158, Applied Psychology, is a very popular call number and includes many 'self-help' books. Best of all, it's heavily represented in the audio section of my library, so while I am driving I can get a cognitive tune-up!
I just finished David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell, which was really intense. He told story after story of folks who faced terrible adversity and from it acquired skills and strengths that enabled them to achieve great things. If I were writing an SAT essay about whether failure is part of success or some such uplifting thing, I could pretty much just summarize this book. Didn't I like it, you ask? Yes, if by "like" you mean "found interesting and thought-provoking." By "like" you probably don't mean "listened to while crying over the Irish Troubles and the London Blitz," though, so I can only recommend the book with reservations.
The most obvious question it makes one ask oneself is: "Do I have any weaknesses that are actually strengths?" One example in my case is my chronic low-grade depression. Before you rush to fix my brokenness, hear me out! Listening to this book reminded me that, although I would prefer not to have this condition and would never wish it on anyone else, it does give me a superpower: there are days where I just don't care. On some days, mind you, just some, I don't care what movie we see, because I'm not going to enjoy any of them. I don't care whether you hate me, because I hate myself. I don't care whether I live or die, because it's all the same to me. Therefore, I can be an unusually easy person to negotiate with, I can take all the blame for the problem at hand so we can move on to actually solving it, and I can take physical risks for causes I believe in. And I already know 3 or 4 pretty good ways to talk someone off the ledge, because I have that conversation with myself on a regular basis.
So, you see, I don't need to be repaired. I'd return this condition to sender in a flash if it were that easy, but I have figured out how to work around it. I appreciate the listening ears and encouraging words that have kept me going over the years, but ultimately my "desirable difficulty" has been like Paul's in the Bible. Gladwell quotes him as another David who defeated Goliaths: "Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me." (2 Co 12:9)
Saturday, February 21, 2015
Monday, February 9, 2015
Interlude: what I want
I review because I care: I want you to read good books and avoid bad ones.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/books/review/is-book-reviewing-a-public-service-or-an-art.html?_r=0
I also want to record the flow of human knowledge as organized by a Dewey Decimal library, and, incidentally, I want to record the effect that being exposed to all these branches of inquiry is having on me personally.
I may not do all these jobs every time. I may not do any of them very well at any time. But I am determined to keep trying and to improve as I go. Thanks for coming with me.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/books/review/is-book-reviewing-a-public-service-or-an-art.html?_r=0
I also want to record the flow of human knowledge as organized by a Dewey Decimal library, and, incidentally, I want to record the effect that being exposed to all these branches of inquiry is having on me personally.
I may not do all these jobs every time. I may not do any of them very well at any time. But I am determined to keep trying and to improve as I go. Thanks for coming with me.
Friday, February 6, 2015
Everyone's a Critic
Well, not everyone-- after all, most of the 130s was in praise of poltergeists and feng shui. But the critical book I chose, Exposed!: Ouija, Firewalking, and Other Gibberish, turned out to be unreadable. Literally indecipherable in that there were sentences that just didn't convey any meaning to my mind. Maybe something was lost in the translation from the original French, but so much for that.
The redundantly titled 50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True was slightly more readable, but it was in a different Dewey Decimal category for a reason. It really wasn't just about debunking specific beliefs, not just about the paranormal, but about various aspects of how people think the world works. It was really about exemplifying and promoting the philosophy of skepticism, which seems to me to be somewhat hollow. It's not so much a philosophy of life as an epistemology. All it has to offer is a certain way to approach knowledge, rather than a coherent body of thought, so I certainly wasn't going to read 50 essays, many of which boiled down to: "Here's a thing people think. I can't prove that it's true, so I won't believe it, which makes me smart!" The one where he pretended to be a psychic was pretty interesting, though. There he really did prove something: that it's not hard to convince someone that you are psychic even though you know you're not!
The redundantly titled 50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True was slightly more readable, but it was in a different Dewey Decimal category for a reason. It really wasn't just about debunking specific beliefs, not just about the paranormal, but about various aspects of how people think the world works. It was really about exemplifying and promoting the philosophy of skepticism, which seems to me to be somewhat hollow. It's not so much a philosophy of life as an epistemology. All it has to offer is a certain way to approach knowledge, rather than a coherent body of thought, so I certainly wasn't going to read 50 essays, many of which boiled down to: "Here's a thing people think. I can't prove that it's true, so I won't believe it, which makes me smart!" The one where he pretended to be a psychic was pretty interesting, though. There he really did prove something: that it's not hard to convince someone that you are psychic even though you know you're not!
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