Books Read in 2011

Posted on 2011/12/272012/01/02 by Jason Hensel

Every year I post my annual list of which books I read, a list that helps me remember past events and feelings that I may have forgotten, like resting in my hammock on a nice summer day reading The Truth About Celia or the eagerness I felt flying to Italy while reading Poets in a Landscape. You could say that I remember things through the books I’ve read. I don’t think that’s such a bad way to live. Happy reading in 2012, everyone!

Lysistrata by Aristophanes
Tinkers by Paul Harding
Me, Myself & I by Edward Albee
Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Diviners by Jim Leonard Jr.
The Second Child by Deborah Garrison
The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick by Peter Handke
A Week at the Airport by Alain de Botton
Burn This by Lanford Wilson
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink
The Sunset Limited by Cormac McCarthy
Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose
Four Seasons in Rome by Anthony Doerr
The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh
The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey
The Mercy Seat by Neil LaBute
Augustus by John Williams
Poets in a Landscape by Gilbert Highet
Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America by Steve Almond
Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet
The Truth About Celia by Kevin Brockmeier
A Happy Death by Albert Camus
The Commedia dell’Arte by Giacomo Oreglia
The Architect of Flowers by William Lychack
The Actor’s Art and Craft by William Esper and Damon DiMarco
Dying City by Christopher Shinn
Slowness by Milan Kundera
The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
Improvise: Scene From the Inside Out by Mick Napier
Book of My Nights by Li-Young Lee
The Sea Gull by Anton Chekhov
Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason by Jessica Warner
The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books by Jeff Martin and C. Max Magee (editors)
Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry by David Orr
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
Jitney by August Wilson
The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing
Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honday Dynasty by Tony Hoagland
Travesties by Tom Stoppard
Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee
The Harvard Psychedelic Club by Don Lattin
The Wrecking Light by Robin Robertson
The Chairs are Where the People Go by Misha Glouberman with Sheila Heti
In a Forest, Dark and Deep by Neil LaBute
Whatever by Michel Houellebecq
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute by Grace Paley
The Night Season by Rebecca Lenkiewicz
A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Seven Guitars by August Wilson
The Curfew by Jesse Ball
The Cripple of Inishmaan by Martin McDonagh
The Jokers by Albert Cossery
Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey Into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism by Daniel Pinchbeck
Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer
Normal People Don’t Live Like This by Dylan Landis

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A Completist Life

Posted on 2011/12/132011/12/15 by Jason Hensel

I’m a completist. I don’t know why. I don’t know when it started. All I know is that when I find something that I enjoy, and it appears in a series, I have to complete it.

My latest obsession is with New York Review Books (NYRB) Classics. I read one (Stoner by John Williams), loved it, and decided to see what else was in the series. I’d find one at Half Price Books (“Oh, this looks interesting, too!), buy it, and put it next to the previous one. This process repeated itself until now, where I find myself wanting (daresay, needing) to collect the whole series.

I know this is crazy. I won’t read every single book immediately or even like all the ones I read. But that’s not the point, which is to complete the collection.

I’ve done the same thing with the Best American Series (Short Stories, Travel, Science and Nature, Essays, Non-required Reading, Poetry) and the O. Henry series. Have I read any one volume of those all the way through? You can safely bet no. There was even a time I collected all the Shakespeare plays in individual volumes by a certain publisher because I liked the woodcuts used on the covers. This is ridiculous because I have many copies of his plays in anthologies scattered throughout the house. Do I really need four copies of Hamlet? Apparently, the answer is yes.

The completist in me is not something new. I collected baseball cards, coins, stamps, records, etc. when I was younger. I never saw it before as a problem, which makes worrying about it now kind of crazy.

The cliched saying is that if you know you’re crazy, then you’re not crazy. Then what am I? Perhaps being a completist is a type of crazy that’s more accepted in society, or at least it was. Hoarders has spoiled that game. Now when I bring a new NYRB book home because it’s part of “the collection,” my plus-one rolls her eyes, silently saying cuckoo cuckoo.

