Books read in October 2014

New:

1. The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court by Anna Whitelock
2. The Glitter and the Gold: The American Duchess in Her Own Words by Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan
3. All the Songs: The Story Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon and Philippe Margotin
4. Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town by Stephen Leacock
5. A Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy by Helen Rappaport

Reread:

1. Fantasy in Death

Books read in September 2014

New:

1. Delusion in Death by J.D. Robb
2. North of the DMZ: Essays on Daily Life in North Korea by Andrei Lankov
3. The Orenda by Joseph Boyden

Reread:

1. Promises in Death
2. Kindred in Death
3. Missing in Death

Books read in August 2014

New:

1. Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story by Robyn Doolittle
2. The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith (a.k.a. J.K. Rowling)
3. The Unquiet (short story anthology) by Robb, Blaney, Gaffney, Ryan and McComas
4. The Corpse with the Golden Nose by Cathy Ace
5. Celebrity in Death by J.D. Robb

Reread:

1. Strangers in Death
2. Salvation in Death
3. Ritual in Death

Books read in July 2014

New:

1. Love and Forgetting: A husband and wife's journey through dementia by Julie Macfie Sobol & Ken Sobol
2. The Little Princesses: The Story of the Queen's Childhood by Marion Crawford (the Queen's former governess!)
3. Miss Manners Minds Your Business by Judith Martin and Nicholas Ivor Martin
4. Servants: A Downstairs View of Twentieth-century Britain by Lucy Lethbridge

Reread:

1. Eternity in Death
2. Creation in Death

Dementia brings back the monsters under the bed?

I've been reading Love and Forgetting: A husband and wife's journey through dementia by Julie Macfie Sobol & Ken Sobol, which tell the story of Ken Sobol's dementia (Lewy Body Disease) both in the first person and from his wife's (Julie's) perspective.

The following passage is a first-person description of the hallucinations he'd have.  As usual, any typos are my own:

Moving day was October 1, 2007. When I got up the first night at the new place to use the washroom, I was startled to find that the stacks of boxes, floor lamps and other scattered leftover from the move were providing material for new kinds of bizarre shapes. The forms were back again the next night. In fact, it got to so that virtually every evening I would find waiting for me outside the bedroom door a troupe of odd, inexplicable creatures doing their best to shake my grip on reality.

These were not like the alarming nighttime apparitions I'd seen in the hospital after the TURP procedure. the new ones came in two basic guises: animals of various sorts - mostly small, skittering creatures - and tall, thin types. Sometimes they ignored me. Sometimes, but only if I turned toward them and started, they became animated. Then, for example, the low rectangular radiator in the hallway might suddenly convert itself into a small sheep; a cluster of scarves on the coat hook might become a high fashion hat; an Inuit print could spring to live as a circle of wolves following me with their eyes. (A litho resembling such a wolf scene hangs on the wall of our home office.) Some of the more feminine figures, if that is the proper designation for them, carried what appeared to be small creatures in their arms.

At first, I freaked. No surprise there.But then I noticed that whenever I approached them, they would immediately rise and move off in a slow motion down the hallway, or simply disintegrate on the spot, before reforming into normal lamps, jackets and whatever other objects in the darkness had led me to imagine their existence.

On the nights that followed, some of the forms even entered our bedroom and then at times, I had to waken Julie to make sure they went away. (Not that she eve saw them, of course, but her voice was reassuring to me and commanding to the apparitions.) Ultimately, it seemed clear to me they meant no harm nor presented any real danger. All the same, when I later came across a reference book that called them "benign visions," I was relieved.

I rarely got a glimpse of the hall dwellers' faces; I wasn't even sure they had any. They never spoke, and except for one accidental instance, they always managed to fade away before I made physical contact. The incident where I touched one took place as I came out of the bathroom one evening and tripped on something (a shoe, I think,), losing my balance. As I thrust out my arm toward the wall to catch myself, so did a vaguely alpaca-like creature. We met and touched at a corner - Julie's terrycloth bathrobe and my shaggy Irish wool sweater hanging on the coat rack. The creature and I both sprang back in alarm. When I looked again it had disappeared, fading into the woodwork.

