The Convert A Novel. Stefan Hertmans. Translated by David McKay

 T

The Convert

A NOVEL.

by Stefan Hertmans 

Translated by David McKay

The story where worlds collide. What’s the blond-hair blue-eyed Viking descendant daughter of a Christian manor lord doing getting married with a Jewish son of a rabbi traversing old France to Egypt evading pogroms and the Crusuades kicking into gear in the 1090’s .

This historic novel is narrated by the author (within the book - not Stephan hertsman) writing the book about the woman convert . Retracing her steps of the 1100s as sleuths

the puzzle of documentation and place 1000 yrs after the fact , by retracing her steps today.

If you like the middle ages , like revisiting places in Egypt and France and Spain that you visited before; like a blend of good guys between Muslims and Christians and Jews - then this is a book for you. I enjoyed all those aspects what a fun read it was a quick read.

Lost and Found. Orson Scott Card

Lost and Found

Orson Scott Card 

Coming of age , growing up story - find your place in the world , no matter how odd - old you might be ; and grab on to your potential 

The boy who harnessed the wind

The boy who harnessed the wind. Film

The boy who harnessed the wind   

This film depicts in subtext, how climate change deeply affects people so dependent on farming for every bite of food they eat and what little cash they can earn. While this film is primarily about a very bright young man who helps his family and community, the underlying conditions affecting them are apparent. It brings home why people become so desperate to leave their homeland when even basic education is denied their children and famine is staring at them with ravenous eyes.
We have so much here and somehow think we are special, blessed. But we are just the beneficiaries of ancestors who were forced by circumstances out of their homelands to come here and steal the lands of the people who had been here for thousands of years. Instead of being grateful for what we have, we sit on our largesse of goods like misters and begrudge even our own poor enough to live. Look at the tents of the homeless lining our city streets.
Yes, this film raises all of these thoughts and questions and it is marvelous how this 13y boy succeeded to help this one community. But if the rest of us sitting on spaceship Earth don't recognize soon that we are all one family dependent on our One Strange Rock we too will find out what it means to be destitute and abandoned by our elected government. Wind power indeed, a real solution and we can help by supporting the development of it and solar energy, no polluting, clean and available everywhere.

A good film to learn from and spark conversation 

Insights Russell M Nelson

Insights from a prophets life.
Russell m Nelson
By Sheri Dew

Not to be read as a novel
Not to be read as a biography
Not to be read as a memoir tell-all

Sheri Dew presents the prophet as an ordinary man. Which is an impossibility . How do you put under a barrel and hide the light of someone who  can:
- speak Spanish and Chinese over the pulpit
- can still accompany a soloist on the piano
- can dissect a scripture
- invented heart transplant methodology
- is  a heart surgeon

For goodness sake’s there’s nothing normal about him

 And then with that in mind what looks like an interesting collection of stories and notes regarding his life his ministry his service his family. Because he plays such a significant  role in the church at some point trying to understand him.  I enjoyed the reading. Not a great book but what a great man in so many ways . 

No Great Mischief. Alistair MacLeod

No Great Mischief. Alistair MacLeod

To be honest the first baseline question I had in regard to this book  was - Are the Irish Celtic or Gaelic? 

Celtic is subgroup of the Indo-European language family. Gaelic is a language belonging to this group. To be more precise, Gaelic actually refers to a group of three close related Insular Celtic languages: Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx.

And others would argue that the British ethnicities of English, Welsh and Scottish are therefore clearly distinct from Gaelic Irish, however they do all fall into a wider “Anglo-Celtic” ethnogenetic supergroup.

My favorite English -based  language experience occurred in London when I lived in Madrid and worked for John Ryan. I had been trying to land a London-based client and this looked like the opportunity. It was a multi-national bank located through-out Great Britain. The kick-off meeting was attended by a dozen regional bankers,  couple of guys from  corporate, and my two assistants;  one who was himself a brit and the other from MN.  We sat at a round conference table and the participants were energized and engaged and soon realized we had a very real linguistics issue.  With my Spanish clients they knew it was a second language and they were very patient with me and supported and enabled my getting eye contact to facilitate, my reading lips, them speaking distinctly and me carefully following the conversation. Not so easy this day in London.

"Dialects are linguistic varieties which may differ in pronunciation, vocabulary, spelling and grammar. ... The major native dialects of English are often divided by linguists into three general categories: the British Isles dialects, those of North America, and those of Australasia.”

