Tag: book-review

Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome #reading

I listened to the audiobook of Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome’s classic novel for children during the period from late March through to early June this year. It was a fairly long process, almost 9 hours of listening, accomplished mostly on my walks to and from work. There were two reasons for my choice of listening, the first linking to my desire to read explore more novels for children as I tried to find stories that were in any way comparable to my own attempt at a children’s adventure story (something that I have written about in my post on Cornelia Funke’s book The Thief Lord), and the second being that Swallows and Amazons was a suitable ‘R’ pick as I worked my way, for the second time, through an alphabet of author surnames in James Mustich’s wonderful book ‘1000 Books To Read Before You Die’.

Swallows and Amazons is, of course, a very well known title, and for many people it is a much-loved one. But despite its name being very familiar to me, I had never previously read a single word of it. I had a vague idea of what it was about – a bunch of kids having adventures on a boat – but for some reason I thought it was set in the Norfolk Broads rather than the Lake District.

The story revolves around the adventures of four siblings, conveniently, to give a nice balance, two boys and two girls – John, Susan, Titty and Roger – as they spend a summer holiday camping on an island in the middle of a lake and sailing their boat, Swallow, around and about each day. Published in 1930, the children unsurprisingly fall into neatly gender-stereotyped and age-constrained roles, John is very much the responsible old-head, and, naturally, captain of the Swallow. Susan, next oldest, and mate of the Swallow fulfills the ‘mother’ role, taking great care and pride in keeping their camp tidy, preparing meals and keeping the younger children in order. Titty, the younger sister, is the Able Seaman and, it turns out, a little bit of a rebel (the privilege of youth!). Finally, Roger, the baby of the family and ship’s boy, is very much treated as the youngest – being taught how to swim, sometimes being allowed to stay up late or accompany the others as a special treat, and frequently falling asleep.

The main action in the story involves the Swallows interactions with two local children, Nancy and Peggy Blackett, captain and mate of their own boat Amazon, and very much portrayed as rather unsophisticated and down-to-earth locals, in comparison to the rather ‘smart’ Walker children. Initially, the relationship between the Swallows and the Amazons is somewhat hostile but, as you might expect, they end up joining forces, first against the Blackett’s uncle James, who lives in a houseboat on the lake and seems to be inexplicably grumpy and awkward, and then against some rather unsavoury characters who they become embroiled with. Throughout the story it is very much John and Nancy who are held up as the masters of the craft of sailing their boats and leading the adventures, but in the end it is young Titty who turns out to be the real star.

Listening to the audiobook of the story was quite an odd experience. The attitudes and happenings of the story are very dated, and I will admit that the constant references to Titty took some getting used to. The story is absolutely chock full of nautical references to the extent that practically everything the children do is rendered in nautical-speak – for example, everyone else is a pirate or a landlubber, they are constantly jibing or backing the mainsail or trimming the freeboard, and everything they drink becomes grog. All of these things – the datedness, the setting, the obscure language – left me wondering how it could be that, more than 90 years after its publication, Swallows and Amazons is still often lauded and recommended as a story for modern children. Perhaps there is some innate craving for a return to the semi-wild that a child can connect with, even if they (probably) haven’t got a clue about one end of a boat from another, and almost certainly have no idea whatsoever what ‘pemmican’ is!

So did I enjoy Swallows and Amazons? Would I recommend it?

Well, let’s be honest, Swallows and Amazons wasn’t written to entertain an almost 60 year old man with limited interest and experience in sailing, reading it 95 years after it was set and published. It’s probably not surprising then, that I would have to say that I was left underwhelmed… But maybe if I was 12 years old with my thoughts turning to imagined adventures and challenges, and yearning to escape from the constraining influence of the adults in my world I might have felt differently. Then perhaps, I would have leapt onboard at the chance to join John, Susan, Titty, Roger, Nancy and Peggy as they hoist their flags, cast off and allowed the wind to fill their sails and send them racing across the lake in pursuit of their next adventure!

Wild Courage – Jenny Wood #reading

In the early months of this year I read and heard several references to a soon-to-be published book: Wild Courage by Jenny Wood. My interest was piqued further after I viewed a Livestream of an episode of the podcast ‘A Productive Conversation‘, in which the host, Mike Vardy, chatted with the author about her book (A Productive Conversation: Episode 611 – Jenny Wood talks about wild courage and fearless self-advocacy). I duly ordered the book and began reading it soon after it arrived on my doorstep, optimistic that it was going to be an interesting and enjoyable read.

Wood’s basic idea is that in order to progress we need to have courage – to push through fear of the unknown, fear of discontent, fear of failure and fear of judgement by others. She argues that successful people feel, but put aside, all of this fear, becoming their own strongest advocate, and having the courage to take whatever steps are necessary to advance towards their goal(s).

