this book. I picked it up because I thought it would be funny, but it turned out to be pretty interesting. It’s written with a “this is going to happen, prepare yourself” kind of attitude, and really gets into the best ways to handle, you know, a zombie uprising. I especially liked the Recorded Attacks section, detailing zombie outbreaks all the way up to 2002.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to pick up some canned goods and a machete.

So, here’s a tip for you readers: before buying a book, take a gander at the cover. Even if it does have pictures of donkeys and elephants and that chick from Wonkette, check to see if it says “a novel” on the front if you’re expecting a political commentary or stories from the Hill.

That being said, Dog Days was pretty good, even if it wasn’t what I was expecting and was the literary equivalent of a chick flick.

Just know what you’re getting into.

It was months ago when I saw the preview for Everything is Illuminated. I’m assuming the book was doing OK by then, but I hadn’t heard about it. The only reason I even remembered the trailer was because of Eugene Hutz. I figured I should read the book before seeing it, so I picked it up a couple weeks ago and finished it last weekend. The beginning is a little hard to follow, but it was an interesting read.

The movie was pretty good, but I don’t know if I like the changes they made. Obviously, they could really only do half the story: Johnathan’s trip through Ukraine. The grandfather’s modified back story was a bit of a surprise. There was some other crap, but Scrubs is on so I’m a bit distracted.

Hutz was surprisingly good, but it was weird to see him without the crazy mustache, and with a shirt on - he’s very much like Dan Lee that way.