A highly readable account (as always) from John McPhee of a difficult subject. In this case, Geology. I read this to acquaint myself with the unusual mountain and desert terrain that we’ve encountered here in Arizona. I have learned a lot about geology in general from this short book. It’s also given me a whole new perspective on Time and the universe. A million years is nothing in geology, but uncomprehending to the human mind.
Highlights
Deffeyes is a big man with a tenured waistline. His hair flies behind him like Ludwig van Beethoven’s. He lectures in sneakers. His voice is syllabic, elocutionary, operatic. He has been described by a colleague as “an intellectual roving shortstop, with more ideas per square metre than anyone else in the department-they just tumble out.”
The inclination of a slope on which boulders would stay put was the angle of repose.
On the geologic time scale, a human lifetime is reduced to a brevity that is too inhibiting to think about. The mind blocks the information.
Since the late Miocene, the earth’s magnetic field had reversed itself twenty times—from north to south, from south back to north—and the dates of those reversals had by now become well established.
I liked parts of this book. The mystery was interesting and the twists/turns were unexpected. I did not connect with the narrator who seemed on the verge of unreliable to me, obsessive, stuck in a loop of her childhood miseries.
My second recent book where the author is/was a professional poker player (the other was The Biggest Bluff by Maria Konnikova). Duke lays out the unsung merits of timely quitting, citing many personal and business stories of people who successfully cut their losses and went on the bigger and brighter things, or failed to quit when they should have and paid the price.
As someone who only two jobs out of college, you would think I could learn a little about quitting. These past few years though — I think I’ve caught up.
Expected Value – The benefit of the outcome multiplied by its probability of occurring. Compare expected values of each potential decision. Think like a power player.
“If you feel like you’ve got a close call between quitting and persevering, it’s likely that quitting is the better choice.” — because we don’t like to quit.
Prospect Theory — model of how people make decisions. Key finding: losing feels about two times as bad to us as winning.
Sure-loss Aversion — makes us not want to stop something we have already started. We will do anything to avoid a loss, even if it’s the right decision. “Once we suffer large casualties, we will have started a well-nigh irreversible process.” — Vietnam war dilemma.
Sunk Cost Effect — a systematic cognitive error in which people consider past investments of time and money and effort in making decisions about whether to invest future money, time and effort.
Katamari — Video game metaphor for the snowballing effect of decision-making.
Monkeys and Pedestals — teaching monkeys to juggle flaming torches is hard. Building the pedestal for the monkey is easy. Make sure to spend your efforts on teaching the monkey, not building the pedestal. Similar to James Clear’s action over motion. Atomic Habits by James Clear
Endowment Effect — when we own something, it’s more valuable to us than an equally valuable object we don’t own. Richard Thaler: “people often demand more to give up an object than they would be willing to pay to acquire it.” We also become endowed to our beliefs, our ideas, and our decisions.
Cognitive Dissonance — When new information conflicts with our prior beliefs and that new information makes us uncomfortable. We naturally want the discomfort to go away so we rationalize away the new information so we can defend our prior beliefs.
Quit Plans
Making a plan for when to quit should be done long before you face the decision to quit. The worst time to make a decision is when you’re “in it”.
Kill criteria — information you learn that tells you the monkey isn’t trainable or you’re not sufficiently likely to reach your goal.
Highlights
In large part, we are what we do, and our Identity is closely connected with whatever we’re focused on, including our careers, relationships, projects, and hobbies. When we quit any of those things, we have to deal with the prospect of quitting part of our identity. And that is painful.
Adults ask children, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” We don’t ask, “What job do you want?”
We are asking who they will be, not what they will do. This is a difference with quite a large distinction.
And children get that. “I’m going to be a firefighter,” or “I’m going to be a doctor,” or “I’m going to be a basketball player.”
When your identity is what you do, then what you do becomes hard to abandon, because it means quitting who you are.
Inflexible goals aren’t a good fit for a flexible world.
Steinbeck was 58 when he took his trip in his new “RV” with his dog around the country in search of an answer to this question: “what is America today?”
He doesn’t find a satisfactory answer, but I enjoyed his musings and evocative travel writing, especially since we plan to do something similar in our little RV.