The distinctive feature, or twist, in Woods espousal of this feel the fear and do it anyway approach to life is that she identifies nine traits that generally hold negative connotations, and then recasts each of them as a type of courage that the reader is encouraged to develop and deploy. The nine traits, and their associate courage, are as follows:

  • WEIRD – the courage to stand out
  • SELFISH – the courage to stand up for what you want
  • SHAMELESS – the courage to stand being your efforts and abilities
  • OBSESSED – the courage to set your own standard
  • NOSY – the courage to dig deeper
  • MANIPULATIVE – the courage to influence others
  • BRUTAL – the courage to protect your time and energy
  • RECKLESS – the courage to take calculated risks
  • BOSSY – the courage to listen and lead

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this approach, in fact I think it provides an interesting route into thinking about this territory…

(can you tell that there’s a but coming?)

…but what I wasn’t expecting from the book, and what disappointed and annoyed me as I read it, was the way that at every turn Wood focused on deploying all of this courage in one area only – career advancement and promotion – so much so that I was left feeling rather battered by the notion that this is the only thing that really matters in life.

At various points in the book I found my anger rising as Wood gave precisely the kind of advice that I detest. For example, in Brutal she instructs readers to ‘let the tree fall‘, i.e. to skip ‘unimportant’ tasks quietly. She suggests that ‘if they’re actually necessary, they’ll come around again, and you’ll have been busy doing unambiguously important work in the meantime.‘. To this I say ‘no, no, no‘. There is nothing more annoying than colleagues who fail to respond to simple requests for information citing the ‘if it’s important I’ll be asked again’ line of reasoning… It’s selfish, inefficient, and plain and simply rude; it says to the person who has sent the request that their time is not important and that it is yours to waste. No, just respond to the request promptly and don’t force people to keep track of your lack of response and to ask twice, or however many more times it takes to rouse you out of your own little world… [rant over]

I also found Wild Courage to be guilty of over-using the ‘personal story’ approach to illustrating the points that were being made. Perhaps some readers like this kind of thing. The odd personal story is fine, I think, but please sprinkle in a few from different scenarios, different worlds, other people etc., so that not every example is drawn from the world of working for Google.

In the end, I found myself frustrated by my reading of Wild Courage. It’s not that the approach and the ideas contained in the book aren’t valid. In the end, the courage that might stem from embracing each of the ‘negative’ traits can be expressed in a nice, succinct and positive manner that has much wider application that career advancement simply by putting the word courage to one side in each phrase. Then, the lessons that flow from those nine traits become a simple set of instructions:

  • stand out
  • stand up for what you want
  • stand behind you efforts and abilities
  • set your own standard
  • dig deeper
  • influence others
  • protect your time and energy
  • take calculated risks
  • listen and lead

which to my mind is a whole lot easier to absorb and a lot more useful than getting caught up having to justify the adoption of those negatively associated words, spinning the idea of courage out of them and suggesting that there is something a little wild about doing so. And what’s more, it’s a set of instructions that is clearly applicable to almost every aspect of life and not just the narrow, corporate-career-focus that Wood chooses to target.

The Productivity Diet – Mike Vardy #reading

The Productivity Diet is the latest book written by Mike Vardy. Mike, who is based in Victoria, British Columbia, on the western side of Canada, describes himself as a ‘seasoned productivity expert, writer, coach and podcaster’ (quoting from his own website biography), and it was through the latter, his podcast A Productive Conversation, that I first became aware of his work. I don’t know how I initially stumbled on this podcast but for some years I have been a sucker for consuming content related to productivity (or ‘how we operate’ as I prefer to think of it). At some point, listening to episodes of the podcast led me to signing up for Mike’s email newsletter and then, after he sent out a request for people who felt they had a tendency to get started later in the day to contact him, I ended up chatting with him via Zoom about the productivity challenges that I faced and the approaches to overcoming those challenges that I used. At the end of the call, I politely declined the opportunity to join a coaching course with him (£££!!!) but did sign up as a member of his online community The TimeCrafting Trust. That was in March 2024, and over the last 15 months I have got to know quite a few other members of the community, most of whom are based in North America, and participated in a wide range of online events including monthly Book Club meetings, podcast livestreams, workshops and seasonal planning sessions. I think it’s fair to say that whilst Mike and I have never met in person, I could properly describe him as a friend, albeit of the online variety.

But what of The Productivity Diet itself? Mike’s basic view is that we cannot ‘manage time’ and so, instead, we should focus on managing our attention, in particular taking into account how much energy we have at any moment. To paraphrase the book: Productivity isn’t about managing time. It’s about how we use it, how we relate to it, and how we move within it. Mike argues that we should eschew rigid productivity systems in favour of thinking about productivity as a continuous interaction between Intention, Attention, Reflection and Action. Mike’s approach, which he calls TimeCrafting, involves laying out some broad intentions for our areas of focus, but then navigating the reality of our daily experience with a sense of gentleness and responsiveness to our evolving needs.