Or maybe I’m obsessing too much on the obsessing. I should focus on the pleasure I get from these books beautifully aligned on my shelf, knowing they are ready for me when I’m ready for them. I should obsess on the knowledge that I have a lifetime of reading ahead of me.

And I will, just as soon as I finish completing this collection.

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Nay-sayers Be Nay-saying

Posted on 2011/11/282011/11/28 by Jason Hensel

I’m usually a positive person. I like to think that I’m really open-minded and flexible. But lately, I’ve been experiencing a case of the nay-says, for myself and in my relationships with others.

I’ve been trying to figure out why this has started. Perhaps it’s because I experience a lot of nay-saying from others, and it’s just rubbed off on me. How many times must your ideas be nay-sayed before you just preemptively nay-say them yourself?

It’s debilitating. It creates a negative cycle that’s difficult to escape. I guess I can take comfort in the fact that I’m noticing it, but that doesn’t make it go away when it’s delivered from others.

After a quick Google search, I found several articles about how to deal with nay-sayers. Basically, I should stay away from them. But when you can’t, what do you do? Don’t let it get to you? Tried that; still trying that.

I think the best thing to do is to remain positive, offer positive rebuttals to the nay-sayers. It’s a fierce struggle, but if you stick with it, your positive attitude will prevail.

For example, when offering up something new at work, the conversation could go like this:

Positive You: I found a great thing that we can add to our system that will increase productivity, streamline our workflow and it’s free.

Nay-sayer: It doesn’t fit our strategy, and it won’t make us any money.

Positive You: This would be a great time, then, to discuss our strategy, especially if it’s one that doesn’t allow for greater productivity with free products.

Granted, the nay-sayer could counter with even more nay-saying. Just keep lobbing positive laser beams at that person. Eventually, you’ll win.

Or go down in a blaze of glory. There I go again, nay-saying myself.

(Photo via Flickr: Ahd Photography / Creative Commons)

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The Doors of Forgetting

Posted on 2011/11/03 by Jason Hensel

Imagine walking through a door and forgetting everything. It’s possible, and a new study in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology explains how. Abstract, you have the floor.

Previous research using virtual environments has revealed a location-updating effect in which there is a decline in memory when people move from one location to another. Here we assess whether this effect reflects the influence of the experienced context, in terms of the degree of immersion of a person in an environment, as suggested by some work in spatial cognition, or by a shift in context. In Experiment 1, the degree of immersion was reduced by using smaller displays. In comparison, in Experiment 2 an actual, rather than a virtual, environment was used, to maximize immersion. Location-updating effects were observed under both of these conditions. In Experiment 3, the original encoding context was reinstated by having a person return to the original room in which objects were first encoded. However, inconsistent with an encoding specificity account, memory did not improve by reinstating this context. Finally, we did a further analysis of the results of this and previous experiments to assess the differential influence of foregrounding and retrieval interference. Overall, these data are interpreted in terms of the event horizon model of event cognition and memory.

Still with me? Basically, what the researchers found is that new memory episodes (event models) form in our brains whenever we enter a new environment. As you move from place to place, you’re stacking memories on top of memories, making them harder to retrieve.

I imagine this knowledge could affect how educators, event planners, or anyone involved in learning and group collaboration structure their operations. If you know that moving people from room to room causes them to forget, wouldn’t it be better to keep everyone in one room all day? If that’s not technically feasible, then what can you do design-wise to mitigate the forgetting?

(Photo via Flickr: Istvan / Creative Commons)

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Review: The Chairs are Where the People Go

Posted on 2011/10/192011/10/20 by Jason Hensel

I work in the meeting and event industry. And one of the things that attracts me most to this field is group dynamics and learning. I love figuring out why people get together to exchange ideas, what ways best foster interaction, and how all of this can make us better humans.

