The 4-Hour Workweek – by Timothy Ferriss

Here is a fairly recent bestseller that I was excited about reading when I first started, enough that I have recommended it to a number of other people, including my son, only to close the book for good on page 171, when I lost interest of the phony and contrived ideas that the author portrays.

Yes, there may be people that can get away with doing very well producing very little, exploiting the system of business we have, the fabric of our society and the rules by which it plays. It can work for some people, but just like a Ponzi scheme, it does not hold up for the masses and has to collapse. For me, it collapsed on page 171.

Make no mistake, the book is chock full of good ideas about time management, the entrepreneurial spirit, how to get things done, how to be successful, how to make money, all with minimal effort. So from that point of view it’s worth reading.

But I asked myself if I would be interested in meeting the author, and I decided I wasn’t. I think he is a person  that cuts corners and takes shortcuts. I would have a hard time respecting a marathon runner who, when nobody is looking, cuts across the brush in a hairpin curve to make the route just a bit shorter. In the same vein, I have trouble with Ferriss and some of the advice he gives.

What bothers me is that he really does not produce any value. He shows you how to move around value to make it larger. There are many people like that, but if everyone in the world were to move around value, there would be no goods to buy or sell, and no food to eat. Somebody has to build, invent,  invest, lead and – yes – work hard.

I am a worker, not a mover-arounder.

Go read The 4-Hour Workweek and decide what you are.

Rating: *

Cryptonomicon – by Neal Stephenson

It seems like most of the books I read now I do not finish.

Cryptonomicon showed up on my desk one morning in my inbasket. I had to walk around the office and ask detective-type questions to figure out who put the book there. One of my colleagues thought I’d love it. But she was reluctant. You don’t put a book with 1152 pages of small print on your boss’ desk and then expect him to spend all those hours reading it.

We talked about it later, when I was at about page 100, and I told her I couldn’t get into it. She assured me I should stick with it. I’d get hooked.

Today, at page 187 I folded a dog-ear and put it on the shelf. I can’t do it.

Stephenson is a great writer. He does excellent description, and obviously he weaves a great story. How else could he get away with paperbacks two and a half inches thick that people buy and read?

Here is a section from page 120. They are in Manila in the Philippines:

Randy is already satisfied of this, and just stands there with arms crossed, looking at the river. It is choked, bank to bank, with floating debris: some plant material but mostly old mattresses, cushions, pieces of plastic litter, hunks of foam, and, most of all, plastic shopping bags in various bright colors. The river has the consistency of vomit.

Avi wrinkles his nose. “What’s that?”

Randy sniffs the air and smells, among everything else, burnt plastic. He gestures downstream. “Squatter camp on the other side of Fort Santiago,” he explains. “They sieve plastic out of the river and burn it for fuel.”

“I was in Mexico a couple of weeks ago,” Avi says. “They have plastic forests there!”

“What does that mean?”

“Downwind of the city, the trees sort of comb the plastic shopping bags out of the air. They get totally covered with them. The trees die because light and air can’t get through to the leaves. But they remain standing, totally encased in fluttering, ragged plastic, all different colors.”

Descriptive, interesting, foreign, but somehow not capturing my motivation to keep turning the pages by page 187. On to the next book on the reading shelf.

Blood Meridian – by Cormac McCarthy

After reading The Road, I felt like I should read Blood Meridian. It’s a rough book, full of brutality, depravity and nightmarish grotesqueness. Some sections captured me, but many passages simply weren’t interesting.

Based on historical events on the border between Texas and Mexico in the middle of the 19th century, the book follows The Kid, a fourteen-year-old boy from Tennessee, who haplessly stumbles into a horrible world of murder and abuse.

I put it down on page 96.

For a proper review that does the work justice, try biblioklept.org.

The Colossus of Maroussi – by Henry Miller

This was another experience with a book unfinished, delightful in some ways, educational in others. But unfortunately, I have too little time to re-read a book unless I am extremely excited by it. So far, most of my endeavors of reading books I read once in my youth have been disappointing. The memories seem to be far more flattering than the actual works. Why destroy those?

I read Henry Miller’s Maroussi in a German translation a long time ago, perhaps thirty years or longer, during the phase in my life when I really devoured Henry Miller books. I remembered little about it, except that it was the most amazing, delightful, inspiring travel description I had ever read about any country. I remember telling people about it over the years. But since my paperback of the time was in German, and I kept very few German books around me and with me, I could not just pick it up and thumb through it and confirm to myself that those feelings I remembered were real. And as it often goes, a story vividly told over and over again grows, small details get added and next thing you know you are telling a tall tale and you can’t quite remember what is real and what is imagined.

So I went on Amazon.com spent a dollar pull shipping and handling, and received an English copy, Miller’s original language, of The Colossus of Maroussi. I also bought a copy of The Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch for good measure, which will be the next “old book” I will try to re-read, but that has to wait for another entry.

Here I should note that I read Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, Sexus, Nexus, Plexus, Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, and Colossus of Maroussi (and probably a few others I am forgetting here) all in German. I have never read a Miller book in English.

