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Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Author: Jonathan Safran Foer

I really didn’t think I would like this book. Avant-garde writing isn’t my cup of tea, but I gave it a chance under the recommendation of a trusted colleague.

I’m glad I stuck with it because I was treated to a heart-warming story that hooked me by the halfway point.

You get used to the stream-of-writing style and a large part of that is the crafted execution of Foer. Believing the main narrator is nine-years old? Yeah… I can suspend some semblance of reality on that one.

The style? Yes.
The language and thinking? Not so much.

Maybe I forgot what it was like to be that age or perhaps that is the mind of a nine-year old, but not one I’ve met.

Still, the book comes together in a satisfying way and I’m happy to have been there the whole way through. It’s opened up a gateway to other books like it.

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff

Author: Christopher Moore

There is something irreverent, but oh so entertaining, about reading a fictional account of religious history–especially when it’s attempted as a humorous one.

Kevin Smith gave us Dogma, complete with Rufus the 13th Apostle and Alanis Morissette as God. Highly entertaining.

And here we have Biff: Jesus’ childhood pal who can fill us in on those missing years (12-30).

“Are you okay?”

My wife would often ask me this as I was reading because my chuckles would turn to snorts, and then full on belly laughs. The last time a book caught me off guard with this amount of tear-inducing humour was Year Zero by Rob Reid… and I read that before I was married.

Moore manages to take some common theories of Jesus and interplay them with a narrative told through an unlikely narrator.

While religious scholars may scoff at the brazen attempt of a quasi-historical account of Jesus’ life, you can’t miss the forest for the trees on this one. It’s not mean to be a history book, or a thought provoking manifesto (although it is thought provoking in many ways).

Instead, it’s a highly entertaining book meant for those can roll with its ridiculousness.

Feeling Overwhelmed

There are two pandemics happening now.

The first one is COVID-19 and the other is panic.

Panic is propagated by the media and amplified with social media. That’s why I made the conscious decision to digitally retreat, only checking in short bursts.

To help, these posts were/are written by hand or with a plain text editor.

Then March break ended and it was time to check-in with the education world. What ensued was an avalanche of information.

PING! Message from a colleague
PING! Email
PING! Clarification email
PING! Form #1 to track
Check in with my students and their families to see how they’re doing.
PING! Another message from a colleague
ARTICLE “Check this out: Tech tool to connect with students…”
ARTICLE “Stop with the worksheets…”
“Here’s a video tutorial…”
“Check out this free resource…”
PING! Form #2 to track
“Daddy! Can you come over here?”
ARTICLE “This might be grief. Read-on…”
Check out what I’m doing!
PING!
BZZZT!
Article to read
Video to watch
Incoming messages
“Make sure to take care of yourself.”
Kids fighting again.
Realized my lack of sleep last night just hit.
New announcement from the government!
More questions, few answers.

I hit a breaking point.

I updated my students for the day, turned off my phone, shutdown my computer and made a cup of coffee.

I haven’t been infected with the first pandemic (yet), but the second one almost got me today.

Time to prioritize.

It’s the government’s job to make the big decisions. That’s why we elect them–for exactly these situations.

Then the chain of command comes down to me.

What do I get to decide?
I get to decide how to react.

What’s my responsibility?
To make sure my family is okay, I’m okay and my students are okay.
After that, I can filter out everything except for what’s best right now.

And that’s what I’m going to do.

How to Take Smart Notes

Author: Sönke Ahrens

The consummate academic personality of mine urged me to pick this up. As someone who constantly reads books and immerses himself in journal articles, I always feel like I’m missing something in the end.

I read, good ideas trigger in my brain, a few stick and I’m disappointed I can’t remember the rest. I’m always going back to books to mine those ideas again.

This book is more than just a note taking technique–it’s an entire learning system.

It will take discipline to put it in place (I’m still working on it) and I want to revisit in a year to see how I’m doing. However, Ahrens fills the gap on why so much learning is lost or forgotten.

The section on the mere-exposure effect and doing the hard work of making connections is priceless. It was a concept explained to me years ago, but this gives the idea practical execution.

While this book revolves around building a Zettelkasten (German word for slip-box or card index) in a paper or digital form, it’s the ancillary information that brings it all together.

From a personal standpoint, this was exactly what I needed.

Bringing the World Together

Our brains are hard-wired for tragedy, panic and all things negative. It’s our biological programming–the thing that saved us in the wilderness.

Heard rustling in the bushes?

Don’t wait to find out if it’s a predator or the wind, just run.

Another name for it is our “fight or flight” response mechanism.

The problem is our brain cannot separate a tiger about to maul us to death from being freaked out about a spider in the house. If it stresses you, it activates.

Useful, but really hard to work around in a time of mass panic. We want to be informed, but we’re attracted to the immediate and the stressful.

When you take a step back from the noise, you can see some incredible things happening.

People are connecting to each other more than ever. We’re connecting online and at the table.

We’re reaching out to those cold contacts to see how they’re doing and stretching our social networks as far as we can take them. We’re also learning which ones to avoid.