Misha Glouberman loves it, too.

Glouberman, a Toronto-based event planner and facilitator, is also a thinker, a ponderer. His book, The Chairs are Where the People Go: How to Live, Work, and Play in the City, is an exploration of his opinions on a variety of topics. Primarily, though, they focus on interactions and how best to nurture them.

The book is co-written with his friend, Sheila Heti, who originally set out to write a fiction book based on Glouberman. She didn’t get too far into it, because she realized that a fictionalized Misha is no match for the real deal. She decided she would ask him his thoughts about several topics and transcribe verbatim (some of you grammarians may squirm a bit).

Examples of these mini-essays include: “Conferences Should be an Exhilarating Experience,” “Don’t Pretend There’s No Leader,” and “Sitting Down and Listening as a Role.” Each topic analysis is strictly Glouberman’s opinion. This isn’t balanced, journalistic reporting. And that’s what makes this book enjoyable and interesting.

For, you see, Misha Glouberman is a modern-day Montaigne. His thoughts are never settled. He leaves himself room to let alternatives enter into view. And that’s the book’s main theme: Think of others. Learn from them. Entertain other viewpoints.

“It’s easy to underestimate the fact that other people have had similar problems to yours and that you can learn from their experiences–and learn from people who’ve spent lots of time thinking about certain problems,” he tells Heti in the chapter titled, “A Decision is a Thing You Make.”

Glouberman’s thinking about certain problems will cause you to think, as well. And for me, that’s the sign of a great book.

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The Value of Quitting

Posted on 2011/10/05 by Jason Hensel

I love to read books. For the longest time, I would read five books at a time, switching among each one depending on my mood. Over time, though, I felt like I wasn’t reading as much (not true) or concentrating on each book as much (somewhat true). So, I decided to force myself to read one book at a time and give it my full attention.

I’ve been satisfied with this strategy for the most part. However, when I decide to read a book and I end up not liking it after 20 or so pages, I feel terrible about wanting to give up on it. I fall into the old trap that I should finish what I started, that winners never quit.

You should embrace quitting, though. Learning when to quit can make you more successful in the long run. Here’s Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics, on the upside of quitting.

So I hang out with a lot of economists. (I know, you’re envious.) But there are two things they love to talk about that will help us understand quitting. One is called “sunk cost” and the other is “opportunity cost.” “Sunk cost” is about the past — it’s the time, or money, or sweat equity that you’ve put into something, which makes it hard to abandon. “Opportunity cost” is about the future. It means that for every hour or dollar you spend on one thing, you’re giving up the opportunity to spend that hour or dollar on something else — something that might make your life better. If only you weren’t so worried about the sunk cost. If only you could quit.

The “sunk cost” is what hurts us most of the time. It’s living in the past instead of the now or the future. It’s a cause of most of our worries.

These past couple of weeks, I started three different books that looked great. Upon reading, they were real stinkers. I started to worry that maybe I was quitting too soon, that I wasn’t giving the book its due. That’s absurd on one level, because a book is an inanimate object. But it’s more absurd that I worried about quitting something that wasn’t making me happy. I found myself in a worry spiral, and the only way to get out of it was to quit.

Dubner goes on to say:

Of course it takes tremendous amounts of time and effort and, for lack of a more scientific word, stick-to-itiveness, to make any real progress in the world. But time and effort and even stick-to-itiveness are not in infinite supply. Remember the opportunity cost: every hour, every ounce of effort you spend here cannot be spent there. So let me counter Napoleon Hill’s phrase with another one, certainly not as well known. It’s something that Stella Adler, the great acting coach, used to say: Your choice is your talent. So choosing the right path, the right project, the right job or passion or religion — that’s where the treasure lies; that’s where the value lies. So if you realize that you’ve made a wrong choice — even if already you’ve sunk way too much cost into it — well, I’ve got one word to say to you, my friend. Quit.

