Ryan Kintanar's Blog

Yesterday I finished Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. It was pretty much what I expected: short, readable stories all on the theme of success. Gladwell made a good case that the traditional narrative of success was flawed, but I would have loved it if he had dug deeper into the subject. To me, Outliers read like an extended TED talk – fascinating and entertaining, but short on meaningful ideas.

Don’t take that to mean it wasn’t a good book – it was. It’s enjoyable and it raised questions that I’ve never really thought about before. Gladwell is a good writer and a great storyteller, and I’m sure that this book accomplished everything he aimed for. I just wish he had aimed a little higher. A little more analysis, a slightly stronger argument – I think Gladwell is on to some cool ideas and I wish he had the guts to keep pushing. He grabbed my attention with his stories about how individual success occurs at the junction of good luck, good timing, good upbringing, and a lot of hard work. Imagine how much more he could have done in another hundred pages.

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Last week I caught up with the Song of Ice and Fire book series. I’m not going to drone on about these books here, but suffice it to say that I’m hooked. If you’re not watching the show, start. If you’re watching the show and you haven’t read the books, definitely start.

The only other thing I want to say about this book series is that I’m glad I’m finally done (for now) – the later books are all over 1000 pages long, so I had to make up for the multiple weeks I read these with Shakespeare plays and Dr. Seuss stories. I’m glad to go back to reading my usual fare. Somehow, despite reading constantly, I still feel like I don’t read enough.

See the full list of books that I’ve read for this project here.

This week I read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahme-Smith. My brother got it for me as a gift a few years ago, but I never got around to reading it. I’m not really a fan of Jane Austen to begin with (although I admit I’ve only ever read Persuasion), so I didn’t have high hopes about this book, although the short page count (317) balanced that out a little bit.

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This is another book of short entries – each topic is only a couple hundred words. I didn’t expect this going in, but these kinds of books are really hard to read cover-to-cover. Because each location has its own section, it’s impossible to get into the flow of the text, so it’s like reading a few hundred index cards instead of just one book.

That said, this is an awesome book to read from front to back. I’ve been living in San Francisco for years, and I learned so much more about what’s going on in the city from this guide. The section on free private libraries was itself one of the best resources I’ve seen in years. It was a lot of work, but by reading the whole thing, I have a much better appreciation of the book’s contents, so it’s going to be a much more valuable resource for me in the future.

If you don’t know, The Elements of Style (also known, after its authors, as “Strunk and White”) is the definitive grammar book. First published in 1919, it’s been read by literally generations of writers. I’ve mindlessly skimmed through and pretentiously bragged about owning Strunk and White for years, but I’ve never actually read it cover-to-cover. Having read it, I have to say it’s the only grammar book I’ll ever need.

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I just finished Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, and I gotta say that it was pretty sexist. In one of the early scenes, Petruchio and Kate have a battle of wits. Their argument was a lot of fun to read, and I was hoping that their relationship would continue like that. Instead, Petruchio psychologically abuses Kate until she’s docile and obedient. I know that the play is notable because of this misogynistic controversy, but I wasn’t prepared for what I got.

I decided to try and read a Mandarin Phrasebook that I bought in Beijing for my book this week. It’s short (less than 300 pages) and written pretty informally, so I expected it to be an easy read. I was completely wrong. It took me about two weeks to read the phrasebook, and I was plugging away at it constantly. Reading any reference book cover-to-cover is hard, but a phrasebook is espcially hard, because I’m working on my language skills the whole time. I had to spend 30 minutes reading ‘X-Rated Shots’ (a tiny gag gift I got a while back) last weekend so that I could stay on schedule. This was a pretty rough book to read.

Not to say it didn’t have an upside: my Chinese dramatically improved. Just reading phrases every day made me think about how I would say the phrase in Chinese, or how I would translate the Chinese back to English. Comparing my way with the book’s way was really eye-opening. It’s fun to think about all the different ways you can say something, and it’s a lot of fun to do that in another language.

All told, I don’t have a lot to say about this book. My Chinese improved, but it was a rough ride. I’m just glad I finished it.

I wasn’t planning to do a blog post about this, but this is a good opportunity for me to look back on the challenge. Ender’s Game is pretty short, so I finished it in only a couple days. I’ll pick next week’s book tomorrow and use the weekend for a head start. I’m worried that I’m too busy to keep this challenge up without always reading short books, but we’ll have to wait and see.