I didn't know what to make of this tactile experience; I still don't. But as time passed, I grew so accustomed to the apparitions that I began looking forward, albeit in a slightly uneasy way, to seeing what form they would take each night.

Then there were those other apparitions, the ones that could come at any time and that manifested themselves not as things I see, but as things watching me. They lurked just outside the corner of my eye; if I glanced their way, they also would run away, as if they didn't like being seen. (Of course, maybe they were just getting old and cranky, like the rest of us when we reach a certain age.) A few times I found myself addressing one of them, momentarily forgetting that I was asking for an opinion from a pile of clothing or perhaps quarreling with something as vague as a wisp or memory.

What struck me about this passage is the extent to which his apparitions resembled the monsters that haunted me when I was a very small child.

My monsters very rarely moved around, instead preferring to stand around menacingly.  I was never brave enough to engage with them so I don't know what would have happened. But his description of how everyday objects would turn into apparitions really reminds me of my childhood monsters.

In the past few years, with my grandmothers declining and various people around me having babies, I've been thinking that old age in some ways resembles a reversion to early childhood.  But it never occurred to me that that could apply to cognitive processes as well.

Books read in June 2014

New:

1. The Master of All Desires by Judith Merkle Riley
2. Mary Poppins, She Wrote by Valerie Lawson
3. Life Below Stairs: Domestic Servants in England from Victorian Times by Frank Edward Huggett
4. She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth by Helen Castor
5. New York to Dallas by J.D. Robb

Reread:

1. Innocent in Death

Books read in May 2014

I had a very busy month and didn't get to read very much.

New:

1. Treachery in Death by J.D. Robb
2. River of Stars by Guy Gavriel Kay

Reread:

1. Born in Death

Books read in April 2014

New:

1. The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith (a.k.a. J.K. Rowling)
2. Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James
3. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin
4. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
5. Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh

Reread:

1. Memory in Death
2. Haunted in Death

Things They Should Invent: memorial library books

Picture this: a loved one dies, so you donate a copy (or multiple copies) of their favourite book or books to the library.  The books get an elegant notation inside the cover saying "In memory of [name]", and are then added to the circulating collection. This means people who check out that book in the future learn about the existence of your deceased loved one and the fact that they enjoyed that book, thereby introducing your deceased loved one to like minds and kindred spirits. There could also be a webpage where there's a blurb about each of the memorialized people, so if the book you check out of the library turns out to be a memorial, you can look the person up and learn more about them.

Possible option: donate the deceased's own books to the library in their memory.  The suitability of this approach would depend on the nature and condition of the books (I doubt the library needs any more Harry Potters, or old dog-eared copies of books they already have better copies of) but if the books were suitable for donation it would certainly be an elegant approach.

Problems to which I don't yet have solutions:  what happens if a memorial book is lost or damaged? What happens if, after some time passes, the library needs to get rid of some of the memorial books?  (For example, they don't have nearly as many copies of Harry Potter as they had when the books first came out, so they've probably sold some copies.)

Books read in March 2014

New:

1. How the Light Gets In by Louise Penny
2. How the Dead Dream by Lydia Millet
3. American Savage by Dan Savage
4. A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

Reread:

1. Visions in Death
2. Survivor in Death
3. Origin in Death

Books read in February 2014

New books:

1. Behind the Scenes at Downton Abbey by Emma Rowley
2. The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II by Charles Glass
3. Bone and Bread by Saleema Nawaz
4. Dexter's Final Cut by Jeff Lindsay
5. Orange is the New Black by Piper Kerman

From my ongoing comfort-food reread of In Death:

1. Imitation in Death
2. Remember When
3. Divided in Death

Once again, a clever detail in the most recent Dexter book (spoiler-free)

When I first saw the Dexter TV series, I thought Michael C. Hall was too attractive for the role of Dexter. I've been reading the Dexter series since the first book came out, and I didn't see the character as anywhere near as conventionally attractive as Michael C. Hall.

