As some of you may know, I have recently become self-employed, although it sure feels like unemployed when I look at my schedule. I had just begun to think about how to organize my finances when Matt, in his quest to escape financial retardation, hit upon a highly praised book and gave it to me for my birthday. That book is Your Money or Your Life. The title comes from that antiquated highway robber threat, but in this book it takes on a different layer of meaning - for many of us, we have to choose between money and life (i.e. time, happiness and everything else that isn’t work and cash) but when we choose money because “everyone’s gotta make a living” we end up feeling like we are “earning a dying”.

The book attacks the concept of money from both the philosophical perspective and the nitty-gritty of saving pennies. One of the core concepts is that money isn’t power or esteem or even time, because you surely cannot swap it back to get more time. Money is a representation of what we have traded our life energy for. That $20 bill represents 4 hours of our lives spent working to earn it. But wait, you say, no one makes $5 an hour. I’m making at least $12 in (insert random job here). Dominguez and Robin push readers to find their real wage after calculating all the time spent getting to and from, dressing and shopping for work clothes, bitching about work after work, decompressing and taking escape holidays and THEN subtracting all of the costs of work, from expensive lunches and drinks from the pop machine to part of the cost of maintaining your car and having a nice office outfit.

The results are pretty shocking. I felt pretty good at making over $20 an hour at Aeon, but that wage was cut down to $8 when I factored in all of the extra work I did and the expenses of going there. This piece of information is critical because it lets one see exactly what you are selling yourself for. And, as an extension of that, knowing that a $40 night on the town actually cost me 5 hours, not 2, at a job that I wasn’t ecstatic about, makes the purse-strings tighten up considerable.

The other angle of the book, now that the reader is feeling somewhat miserable about how cheaply they are prostituting themselves out to company X, is to show how we can all live on much, much less money. So much, in fact, that some of his example people started earning more money by quitting their expensive jobs and working closer to home or doing all those expensive things we pay others to do for us. The authors take the reader through several ways to account for every single penny and then to look at how she feels about spending 30 hours of the month on a shoe habit or on boozing. From that feeling, frugality is internalized, not by unrealistic, external spreadsheet budgets that are as easy to break, but by a shift in values. So while that doughnut habit of mine is becoming less attractive, I don’t feel bad about spending $150 a month eating out with friends because that’s a really important way for me to enjoy both good company and great japanese food. Spending money on books is foolish because I currently have more books that I can possibly read in the next year. Spending more money on dates and girls is an absolute necessity if I want to actually get a girlfriend, and I value such a notion as getting laid here and there. Essentially, the authors are aiming at the idea of enough. True fulfillment is at that tipping point where less would leave you wanting and more wouldn’t matter - it is up to us to take a long look at how we spend our money and see what is enough and what is too much.

While some may feel this is all just stingy penny-pinching, it is, in my view, an affirmation of life and its transience. If I have to work to earn money to live, I am going to put that money to its best use, towards the best kind of life. For a guy who used to say that money was evil and soul-sucking, this book has really changed how I earn and spend money, how I spend my life. Highly recommended.

Tags: money, Resolutions

There are a variety of starting points for this review:

--Remarking that the most pivotal writers in several stages of my life have been K writers -- Kipling as a child, Kazantzakis in university, and now it seems, Kerouac and Kapuscinski.
--Starting with the current assault on reporting and investigative journalism as newspapers become merely parts of media empires trying to make a buck.
--Pointing out weird synchronicity - as I sat drinking tea in Kyoto, learning about Kapuscinski and his life for the first time, he lay dying in Poland, his Africa battered body to succumb that day.

Kipling, Kazantzakis, Kerouac (to an extent) and Kapuscinski all share something other than a letter - each writer is an explorer and evokes a sense of wonder for the places they trace. Kipling, my favourite childhood writer, was an Englishman born in Bombay, and most of his life’s work deal with the strange and fantastic, the jungle and Indian culture (the Jungle Book, Just So Stories, and Kim being the most famous).
Kazantzakis, my favourite writer period, wrote the ur-voyage poem - over the course of 12 years he penned a sequel to The Odyssey that is twice the length of The Iliad and the Odyssey combined, all in verse. The poem (which I am still reading, but nearly finished) follows Odysseus’s journey to the ends of the world and the philosophical limit of human being, transcending vice and virtue, God and hope.
Kerouac is another famous traveller - both geographically and psychedelically. Although I have only read On the Road, I enjoyed his pursuit of something elusive across the American landscape and the new cultural ground the beats were breaking.

And then there is Kapuscinski. Investigative journalism ain’t what it used to be, as large newspapers shed subscriptions left and right while the successor to print media, so-called citizen journalism on the net, often merely amounts to armchair commentary on what has been read in the Associated Press. But Kapuscinski! In the 1960s and early 1970s he was the only foreign correspondent for the Polish Press Agency under communism. So, if Poland wanted it’s own reporting, rather than buying it from another country, Kapuscinski was the man. You may see on the news — “and now let’s turn to our London correspondent”. Kapuscinski covered Africa. All of it. Not only that, but his book, The Soccer War, is a refreshing take on journalism: while Western journalism strives for objectivity, apparently the tone of Eastern Europe is more personal and more poetic license is permitted. Kapuscinski has been criticized for taking poetic license but that same license to bend facts creates a better sense of narrative and moreover, allows poetry to enter into the otherwise dry reportage of conflict in the faceless continent of Africa.

