Category: Books

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My 2020 reading list – fiction

Continuing  the list of books I read last year. The beginning of it, where I list children’s books that we read with my daughter is here. The fiction category is my favourite, but ironically, this is where I actually have to put some effort into making a daily progress. Normally, I read quite a lot of technical literature related to my research, and that takes most of the available reading time. Even the non-fiction books, which I will list later, are somehow easier to read regularly. This is probably because I subconsciously view them as less of a time-waste than fiction. 

6. “A death in the Family” by Karl Ove Knausgaard. I heard about this book in some podcast (probably, the Tim Ferriss Show), and after looking at the reviews it became apparent that it was widely regarded as a masterpiece of modern literature. I must say, it’s not an easy read, and it’s almost unapologetically weird for my tate, but somehow I really liked it. So much, in fact, that I got the second book in the “My struggle” series by Kanusgaard, “A Man in Love”. Here is the conundrum, though – I liked it even better, but haven’t finished reading it, being distracted by faster-paced, more entertaining stories. I left it at 42%, according to my phone. It does give a really curious insight into the (relatively) modern lifestyle of the Scandinavia. Maybe, I’ll pick it up again.

7. “Cockroaches” by Jo Nesbo. Ah, this is what I dropped “A Man in Love” for! It’s a proper page-turner of a detective novel, the second in the series about Harry Hole (the first on is “The Bat”, which is equally good).

8. “Seveneves” by Neal Stephenson. That was my favourite book of the year by far – a hard science fiction that is both entertaining and educational. Dynamics of moving chains and whips with applications ranging from launching and retrieving space vehicles to hand-to-hand combat – if that’s not a worthy research topic, I don’t know what is! I also unexpectedly picked up one of my favourite productivity tips from the main character, Dinah MacQuare, who decided to dedicate fifteen minutes a day to her pet robotics project in the face of a global crisis that apparently demanded her entire time and attention. She did it because the alternative would have been to let the project die, and fifteen minutes a day was better than zero. As one would expect, that particular project turned out to be uniquely important, completely validating her decision.

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My 2020 reading list – children’s books

At the beginning of the New Year, I had an idea of looking back at the books I’ve read last year to see if any particularly memorable or useful bits that I learned from them would spring to mind. So here it goes: books I’ve read in 2020, not including various technical books, papers, etc. that I read for work (some of which are actually quite entertaining, but maybe it’s just my nerdy opinion). I am not going to list all of them at once, but rather will try to do it one or two at a time. I think this way I’ll be able to reflect on them a bit deeper.

As a note, most of what I read is e-books, unless otherwise noted. I typically read them in the tiniest chunks of time I have throughout the day while waiting for something or someone. Notable exceptions are the books I read aloud to my daughter. Those are physical paper books, and we read them over longer intervals (15 minutes would be minimum – when we really want to know what happens next in the story, but the bedtime is really close).

1. “Percy Jackson’s Greek Heroes” by Rick Riordan. Just before the COVID lockdown, my daughter participated in a piano festival in Vancouver. After the performance, we stopped by an Indigo bookstore, and this book was recommended to us by a store employee. We got the hardcover version, illustrated by John Rocco. This book has been quite influential for us. It fanned my daughter’s interest in Greek Mythology and prompted us to read more of the Percy Jackson series (Percy is short for Perseus – just to give one spoiler to those who are new to this). I also used this book as a reference in one of the first videos that I made for my Energy Conversion course, when we were abruptly plunged into the online teaching mode in March.

2. “Percy Jackson’s Greek Gods” by Rick Riordan. We simply had to read this book after the “Heroes”, and it did not disappoint.
3. “The Lightning Thief” by Rick Riordan. As an adult, I personally really enjoyed this book. It has all the components of a good adventure story – fast pace, historical references and just the right amount of humour, which is equally aimed at the millenials (maybe even early generation Z’s), their parents and all the way back to the ancient Greeks themselves.
4. “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” by J.K. Rowling.
5. “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” by J.K. Rowling. In parallel with other books, my daughter and I have been slowly making our way through the Harry Potter series. These books need no introductions, and I can just echo what everyone probably already knows – they are practically perfect in every way, to paraphrase Marry Poppins.

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Paying attention

I came across the idea that any activity can be made better by paying more attention in the incredibly inspiring book “Flow” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The original concept was that achieving the flow state is possible by focussing one’s attention on the activity in question (the process itself, rather than the goal) and consciously increasing the complexity of the activity over time. If you are studying chess, for example, it would be necessary to play higher- and higher-rated opponents and learn more opening theory to avoid stagnation when your level of understanding of the game increases.