The combination of differences in pronunciation and use of local words may make some English dialects almost unintelligible to speakers from other regions. This WAS happening to me.  There is a discernible difference between an accent and a dialect. An accent is “a way of pronouncing a language.” This is interesting because it means that everyone in the world, no matter the language, has an accent. To not have an accent means to not pronounce anything at all. So BAH to those Utah California  Minnesotan who claim to have none . A dialect is “a particular form of language which is peculiar to a specific region or social group”. So between, dialect and accent, there are myriad variability. How many English dialects are there that are recognizable from one another?  Specifically, the language experts declare there are 160 distinct English dialects throughout the world; England has the most amount of distinct dialects with 29 different ones (not including dialects from Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Man, or the Channel Islands). My friends and I counted 15 present in our conference room; of which I could readily understand perhaps 9. The resulting cacophony lost me - I had been taking notes but begged off to my assistant and had him take charge of note taking because he could understand most everyone. It was a great lesson to me that day about listening, understanding differences, and how what seemed to be the same, could vastly differ.

Back to the book. I wasn’t enjoying it to begin with with as it was feeling too morose and burdened with painful family anxieties encumbered with trying to lift me by those same notions of family.  There’s probably more levity in the book than I could catch on to, but the story grew on me and as it did, ultimately became hard to putdown. Loyal dogs? Anti-Quebec characters? Perhaps not my favorite themes; nonetheless a great read of a hard scrabble life of a disrupted group from the Scottish Highlands who mix with other French and some English Canadians doing whatever work they can.

 The motif for the humans is that the past is always relevant to the present moment. And, as with all family history, the novel is laced with tragedy and death.

A Further Lapse

CURRENT BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS

A friend requested my current recommended book list. Le VOILA-perhaps  others will offer you better ideas - but I’ve read each of these and they all left me better for having done so. 

Always eat left-handed by Trohit Bhargava - call it self help; call it office and life hacks; call it a guy I had heard offers a quick read 

The Winter Soldier by Daniel Mason - read this before you go to Budapest- it is happy/ sad novel set in WWI-powerful prose that induces brain stretching 

The Space Barons  by Christian Devonport- insight into today’s race to space. These guys are rich, these guys are powerful, their influence

multiplying . 

The Rent Collector by Camron Wright  - set in the municipal dump in Cambodia it revolves around  the lingering ravages of war, humanity, and the uplifting power of the written word .

Between the World and Me by Ta–Nehisi Coates because if I don’t try to understand race relations better how can I expect others to try - It is written as a letter to the author's teenage son about the feelings, symbolism, and realities associated with being Black in the United States.

What have you read and enjoyed

———-

Becoming  by Michelle Obama.  Warm, wise, and revelatory, Becoming is the personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations—and whose story inspires us to do the same. She is strong, a great role-model of many character attributes. She is someone  would enjoy meeting had I the opportunity. 

You are not so smart by David Mcraney

The book, based off of a popular blog of the same name, helps orient us towards the blind spots and the hidden assumptions of our day-to-day lives, while using humor to explain our sometimes puzzling behavior

He asserts that there’s a little that we do know but our brains merrily keep writing a script that may or may not resemble the facts.

A lapse in thinking

I’ve fallen further  behind in  even completing the brief reviews I had been doing. The typing takes forever and I’m not as thoughtful as I once was. I continue to delight in reading and pondering what is there to learn from the writers. It succeeds in actively engaging me  and provide a growth opportunity. I am trying anew to put a smattering down to acknowledge that I’m  still here.

So...
The Witch by Roald Dahl

The Tim Wilson and Eden Elaine book club read, met and discussed the following discussion guide questions Tim .  Both of us enjoyed revisiting this classic !

• Should children have to Bath
• What would you do if Taft was turned into a mouse
• What did you think of people getting fried
• What would you do if a mouse ran up your leg
• What do you find interesting about the comparative  life span of a mouse and the life span of a grand parent. 

Back of the napkin by Dan Roam  

The premise is simple: anybody with a pen and a scrap of paper can use visual thinking to work through complex business ideas. He demonstrates solving complex problems in unexpected ways, and dramatically improve your ability to share your insights.

I find that successful storytelling and/ or design is in-part dependent that you have a simple way to develop and then in turn share your insights.

The Great Believers - Rebecca Makkai

I read the first 50-100  pages bailed on it . 

Zen Master Raven 

the teachings of a wise old bird by Robert Aitken

A collection of Zen teaching stories. Consumed as morsels given snippets of time during which one can consume. It fills its purpose but not profoundly. There are better books that take you down the path with more style and grace.

The Book Shop on the Shore by Jennie Colgen

The book shop on the shore by Jennie Colgen

So who is recommending me books these days? I think because of the limited range of my understanding of hoopla as a  content provider, I am found picking books way beyond my norm. . It was a digital download since I wasn’t checking out anymore from my local library as we’re moving. At the end of the digital book I read the following tributes:

“Chick lit with an ethical kick”

“A quirky tale of love work and the meaning of life”

“A smart witty love story.”