After reading The Soccer War, I couldn’t believe that the bleachblond bimbos and this crazy Pole are in the same field of work. The various chapters cover a handful of the 25 different coups, wars or revolutions that he was present for. He shows you the bars of Leopoldville in Congo where Lumumba first spoke, the foreigners’ hotel stormed by gangs of furious men after Lumumba’s assassination, the airplane from the UN whisking them into the apparent safety of Burundi, the jail cell and deadline to execution he faced when he arrived there. Kapuscinski crosses the road that no white man could cross, beaten, robbed, doused in benzene and nearly immolated. He crawls along the uncertain border between Honduras and El Salvador with a soldier that only wants to take boots off of corpses back to his family.

All of his episodes stun the reader at both the barbarity of man and the insanity of the author, driven to go where the action is and avoid life behind a desk at all costs. Most importantly, they helped put a face and character to the vastly diverse nations of Africa, and did so far better than the latest report on Sudan.

Tags: Journalism, Books, Resolutions

History and I have a strange relationship other than that it, you know, made me. I've always shied away from reading history to a certain extent due to bad experiences being beaten over the head with dates, statistics and countless individuals. Kyoto, from the Cities of the Imagination series, takes the 1200 years of history here and splits it up thematically, rather than chronologically. The chapters are arranged in loose historical sequence (from the founding of the city to the shogunate, or military rule, to the time of geisha etc) and move more or less chronologically as well, but the focus on theme made the city's history a lot easier to grasp.

And what a history! Kyoto was the focal point for more religious subdivisions than Martin Luther could shake a stick at, and this book helped me get a bit of a handle on the various breeds of Buddhism in Japan. The book also details the birth of Zen in Japan, the rise of the tea ceremony, the history of the geisha, what life was like during the aristocratic Heian period (about 1000 years ago), and most interestingly, the role Kyoto played as a centre for poetry and other arts.

Now that I have read it, I feel that traveling anywhere (not to mention living somewhere) without a sense of the history of the place is the height of folly. Find a copy, get inspired and come visit me here!

David Allen and his methodology, Getting Things Done (or GTD, in common parlance), has gained a cult following among a distinctly male half of the self-help book genre - Productivity and Success techniques. Websites abound concerning productivity, such as lifehacker.com and 43folders.com, but through them runs a current of GTD obsession (43folders is named after the number of folders needed to operate a GTD file system).

So what's the big deal? In order to avoid "proselytizing", as my Dad called it, I'll avoid the juicy exclamations. Basically, GTD is a way to capture loose thoughts. In the book, Allen argues that stress is due to unfulfilled obligations, any time we think to ourselves "oh, I need to do this, or I should do that." It doesn't matter that we can't DO such and such a thing at a given time -- like remembering to fix the sink while in the middle of a business meeting -- the obligation part of the brain has little sense of time and hence thinks we should be fixing that sink all the time. Have you ever remembered something, and then forgot it, and then remembered it again and thought, "Shit, I already remembered that!" only to forget again? That is a source of stress.

One of the basic pieces of GTD is total capture. It doesn't matter how big or small an obligation is that is rattling around in our heads -- all of it needs to be put into a trustworthy system so that we know that we don't have to keep reminding ourselves of the same thoughts and stressing out. One of his best quotes is: You never need to have the same thought twice, unless you happen to like that thought.

So, first, you collect everything you see around you that could possibly have some sort of hold on you. "Dust the lights." "Call Darren RE birthday" "Clean up classroom" "Start to look for new apartment" "Replace old underwear" These are all possible obligations. Once you have gotten everything from your surroundings, you dump out your brain, writing down every single thing that occurs to you as needing to be done.

By now you have an intimidating mountain of notes in an inbox. Allen's next stage is Process. From here, you got through all of the items, asking a few key questions.
1 - Is it actionable - that is, can I DO something about this. If not, it is either Trash, Reference, or saved for Someday.
2 - If Yes, What is the next action?
3 - If the action is shorter than 2 minutes, Do It.
- If the action is longer than 2 minutes, Delegate It to someone else, or Defer it, that is, put it off until you have time to spend on it, OR Drop it - decide you don't really want to do it.

For example, I look in my inbasket and there is a magazine and a note saying "Charity coming to Japan? Timetable." The magazine is not actionable, it is reference. On to the shelf. The note about Charity is actionable. What is the next action? Write Charity an email. Can I do that in two minutes? Maybe but I'd like to write a nice one, so no, I'll put it off (Defer) until I have time for some emails.

Repeat several hundred times.

The result will be that you have a handle on every single project, big or small, that is weighing on your conscious, and the next action step to move it forward. This turns the most amorphous mass of confusion, the most intimidating task, into a series of small bites and a great roadmap for successfully doing what we want to get done.

The book has a lot more to say, especially about planning projects, and about considering what needs to be done regarding life and our existences on the planet. I won't go into that here. I will say though, that in the year since I first became acquainted with GTD, I have gone from an unorganized uber-procrastinator to someone who knows what he want to do and how to do it. On top of that, I'm able to make priority choices about leaving projects for tomorrow because there is a full inventory and nothing is going to blow up if I relax a while.

