Happy Halloween!

 

A quick sketch of Mr. Voorhees for Halloween. I didn't have the right "blood color" red but still liked how it came out.

First Lines of Cal Newport's "Deep Work"

"In the Swiss canton of St. Gallen, near the northern banks of Lake Zurich, is a village named Bollingen. In 1922, the psychiatrist Carl Jung chose this spot to begin building a retreat. He began with a basic two-story stone house he called the Tower. After returning from a trip to India, where he observed the practice of adding meditation rooms to homes, he expanded the complex to include a private office."

- Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

This useful book has helped me in a number of ways already - and I'm only 75% completed. First, it provides an inspirational picture of what we can do if we can conduct "Deep Work" - what Newport defines as "Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit." He provides a lot of detail, but mainly the culprit in our inability to conduct Deep Work is in what he calls "network tools... constantly sending and receiving e-mail messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction." The best part though is that he provides four rules for building your ability to conduct Deep Work: 

1. Work Deeply.
2. Embrace Boredom
3. Quit Social Media
4. Drain the Shallows 
   

First Lines of Stephen King's "Billy Summers"

"Billy Summers waits in the hotel lobby, waiting for his ride. It's Friday noon. Although he's reading a digest-sized comic book called Archie's Pals 'n' Gals, he's thinking about Emile Zola, and Zola's third novel, his breakthrough, Therese Raquin."

- Stephen King, Billy Summers

Recently, I contracted a nasty case of swimmers ear, and luckily I had Stephen King's latest novel on hand to entertain me. Finding it hard to do anything else, I consumed the whole book in six days: a testament to both the propulsiveness of King's prose (even after all of these years!) but also the compelling story he's written. Many people make this claim, but in his recent novels I've found that his climaxes tend to border on the absurd: Take the final confrontation in Mr. Mercedes, the "supernatural showdown in Doctor Sleep, or even The Outsider's siege: they can feel by-the-numbers and sometimes even - as hard as it is to admit - boring.

This was not the case here. I was quickly sucked into Billy Summers. King's really does have a masterful eye for detail and an ability to create compelling characters. The plot of the first half of the book is a standard crime novel, and the second half builds on a "hit gone wrong" and moves to a darker place that explores the evil inside us all. Interestingly enough, the narrative is interspersed with an excellent "coming of age" story and war narrative, written by Billy himself, that provides insight into his character but also is a great book in it's own right. It avoided any supernatural elements and kept me reading and engaged to the very last page.

But there's one caveat that I have to mention. King has never shied away from gruesome details either physically or psychologically, but as I get older, i'm bothered by the extremely graphic details about sexual trauma. I'm not sure that level of detail is necessary for the story and, combined with (spoiler alert!) Alice's almost immediate recovery from a terrible sexual assault to become Billy's assistant, it rang false and perhaps somewhat titillating. Honestly, I couldn't avoid thinking this aspect was the male gaze at work, and pondered how the same story would have played out if written by a woman. It was a disturbing blemish on an otherwise excellent novel.

First Lines of Javier Marias' "Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me"

"No one ever expects that they might some day find themselves with a dead woman in their arms, a woman whose face they will never see again, but whose name they will remember. No one ever expects anybody to die at the least opportune of moments, even though this happens all the time, nor does it ever occur to use that someone entirely unforeseen might die beside us."

- Javier Maris, Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, translated from Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa

I've had this book for a long time. I don't remember why I bought it nor why it took me so long to pick it up, but when Marias sadly died earlier this year, I learned more about him and realized it was time. So far i'm impressed by both the sheer length of his sentences and his powerful observations. For example: I suspect that this early line will be a recurring theme of the novel: "... the misery of not knowing what to do and of having to act regardless, because one has to fill up the insistent time that continues to pass without waiting for us, we move more slowly: having to decide without knowing, having to act without knowing and yet foreseeing, and that is the  greatest and most common of misfortunes, foreseeing what will come afterwards, it is a misfortune generally perceived as quiet a minor one, yet experienced by everyone every day."