1. All which are true. I enjoyed the book – don’t tell.

The checklist manifesto By Atul Gawandeef

The Checklist Manifesto

By Atul Gawandeef

I enjoy living near a library for on a rainy weekend, or a sunny day on the beach, you can grab a book and learn something new. This weekend I picked up The Checklist Manifesto. It's a quick read but an interesting read. It has a few insights that might be worthwhile - some gleaned from reviews. The book focuses on usage of checklists in relation to a problem that afflicts virtually every aspect of the modern world – how professionals deal with the increasing complexity of their responsibilities  of daily and professional life

Gawande suggests that people tend to fail for two main reasons. The first is ignorance – having only a partial understanding of the task in front of us. The second is ineptitude – instances where we have the knowledge but we fail to apply it correctly.

But it’s not ignorance that leads to mistakes in today’s world. We have access to more and more information and our knowledge base is growing every day in every field. It’s the complexity of our world that is making it more difficult to deploy our knowledge predictably and routinely - like a weekly preprint or massive catalog. We need a strategy that builds on experience and takes advantage of the immense knowledge we all have in our brains, and in our hands, but also makes up for our inevitable human inadequacies

As the complexity of the challenges, problems, and tasks we face increases, we can’t just rely on memory or our “routine” to help us perform at the highest level. Gawande points out that, “[checklists] remind us of the minimum necessary steps and make them explicit. They not only offer the possibility of verification but also instill a kind of discipline of higher performance.”

Gawande offers some tips for building good checklists:

Make them precise.

They should be efficient, to the point, and easy to use even in the most difficult situations.

Do not try to spell out everything.

Provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps – the ones that even highly skilled professionals using them could miss.

Above all, make sure they are practical.

“…Under conditions of complexity, not only are checklists a help, they are required for success. There must always be room for judgment, but judgment aided – and even enhanced – by procedure.”  

I“We have an opportunity before us, not just in medicine, but in virtually any endeavor. Even the most expert among us can gain from searching out the patterns of mistakes and failures and putting a few checks in place. But will we do it? Are we ready to grab onto the idea?”,

Here are three suggestions on how we can implement checklists more effectively:

1. Identify areas of opportunity: What areas of your business could benefit from a checklist? How could you begin to reduce the number of mindless mistakes that lead to unhappy customers, failed execution, or even something far worse?

2. Check your ego: Throughout the entire book, ego more than anything seems to be the largest obstacle to implementing checklists. Remember, they are not intended to undermine your intelligence or ability. They are a tool to combat the increasingly complex nature of our lives.

3. Curate: Not everything requires a checklist, nor are they effective for every situation. The key is using them only in the most essential places and to be diligent about making them practical and precise.

Make a checklist!

Personally I phase in and out of check list usage . If you are going to be driven by adherence to a checklist then I am a true believer that said  check list must be curated.

A Man Called "Ove" . Fredrik Backman

A Man Called Ove.  Fredrik Backman

Ove (Golf Lassgård) is the quintessential angry old man next door. An isolated retiree with strict principles and a short fuse, who spends his days enforcing rules that only he cares about, and visiting his wife's grave, Ove has given up on life.

“Unless you are simply opposed on principle to feeling uplifted by a mordantly humorous melodrama, you will dab your sad old eyes at "A Man...”
You’d be impressed with me if you realized how hard it is for me to read for more than 5 minutes at a time and crank out a book like in days gone by, quickly consumed. So I fidget and stir and hop round to stick together creating continuity, of a type. But I flew thru Ove.

Even though it made me cry at the end – I enjoyed it, recommend it, and say let’s discuss when you are done.

The novel definitely has insight into relationships and finding a match – catch this quote:

“She liked talking and Ove liked keeping quiet; retrospectively Ove assumed that was what people meant when they said that people were compatible.”

Or who can’t love this kind of writing

 “Ove stares back at it with a suspicion normally reserved for a cat that has rung his doorbell with a Bible in its paws like a Jehovah Witness”

“Death is a strange thing… Some need it’s constant presence to even be aware of its antithesis. Others become so preoccupied with it but they go into the waiting room long before it has announced its arrival. We fear it yet most of us fear more than anything that it may take someone other than ourselves. For the greatest fear of death is always that it will pass us by. And leave us there alone.”

“One of the most painful moments in a persons life probably comes with the insight that an age has been reached when there is more to look back on than ahead."

“Acknowledgment – my father. Because I hope I am unlike you in the smallest possible number of ways. “(that’s also me speaking of my dad)

It is a bizarre odd book – very Scandinavian, very adapting to the changes that come with aging and death, very learning to embrace a wide array of “who is my neighbor” - Just what I like to read.