The Productivity Diet was the subject of a Kickstarter Campaign that Mike started before I got to know him. I think there were a few hiccups along the way, but the book was launched successfully earlier this year. The launch included Mike making appearances on a number of other productivity-related podcasts, and when he announced that he was going to focus an episode of his own podcast on the book I thought it would be fun to offer my services as a stand-in ‘host’ so that rather than it being Mike Vardy having a productive conversation with himself, the episode had a more normal host-author format. A little to my surprise, and despite the fact that I have pretty much no experience of working in broadcast communications, Mike thought this was a good idea and we went ahead and had a lot of fun recording the episode. You can pick it up here if you’re at all interested: A Productive Conversation Episode 603.

There are three major pillars to TimeCrafting as set out in The Productivity Diet: Time Theming, Attention Paths and Reflection.

Mike is big on the first of these pillars, Time Theming, suggesting that it can be beneficial to designate different kinds of themes to act as guide-rails as you decide, in the moment, exactly what to do next. These themes are time-based, for example, daily, weekly, monthly, seasonal or what are termed ‘horizontal’ themes where you select to focus your attention on a particular type of activity at the same time each day. At an even longer timescale, it is suggested that you adopt an ‘Annual Axiom’ – essentially a very short (e.g. three word) description to guide your overall approach to the year ahead. In the world of TimeCrafting, one might decide to group administrative tasks together to tackle on, say, Thursday, or to designate Friday as a day to consider finance-based activities, Tuesday for ‘creating’ etc. One might decide that the focus for the week ahead is, say, ‘rejuvenation’ or ‘correspondence’, or that the next month is for ‘growing contacts’ etc. A key aspect of Time Theming is that the themes are not meant to be a way to rigidly enforce a particular regime of action, but serve more as beacons to guide you back to an intended path if you move away from it. In addition, it is perfectly fine to do tasks and activities that do not match the current intended theme if there is time and space to do so.

The term ‘Attention Path‘ relates to a factor that will influence what you choose to, or can, focus your attention on at any given moment. The Productivity Diet introduces the acronym TREAT as a way to separate out five different types of attention path. TREAT stands for Time-based, Resource-based, Energy-based, Activity-based and Theme-based. The idea is that when selecting tasks to work on next, one considers the options in relation to each of these attention path types, asking questions like: Can this task be accomplished in the time I now have available? Do I have the resources I need to hand? Do I have the energy for this? Does it make sense to do this alongside some other similar task? Does this fit within my intended theme? I know from my interactions with him, that Mike is a firm believer in designating tasks as being low, medium or high energy so that, for example, when you hit a point in a day where you feel fatigued and might otherwise grind to a complete halt (as we all do…) you can glance at your list of possible tasks and pick one or two low energy tasks to accomplish. In this way, time which might otherwise be lost to the void of the internet (for example) can still result in some useful outcome.

The third pillar of TimeCrafting is Reflection. This is the key to continuous evolution and improvement. By reflecting on your actions, for example by writing in a journal, you can identify adjustments that can be made, obstacles to overcome, approaches that can be reinforced or extended. Without meaningful reflection there is no evidence base to use to help inform the decisions you make about what to do when and how etc., and so everything just unfolds somehow in a rather haphazard manner.

I will admit that in my own day-to-day operations, I have not had a great deal of success in using daily, weekly or monthly themes. I think my work days are too variable and I do not have sufficient control over exactly what needs to be done when, for them to work in a very consistent manner. But I think that having the general approach in mind is still helpful, especially at the longer timescales (‘this week/month I will focus on finishing X’). I have had more success with horizontal theming, but the variability of my days (sometimes I have classes to teach, other days I have a meeting etc) means that my attempts to impose order on my day through horizontal themes is generally most successful during the earlier and later (non-work hours) parts of each day. Similarly, I do consider attention paths to some extent, but I find that once my day is underway I tend to forget my plans and just go with the flow. It doesn’t help that I am not very good at checking in with myself to consider whether I would benefit from re-directing my attention (even setting reminders to do this doesn’t work very well – I just ignore them much of the time!). It’s not that I think the ideas underlying TimeCrafting are not valid, quite the reverse really, but I just seem to revolt against any attempt to constrain or direct my attention even though I would very much like to be able to do so!