... and the bandwagon makes its last stop at my front door. This book has been very popular and widely read -- rightly so -- it presents a new way to see how the world changes in an accessible format. Basically the book covers a variety of examples of epidemics, of sudden, often unexpected changes in culture, crime or prevalent attitudes and traces them to the idea of the Tipping Point. We usually use this term to describe the moment when the tides turn: "The tipping point came when the Canucks killed off a 5 on 3 penalty in the 3rd." Gladwell's usage is different, and if I criticize one point of his book, it was that his alternate usage wasn't totally clear to me until I had read most of the book. For him, the Point is not the moment of shift, but the place, the fulcrum upon which the tilt happens, and how, if a little pressure is applied at this place, dramatic change can occur.

One of his examples came from crime in New York in 80s. A new police chief came to town at the height of violence and instead of cracking down on the violent crimes he focussed on the subway. All of the cars were stripped of graffiti and weren't allowed to operate with any on them, cops patrolled the stations more frequently and groups of 10 plainclothes cops lurked at ticket gates to bust farecheaters. The results were stunning - a 66% drop in crime over the next decade. Why?

Gladwell spends most of his book outlining the reasons, but there were a few main points:
--Grafitti, a slight offense, establishes an atmosphere for further crimes, as does farecheating. If something small is permitted, something bigger will be attempted. Arresting and charging ordinary people who tried to escape paying fares established zero tolerance from the ground up, not between violent and more violent crimes.
--Arrests at ticket gates nabbed a lot of wanted felons, taking them off the street, and forced other minor felons to be straight, at least for the subway, thereby encouraging further honest behavior.
--By focussing police attention on the subway instead of violent crime, the city government removed one of the primary environments and breeding grounds for violent crime.

That's pretty much it. Without gobs of extra cash or personnel, the fortunes of NY City were reversed with the right kind of pressure applied to the right place. I really enjoyed his writing, and compared to the poetry I have been slogging through, it was breezy, fascinating stuff. His book also made me think differently about how my own mind works, as well as consider how a few people, with the right message, at the right time and place, can fundamentally change the world. If the concept of a cultural epidemic can be understood, maybe it can be harnessed and directed for the common good, which is the challenge Gladwell leaves us with.

Wow - something good actually came from going to Aeon Headquarters! I discovered the book-swap bin, which I then proceeded to raid for a copy of Hey Rube as well as McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. In order to save money, I am going to swap this one for the one I had plan to read - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I'll get to it if I have time.

First, let it be said - I Understand All Now. I understand Ty, over at TRR, and his weird use of capitals, the random streaks of totally non-sensical hyperbole. It is all Thompson. Reading the first page of Hey Rube nullified an aeon of Ty and I arguing over style.

Which isn't to say I like it. I just know why Ty was writing that way. Anyway, Hey Rube is a collection of semi-sports-related rants that ESPN.com paid Hunter to write. I found myself drawn into the book even though over half of the material was boring. It was like a captivating person describing lint -- you are still captivated even though the material is dull. The main theme of the book was sports, or more specifically, sports-gambling. I found Hunter's autobiographical antics to be humourous, but the sports talk itself wasn't very interesting unless he was being really vituperative.

But then, sprinkled in like fragments of what I am pretty sure his other books are like, were his "digressions" on Bush, the new war on terror and the decline of America. These sections were by far the most insightful and interesting, and while they gave me a taste of what his style is really like, he usually cut himself off with a "whoops! I seem to be wandering...", feeling some sort of obligation to actually talk about sports.

This book was overall ho-hum, but if other books he has written are permitted a narrative longer than a couple pages and deal with a more interesting topic, you can count me in.

My first encounter with Chatwin was through advertising: my journal of choice, the Moleskine, is labeled "the famous journal of Hemingway, Picasso, Chatwin". It wasn't until I stumbled across In Patagonia in a Vancouver used book store that I connected the vaguely known writer (Chatwin's The Songlines is one of Dad's favourites) with the marketing scheme.

I started the book pretty excited, as it was one of my first real forays into travel literature, a genre I am interested in contributing to. The verdict? Confusion and disappointment. The book details Chatwin's quest into Patagonia (the southern tip of South America) because of a scrap of "brontosaurus skin" his grandmother had, which had come from a cave in Patagonia. As the first few chapters reveals, it was actually the skin of an extinct sloth. My confusion comes from the narrative. The book has two modes: it follows Chatwin's route through Patagonia and recounts his encounters with the locals, or describes the historical detail around a figure that he pursues through various interviews and history books. Both were unsatisfactory.

The travel/exploration side of exploring South America was a bit letdown. I was intrigued by Patagonia, as I really had no clue as to what was down there. My impression was of mountains, natives, Spanish, and mist but little rainfall. To my chagrin, I discovered that Patagonia is full of British, Welsh, Irish, Scottish, German and Boer settlers, most of which were there to escape the World Wars, the Cold War, their own personal histories. So settlers, and sheep. Sheep, sheep, sheep. Chatwin wanders from exile sheep-farm to exile sheep-farm, and I really couldn't help but feel both bored and that he had somehow missed out on the vitality of the native peoples, which are generally described only as sheep-thieves, as victims of small-pox epidemics or of missionaries, or as nameless, faceless peons, servants and "tame indians". (the vitality of the natives could be my own fantasy, as they are continually described as drunks) Instead the book focuses on these poor souls trying to recreate Wales or wherever, fighting against Marxists, anarchists, indians, or other landowners. Reading all of this was a let down, as though a mysterious spot on the map was revealed to be just as boring as the rest of the world.