Reading it again, I find some passages that are great and clever story-telling, others Millerian monologues of nonsense, meandering on for pages, like this:

Mycenae, like Epidaurus, swims in light. But Epidaurus is all open, exposed, irrevocably devoted to the spirit. Mycenae folds in on itself, like a fresh-cut navel, dragging its glory down into the bowels of the earth where the bats and lizards feed upon it gloatingly. Epidaurus is a bowl from which to drink the pure spirit: the blue of the sky is in it and the stars and the winged creatures who fly between, scattering song and melody. Mycenae, after one turns the last bend, suddenly folds up into a menacing crouch, grim, defiant, impenetrable. Mycenae is closed in, huddled up, writhing with muscular contortions like a wrestler. Even the light, which falls on it with merciless clarity, gets sucked in, shunted off, grayed, beribboned. There were never two worlds so closely juxtaposed and yet so antagonistic.

Huh?

Sorry, I can’t read this stuff anymore nowadays. I just don’t have the time. So I turn the pages after just looking at them, picking out words like hydra, vomit, beast, breast, phantasmal hue, demarcation, metaphysics as my clues that he’s still babbling, moving on.

There are some curiosities that I enjoyed. For instance, the book is copyrighted 1941 (and my paperback is about that old, cool, huh?) and he talks about “the World War.” World War II is just starting to happen and some events in the book are woven into the story, but at that time nobody, including Miller, knew that this was going to turn into World War II, so there was only one World War.

Here is another curious passage, which has particular significance to me typing these very words while sitting in an airliner traveling from Chicago to San Diego:

In Greece you have only to announce to someone that you intend to visit a certain place and presto! in a few moments there is a carriage waiting for you at the door. This time it turned out to be an aeroplane. Seferiades had decided that I should ride in pomp. It was a poetic gesture and I accepted it like a poet.

I had never been in a plane before and I probably will never go up again. I felt foolish sitting in the sky with hands folded; the man beside me was reading a newspaper, apparently oblivious to the clouds that brushed the window-panes. We were probably making a hundred miles an hour, but since we passed nothing but clouds I had the impression of not moving. In short, it was unrelievedly dull and pointless. I was sorry that I had not booked the passage on the good ship Acropolis which was to touch at Crete shortly. Man is made to walk the earth and sail the seas; the conquest of the air is reserved for a later stage of his evolution, when he will have sprouted real wings and assumed the form of the angel which he is in essence.

Another passage for the road warrior in me:

At Patras we decided to go ashore and take the train to Athens. The Hotel Cecil, which we stopped at, is the best hotel I have ever been in, and I have been in a good many. It cost about 23 cents a day for a room the likes of which could not be duplicated in America for less than five dollars.

Ouch. I just spent 4 nights on the road, $167 plus tax on night one and two, $155 plus tax for night three, and $125 – I got a great deal – for night four.  

Here is a crackup:

Now and then I would get excited and, using a melange of English, Greek, German, French, Choctaw, Eskimo, Swahili or any other tongue I felt would serve the purpose, using the chair, the table, the spoon, the lamp, the bread knife, I would enact for him a fragment of my life in New York, Paris, London, Chula Vista, Canarsie, Hackensack or in some place I had never been or some place I had been in a dream or when lying asleep on the operating table.

So: New York, Paris, London, Chula Vista? Chula Vista is a southern suburb on San Diego, close to the Mexian border, and in 1940 it must have been a very small rural cowboy town indeed. Miller naming Chula Vista long with Paris and New York made me crack up and laugh out loud.

Of course, further study reveals that Miller went to San Diego in his youth from Brooklyn, New York, around 1913 or so, I can’t tell exactly what year. He tried to attend lectures by Emma Goldman. But mostly, he worked “like a slave” in Orange Groves in Chula Vista for a while, and wrote about some of those episodes decades later in Tropic of Capricorn. So it makes sense for him to pull out a colorful name of a locale of his youth in his writings from time to time.

Delightful as some of the reading was, I tired of it, and so, halfway through, I folded a dog ear on page 134, and put it on the shelf of books done reading. Perhaps long after I am gone, somebody will buy this book which has the name A. Schwartz penciled inside the front cover, from a descendant company of Amazon, and wonder who it was that stopped reading on page 134. By then it will be a true antique, a very old book, which had a short midlife awakening, an airplane trip to New York and back to San Diego, before sinking back to a long sleep.

Catch-22 – by Joseph Heller

In my quest to read the 100 best novels (as listed in a number of different places), I came across Catch-22. Highly acclaimed by everyone. I got to page 75 and decided that I simply wasn’t interested enough to complete it.  Just because everyone says that this is a great book does not mean it captivates me enough to want to spend countless more hours on it. So I let it go. I’ll have to come up with an “unfinished” category in my tracking spreadsheet.

It tells the stories of a group of soldiers in a flying squadron in Italy during WW-II. The author is funny and descriptive. The story is entertaining.

Maybe I’ll try again some other time.