I’ve mentioned Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta in a previous post, but thought it was worth its own post now that I’ve finally finished it.

We learned about this book on our 2006 trip to India, but it took me over a year to finally get to it.

The book is Suketu Mehta’s collection of stories from his return to India after 21 years. He’s an insider and an outsider all at once. He shares his own experiences (say, in trying to rent an apartment, or get his kids into a decent school) but also picks a number of different subcultures (life in the slums, commuting, gangsters, Bollywood, sex workers, homeless artists, religion, politics, law enforcement) and goes deep. He develops intense relationships over time and tells the stories of the characters he encounters, many of whom live outside the norms that most of us could tolerate. He goes deep enough that as a writer, he’s pulled into writing a screenplay for a Bollywood film.

Although he goes into these subcultures as individual forays, many of the threads overlap (Bollywood and gangsters, the police and politics and religion, etc. etc.) and collide and so a more complete portrait begins to emerge.

I really appreciated having my own experiences contextualized by the author’s similar (if much more extreme) personal experiences and subsequent explanation, and then the opportunity to see so much further into the city, as an icon of Indian life. This is classic participant-observation. What’s the Hindi word for gonzo? How’s about gonzoti?

There’s a lot of exuberance about India nowadays and I think that needs to be tempered with some other perspectives. It’s not necessarily an easy place to live, work, visit, or develop.

Where Were You by Rob Walker
Walker collects a year’s worth of reactions to various obituaries. While I admire his lo-fi approach to turning a habit into a publication, and acknowledge that he promised very little except “here it is” I mostly found this unsatisfying. Walker is a good storyteller, journalist, writer, etc. He gets his facts in line and then tells us what it means. He (by design) doesn’t do that here. And so you get a lot of “I didn’t really know this…” or “I don’t really care about that” which mostly generates a squawk reaction in me. What?! How could you not know….how could you think that…etc. etc. And that isn’t pleasant. It was a quick experiment as a reader, so no regrets.

How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer by Debbie Millman
This is the sort of book I’d imagined writing someday – sitting down with a bunch of folks in a similar field and interviewing them. I ran an impromptu panel discussion at a regional IDSA event in 2004 where I did just that. And I’ve done a few podcasts for Core77 (including one with Debbie Millman). For the most part, this book was fascinating. It’s a powerful demonstration of how crucial rapport is to a good interview. In many cases, Debbie is interviewing people with whom she has a historical relationship, and so that rapport comes from friendship/colleagueship. In other cases, she’s encountering them for the first time in their (in-person or email) interview. I’m not sure, but I think I can tell the difference; certainly the in-person interviews range wider and allow for more following up and clarification, and that’s often where the good stuff comes out.

The subjects are all prominent in the graphic design field (although many of them were names I did not know) and many of the questions are exactly the same; this reveals itself more in the email interviews where the lack of opportunity to follow-up creates a disappointing sameness. By the end of the book, I was pretty bored in the same questions over and over again. I could see cutting out some of the interviews and letting the remaining ones go a little longer.

The book is mostly fascinating, however. Some themes and characteristics emerge: relevance, ego, humility and insecurity, thoughts on creativity and collaboration, and what I found to be the biggest personal a-ha – the relationship of other professional-level endeavors to support the primary one. These folks all identify as designers, but most of them also express themselves as painters or writers, and tell a coherent story as to how that activity is a critical complementary pillar to their design process/identity. Maybe that’s true for many of us; do we talk about it enough or is there a concern that this will dilute our perceived quality in our primary professional identity. Certainly for me, writing and photography feed into the work I do with our clients. I’ve advocated for others to develop these secondary pieces in order to support their main work. Still, it was gratifying to see that emerge strongly and consistently across these thought leaders.

Rochdale: The Runaway College by David Sharpe
My time at University of Toronto was blocks away from this rather drab senior center; one day I heard from one of my residence pals that said building had once been a den of hippiedom, an out-of-control social experiment. I picked up bits and pieces over the years, but this was my first chance to read an in-depth history of the Rochdale experiment. It’s a perfect artifact of the 60s idealism/naivete giving way to abuse, crime, drugs, financial ruin, and every other form of entropy.

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
I know we’re supposed to love Vonnegut for his sadly wry commentary about the nature of man, but this is my third Vonnegut in a short time and I have been left wanting each time.

Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Japan by Alex Kerr
I just started this book in advance of our trip to Japan in just a couple of weeks!

Around the World in 57 1/2 Gigs by Dave Bidini
What is it about the Canadian book publishing industry that they can’t afford copy editors? Bidini tells a story about how in the early days of his band (the Rheostatics) they blew off a record exec who got the name of an XTC album wrong. But Bidini makes a couple of errors himself when referring to the titles of popular rock songs (while he’s being dismissive of those songs, even); his publisher should make sure he doesn’t look like a hypocrite! Anyway, it’s another round-the-world book from Bidini. In 2002 he went across the globe to play hockey in strange places, here he’s playing rock-n-roll in strange places. His adventures are great, his writing is improving (editing notwithstanding), and he’s fairly fearless in engaging with strangers across the barriers of culture, politics, alcohol, and hunger.