The other mode the book operates in is the description of historical figures who factored into the area somehow. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, two famous train robbers from the States, were a couple of the main figures, as was a leader of an attempted revolution and the self-proclaimed king of Patagonia (in exile). These historical figures were fairly interesting, but often I found that my understanding of their roles was limited by my total ignorance regarding Chilean/Argentinean politics in the last century. I had to Google Péron (Juan and Evita, you know, don't cry for me Argentina etc -- thank you Madonna!) to fill some basic gaps. I don't expect to be spoonfed, but I felt that I missed out on some of the references that other people would have understood better. Also, some of the historical figures seemed to have been tossed in just for the need for material. Near the end of the book Chatwin interviews several people about a barber that had recently committed suicide. I felt, as I read, what the hell is the point of telling me about this random dood?

And that became the overall theme - a lack of a theme. I often felt vaguely interested, but soon the little investigation would end and Chatwin would move off to another town, in which he would introduce a new character and finish his biography just as quickly. Overall, I've realized that a day by day account of people and places is really boring if there isn't some sort of pattern, theme, or clear conclusion. There doesn't need to be a moral to every story, but let there at least be a story that unites the book more than just the fact that he wrote it all in one area.

Carousel is unfortunately not going to go beyond a trial issue, such was my disappointment. I'll first say that the journal is put together well and that the art was pretty interesting. I'll counter that by saying that there were all of 2 poems that I a) understood and b) therefore enjoyed.

Those of you who know me know that I enjoy poetry, but as I read more and more currently produced stuff, it is becoming apparent that my tastes are out of fashion. I'm not going to type out any example poems because it would be bad for copyright reasons and annoying to have to look at any of these poems again. Nevertheless, the breed of poetry that Carousel has chosen to espouse is the obscure, obtuse, post-modern variety that glories in its own artistichoodiness. That doesn't mean I like sugary, moralistic, reductive, Chicken-Soup-for-the-Soup slop -- on the contrary. Even though I can talk poetry, I want to be able to walk into any poem and feel moved somehow, that I understood something, and that further rereading will only deepen my appreciation of the piece. I don't want to have to consult my Dictionary of Obscure and Oblique Literary Reference to figure out where a quote is coming from. I read the whole issue twice, and reread several of the poems further to make sure I wasn't been hasty in my dismissal. Instead I only became more certain that most of the writers were completely high on their own bullshit. Writing like this, with its Ezra Pound "make it new" obsession, has thrown out any notion of storytelling, narrative voice or evocative metaphor in favour of the "look how bloody weird I am" competition that has gripped the art world now and then.

No thanks.

Before I even begin, let it be known: I am a rabid Dahl fan. I read nearly all of his kids books over and over as a child, however, it was with some trepidation that I started into his adult fiction. I wasn't sure if the same guy who wrote naughty children's books would be the same for an adult audience. I started reading this book about a year ago, slowly working through the stories, starting with the shortest ones as I would often be reading before bed.

I'll just go ahead and say that they are delicious, electric and disturbing. His stories largely fall into a few well defined camps: stories set in WWII (in which he was an RAF pilot), stories about assholes we end up liking anyway, stories that start out ordinary and end very very sinister, stories of science gone awry, and stories with a great, often funny, twist. Actually, the majority of them have twists, but the last category is for ones that aren't WWII, assholesque, sinister or scientific.

I ended up liking the stories about antiheroes, tricksters, scammers and infamous womanizers the most. For at least a quarter of his 50-odd stories I palpably quivered with tension as I tried to read without skipping ahead, having to go back paragraphs again and again as my excitement grew. A couple others shocked me so badly that I couldn't stop thinking about them, and I couldn't decide whether I thought "oh, that poor bastard. That sucks so much." Or, "That is hilarious. He totally had that coming." Really, both were true, and it is rare that a writer can create such tension not only within the story but within a reader's emotional response. A couple stories were duds, but this was largely because I felt that the twist was just too cruel to the protagonist or came too early to be a shock. These, however, where huge exceptions. The vast majority bred sympathy and lulled my senses so easily that each story still had an effect upon me.

Matt, another fan, said he read Dahl's stories a little at a time because the endless twists can become repetitive. I don't quite agree, but I do think that the book should be read a little at a time to better savour the stories, and that a reader should skip around instead of reading all of his war stories or sexy ones all at once (and they do sort of form clumps in the books that make up the collected). Before reading the last story (the last one in order as well) I reread one previous to it that I thought I hadn't. Even though I knew the result, I still really enjoyed watching Dahl craft the buildup to that moment, so for me at least, these twist stories bore rereading.

If you want to get a taste of his writing, find a copy of this book and sit down with one of the following great examples of the 5 different subgroups mentioned above:
Parson's Pleasure
Beware of the Dog or They Shall Not Grow Old
The Butler
Genesis and Catastrophe
The Great Automatic Grammatizator

Now that I have this list, I urge, nay, order you to go out and read these!

