Book #17: Outliers by Malcom Gladwell

Seventeenth book I read since May 2008:

Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcom Gladwell. It's the first non-fiction entry on the blog, and it is a fascinating book. A true must read for anyone who buys the idea that our society is anything close to a meritocracy.

Gladwell clearly and sometimes painfully illuminates the role of luck, societal bias, class, culture, and well... luck, in the lives of hyper-successful people. In our world, the year you were born, the month of your birthday, the genes you got, the random opportunities that present themselves, and the family/culture/region in which you were brought up -- those factors have much more to do with your success or failure than your own hard work, determination, and your ability to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.

The author is not a nay-sayer to the American Dream; he contends that hard work is essential to any success story. And in fact, he argues that to improve the lives of people and the overall functions of society we should we provided better, more equally distributed opportunities to all. Then talent and hard work would be rewarded more often and those successful people would make our world a better place by having their talents and hard work rewarded and recognized.

Gladwell does prove that the "self-made man" is a cultural illusion -- a fairy tale we tell ourselves -- that has virtually no examples in real life. Success in our world depends on being born into the right situations, having time to discover and nurture your talents, and getting the opportunities to apply those talents.

I would recommend this book highly to anyone who questions our society or culture and anyone who goes through life without questioning them. It's an intriguing study of how cultures self-select who will become successful, why some cultures have more success in some areas and tend to fail in others, and is far from the downer that this blog entry might make it sound like.

It's a celebration of success, and a hopeful dream that we can make small changes that can result in big success for even more people. And by the way, it's a quick read. I finished all 300 pages in less than a week on the train :)

- Scott

Book #16: Certain Things Last by Sherwood Anderson

Sixteenth book I read since May 2008:

Certain Things Last: The Selected Short Stories of Sherwood Anderson (edited by Charles E. Modlin)

I enjoyed every single minute of this book. Anderson's spare style and simple phraseology make him easy to read and get into, and he pulls a lot of life knowledge from simple things.

His landscape is mostly rural Ohio, and yet his stories plumb the depths of human experience. Frustration, sexual desire and promiscuity, family obligations and limitations, status, artistry, the innocence and lack of innocence of youth, race relations, class distinctions, and even gender bending.

He also portrays his world with simple grace, bringing back visions of old town and slick cities as they moved from the industrial revolution and the great depression. But not the down sides of this transformation but the simple realities those events created for the people who had to survive them. And the yearnings and discarded dreams of those people.

The stories are short but chock full of great writing and vast knowledge. My favorites were Death in the Woods, Virginia Justice, and Fred. Anderson is a thoroughly modern and accessible writer, and I'd recommend these or any of his works to anyone.

- Scott

Book #15:Tales of H.P. Lovecraft

Fifteenth book I read since May 2008:

Tales of H.P. Lovecraft by H.P. Lovecraft (edited by Joyce Carol Oates)

In the end I think Lovecraft spends more time building a scary world than actually scaring you. Maybe it's because of the time he wrote and how much the fright-and-gore industry has grown, but an underdescribed descent into madness that ends in cannibalism or weird stuff that happens after a meteor lands in a New England field just didn't do it for someone raise on Jason the Slasher and Stephen King. King still thinks Lovecraft is brilliant, and he probably knows more about it than me. But if you are like me and haven't studied horror fiction extensively, you're more likely to react to this out-dated fiction the way I did.

- Scott