Woken Furies by Richard K. Morgan
All the books in this series are complex, mysterious, hardboiled, techy, and filled with action. I love ’em.

JPod by Douglas Coupland
I’m already on record objecting to this book, since Coupland figures as a character. I finally read the book (rather than criticizing it without having read it) and it was…okay. The parts with Coupland were extremely distracting, taking you out of the narrative to wonder why the author put himself in the book, why the author had the narrator despise Coupland so. Is that clever irony, oh, Coupland wrote the book but he’s using someone else to talk crap about him? It’s really him that’s saying that? See…distracting. Otherwise, it was a satisfactory Coupland romp, without the soul-cutting brilliance that a third of his books reaches. Oh, and J-pod has nothing to do with Japan or iPods. Phew.

Thanks to Fred Sampson’s recommendation, I had some time in Hawaii to read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.

…and the memories and the dreams that he had brought back from the tree would be elided by the world of things you could touch. That was the way it always went.

I gave the book away, but I wrote that quote down because it just really struck me as beautiful and also commenting on some similar stuff to what I tend to write about (just not as eloquently…elided!)

I also read Market Forces by Richard Morgan; also discovered via a blog entry, in this case from a student in my class last semester. It wasn’t as cool as the Takeshi Kovacs books (action/noir/hardboiled/tech-sci-fi) and in some ways was rather silly and heavy-handed (in the future, investment bankers drive armored vehicles and have sanctioned duels to kill each other and win deals to subsize global events like small wars), but fun anyway. Most amazing was Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer which blew me away. I liked his first book, but this was awesome. Read it in one long day of airport lounges and airplane rides. Highly recommended.

And I made it through about 70% of The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge; the kind of sci-fi I would have liked in my younger days; but now really dated. The speculative concepts he’s exploring seem less exciting or relevant than what Sterling et. al are doing.

I just love that headline because you can read it a couple of different ways depending on what your expectation is. Perhaps Mr. Cheney felt bad about not getting him the first time so he’s been lying in wait outside the hospital!

Today I was at the library, and so I picked up The Dark Tower, the 7th book in Stephen King’s long-running series. A 770 page tome.

I’ve chewed up the previous books quite happily, as they’ve grown longer I’ve managed to make quick work of ’em, even. I have memories of reading this series going back many years (I could tell you when the first book came out, but I see that Amazon lists the 2003 edition so if they are going to make it tough for me – whatever – suffice to say it was probably in the 80s).

The amount of complexity and jargon jammed into the first 30 pages was overwhelming and hard to take seriously. And of course I remember very little from the last book in the series from about 2 years ago. Anyway, I see that Mr. King himself is a character in the book.

I put it down. No thanks. Not only is there an attempt to combine dozens of mythologies from previous books into this super-story, but the author himself is appearing? How daring! How circular! How post-modern! How poorly executed and frankly…annoying. And you sir are no Charlie Kaufman. Heinlein did something like this when he was well past writing anything good but was still marketable. Blecch.

It’s a drag that I won’t have the sense of completion that I imagine could come from having “read ’em all” – but I guess life’s too short to put the time into this. There’s certainly no shortage of stuff that I’m more eager to read.

========================================================
FreshMeat #14 from Steve Portigal

               (__)                     
               (oo) Fresh                  
                \\/  Meat

FreshMeat – It’ll heat you up and it’ll cool you down…
=========================================================

Here’s an assemblage of books that have caught my eye.
I own most of them (at least one was a library book),
I’ve started to read most of them, and I’ve even
finished a quite a few. Some of them I’ve probably
had for a few years, even.

Note that the year listed may be inaccurate - between 
different editions, paperback, reprints, or releases in 
various countries, it was difficult to be completely 
accurate (well, it didn't seem like it would be of any 
benefit to formulate a consistent date system).

+++++++++++++++++++++

Litter Only
Alexandra Martini
2001

Neat little photo essay of public garbage receptacles
from around the world. Too tightly bound to really get
a good look at a lot of the pictures, however. The kind of
book that makes many of us think "hey, I could have done
that…"

+++++++++++++++++++++

Walker Evans: Signs
Walker Evans, Andrei Codrescu
1998

A personal fetish of mine is photographing signs,
especially old ones. This is a book of wonderful
(and old) pictures of wonderful (and even older)
signs.

+++++++++++++++++++++

Open Here: The Art of Instructional Design
Paul Mijksenaar, Piet Westendorp
1999

This is a beautiful collection of illustrations that
explain how to use products. How, where, and when to
pull, push, insert, twist, spin, shake, connect,
remove, and so on. A celebration of the ephemeral.

+++++++++++++++++++++

Understanding Comics
Scott McCloud
1994

Presented as a comic novel, an exploration of the
"user interface" of comics – how a page of framed
illustrations with captions and balloons works as
a narrative form. The author places himself as a
character in the book, explaining his theories with
plenty of examples. A very non-threatening format for
dealing with some complex stuff. Something about his
visual style is kind of annoying to me, too much
"Sunday Funnies," with the veneer of underground
comix.