Reading this book was sort of like getting life advice from your crusty old great aunt. She has seen some stuff, had her ups and downs, and her advice is great, but it is laced with biblical allusions, she speaks to you like you are a total moron and really has no sense for anything other than her conservative worldview. Ramsey gives his own personal history: he was a hotshot with big loans, big deals and big money. At the height of his successes the real estate market crashed and the banks came coming for money that he didn't have, sending him into 4 years of financial hell, crawling out of the debt pit he had dug for himself.

That brings us to this book. He wrote about his experiences, gave it to a bunch of other financial experts for feedback and then self-published it. Let me preface this next paragraph by saying there are some good points to his book. First I need to bitch.

My main complaint is that somewhere along the line he should have given it to an editor. I've read a couple of books on finances, and the usual tone is sort of "we are going to talk slowly because you wouldn't be reading this if you didn't get it already". The Wealthy Barber does this, and does it successfully through 4 characters and their interactions. Ramsey, on the other hand, was too blunt for me. My finances aren't so bad; perhaps there are people that need to be told that "only people who like eating dog food don't save for their futures" but it rubbed me the wrong way.

Even so, even if a bit of bluntness can be excused, for he has certainly counseled a lot of people that need a strong slap upside the head, the Christian overtone nearly made me wretch. Before he gets to the good advice he spends a whole chapter talking about the spiritual aspect of money, quoting scripture once a page on average. Even before he talks about financial priorities, his first advice is to tithe, no matter the situation. A real gem, that one. Another choice piece is in the chapter regarding counsel. He laid out why a financial advisor isn't always in your best interests, how you should always consult your spouse etc -- FINE. Great. Then he says that your pastor is also a good source of financial advice. "If you are willing to trust your eternal soul to this person's direction, you should also seek his or her counsel in financial matters. As a Christian I believe God will give my pastor wisdom in matters he might not seem to have access to through his background or education. So I will seek his advice in decisions of importance" (243). Saying not to trust your banker but trust your pastor with your financial future is out and out retarded -- EVEN IF your banker wants a commission out of you.

ANYWAY, rant over.
The book actually does have some good advice if you can palate the style. Here are a few of my favorite points:

Credit cards are designed to pay themselves off on their own, so stop using them!
Live within you means - the best way to double your money is to fold it in half and put it in your pocket.
He also gives a step by step plan:
--Save $1000 before anything else as emergency money. I've realized that part of my money stress relates to this -- I have no financial cushion and if I am broke, I am flat broke.
--Kill off your loans, smallest ones first. (except mortgages) I mostly agree with this. Some people say that you should focus your money on the loan with the highest interest, but he believes that the psychological benefit of killing off a whole loan, even if the interest isn't the highest, is a huge reward and will keep you moving forward.
--Save up 3 to 6 months of expenses to cover any serious disasters. This, again, is pretty good counsel. Sure, you could have put that toward your mortgage, or spent it on something fun now that all of the other loans are done, but by building this nest egg a major amount of stress will be lifted.
--Lastly, start investing your income / killing off your mortgage.

One of the best things he said was about our feelings toward debt. After the Great Depression, people who were indebted were looked upon as pitiful, particularly because so many people had lost their whole fortunes from trading borrowed money on the Stock Exchange. Ramsey argues that the idea that "debt is a fact of life" is nonsense. Save up and buy that car in cash, don't lease it and pay double. Save up and budget your expenses, don't sell yourself to the bank. We can have all we desire if we only exercise a little patience and put money aside for a few months instead of buying it on the Visa and paying for it for even longer. For this resounding affirmation of one of my life goals, I give Ramsey a high five, despite his writing skills.

My dad gave me (or I forcibly inherited) his volumes of Piet Hein's Grooks when I was pretty young, and they have always had a strong impression on me. The Grook is his own creation, sort of a Scandinavian answer to the haiku - a short, humourous and aphoristic poem that for my money is vastly superior to the intangibility of Japanese nuance. More than that, these poems were used as a form of code for members of the Danish resistance during WWII, of which Hein was a leader in hiding. When was the last time you heard of poems being used to fight soldiers? Hein was also interesting because he didn't fall for the usual science vs art bullshit. He was a scientist by trade, even discovering that the super-ellipse (which is essentially a oval and a rectangle at the same time) is one of the most efficient and pleasing shapes for design, making a profound contribution to Scandinavian style (think Ikea).

For some reason I didn't have the 2nd volume, so when I saw it in Vancouver on New Year's eve I snapped it up. The whole book can be read in a sitting as there are only 53 poems, each less than a page long. Each poem is accompanied by one of Hein's own drawings, which unfortunately I can't reproduce for you here. Nevertheless, I'll let some of my favourites speak for themselves.

Thoughts on a Station Platform

It ought to be plain
how little you gain
by getting excited
and vexed.
You'll always be late
for the previous train,
and always in time
for the next.

The Untenable Argument

My adversary's argument
is not alone malevolent
but ignorant to boot.
He hasn't even got the sense
to state his so-called evidence
in terms I can refute.

What Love is Like

Love is like
a pineapple,
sweet and
undefinable.

The State

Nature, our father and mother,
gave us all we got.
The state, our elder brother,
swipes the lot.