I like the general approach of TimeCrafting that is set out in The Productivity Diet. I’ve tried to implement what might be called ‘heavier’ systems – things like time-blocking/time-boxing – and whilst they seem to offer an attractive level of control, I always (and quickly) end up revolting against them as my feelings in the moment take over. TimeCrafting offers a more gentle, sensitive, approach to keeping yourself on track, or at least somewhere close to being on track. To use a travel analogy, TimeCrafting is like having a traditional map, understanding what all of the symbols mean and knowing generally where you want to end up, but allowing yourself flexibility to move around the terrain, informed by the map, in the way that feels most appropriate at the time. This seems to me to be a much better way to travel than to switch on the SatNav and following it blindly to the selected destination, even when the road you have just been instructed to turn down is clearly little more than a rough and ever-narrowing track heading to an almost inevitable dead end and a ton of frustration as you try to turn around or back-up, surrounded by a herd of angry cows. Give me the map and my intuition any day!

The Call of the Wild – Jack London #reading

A few years ago I discovered the wonderful book 1000 Books To Read Before You Die by James Mustich. Looking through it made me think about the range of books that I read, and in an attempt to make myself explore titles that I might not otherwise look at, I decided that I would work my way through the letters of the alphabet, picking a title written by an author whose surname started with each letter in turn. On my first trip through the alphabet back in 2020 my L title was The Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin and then on a second, much slower, alphabetical loop that began in mid-2022 and has only fairly recently reached R, I chose The Spy Who Came In From The Cold by John Le Carre. However, on both of these occasions I came very, very close to selecting one of Jack London’s adventure stories… and so after picking up a combined volume of The Call of the Wild and White Fang in a charity shop, I decided I would finally give one of them a go, plumping for The Call of the Wild, partly because it was the first stories that London wrote, but primarily (I will admit) because it was the shorter of the two!

I enjoyed the story, which is written entirely from the perspective of Buck, a pampered St Bernard-Scotch Shepherd dog who is stolen from a California ranch and sold into service as a sled dog in Alaska. Buck soon has to get wise to the demands of his new environment, being beaten by his first owner and learning to fight with the other dogs to ensure his place in the pecking order. Over time Buck passes between several owners, and makes the long journey into the Klondike region of Canada and across the Yukon Trail. Buck soon establishes himself as the lead dog, having to brutally respond to challenges from rivals. Eventually, Buck is found in a poor state by an experienced traveller John Thornton who nurses him back to health, and the two form a strong bond. Thornton becomes rich after finding gold, and with little work for his dog team to do, Buck, now thoroughly attuned to life in the wild northlands, hears the howling of wolves and wanders off into the wilderness. Buck locates a wolf pack and then makes regular trips to socialise with a lone wolf from it. One day, Buck returns to camp to find that Thornton, his companions, and their dogs, have all been killed by native Americans, and so he sets off in search of his wild brother. Buck encounters a wolf pack and has to fight with them for survival, before discovering that his lone wolf friend is a member of the pack. The story ends with Buck answering the ‘call of the wild’ as he goes off to join with the pack.

It was interesting to read a story in which the human characters are secondary and all of the events are seen through a dog’s eyes. Buck’s journey from domesticated animal to a fearsome creature capable of matching a pack of wild wolves is fascinating to follow, and along the way there are lots of poignant moments as Buck and his human owners come to know and love each other. There are also some sickening scenes in which some of the humans show a complete lack of respect for their animal companions, and for the environment through which they are travelling.

The overarching theme of the book, at least from my perspective, centres on the harshness of the environment and the need to show it, and those traveling through it (human or canine), the utmost respect. Buck instinctively learns first to survive, and then to thrive in the wild, but most of his human owners, underestimating the power of the natural world, do not fare so well.

Call of the Wild was an enjoyable, fairly light read, and it certainly didn’t put me off indulging in another dose of canine adventure, in the form of White Fang, at some point in the future.

Deep – James Nestor #reading

I read James Nestor’s book Deep back in February/March, but I am a bit behind with my efforts to write blog entries and so I am only just getting round to writing something about it now. You could say that I have been submerged to such an extent that I have not been able to see even a glimmer of light to guide me in the right direction to get back on track…

Deep was not a book that I had ever noticed and thought I wanted to read, but one morning, at the back-end of last year, one of the students I teach in my first-year introductory oceanography module (there are almost 300 of them, although they are rarely [never?] all to be seen in the same place) came to see me during the break in one of my lectures and passed their copy of the book to me suggesting that I might like to read it. I think that my students generally assume that I am fascinated by the subjects that I teach and will love finding out more about any topic relating to them. This is actually not the case – it was a fairly random and somewhat inexplicable sequence of events that ended with me studying for an MSc and then a PhD relating to oceanography, and from there it was just a case of me continuing to follow what seemed to be the simplest path (i.e. the one that involved me making the minimum number of decisions) into my career as a Marine Science lecturer. Inexplicable it may have been (to me at least), but it’s a path that stuck, such that here I am, some 33 years later, still following it (maybe some would call it a rut!). So, in fact, I am not that interested in the undersea world, marine life and topics such as diving, I just somehow create the impression that I am fascinated by the oceans when I am teaching students about the various processes that occur within and on them.