I finally got around to reading this classic, one I thought I had read but hadn’t. The book was soaked with atmosphere. You felt you were with the unnamed narrator, over your head in some grand english manor. Her uncertainties and fears became your own in a stream-of-consciousness flutter of internal dialogue. There were some good twists along the way, and Mrs. Danvers was certainly creepy. And yeah, so it was largely set in the library of a grand old house.
What a delightful little book. I read this 36 years ago, so parts of it were vaguely familiar.
When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue-you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night-there’s all heaven and earth in a book, a real book I mean.
The book describes how QAnon and other conspiracy theories emerged to be a major forces in politics. I am reading this to better understand the beliefs of a family member. The writing here is not great. The author repeats himself and does a poor job of relating stories. But at least I have a better understanding of this bizarre cult.
★★★★☆ | Mystery-Suspense | Print | Own | Goodreads
Fun suspense yarn set at sea. Interesting writing style: points of view change within chapters without warning; no flashbacks; everything revealed via dialogue. I enjoyed this one.
This book won the Hugo award in 2020. Slow moving at first with a lot of world building jargon to pause over. The plot picked up in the middle and became almost a page turner by the end.
I liked the eerie description of the Sunlit, a human/AI police force (we never really find out what they are).
Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe; it gives life back to those who no longer exist.
Incredible! The graphic novels are way different than the TV series! Many of the plot lines are the same, but wow oh wow were there some surprises. Very fun, but also surprisingly comforting to have these fellow grieving souls to commiserate with.
A cranky, comical book of essays written in the last years of Vonnegut’s life. He is depressed about the state of the world and our short-term minded treatment of it. He reminds you that everyone, even those experts in power only just got here, like everyone else and no one really knows anything.
A great collection of essays and fight recaps over boxing’s storied history. Some of these I had read before (Shadow Box by George Plimpton, The Fight by Norman Mailer and Four Kings by George Kimball). Gene Tunney’s essay about fighting Jack Dempsey was amazing.
I began to wish I had more time to think and read and talk to people, to stop writing so much and with such assurance. Columnists have to write with assurance because they are paid to raise The Truth. — Robert Lipsyte
A wonderful collection of essays across a variety of topics. I read her essay “Three Fathers” in the New Yorker a while back, but it’s so much more engaging to hear Ann read it aloud in her own voice. Her writing reminds me of my own if I were better — and that it’s possible to write and essay and still be impactful.
A painful book for me to read — the story of a father losing his 17-year-old son. Mr. Ives – a religious and kind family man – spends the remainder of his life grieving. He relationship with the love of his life withers, he takes no more joy is in existence, he loses faith in God. Some 35 years after his son is murdered, he regains some of his faith through dreams, travel and forgiveness of his son’s killer. It’s a dark, melancholy book. I worried for myself as I watched Mr. Ives grieve over the decades following the loss of his son.
I enjoyed the writing of this story more than I expected to. I guess I have a weakness for time travel and Universe as Simulation books.
A key theme of the book was the powerful but morally corrupt Time Institute — a secret government agency that developed and used time travel technology to preserve itself without regard for the moral good it could do. The main protagonist joins the agency and uses time travel to safe a life which gets him in huge trouble.
A boating friend gifted me this book after he learned about Connor’s passing. The author’s 26-year-old son died in a climbing accident. He wrote the book as therapy for himself and as a way to help other dads who have lost a child.
The most important takeaway is something I already knew but was good to be reminded: if Connor could somehow communicate with me from the other side, he would tell me to heal up and find a way to be happy again. He would want me to miss him of course, but he wouldn’t want me to give up living. I know that is true.
An interesting book. After you die, you go to a city where you live so long as someone remembers you from the living world. At this city, life seems to go on as it did on Earth. People work, go out to eat, read books, complain about “life”, and all the while seem not to be amazed at this life after death.
I can’t remember the last 300+ page book I read in nearly a single sitting. What a terrific story, so well told. So many tie ins to my life: Mallory the protagonist, 18 months sober, the early death of her sister in a car accident.
Books like these remind me of the true joy that comes from reading a good story. I’d give it five stars but for the zany, frumped up ending. This story demanded a simpler, more elegant way to finish such a smooth, entrancing beginning and middle.