The Slot Machine
(A contribution to the psychology of disappointment)

Yes, life is a gamble;
but isn't it mean
that you're never the one
to win it,
when the thing is
a coin-in-the-slot machine
and you did
put a shirt-button in it.

Timing Toast
(Grook on how to char for yourself)

There's an art to knowing when.
Never try to guess.
Toast it until it smokes and then
20 seconds less.

That's Why

Why do bad writers
win the fight?
Why do good writers
die in need?
Because the writers
who can't write
are read by readers
who can't read.

The Unattainable Ideal

We ought to live
each day as though
it were our last day
here below.

But if I did, alas,
I know
it would have killed me
long ago.

I am invariably attracted to his funny ones, but all of them are really good. Looking around on the net, it appears that there are more than 5 volumes but they are out of print. That said, I have found them in used books stores. I'll post more from this volume by request.

Ok, Time to hit the books! I realized while in Canada that some of these choices were flexible according to used book availability and others could be replaced with other, more readily available titles. I also added two more from Miguel, the only person I know of through the blogosphere to contribute.

I have these ones already:

The Collected Short Stories - Dahl
The Odyssey - A Modern Sequel - Kazantzakis
Getting Things Done Allen (2nd read)
7 Habits of Highly Effective People Covey (2nd)
If You Want to Write - Ueland (2nd)
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Thompson
Guns, Germs and Steel - Diamond
Remembering the Kanji 1
Collected Fictions - Borges
On the Road - Kerouac
20th Century Poetry and Poetics - ed Geddes

Dalva - Harrison - Dad
Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis - Naben
The Old Devils - Kingsley Amis - Naben
On the Road - Kerouac - Ty
Financial Peace - Ramsey - Matt
The Tipping Point - Gladwell - Matt

I don't have these ones yet.
I am a Cat - Soseki
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World - Haruki Murakami
Lightweight Backpacking and Camping: A field guide to wilderness hiking equipment, technique and style
Lost Japan - Kerr
Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry

Nausea - Sartre - Ty
A Pale View of the Hills - Kazuo Ishiguro - Naben
The Collected Poems of Philip Larkin - Naben
Hitching a Ride with Buddha: Travels in Search of Japan - Ferguson - Melia
True North - Harrison - Dad
The Road Home - Harrison - Dad
Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon - Miguel
Queen of the South - Arturo Perez-Reverte - Miguel

And the swap books:
The Road - Cormac McCarthy - This is still in hardcover, so I'll read his Outer Dark instead.
The Magus - Fowles - I couldn't find this one in my boxes, so screw it. Swap for Grooks 2 by Piet Hein.
The Old Capital - Kawabata - I couldn't find this title, so I'll read The Sound of the Mountain instead.
Four Pairs of Boots - McLachlan - I have flipped through it a bit, but wasn't super interested. I'll read Chatwin's In Patagonia.
The Complete Walker IV - Fletcher and Rawlins - Expensive. I'll read Outdoor Safety and Survival.
Fixing your Feet - Vonhof - This book may be redundant because the Backpacking Light one has info on feet. Switch for another Kazantzakis - Report to Greco.

Regarding publications: I finally got an endorsement for a journal: Carousel. Ty's girlfriend recommended it or Geist. I have a trial copy of Carousel, so I'll check it out first. As for my other publication slot, I received really strong pushes from both Dad and Naben toward the New Yorker. It is super expensive, so I'll have to wait until I pay off my credit card.

Ok, that's it! On to the reviews and reading. I should have one within the week, as well as the photos from the rest of my trip.

Ok, I have decided that I have enough books for the new year, primarily because I am not sure I can afford to buy this many books! Here is the list of my own choices:

The Collected Short Stories - Dahl (already about half done)
The Odyssey - A Modern Sequel - Kazantzakis (just started, pretty awesome, heavy Nietzschean influence, very long)
Getting Things Done Allen (2nd read)
7 Habits of Highly Effective People Covey (2nd)
If You Want to Write - Ueland (2nd)
One Hundred Years of Solitude (ugh, I have to read an Oprah book)
The Road - Cormac McCarthy - yay postapocalyptic fiction!
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Thompson - I am breaking down and finally reading it.
Guns, Germs and Steel - Diamond
Remembering the Kanji 1 - this is a textbook with all 2000 main use Kanji - I intend to learn them all.
The Magus - Fowles
The Old Capital - Kawabata
I am a Cat - Soseki
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World - Haruki Murakami
Lightweight Backpacking and Camping: A field guide to wilderness hiking equipment, technique and style
Fixing your Feet - Vonhof
The Complete Walker IV - Fletcher and Rawlins
Four Pairs of Boots - McLachlan
Lost Japan - Kerr
Collected Fictions - Borges
On the Road - Kerouac
20th Century Poetry and Poetics - ed Geddes
Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry

Because no one made any suggestions for subscriptions, I am going to subscribe to the Malahat Review and The Fiddlehead, because the former was my first rejector and the latter may dare to be my second, and because they are fairly prestigious. Lastly, because I am turning hardcore and because it is cheap, I am going to subscribe to Backpackinglight's print mag. It is $15USD with my membership, though shipping costs double the price. Still, $30USD for 4 issues is pretty good.