So I was quite delighted to see, in Double Dexter, that Dexter seemed to have noticed for the first time that he's rather handsome. That totally resolve that very minor, completely subjective, inconsistency between the books and the casting - Dexter didn't seem handsome on paper because he's a non-omniscient narrator and he never thought to notice before!

Something similar happened with the most recent book.  In Dexter by Design, Dexter says "Of course, for some bizarre reason, we don't have a National Registry of Who Your Friends Are".  As I pointed out when I read it, Facebook serves that function.

And in the most recent book, Dexter's Final Cut, Dexter and Debra are shown Facebook by a civilian, and it turns out they weren't previously aware of it!  It doesn't address why they weren't aware of it (maybe the books are set a few years ago?) but it does make it apparent that it wasn't a tool they had in previous books.

I love how this author closes tiny little plot holes that aren't even really plot holes!

Books read in January 2014

I recently realized that I read more books than I thought I did.  So, for 2014, I'm going to keep track of the books I read each month. Might be interesting to see how many I get done or if any patterns emerge. (Although which books I read when is really a function of the library's holds system rather than any deliberate choice.)

New books (i.e. read for the first time):

1. Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey by the Countess of Carnarvon
2. The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag by Chol-Hwan Kang and Pierre Rigoulet
3. To Marry an English Lord by Gail MacColl and Carol McD. Wallace
4.  How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman

I'm also doing an ongoing comfort-food reread of the In Death series. I don't really think of this as "books I've read" because they're not new, but nevertheless they are books and I did read them. This month I read:

1. Purity in Death
2. Portrait in Death

Hmm...that's fewer than I expected when I tweeted excitedly about how many books I'd read earlier this month...

How to tell if you've already read a particular library book

Sometimes I come across a book that seems vaguely familiar in concept, but I'm not sure if I've read it already or not.  I don't really care to waste my time rereading something that turned out to be forgettable, but I don't want to not read an interest-sounding or recommended book just because I might have once read something similar.

The library doesn't keep records of which books you've checked out in the past - which makes perfect sense from a privacy perspective, not to mention what a huge-ass database that would end up being.

But I've just worked out a way to figure out if you've checked out a particular book before.  And the solution is beautifully simple:

Search your email.

If you checked out the book by putting it on hold and having them send it to your local library branch, you'll have an email alert that it's ready to be picked up.  If you kept the book until nearly the due date, you'll have an email alert that it's due soon.  (Helpful hint for Toronto Public Library patrons: search your email for the call number rather than the book title, since the email notifications used to not contain the title.)

This won't work if you don't use email alerts, or if you delete your emails, or if your primary method of library use is to browse the shelves.  But if your library transactions habitually pass through your email, you can find a record of what you've taken out of the library in your email.

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

In my readings about neuroplasticity, I came across a mention of a book called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, which is a drawing course that uses neuroplasticity principles to improve your drawing skills by strengthening your right brain.  I have no interest in drawing but I did want to see neuroplasticity happen, so I decided to try it out.  (This is also why blogging has been particularly slow lately - I've had to spend a lot of time drawing!)

Here's what I discovered:

Using my right brain only literally makes my brain hurt!  One of the earlier exercises is copying a line drawing upside down.  Because it's upside down, it's far more difficult to recognize what you're drawing, so instead of thinking "This is a leg that I'm drawing now" you think in terms of "How do the length and angle of this line relate to the line I just drew?"  Because your left brain can't name the parts of what you're drawing, it stops participating in the exercise, leaving it to the right brain only.  My poor, underused right brain was not accustomed to this, and the exercise gave me the worst headache I've had since the first day I tried going coffee-free on weekends.  If I hadn't known about the neuroplasticity benefits, I would have given up right then and there.