Nevertheless, I thanked the student for passing the book to me and set it aside to read at some point. I had previously read his later book ‘Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art’, I knew that Nestor wrote well and would almost certainly have some interesting points to make, so it wasn’t really a difficult decision.

Deep is mostly about the pursuits of the very strange (to me at least) group of humans who strive to head as far as possible downwards into the ocean depths. It is nearly structured as a series of chapters titled by a depth in feet (e.g. -650, -2500, -35,850) and containing stories of human exploration towards that depth. Initially, at shallower depths, Nestor describes the pursuits of free divers, including the absolutely insane group of people that risk death competing to dive deeper and longer than their rivals. Some of the events that Nestor recounts, in which competitors emerge from the water with blood streaming from their faces, or in a semi or fully unconscious state were pretty horrific and I find it surprising that i) the ‘sport’ is allowed to continue, ii) anyone wants to participate in it and iii) Nestor still went ahead and learned to free dive so that he could join in with various activities.

In the latter part of the book, much of the content focuses on scientists and researchers who combine diving with attempts to better understand the behaviour of marine life such as various types of sharks and whales. All of this content was quite interesting, even for someone who is not at all obsessed with sharks and whales like me! It was particularly interesting to get a glimpse of the kinds of private organisations and collections of individuals that operate in this area of scientific exploration and research – often rather cavalier and unorthodox in their approach, because, I suspect, anyone trying to do the kind of ‘animal-encounters-at-close-quarters’ research that the book describes in a traditional, more highly regulated, academic setting would probably find that their efforts were thwarted by the requirements of such niggly things as risk assessments and ethical considerations.

In the end, I enjoyed reading Deep, and found it interesting to get a glimpse of the world of underwater activity it describes. However, it did nothing to make me wish that I was able to descend below the waves myself, quite the reverse in fact. I’ve always been quite happy existing on the solid substance of the land surface, and it’s pretty obvious to me that nothing is going to change that now!

The Ink Black Heart – Robert Galbraith #reading

Oh J.K. Rowling (a.k.a. Robert Galbraith)… Why oh why do you seem to be obsessed with writing ever longer lengthier novels?

The Ink Black Heart is the sixth novel in the Cormoran Strike series, written by J.K. Rowling under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. The plot follows Strike and his former assistant, now professional partner, Robin Ellacott, as they try to get to the bottom of a complex and grisly crime – the murder of the co-creator of a highly successful online cartoon series (The Ink Black Heart of the book’s title) in the very graveyard in which the cartoon is set. The story plot is typically convoluted, throwing in lots of characters, many of whom are suspects at some point, with all of the action happening alongside the ongoing will-they-won’t-they saga of Strike and Robin’s frustrated relationship.

Compounding this complexity, the plot is made even more complicated to follow by the fact that large chunks of the dialogue between some of the characters takes place via online messaging threads. This throws up two issues for the reader. First, because the characters involved in the online messaging conversations hide their identity behind anonymous usernames it is some way into the book before you know who is talking to who (obviously, this is deliberate). Secondly, it is an (impossible?) challenge to work out how to read up to three parallel conversations between different pairs or groups of, sometimes overlapping, individuals. I can understand why the Rowling/Galbraith chose to write these sections in this way – the chat threads take place within an online game that is based on The Ink Black Heart cartoon – but I felt it made reading the book unnecessarily hard, and at times rather frustrating, work.

I should come clean… In general, I’m not a fan of long books. I like to feel that I am making reasonably rapid progress through a novel and that I won’t get stuck on the same book for more than a few weeks. So with The Ink Black Heart extending to around 1200 pages it took me a while to summon up the courage to make a start on it. However, it wasn’t simply the length of The Ink Black Heart that set me off on the wrong foot, because I’ve also had a long-standing gripe about the way that Rowling’s books seem to get longer and longer with each new one that comes out. This happened with the Harry Potter series, in which the first three titles were quite short, easily-tackled, but still satisfying stories, as the later volumes became progressively more ‘doorstop-like’ each time one appeared. I still enjoyed all of these books, but when I read them I really felt that Rowling’s writing could perhaps do with a good dose of editing… [hark at me, calling out one of the most successful, if not the most successful, writers of modern times.]

Rowling’s tendency for bloated writing is something that I think is particularly apparent in the Strike novels. I do enjoy reading them, but I can’t help but wonder whether it is really necessary to drape Strike and Robin’s relationship across quite so many pages. I think it’a all a bit tedious, and find myself almost screaming at the pair of them to just get on with it. [For balance here, I should say that both my wife and my elder daughter completely disagree with me on this point!] There is also a lot of description of minute details of events that have no bearing on the plot, which is fine if you like that sort of thing (i.e. not being allowed to get to the heart of the matter as quickly as you would like), but stretches my patience close to breaking point. I suspect that The Ink Black Heart could probably be half its present length and still be a great read (and obviously a better read in my opinion).