Here are the submissions:
Financial Peace - Ramsey - Matt
The Tipping Point - Gladwell - Matt
Nausea - Sartre - Ty
On the Road - Kerouac - Ty (unofficial submission)
A Pale View of the Hills - Kazuo Ishiguro - Naben
Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis - Naben
The Old Devils - Kingsley Amis - Naben
The Collected Poems of Philip Larkin - Naben
Hitching a Ride with Buddha: Travels in Search of Japan - Ferguson - Melia
True North - Harrison - Dad
The Road Home - Harrison - Dad
Dalva - Harrison - Dad

As Naben, cocky ass that he is, pointed out, if the same person suggests both the 1st and 2nd place books, or if he or she already owns the prize, I'll figure something else out.

37 Books all told! Some of them are ridiculously huge, as in entire anthologies, but I have a whole year, so I'll give it my damnest. I'll start with the ones I actually own, in addition to the subscriptions. Here's a tentative starting list:

The Collected Short Stories - Dahl (already about half done)
The Odyssey - A Modern Sequel - Kazantzakis
Financial Peace - Ramsey - Matt (loaned)
Getting Things Done Allen (2nd read)
7 Habits of Highly Effective People Covey (2nd)
If You Want to Write - Ueland (2nd)
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Guns, Germs and Steel - Diamond
The Magus - Fowles
The Tipping Point - Gladwell - Matt (loaned)

These are so big that I'll have to read them gradually.
20th Century Poetry and Poetics - ed Geddes
Remembering the Kanji 1
Collected Fictions - Borges

Wish me luck and look forward to the reviews!

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.
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How the hell am I going to afford this?

From Melia, the finest photographer I know, we have Hitching a Ride with Buddha: Travels in Search of Japan - Ferguson, and from the ol'Dad three Jim Harrison novels (I sure hope I like them!) True North, Dalva and The Road Home. This brings the total up to 33 novels, collections, books, or tomes of poetry, some of which are staggeringly large. Anyway, cross that bridge when I have to.

I am still waiting on some poetry journal suggestions. Keeping with my habit of upping the ante, I'll add one more: On the Road - Kerouac. I figure I have bugged Ty about his tastes enough to actually warrant reading something he likes, if only to further ridicule him. Actually On the Road may very well speak to me at this time in my life, so I'll give it a shot.

I am only two suggestions away from my cap, but I may still raise that cap! As for the contest, next year the person who suggests the best book will receive a copy of the second place book as well as something else, and the second place will receive the first place book.

Naben, pinnacle of erudition himself, has contributed to the book list.
First - The Collected Poems of Philip Larkin - Larkin is a great poet from all appearances, and I have been meaning to read this.
Next - Lucky Jim and The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis. I have no idea about the titles or the author, so these are certainly the most mysterious.
Lastly - Kazuo Ishiguro's A Pale View of the Hills. Ishiguro is another author that I am aware of, but have never read.
Thanks to Naben for his varied suggestions!

We are now at 25 books and 3 volumes of poetry. Naben also pointed out that if my work schedule changes, 2 books a month isn't very much. So, let's make it 36!

I am going to up the ante and put down Jorges Luis Borges - Collected Fictions. This is actually a previous Naben suggestion, and I have read a bit of it already, but much remains.
I will also subscribe to 2 journals or "zines" (though I find that title distasteful), provided that they will ship to Japan, so if you know anything about that scene, make a suggestion! It can be large-scale or small production. I'll review each issue and the publication as a whole.

Finally, the best suggested book for the year will win a prize! I can't reveal it (mainly because the idea just occurred to me) but due to the nature of the contest it is pretty clear what sort of gift it will be.

Starting this May I set out to read 12 more books in the remainder of the year. Happily, I have surpassed that total - here is the list with a hard and fast review out of 10:
Thus Spoke Zarathustra - Nietzsche 8.5/10
More Die of Heartbreak - Bellow 7.5/10
If You Want to Write - Ueland 9/10
Pale Fire - Nabokov 8/10
Turning the Mind into an Ally - Mipham 7/10
The Illiad - Homer 7/10
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People - Covey 8/10
Kokoro - Soseki - Review 5/10
An Inconvenient Truth - Gore - Review 9.5/10
A Short History of Nearly Everything - Brison - Review 8.5/10
The Cossacks - Tolstoy 7/10
The Three Musketeers - Dumas 7.5/10
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold - le Carre 8.5/10
The Well Fed Writer - Bowerman 8/10

Before May I know I read at least these three:
Getting Things Done - Allen 9/10
Freedom and Death - Kazantzakis 8/10
Valis - Dick 7/10

My Goal for Next Year is 24 Novels/Books and 3 Volumes of Poetry - here is a tentative list:
The Collected Short Stories - Dahl (already about half done)
The Odyssey - A Modern Sequel - Kazantzakis (just started, pretty awesome, heavy Nietzschean influence, very long)
Getting Things Done (2nd read)
7 Habits of Highly Effective People (2nd)
If You Want to Write (2nd)
One Hundred Years of Solitude (ugh, I have to read an Oprah book)
The Road - Cormac McCarthy - yay postapocalyptic fiction!
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Thompson - I am breaking down and finally reading it.
Guns, Germs and Steel - Diamond
Remembering the Kanji 1 - this is a textbook with all 2000 main use Kanji - I intend to learn them all.
The Magus - Fowles
The Old Capital - Kawabata
I am a Cat - Soseki
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World - Haruki Murakami

20th Century Poetry and Poetics - ed Geddes
Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry

Wow! That's a lot. But wait, you say, there are only 14 books there. That's where you come in: I will read whatever people suggest! Now is your chance to bless or inflict a book upon me! I'd like to read some new authors, so I am open to your suggestions.