More recently, I’ve started thinking that most problems can be solved by concentrating sufficient attention on them. I could use numerous examples from chess, music or martial arts, but the principle holds even in such mundane context as taking my dog for a walk. A dog trainer once told me that, as far as teaching the dog not to pull on the leash, the most important thing is to constantly pay attention to what he is doing and where his focus is. In my experience, as long as I maintain constant contact with voice, treats and changes of speed and direction, Bruno, my Lagotto Romagnolo, is more than happy to follow the lead and keep the leash lose. The problem is that as soon as my attention goes elsewhere (and it’s very easy to zone out during a walk), Bruno finds something else to entertain himself, which immediately leads to his pulling it the direction of his interest. As the dog trainer said, if on a particular day you are not in the mood of giving the puppy your complete attention, it would be better to skip walking on leash altogether to avoid developing bad habits.

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On the value sketching

I realized a while ago that sketching is a good exercise for developing observation skills and, more generally, memory. It requires full concentration, because the subject is usually not standing still, and one needs to be able to consciously think about which features of the subject are essential and which are superficial. The deliberate thinking is important, because it is the mechanism that allows committing the visual information to long(er)-term memory. The short-term memory (the one in which information lives for a couple of seconds) is not sufficient for preserving the visual details until they can be captured on paper.

Lately, I’ve been recording video highlights to supplement lectures in my Advanced Fluid Mechanics course, and one of those is about the importance of being able to make conceptual sketches of flow features for understanding of the underlying physics. Incidentally, one of the forefathers of studies of fluid mechanics was Leonardo da Vinci, whose approach was based on (some would say it entirely consisted of) observation and sketching of the natural phenomena. We are not aiming at Leonardo’s level of artistry in my fluids course, but observation is an important skill for a scientist and an engineer, and sketching is way to develop it.

The book I am recommending in the video is “Boundary-Layer Theory” by Herrmann Schichting. It is one of the first technical books I bought as a grad student, because I knew that it would remain a classic.

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Bending the rules

“Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.”
James P. Carse “Finite and Infinite games”

Last week, I missed a deadline for a research funding proposal by several days. Originally, I was not planning to apply at all, but as I worked on a larger research plan, it became apparent that it would be great to add an ultra-high-speed camera to our arsenal. It also became apparent that I wouldn’t get the needed info from the supplier in time to meet the deadline. Being a good academic citizen, I asked the administration for an extension. No answer. Being in addition an optimist, I interpreted the lack of response as a go-ahead. After all, nobody said “no”. Long story short: I wrote the proposal, and it was accepted despite being late. That’s not a guarantee that we’ll get the funds, by the way, but did I mention that optimism is important?

I think that mild disregard for the rules is required for progress, generally speaking. It is very much in the spirit of Steve Jobs’ “reality distortion field”, brilliantly documented by Walter Isaacson. When told by his team that a certain goal was not possible due to various objective reasons, Jobs would still insist on pressing forward, ultimately proving everyone wrong (not always, but often). It is liberating to remind yourself that you are always free to make the rules of the game you are currently playing a mere component of a larger, encompassing game. As James Carse writes, “There are no rules that require us to obey rules.”

It is also easy to assume that the rules are there even when they are not. I am taking a painting class, where we copy a Rembrandt’s self-portrait. The other day, I was transferring a pencil sketch onto a canvas. To check the proportions, I projected the original painting on top of my sketch using a digital projector. In the end, I was quite pleased with the result and showed it to my mother (“Look mom, no hands!” kind of feeling). “Are you allowed to use that?” she asked pointing at the projector. I thought that it was ironic that we assume, by default, that using modern technology constitutes cheating when our goal is to study the work of old masters. I remember reading (also in a biography by Isaacson) that Leonardo da Vinci and his contemporaries went to great lengths to invent and build contraptions for projecting original images on their canvasses for copying. Some even went as far as making sketches of Florentine cityscapes on pieces of semi-transparent fabric stretched across a window. I am convinced that if Leonardo, Rembrandt or Van Gogh had access to an optical projector they would definitely use it.