Perhaps, in the future, Rowling/Galbraith could write two separate books that can be read in parallel – one housing all of the crime/sleuthing-related action and then for those that can be bothered to read it, a second volume that takes a microscopic look at the trials and torments of the relationship between Strike and Robin. At the end of each chapter of the first volume the text could read something like this:

Reader:
If you want to get straight on with the exciting action to discover just how the shocking realization that Strike and Robin have just made takes them one step closer to uncovering the identity of the killer that lives in their midst, then turn the page and read on.
But if, instead, you’d like to lose the thread of the story and forget exactly who said what to whom as you read another account of Robin’s misapprehension of Strike’s words to her in their last conversation and Strike’s desperate attempts to convince himself that getting closer to Robin can’t possibly be the obvious conclusion of them spending almost every waking hour together, then switch over to the companion volume where things might eventually get ever-so-slightly slushy.

Sizzling sleuthing or risky romance? You decide…

Language of the Spirit – Jan Swafford #reading

I started reading Jan Swafford’s Language of the Spirit – An Introduction to Classical Music back in June 2023 and finally completed just a fortnight ago. It would be tempting to conclude from this that it was a book that I struggled through but, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

I grew up in a household that was full of classical music, from the long, purpose-made shelf unit in the living room that was stuffed full of vinyl records, to the assortment of musical instruments that my father acquired and dabbled with (flute, trumpet, clarinet, mandolin, violin). Apparently, when my brother and sister and I were very young, we would be accompanied on our way to bed by our personal favourite pieces of music, presumably each one being some piece that we had reacted to positively at some point. I don’t recall what my sister’s piece was, but I do know that my (older) brother’s piece was a movement from Schubert’s ‘Trout’ Quintet and mine was the rather stirring ‘March Slav’ by Tchaikovsky (so it is probably no coincidence that Tchaikovsky later became one of my absolute favourites).

I had piano lessons from the age of about six and then at around nine years old I began to learn the ‘cello (because apparently I had shown an interest in learning it, although I can’t say that I remember that and I suspect it was more because it was an instrument that my father wished he had been able to learn). I was never that great at the piano, and stopped after passing my Grade 6 exam, but playing the ‘cello certainly became a big part of my life all the way through my teens and well into my 20s. Over the years, I played in various ensembles and orchestras, in particular leading the ‘cello section in the Somerset Youth Orchestra, the Somerset County Orchestra, Oxford Sinfonietta and Bangor University Orchestra and being on the first desk of the ‘cello section for the annual summer gatherings of the Somerset Chamber Ensemble/Orchestra. It’s fair to say that I was a pretty good ‘cellist – although better known, I think, for my expressive playing than for a robust technique (or any kind of technique at all really – practice and I have never really been comfortable bedfellows in any area of activity…).

I always enjoyed orchestral music the most, especially music composed from around 1850 through to perhaps 1930 – the romantic and late-romantic periods – music full of emotion, passion and angst. My mother used to call the kind of music I liked best ‘troubled music’, which I guess is fair: Brahms, Tchaikovsky (and assorted other Russian composers of that time), Wagner, Sibelius, Richard Strauss, Mahler – that kind of thing. Unlike a lot of musicians, I never went much for some of the classical greats like Bach and Mozart, especially the latter, whose music (am I allowed to write this?) I tend to find rather boring.

In Language of the Spirit, Jan Swafford, a US-composer and music academic, provides a wonderful journey through the classical music canon, from early single-line chants, through all of the great names, and right up to the present day and the post-modernists. The book is mostly written on a one-composer-per-chapter basis, with most chapters being perhaps six to eight pages in length. In each case, Swafford outlines what makes each composer’s work distinctive, and provides a little detail of about their life, their influences and their major works, which brings me to the reason why it has taken me the best part of two years to finish the book…

Just for fun, I decided at the outset that I would listen to every piece of music that Swafford had picked out as being important or a good example of some aspect of a composer’s works. This meant that for each chapter I created a playlist with something like 8-15 pieces requiring multiple (many in some cases) hours of listening – Spotify was my friend! In the end, I managed to listen to every single piece that was highlighted or recommended (including several full operas) except for one piece by Stockhausen that I couldn’t find (but based on the Stockhausen works that I did listen to I can’t say I am too upset about that).

I listened to lots of music that I already knew well, lots of music that I thought that I knew well, and even more music that I didn’t know at all, some of it major works by major composers. I had a few surprises, particularly enjoying the music of Schumann (who I have never paid that much attention to in the past) and Grieg (who I always thought was a bit lightweight), and despite not really enjoying most of the noise that was described as atonal and/or post-modern, there was something about the work of Philip Glass that I enjoyed more than I feel I should have done.