Leave a post in the comments! One to two books per person. (I hope I actually have 5 readers...)

Bill Bryson is known mainly for his travel literature, but maybe he should be known for his curiosity. This book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, is three years of research into everything we know about science, from the most fundamental to the most widely disputed. The book is organized into large chunks of kinds of science, starting with the cosmos, working through chemistry, then onto biology and genetics, and finally looking at human descendants and our future. Each chapter is laid out historically, from early thoughts on chemistry and alchemy to the current puzzlings over just how the hell proteins sort themselves out.

First, it has to be said that the book is well researched, clear, and full of analogies that continually pummel the reader with the scale of the earth and the severe improbability of our existence. However, the book truly shines in the human stories behind the science. These days, with rabid fundamentalism making an even worse name for religion than before, science has come to be just as trusted as the gods of yore. The famous figures, like Newton or Darwin, come to life as real, confused, and often plain weird individuals. Newton, for instance, sometimes sat up in bed after waking and then sat motionless for hours due to the inundation of thoughts swamping his mind. Another anecdote describes Huxley asking him if he knew why planets moved elliptically ( a big question of the day ) to which he replied it was due to gravity, and that he had proven it. Huxley was shocked and asked to see the proof - Newton, had, however, misplaced it. Bryson writes that this is the equivalent of telling a cancer researcher in an offhand manner that you cured the whole business but then lost the file.
Karl Scheele, the humble pharmacist who discovered 8 of our most common elements, had the habit of tasting everything he worked with, a habit which eventually killed him.
My favorite is Henry Cavendish, a major discoverer of chemical laws, who was so shy that "any human contact was for him a source of the deepest discomfort." (85) Bryson describes him going to scientific parties where the understanding was that no one was to talk to him or even look directly at him, but rather stand in his vicinity and speak as though speaking to no one. If he had the courage to reply you might have heard a mumbled reply, but often you heard a frightened squeak and found yourself truly speaking to no one, as he had fled.

Now that I've read through the book (and it is quite sizable) a lot of the details of science weren't new or particularly worth remembering, especially all the wrong theories, but then again, I've always been interested in that kind of stuff, so other might learn more from it. The stories of brilliant, vicious or just plain lucky people figuring out our little corner of the world stuck with me much better. Recommended.

To date I have read two very famous Japanese books: Snow Country and now, Kokoro. I haven't understood either.

Looking back at my notes on Snow Country, I liked enjoyed it more and understood it less. It had far more imagist beauty that I could connect to, but much more unsaid nuance.

What of Kokoro then? The book is split into 3 parts: a young student meets a disillusioned man and becomes fascinated with him, the student is forced to part from this man to attend the slow passing of his ailing father, in which time the disillusioned man attempts to explain his life to the student in a lengthy suicide letter mailed to the student's country home. The letter gives the man's full biography and details the fatal love triangle that occurred between him, his future wife and his best friend, the results of which crush the man's spirit for the rest of his life.

The book is mainly a psychological exploration of relationships: the student and the enigmatic man, the student and his parents, the older man, his friend and his future wife. More interesting that this, the book is a discourse on suspicion, anxiety and guilt that swallows lives. At times it reminded me of Crime and Punishment, what with Raskolnikov's consuming guilt. Raskolnikov, however, finds some salvation.

The book aside, I just can't get into Japanese literature. The entire book, the whole premise hinged on the fact that the man couldn't talk to his best friend honestly and resolve their differences with some sanity. The whole plot was swollen with obligation, honor, and propriety, such that the characters were paralyzed to near inaction.

A westerner reading this book probably just wouldn't connect with it. A Japanese person, although the Japanese have opened up a bit in 100 years since this was written, would understand. As for me, living in Japan and experiencing, albeit through the gauze of semi-ignorance, the same social pressures and seeing them all around me, this book encapsulates everything that pisses me off about this culture.

A comparison: Zorba the Greek, a book that I adore, has as its title character one of the most passionate people I've ever read about. Zorba wouldn't sit in a little room and agonize about his rival in the other room, he'd challenge the man to a fight. He wouldn't feel put out and depressed if he caught his love talking to the other man, he'd grab his mandolin and try to win her affections. Overall, he wouldn't wait for the "right moment" like the main character of Kokoro. He'd just do it, and to hell with propriety. If he couldn't talk about something, he'd explain with his guitar or with a crazy dance.

The book itself is so so. If you want to have an idea of Japanese-ness that gets pushed over the edge by unfortunate circumstances, give it a read. For me, however, I tossed the book down, glad that the somewhat interesting plot but annoying characters were done with. Oh, life has no meaning, I have no faith in mankind. Blah blah. When I hear someone talking like that, I think he needs to get laid or have his life put in danger. Suicide as the only recourse in a situation laced with obligation, guilt and honor, seems totally ridiculous to me. But that's the take of a freefloating "outside person" in Japan.