My left brain quickly adapted. When I did that first, painful upside-down line drawing, the exercise was a success in that I couldn't recognize what I was copying so I copied the actual lines far more accurately.  However, by the time I got to the second (which was on another day, with at least one sleep in between), rather than my right brain being stronger, I found my left brain had adapted to the exercise and I could recognize what I was drawing far more readily, which defeated the purpose of the exercise and resulted in a less realistic drawing.

My drawing did improve, but not as much as I had hoped. The last pictures I drew were significantly better than the first ones.  However, they weren't nearly as good as I had hoped they would be based on the description of what the book was meant to achieve.  I wasn't able to enjoy my clear, obvious, significant improvement because the drawings still didn't come out nearly as well as I wanted.

This book helps you see, but doesn't help you actually draw. The core function of the book is to make you see what's actually in front of you - how the lines and spaces and light and shadows relate to each other - rather than letting your left brain fill in the blank. The problem - as with everything physical and tangible - is that I can't always make my hand make the pencil do what I want it to.  I draw a line, and it looks wrong.  Using the principles taught in the book, I am now able to think "That should be on a steeper slant." But when I erase it and try to redraw it on a steeper slant... it comes out exactly where I put it in the first place!  This book doesn't do anything to help with that, and it's currently the biggest obstacle to my drawings coming out the way I want them to. 

I'd also hoped that it might give me drawing skills that enable me to do a quick, semi-realistic sketch, the sort of thing I could bust out as a parlour trick.  I was picturing sitting and colouring with my fairy goddaughter, and while she makes me a page of crayon scribbles that I will keep forever, I make her a recognizable picture of her dog or something.  But instead the process is slow and technical, and requires a subject or model that stays still (which my fairy goddaughter's dog most definitely does not.)  It gets results with time invested and hard work, but doesn't give you the ability to improvise delightfully.  Much like my music skills, actually.


Turns out I don't like drawing. I never got to the point of enjoying the drawing exercises.  Every time I got to one, I'd be like "Aww, man, I have to draw now!"  I found it tedious and time-consuming and got no pleasure out of it.  I wasn't expecting to enjoy it - I was in this for neuroplasticity, not for art skills - but because of this I found it a bit annoying when the book suggested that I was probably pleased with my drawing or I probably found this particular exercise enjoyable.  In fact, the exercise I found most enjoyable was the pure contour drawing, where you try to visually copy the contours of what you're drawing without looking at the paper.  This is a visualization exercise rather than a drawing exercise - it isn't intended to produce an actual drawing and most often just produces a scribble - and I found I enjoyed it specifically because there were no expectations of the end result.

I don't know if this actually had any neuroplasticity effects.  I noticed my left brain compensating, and I noticed that after the first couple exercises my brain stopped hurting during the right-brain-only work, but I don't know if that's my right brain getting stronger or just that my left brain figured out a way to barge in and help.  Other than that, I didn't notice anything, but the fact that I don't perceive it doesn't mean it isn't there.

Analogy for why social media is not a replacement for RSS

One of the things I found most bizarre in all the discussion surrounding the cancellation of Google Reader is that some people (including, apparently, some who work at Google) seem to think that social media is a suitable replacement for a feed reader.  As though we're perfectly content with reading whatever our internet friends choose to share and have no need whatsoever to curate our own reading list.

Today my shower gave me an analogy:

I've just caught up on the Inspector Gamache series, and am waiting with bated breath for the next book to come out in August.

So suppose, on the release date in August, I walk into a bookstore and ask "Do you have the latest Inspector Gamache book?"

The bookstore worker answers, "Here are some books I read and enjoyed recently!"

That doesn't solve my problem, does it?  I want to know what happened with Inspector Beauvoir.  I want to know how (or whether) Peter and Clara's marriage is holding up. I want to find out who leaked the video.

The books the bookstore worker read and enjoyed recently won't address these needs.  They may well be good books, I may well enjoy them, they may well end up being new favourites that I end up following diligently.  But, even if I read and enjoy them all, I will still want to read the next Inspector Gamache.