Exactly. Why continue when you know you’re going to fail? Quit and move on to something that you know will be more successful. Myself, I started to read another book, The Harvard Psychedelic Club. It’s fun to read, interesting, and, more important, it makes me happy.

How easy is it for you to happily cut your loses and move on as quick as possible? Or do you have difficulty quitting things?

(Photo credit via Flickr: Frits Ahlefeldt-Laurvig / Creative Commons)

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Embarrassed People are More Trustworthy

Posted on 2011/09/30 by Jason Hensel

You may be embarrassed by being embarrassed, but that’s not a bad thing. In fact, it makes you more trustworthy.

“Embarrassment is one emotional signature of a person to whom you can entrust valuable resources,” said University of California Berkeley social psychologist Robb Willer, a coauthor of a study published in this month’s online issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. “It’s part of the social glue that fosters trust and cooperation in everyday life.”

The researchers conducted a few experiments to get to their findings.

In the first experiment, they videotaped 60 college students recounting embarrassing moments such as public flatulence or making incorrect assumptions based on appearances. Typical sources of embarrassment included mistaking an overweight woman for being pregnant or a disheveled person for being a panhandler. Research assistants coded each video testimonial based on the level of embarrassment the subjects showed.

The college students also participated in the “Dictator Game,” which economics researchers use to measure altruism. For example, each was given 10 raffle tickets and asked to keep a share of the tickets and give the remainder to a partner. Results showed that those who showed greater levels of embarrassment tended to give away more of their raffle tickets, indicating greater generosity.

Researchers also surveyed 38 Americans whom they recruited through Craigslist. They asked survey participants how often they feel embarrassed. They were also gauged for their general cooperativeness and generosity through such exercises as the aforementioned dictator game.

In another experiment, participants watched a trained actor being told he received a perfect score on a test. The actor responded with either embarrassment or pride. They then played games with the actor that measured their trust in him based on whether he had shown pride or embarrassment.

The results consistently showed that embarrassment signals people’s tendency to be pro-social.

“You want to affiliate with them more,” said Matthew Feinberg, a doctoral student in psychology at UC Berkeley and lead author of the paper. “You feel comfortable trusting them. Moderate levels of embarrassment are signs of virtue. Our data suggests embarrassment is a good thing, not something you should fight.”

How easily do you get embarrassed?

(Story materials provided by the University of California Berkeley.)
(Photo credit: Sarah Rebecca / Creative Commons)

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Changing the World Through Yourself

Posted on 2011/09/222011/09/27 by Jason Hensel

I was originally going to write about a recent survey result showing that women use social networking more than men. In my research on the story, though, I came across another study that I found more interesting.

According to a Walden University and Harris Interactive survey, “more than nine in 10 (92 percent) Americans have taken action to engage in positive social change in the past year and that more than three-fourths (77 percent) say it is important to them personally to be involved in social change.”

The Social Change Impact Report’s “results show that Americans have a strong belief in their own power to effect change with nearly nine in 10 adults (85 percent) agreeing that they can make the world a better place by their actions. Fifty-two percent say they are most likely to personally get involved in social change in the future as individuals acting on their own or in informal groups.”

The 2,148 U.S. adults surveyed believe that the top social change issues are education, health, and poverty. They also believe that technology enhances social change by making it easier to follow news and increasing awareness. Finally, they feel that the best way to impact change is to begin at the local level.

This survey interested me because lately I’ve been trying to impact change in various aspects of my life, some successfully, some not so successfully. Really, the ultimate local level is yourself. You can have the biggest ideas for change in the world, but sometimes it’s yourself that needs to change before larger changes can occur.

I can totally hear in my head Gandi’s quote now, as I’m sure you can: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Personally, some changes I need to work on are learning better persuasion skills and becoming more accepting of the process of letting go.

We all have ideas and changes for the world. But before they happen, what are some of the changes you’re working on for yourself? What are your small changes that will lead to larger changes?

(Photo credit: love2dreamfish / creative commons)

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