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Collective experience

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book “Flow” is possibly the most enjoyable non-fiction book I’ve read. It makes perfect sense, of course, because the book is about optimal experiences. As I’ve been reading it, I notice the concepts described there everywhere around me. For example, one of the theses is that for an activity to be enjoyable it needs to be autotelic, i.e. deriving the meaning from itself. Ultimately, it all comes down to being present, which means paying close attention to whatever one is doing at the moment. Apparently, it helps if we have heightened expectations of the experience and also if large groups of people participate in the same activity. Csikszentmihalyi gives an example of live music performances, and I think that any kind of group activity or event works in a similar way to focus our attention. I see it regularly at my own kendo practices, tournaments and gradings. It is often difficult for me to convince myself to go, but it is seldom a question whether it was worth it once I am there.

Most recently, I saw an example of this effect last Saturday. I was taking photos of a rehearsal of the Christmas parade routine that will be performed by my daughter’s dance school next weekend. From an objective point of view, taking part in the parade should be a miserable experience. Last year, for example, it was pouring cold rain all through the event, and there is every indication that the weather could be the same this year. The rehearsal itself is also tough – more than 150 people cramped together in a dance studio for more than an hour. Yet, the dancers evidently have been having tremendous fun. My photo gallery of the last year’s parade is the most visited of the entire school year coverage. The camaraderie between the different age groups is amazing to witness. My daughter was eager to be part of the parade crew just for the experience of spending time next to the older dancers, whom she admires, and doing something together. I also cannot help but feel lucky that I have an opportunity to have an insider’s look at this collective experience and also to contribute to it by attempting to capture the elusive atmosphere of “flow”. An important part of any experience is our recollection of it, and photos not only capture memories, but actually shape them.

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Simplicity

I’ve just finished reading a rather Machiavellian book “Extreme Ownership” by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. Part of it’s appeal is simplicity of the concepts of military leadership that are presented there. In fact, the authors make a compelling case for simplicity being a necessary condition for effectiveness of a mission plan. Not-surprisingly, the book also plays on the universal applicability of the principles of military strategy. From my experience, I can attest that at least some of these principles apply in science and art.

As it happens, I’ve been working on a research proposal that is supposed to outline my research program for the next five years. The issue is that the adjudicating panel spans a range of expertise, but none of the panelists is exactly in my area. Hence the need to simplify the description of my work. This may seem like a limitation for the proposal, but it’s actually a great thing. I find it very helpful to have main objectives to be formulated with enough simplicity that I can keep them on top of my mind on a daily basis as I work with graduate students, who do the actual research work. This makes making everyday micro decisions easy: does this move us closer to the objective? When the description of the goal is simple, this loaded question reduces to a yes-or-no one.

The same principle applies to photography. My camera is pretty advanced, and there is a nearly infinite number of combinations or lenses and settings that I could use. However, I find that it is most effective to simplify things. I only have a few combinations of settings: for action (maximum aperture, fast shutter speed, auto ISO, high framing rate, continuous focus), for portraits (same as above, but slower shutter speed, sometimes, manual low ISO), for landscapes (narrow aperture, low ISO, single-shot focus, single frame drive). There are othe creative scenarios beside these, but they are exceptions. So the question of choosing the settings, which can be overwhelming to a beginner photographer, can actually be simplified to “what are you trying to achieve?” And the beauty is that there are only few answers: freeze (or blur) motion, separate the subject from the background (or maximize the depth of field). This classification of shooting scenarios is so simple that it frees me to mostly think about composition, which is always important.

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Habits are synthetic

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I have started reading “Better Than Before” by Gretchen Rubin, and in the introduction, she writes that habits are powerful because they eliminate the necessity of decision-making, which, she also argues, is a finite resource. Basically, you make decision once and then follow a habitual sequence of steps to the desired result without thinking about the individual steps.

This reminded me of the “Creation and Destruction” essay by John Boyd, which I came across a month ago. Boyd was a military strategist and an instructor of fighter pilots. His theory of making creative decisions is based on a continuous loop of analysis (destruction) of the current reality (and one’s mental model of it) and synthesis (creation) of a new and improved mental model. In this context, a habit, as Rubin describes it, is a synthetic process – you don’t analyze the components of a habit, but instead string them together into one complex action.

Acting without thinking, but in a way appropriate to the situation is, of course, a central concept in martial arts. In kendo, it is called mushin. And just as an everyday habit, the instinctive reaction in a fight is developed through repeated practice.