Lesen auf Deutsch

I'm currently reading a book in German (Der Knochenmann by Wolf Haas, published in English as The Bone Man - no spoilers please, I'm only partway through).  This is noteworthy because I haven't done any long-form reading in German in 13 years, and even then German has always been a difficult language for me to read.  When I was in school, I'd be sitting there with my dictionary looking up every single word I don't understand, then using my grammar rules to decode how the elements in the sentences relate to each other.

But I was surprised to discover that now it's much faster going!  Not because I understand more German, but because I seem to know intuitively which parts I don't need to understand.  Based on the words I do understand and my knowledge of how a novel works, I can tell "Okay, this is a soccer game, these few paragraphs are describing gameplay, anything I don't understand is soccer-related, no need to look stuff up." So I skim over those paragraphs with little understanding except that the local team won and the goaltender was awesome, and don't reach for my dictionary until we're back into the main plot.

Similarly, I find I'm not analyzing the grammar to figure out how the elements in a sentence relate to each other.  I'm thinking "How would these elements relate to each other logically?" and only digging down to the grammar if the logical interpretation doesn't make sense in context.

Surprisingly, this works!  I looked up an English excerpt to make sure I haven't missed anything important, and I haven't! Everything I glossed over contained exactly what I expected it to! It could be I missed a gun on the mantlepiece, I don't know yet, but worst case I'm surprised by the ending rather than seeing it coming like I usually do in mysteries.

I think this is all a result of translation brain.  When you're translating, you have to render not the words per se, but rather the truth of what the text is saying.  The vast majority of the time, it doesn't matter whether the author of the text used a word that translates as "however" or "moreover", what matters is whether the relationship between the two ideas in question is "however" or "moreover".  (I've always thought fill in the blank exercises for linking words would be useful for translation students.)  It doesn't matter that the source text used the pluperfect, what matters is which tense most accurately represents the idea being expressed in the target language.

So after 13 years of thinking this way (coincidentally, the same amount of time since I last read in German - my last German class was the year before my first translation class), I seem to have developed intuition for which unknown words or syntax is ripe with meaning and which parts will end up saying exactly what I'd expect them to say.

Gambling and positive thinking

The following is a quote from page 264 of The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg.  As usual, any typoes are my own.

In 2010, a cognitive neuroscientist named Reza Habib asked twenty-two people to lie inside an MRI and watch a slot machine spin around and around. Half of the participants in Habib's experiment were “pathological gamblers” — people who had lied to their families about their gambling, missed work to gamble, or had bounced checks at a casino — while the other half were people who gambled socially but didn’t exhibit any problematic behaviors. Everyone was placed on their backs inside a narrow tube and told to watch wheels of lucky 7s, apples, and gold bars spin across a video screen. The slot machine was programmed to deliver three outcomes: a win, a loss, and a “near miss,” in which the slots almost matched up but, at the last moment, failed to align. None of the participants won or lost any money. All they had to do was watch the screen as the MRI recorded their neurological activity.

“We were particularly interested in looking at the brain systems involved in habits and addictions,” Habib told me. “What we found was that, neurologically speaking, pathological gamblers got more excited about winning. When the symbols lined up, even though they didn’t actually win any money, the areas in their brains related to emotion and reward were much more active than in nonpathological gamblers.

“But what was really interesting were the near misses. To pathological gamblers, near misses looked like wins. Their brains reacted almost the same way. But to a nonpathological gambler, a near miss was like a loss. People without a gambling problem were better at recognizing that a near miss means you still lose.”

Two groups saw the exact same event, but from a neurological perspective, they viewed it differently. People with gambling problems got a mental high from the near misses— which, Habib hypothesizes, is probably why they gamble for so much longer than everyone else: because the near miss triggers those habits that prompt them to put down another bet. The nonproblem gamblers, when they saw a near miss, got a dose of apprehension that triggered a different habit, the one that says I should quit before it gets worse.