Having now finished reading the book, and having listened to the last piece (John Adams’ Shaker Loops), I was spurred on to re-arrange the furniture in the small bedroom that I use as a kind of home office/personal den so that I could fit in some nice wooden CD shelves that we have struggled to find a good home for recently, and I unboxed all of the CDs (not just classical) that have sat out of sight since we packed them up last summer before having our kitchen re-modeled.

If you don’t know much about classical music but want to know more then I thoroughly recommend Swafford’s book. It is written for a general reader and gives a lot of interesting background and insight into a huge range of music. Alternatively, if you are like me, and know (or think you know) a lot about classical music already, then Language of the Spirit is a great stimulus to rediscovering old favourites and discovering new ones (and also discovering ‘music’ that you will never want to hear again for that matter – but each to their own of course!). Reading Language of the Spirit didn’t convert me into a Mozart-lover – I’m still very much in the ‘troubled music’ camp – but it did broaden my knowledge and has given me a number of composers to explore further. I also discovered that rather than being the somewhat over-sentimental ‘slush-fest’, that I recalled it being from when I played it with the Somerset Youth Orchestra over 40 years ago, Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto is indeed a rather special piece of music.

Meditations – Marcus Aurelius #reading

Meditations is essentially a collection of journal entries written by Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor (161-180) and well-known adherent to the principles of Stoic philosophy. Most of the entries are short notes, written by Marcus as he unpacked his thoughts on the events of a day just passed or noted down some reminder to himself about the way that he wanted to live his life. These entries were never set down with a view to them being read by anyone other than the author, but they now constitute one of the most commonly cited sources of Stoic wisdom, to the extent that Marcus Aurelius is now generally regarded as one of the big three Stoic philosophers (along with Seneca and Epictetus).

I have read and listened to multiple books on Stoic philosophy and the Stoic approach to live that draw heavily on Meditations, most notably the works of Ryan Holiday – in particular The Daily Stoic and the first three books in his series on the four Stoic virtues: Courage is Calling (Courage), Discipline is Destiny (Temperance) and Right Thing, Right Now (Justice) [the fourth and final book in the series: Wisdom Takes Work (Wisdom) is scheduled for publication later in 2025] – and I have dipped into Meditations on and off over the years. But I had not actually read Meditations in its entirety for myself. With that in mind, at the start of this year, I decided to include Meditations as a component of my ‘morning reading’ sequence.

My initial plan was to read one entry of Meditations each morning, but I soon found that the entries are so variable that this approach was frequently not particularly satisfying, and so I switched to reading 5 or 10 entries at a time (depending on how they fell on the page). This meant that it ended up taking me 2.5 months to complete the whole volume.

I had quite high hopes for my reading of Meditations – I was familiar with it as a source of many great quotes – but, in fact, I found it something of a slog to get through. Every now and again a sentence would leap out at me and I would rush to note it down, but around those golden nuggets there was quite a lot of dull rock. I think that most readers would get a lot more out of reading material that draws from Meditations, such as the aforementioned works by Ryan Holiday, than working their way through the original source material. It can obviously be argued that the former approach is lazy and relinquishes control over what wisdom one might gain from the material, but my feeling is that in this case, the ‘tour’ is much enhanced by the commentary provided by a skillful guide.

I guess the real issue with Meditations is that, as already noted, it is not a book that was written by the author to be read. It’s much more suitable for the ‘open at a random page and read an entry whenever the mood takes you’ approach than a cover-to-cover examination (unless your intention is to actually study it). But either way, the little nuggets of wisdom should emerge, and can serve as useful reminders. Here are a few that stood out for me…

Be like the rocky headland on which the waves constantly break. It stands firm, and round it the seething waters are laid to rest.

Just as drifting sands constantly overlay the previous sand, so in our lives what we once did is very quickly covered over by subsequent layers.

Perfection of character is this – to live each day as if it were your last, without frenzy, without apathy, without pretence.

When you have done good and another has benefited, why do you still look, as fools do, for a third thing besides – credit for good works, or a return.

Universal nature delights in change, and all that flows from nature happens for the good.

Now It All Makes Sense – Alex Partridge #reading

A few weeks ago, I completed my seventh book of the year: ‘Now It All Makes Sense’ by Alex Partridge. This was one that I consumed in audiobook format, narrated by the author.

I decided to listen to this book after my wife drew my attention to it. I’m not sure where she came across it being mentioned, but it’s clear that Partridge currently has a pretty massive media presence with social media channels (with millions of followers), a podcast called ADHD Chatter (with 500,000 listeners) and now this book (an ‘instant Sunday Times bestseller’ apparently). From a bit of searching online, it seems that, in the world of new media he is viewed as one of the experts on adult ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). His background is in social media content creation – he founded UNILAD and LADBible at the age of just 21, two social news and entertainment companies that, according to his biography, were followed by 300 million people. I guess it is not surprising then that after being diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 34, he has come to be a dominant figure in the online adult ADHD media space but I’d never heard of him.