Being a fairly universal principle, habit-forming can be applied practically to everything. For example, in photography, say, I decide that I want to freeze action of dancers during a performance. I select a ‘fast’ lens, open the aperture wide, set the shutter speed high, autofocus – to continuous tracking mode, framing rate – to ‘high’ and from that point on worry only about composition and catching the dynamic moments. Actually, even this preliminary setup becomes habitual with practice. I only need to think ‘freeze action’, and the rest happens more or less on autopilot.

Of course, as Gretchen Rubin also mentions, habits are great servants, but terrible masters. They makes us more efficient, but in doing so rob us of the actual experience of the action. When you hit a pause on Boyds Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action (OODA) loop and delegate part of the sequence to a habit, you sacrifice present-moment awareness. Autopilots, after all, are not famous for their creativity.

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Arc of a hero (chihuahua)

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My daughter and I decided to make a new picture book based on the pretend-play that she does every day in the car on her way to school.

We made our first (still unpublished) book about a Girl and an Egg in a very unstructured way by sketching up new scenes as the story was progressing over the days, without a particular plan to begin with. It was a fun and pressure free way to make stuff up, but it was a bit challenging to wrap things up into a story that would make sense to anyone besides the two of us and my wife, who was literally playing an active role in all the reenactments.

Not only we had fun making the first book, but we gained some experience, and I wanted to put together some kind of an outline, so that we would have a structure to play within. So before even sketching the main character, I decided to make storyboard for the book.

I also noticed that in our games we might have a beginning of a hero’s journey type of a story, which is described in Joseph Campbell’s seminal book “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”. This is structure that has apparently been followed by many of my favourite books and movies from “Star Wars” to the “Wizard of Oz”.

So even though we are still at the blank canvas stage, we are potentially in a good company as far as stories go. Oh, and our main character is a pet chihuahua.

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Too present to learn

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“You can’t think and hit at the same time.”

– Yogi Berra

I wonder, wouldn’t it be super-productive to apply my analytical skills to learning a physical skill? For example, I could use a fundamental studying technique like note-taking for learning kendo or violin-playing.

However, this is obvious and easy only in principle. In reality, I find that practicing a martial art or music requires so much focus and present-moment awareness that I literally remember very little to take notes of after practice. All my energy, both physical and mental, is spent on doing the thing, not on thinking about it. In fact, I am surprised how some people can ask questions during a kendo practice. Not that that find the answers obvious (mostly, quite the opposite) or the behaviour awkward (even though the structure of a typical kendo practice is not conducive to question-and-answer sessions, we are not in Japan after all). I just don’t find that beyond the very basic level, intellectual understanding of a particular technique is helpful for making progress. It feels like practice is needed at the moment, not another explanation.

I recently came upon a similar reflection in a book I’ve been reading, “A Man in Love” by Karl Ove Knausgaard (which is a fantastic book, by the way – I can’t say that I enjoy any particular aspect of it, and the story is not exciting, but somehow I just know it’s a modern masterpiece, and I cannot stop reading it). There, a writer friend of the main character describes his experience of writing about and training with professional boxers: “You know, the boxers I wrote about had an incredible presence. But that meant they weren’t spectators of themselves, so they didn’t remember anything. Not a thing! Share the moment with me here and now. That was their offer.”

Having said all this, I think there is a way of harnessing the power of analysis. In fact, this is how progress usually happens – at the juncture of previously disjointed fields. Just look at Bruce Lee’s notebooks with all the detailed sketches and notes on the physical, psychological and philosophical aspects of his practice. I think the idea is to separate the two activities in time. Practice first, analyze later. To paraphrase Yogi Berra, you cannot think while hitting, but you can think about how you’ve just hit.

In fact, I was probably wrong, when I said that couldn’t remember anything about the last night’s practice. After all, there are established techniques for helping me remember, to improve my ability to remember:

  • Verbalize the learned concep. If I learned only one thing during last practice, what is that? Assigning words to the idea captures it and gives it some substance. Now it can be studied and analyzed.
  • Do this soon after practice (within the first 24 hours). Make a written note of what you learn.
  • Revisit the note before the next lesson, so you can build upon what you’ve learned during the practice.

In the case of violin practice, things are even simpler – my teacher takes notes while I practice and gives them to me after the lesson.

All these suggestions sound incredibly simple and obvious. This is what we teach our students, who study math, physics and engineering.

Obvious – definitely. Simple? I find them easier said than done. But if nothing else, learning this way is a practice itself.

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