The mindset that makes the problem gambling problematic sounds an awful lot like positive thinking, doesn't it?

Things the Library Should Invent: subscribe to author or series

A while back, I read and enjoyed Daughter of Smoke and Bone.  I then googled it and learned that a sequel was in the works, but the title and release date of the sequel hadn't been announced yet.  Then I forgot about all it.

 

Fortunately, the sequel (entitled Days of Blood and Starlight - I haven't read it yet so no spoilers please) turned up on some of the Best Books of 2012 lists, so I was reminded of its existence and added it to my holds list.  However, if it hadn't been mentioned in an article I read, I would never have thought to look it up again and would miss the opportunity to spend more time with the characters.

 

The same thing keeps happening with the Dexter series.  I forget to look for new books and discover two have been written since I last checked, or I check for new books and find that there aren't any.  I'd also be interested in reading whatever Malcolm Gladwell happens to write next, but he hasn't published in 3 years. I also think I'm going to keep reading the Inspector Gamache series once I catch up, but I don't know whether it's on a predictable publication schedule. 

 

I don't want to subscribe to all the authors' newsletters, because in many cases I’m not actively involved in the fandom so I don't want all the promotional material about book signings and paperback release dates and media appearances.  I just want to be informed when there's a new book to add to my holds list.

 

I think the library would be able to help me with this.

 

I'd like to be able to select an author or series out of the library catalogue, and have it automatically add any new title from that author or series to my holds list.  Users who subscribed first get placed on the holds list first, and users would have the choice whether to add the title in active or inactive mode.  That way I don't need to keep googling every author I'm interested in, then keep searching for upcoming titles until they show up in the library catalogue, and perhaps the library would have better data on interest in upcoming titles.

 

If this is all too complicated, maybe the library could just send out automated email alerts when a new title from an author or series you subscribe to has been added to the catalogue, and users could add it to their holds list themselves.

Thoughts from The Antidote: anti-procrastination

As I blogged about yesterday, I recently read The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman.  I think his thoughts on anti-procrastination are interesting.  As usual, any typos are my own:

The problem with all these motivational tips and tricks is that they aren't really about 'how to get things done' at all. They're about how to feel in the mood for getting things done. [...] The most common response to procrastination is indeed to try to 'get the right emotion': to try to motivate yourself to feel like getting on the with the job.

The problem is that feeling like acting and actually acting are two different things.A person mired deep in procrastination might claim he is unable to work, but what he really means is that he is unable to make himself feel like working [...] This isn't meant to imply that procrastinators, or the severely depressed, should simply pull their socks up and get over it. Rather, it highlights the way that we tend to confuse acting with feeling like acting, and how most motivational techniques are really designed to change how you feel. They're built, in other words, on a form of attachment - on strengthening your investment in a specific kind of emotion.

Sometimes, that can help. But sometimes you simply can't make yourself feel like acting. And in those situations, motivational advice risks making things worse, by surreptitiously strengthening your belief that you need to feel motivated before you an act. By encouraging an attachment to a particular emotional state, it actually inserts an additional hurdle between you and your goal. The subtext is that if you can't make yourself feel excited and pleased about getting down to work, then you can't get down to work.

Taking a non-attached stance towards procrastination, by contrast, stats from a different question: who says you need to wait until you 'feel like' doing something in order to start doing it? The problem, from this perspective, isn't that you don't feel motivated; it's that you imagine you need to feel motivated. If you can regard your thoughts and emotions about whatever you're procrastinating on as passing weather, you'll realise that your reluctance about working isn't something that needs to be eradicated, or transformed into positivity. You can coexist with it. You can note the procrastinatory feelings, and act anyway.

I'm not sure to what extent this is applicable to me (I'd describe my procrastinatory feelings as "I don't WANNA!", not "I don't feel like it" or "I'm not motivated") and I haven't yet figured out how (or whether) to actually apply this in my own life, but I think it's an interesting and refreshing perspective.