We also have every top medical researcher in the world working non-stop to come up with solutions and… here’s the big one… sharing this information with each other. The developments happening are accelerating and we’re no longer wondering if, but when.

Amidst the outcomes that will happen as a result of what we’re facing now, we may see some strong, positive ones.

This may bring us together in a small way and that’s a good step to take.

A Lesson from the Hermit of Maine

The last hermit, that we know about, may provide us with a pearl of wisdom during this time.

While he refuses to claim any worldly wisdom, enlightenment, or any form of transcendence, a person who willingly isolates themselves from society is the perfect source of wisdom. Of course, you can also read up on the many spiritual seekers who also willingly retreated from the world to provide comfort.

Back to our hermit.

When asked what he did for most of his days, he tells us most of his time was spent sitting and thinking. He read the occasional book, played the occasional video game and went on walks, but most of his days was to just sit.

How did that not get boring?

He replied that boredom is a word we invented because of our perceived need to always be doing something.

If we can get it out of our head that we need to do something, or need to be somewhere, perhaps we can eliminate the boredom in our days. It’s a challenge, but it’s worth examining.

After all, are you in a rush to be anywhere now?

A Monster Calls

Author: Patrick Ness

I love Ness’ writing and enjoy his books, but this one… this one… was perfection all the way through.

The writing, artwork, pacing–everything.

I’ve gushed over books and declared my undying love for some, but this one is on the highest pedestal. It says it’s young adult, but that is just the entry audience.

This book is for everyone.

It deals with loss, grief and the stages one goes through before acceptance. I couldn’t stop reading it and by the time I got to the last sentence, there were tears in my eyes.

Yes, this book brought me to tears.

For me, as everyone brings their own experience to a novel, this book hit me multiple levels. It targeted my own grief, while also pulling at my heart strings for the protagonist. I wanted to reach through the book and let him know the monster who calls him is the same monster that calls us all.

Some books keep you hooked because they skim you across the water at a rapid pace. Others pull you beneath the surface where you see a whole new world.

This one pulls you to the bottom of the lake until you drown in it.

All Fiction is a Necessary Lie

If you want to spread a lie quickly, mix in a bit of truth.

Fiction has a lot to teach us about ourselves and the world around us. Reading it provides us insight into a world behind the author’s hand, guiding us into their imagination and discovering something new.

In-between the scenes, dialogue and extraordinary measures characters go through to accomplish their goal, there are glimmers of a mirror to force us to reflect. The reason fiction resonates with us is because it opens up something inside of ourselves.

We know what we’re reading is a lie, but the truth of what we’re reading is what part of us opens… or closes. We get drawn into work because of our own latent desires.

Goosebump books, by R.L. Stine, hook young readers because the world of Goosebumps is perfect. There’s no divorced parents, gruesome torture or even death. Young people feel safe entering that world and feel comfortable getting sucked into the scary, or horror, part of it. A Goosebumps book is a hug from your parents after having a nightmare.

Fantasy books hook young adults, specifically the outliers, most. It’s an appeal to escape to another world where your sense of wonder, weirdness and call to be more powerful than the nerd you are beckons the reader. Eventually, many of those readers find their place in the world and those fantasy books don’t hold the same sway they once did.

My students are hooked on the Gone series this year. Mystery, adventure, wonder, action, suspense, thriller… it was all there for them. I had a hard time getting through the first hundred pages because I couldn’t stop thinking about the babies and young children (I eventually put that part of my brain to rest and blasted through the rest).

We don’t remember books for what lies the author told, but for what truths were illuminated in our reading of it.

Fiction is necessary because its lie is what brings you to the truth.

Groundhog Day

With nowhere to go and nothing to anticipate, groundhog day can feel like the most appropriate term.

Except this is the name we also gave to our daily grind of morning rush-work-home. Now, we’ve opened ourselves up to a greater possibility of what an endless cycle of repetition can mean.

It’s during this time, we have to look for those moments that stick out from the norm. It’s a time to pay attention to the details that often go overlooked in our day.

It’s a time to do something different, to seek something more, to strive for something greater.

Or, it can be seen as a time to stand back.
Relax.
Enjoy the stream of life.
Take a break from the usual programming.
Recharge.
Reset.
Reconnect.

And when this groundhog day is over, one question we must ask is:

What will I do differently now?

Starsight Book Review

Author: Brandon Sanderson

Writing a sequel is tricky.

There’s an expectation setup from the first book, which readers take with them as the starting point for the second. It’s a nervousness about whether this second one is going to be “as good,” which can lead to disappointment.

This is compounded by the fact Sanderson writes his first books as a complete package, making you feel you’ve already gotten your fill by the end.

Skyward was a ton of fun and addictive to read, which made me a bit nervous. However, within ten pages, I remembered this is being written by a master author who plans his books as a series and not one-off attachments.

Starsight does not disappoint in any way. It gets right into it, then veers the story in a different direction afterward. I was happy with this sudden pivot because had it not done that, it would’ve been nothing more than a drawn out vapor trail of the first.

The ending was curious–not unexpected, but a little surprising. It sets the expectation the third will move in a much different way than the first two. I’m already excited to read it.