+++++++++++++++++++++

Reinventing Comics
Scott McCloud
2000

Again, a comic novel format, some furthering of the
same theories, taking into account new methods of creating
and consuming comics (i.e.,the Internet).

+++++++++++++++++++++

Art & Fear
David Bayles, Ted Orland
2001

An earnest if repetitive piece of encouragement – Art is
work, allow yourself to fail, "practice, man, practice…"
and beyond.

+++++++++++++++++++++

Waiting: The True Confessions of a Waitress
Debra Ginsberg
2001

An enjoyable memoir about a woman who spends many years
as a waitress. She interrupts her narrative to offer up
interesting mini-lectures on the world of food service
the kitchen romances, the politics of tipping, etc. The
narrative was more engaging than the information, however.
I was hoping for some proto-anthropological insight, but
I didn’t find it.

+++++++++++++++++++++

Big Hair: A Journey into the Transformation of Self
Grant McCracken

1996

A very readable and provocative book that documents the
cultural bringing you along for quite the ride, provoking you with experiences and opinions regularly. I was sad when it was over.

+++++++++++++++++++++

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
Malcolm Gladwell
2000

Required reading. You can even just pick a chapter and
cruise through it. Seems to be written at a slightly lower
level than his New Yorker articles (some of which are
integrated into the text of this book).

+++++++++++++++++++++

Uncommon Wisdom
Fritjof Capra
1989

A big thinker documents his intellectual explorations with
other big thinkers.

+++++++++++++++++++++

Soloing: Realizing Your Life’s Ambition
Harriet Rubin
1999

More than a guide to freelancing, the attempt here is to
pave a pathway to self-discovery, illumination, and of
course, self-actualization. All while pulling down some
pretty mean coin.

+++++++++++++++++++++

Leading at the Speed of Growth: Journey from Entrepreneur
to CEO
Katherine Catlin, Jana Matthews
2001

Based on a study of 500 business leaders who made it,
looking at how to lead, and how to grow.

+++++++++++++++++++++

Work Hard & You Shall Be Rewarded: Urban Folklore from the
Paperwork Empire
Alan Dundes, Carl R. Pagter
1992

Ever see an office with a "you don’t have to be crazy to
work here (but it helps)" sign? Or a round TUIT? This book
is one in a series that assembles this widespread yet
hard-to-trace form of urban folklore.

+++++++++++++++++++++

The Experience Economy
B. Joseph Pine, James H. Gilmore, B. Joseph Pine II
1999

"Goods and services are no longer enough," and "work is a
theater & every business a stage."

+++++++++++++++++++++

Star-Spangled Canadians
Jeffrey Simpson
2000

The Canadians in the U.S. – what brought them here, what
are they doing here, and what is their sense of national
identity? The author interviewed me (a Canadian) when he did
a pass through Silicon Valley in researching this book. And
no, I’m not in it. Damn!

+++++++++++++++++++++

Tropic of Hockey: My Search for the Game in Unlikely Places
Dave Bidini
2002

The author travels around the world to play hockey,
comparing his own imperative to learn and play the game
in 1970s Toronto with what he finds in Hong Kong, Dubai,
and Transylvania.

+++++++++++++++++++++

Inventing Desire: Inside Chiat/Day: The Hottest Shop, the
Coolest Players, the Big Business of Advertising
Karen Stabiner
1993

The author spent a year inside Chiat/Day (before they
were TBWA), studying the creative process, the egos,
the innovative office environments, the ad campaigns,
and the clients. Very engaging, but a little too
positive.

+++++++++++++++++++++

Truth, Lies and Advertising: The Art of Account Planning
Jon Steel
1998

Account Planning is the process of creating advertising
that connects with consumers. As opposed to? The writing
style makes Newsweek seem like Umberto Eco.

+++++++++++++++++++++

Where the Suckers Moon: The Life and Death of an Advertising Campaign
Randall Rothenberg
1995

An incredibly revealing document of how Subaru put their
account up for review, considered several agencies, and
selected one. And then how the agency (and their client,
Subaru) screwed it up.

+++++++++++++++++++++

My Life As a 10-Year-Old Boy
Nancy Cartwright
2001

The woman who does Bart Simpson’s voice details her
career as an actor, a voice actor, and most interestingly,
as Bart. Good document of the process of making an episode.

+++++++++++++++++++++

Have Not Been the Same: The Canrock Renaissance 1985-1995
Michael Barclay, et al
2001

An extraordinarily detailed (and thick) document of the
radical in Canadian music (the bands, and the business),
in the post-Adams/Hart/BTO/Loverboy era.

+++++++++++++++++++++

PCAT: Preparation for the Pop-Culture Aptitude Test: Rad ’80s Version
John Sellers
1998

I spent the 80s watching a great deal of TV, music videos,
and listening to the radio. And I am blessed/cursed to
remember most of it (not just the recycling-friendly bits
that VH1 has chosen to exhume). This book is a detailed
and challenging review of those (and other) elements of
80s pop culture.

—

What are YOU reading?