You might think that as a fellow late-diagnosed ADHDer (albeit more than 20 years later in life than Partridge), I would have found plenty in ‘Now It All Makes Sense’ that resonated with me, but that wasn’t the case at all.

I’ll come straight to it… I didn’t much like this book. Partridge clearly writes from his own experience, which is, obviously, a sensible thing for him to do… except that throughout the book he refers to ADHD only in terms of his own particular expression of it. He writes/says things like “Those of us with ADHD will be familiar with…” and “As anyone with ADHD will know…”, and then he describes how he is forgetful, how he loses things, how he is completely disorganized, how he is entrepreneurial etc. Well, I have ADHD and I am not (generally) forgetful, I don’t (generally) lose things, I am probably one of the most organized people around and would hardly describe myself as entrepreneurialanything…, so no, actually, I am not “familiar with” and don’t really “know” the ADHD that is described by Partridge, not in myself at least. And if I am not familiar with it then I am sure that there are plenty of others in the same boat. ‘It’ might now all make sense to Alex Partridge, and I am sure that ‘it’ will now also make more sense to some readers of his book, but if I had read or listened to the book a few years ago it would simply have reinforced the inaccurate understanding of ADHD that I then held… and who knows, that might have prevented or delayed me from being able to make sense of my own ‘it’ in the way that I have been able to since my diagnosis.

There’s nothing wrong with Partridge’s account of his ADHD, the impacts it has had, and is having, on his life, and the advice and tips that he provides in the book… provided, that is, that you have an ADHD presentation that is similar to his (or are seeking to understand ADHD in relation to someone you know who is like him). But many people don’t have that ADHD presentation like his and so are not that much like him… that’s one of the peculiarly frustrating but also, dare I say it, interesting, things about ADHD – the challenges it creates can be very different for different individuals. What is wrong… no, perhaps ‘wrong’ is too strong a word here, let’s say ‘potentially unhelpful’ is that Partridge doesn’t really seem to recognize this variation in the diverse challenges that ADHD presents for different people enough. In this way, I think that Partridge misses the opportunity to really broaden out his readers’ understandings of the challenges of living with ADHD, and given his huge online audience and social media status, I think that’s rather disappointing, Maybe instead of ‘Now It All Makes Sense’ the title of the book ought to have been ‘Now I All Make Sense’ (forgive the mangled grammar) to reflect the rather personal nature of Partridge’s narrative.

The Wisdom of Groundhog Day – Paul Hannam #reading

I first read Paul Hannam’s ‘The Wisdom of Groundhog Day’ (TWoGD) back in October 2022. It was one of a number of occasions when I have listened to an episode of a podcast on my walk home from work and been so taken with the content being discussed that I placed an order for the book as I walked along and before I had even arrived home. In this case, the podcast episode was an interview with the author about his book from the ever excellent ‘Art of Manliness’ podcast (Episode 828: The Groundhog Day Roadmap for Changing Your Life).

In the 2.5 years that have passed since that reading, I have held a really positive memory of TWoGD. I was drawn to the way in which Hannam teases his message out of the story of the ‘Groundhog Day’ film – ostensibly just a routine comedy about a grouchy weatherman who gets stuck in a small town having to live the same day of his life again and again and again. The heart of the message is that to find happiness and fulfilment in life it is necessary to change yourself on the inside and this happiness can only arise when you are fully present and focused at all times on being true to yourself, open to experience, and appreciative of the world and the people around you. Based on this memory, I breifly mentioned TWoGD at the end of a meeting of the Book Club associated with Mike Vardy‘s Timecrafting Trust Community and with others intrigued by the idea of the book, it was chosen to be our February read.

So, I came back to TWoGD for a second reading with high hopes and also a little trepidation… What if everyone else hated the book? As I worked my way through it for a second time I found myself with very mixed feelings. I could still see, and appreciate, the cleverness that lay behind it, but I also couldn’t help feeling that it was all a bit forced – a neat idea stretched out to a length many times greater than necessary. I found that there were certain stylistic aspects about the writing that I really disliked – the way that it was written in what seemed to be a series of ‘sound bite’ paragraphs one after the other with not much flow when read together, and the fact that at every turn the example given for how such and such a principle idea had made an impact on someone was taken from Hannam’s personal experience.

As it turned out, most other members of the book club community had fairly similar issues with TWoGD as I did, but the message of the book was well received and we had a lively and interesting discussion nevertheless.

If I was going to sum up the message in TWoGD in one phrase then I think I would struggle to do better than to use the same quote that Hannam uses in the book’s conclusion, taken from the second volume of Marcel Proust’s epic ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ (1924):

‘We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us.’