Imagine the Power of Habit: The science of science-y self-help

Probably the two books I was most excited about reading this summer were Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit and Jonah Lehrer's Imagine. I borrowed the Power of Habit ebook from the library, but I had bought the Imagine ebook off the Barnes n' Noble website -- and was then quite disappointed when it turned out that Mr. Lehrer had fabricated some of the quotes in his best-selling book and subsequently resigned from his position at the New Yorker. So in the end, I didn't read Imagine (and eventually managed to get a refund).

But why were these my books of choice? I had never really thought about it, beyond the superficial -- they were bestsellers and they sounded interesting. Doesn't that seem like enough? But then I read a really interesting critique of Imagine on the New Republic website, and it flipped my whole perspective of these intellectual, science-y self-help books that have become immensely popular the last couple of years. In his review, Issac Chotiner of TNR writes, "Imagine is really a pop-science book, which these days usually means that it is an exercise in laboratory-approved self-help. Like Malcolm Gladwell and David Brooks, Lehrer writes self-help for people who would be embarrassed to be seen reading it. For this reason, their chestnuts must be roasted in 'studies' and given a scientific gloss. The surrender to brain science is particularly zeitgeisty."

I saw another article about Lehrer, post-scandal, that was discussing this same issue. Eric Garland essentially says on his blog that we, the reading public, have become enamored with these sorts of easy answers to difficult questions, which is what has funded this trend. I personally thought The Secret was a little ridiculous -- believe away your cancer! -- but when you add scientific studies and whatnot to the mix, it suddenly seems like these books will allow you to grasp creativity, success and your habits, and even better, grab hold of them. When I think about it, this too sounds a little ridiculous -- these concepts are not that simple -- but I suppose we all want some easy solution, myself included.

Interestingly, when I look back at my blog posts on both The Secret and Outliers, I noted that both books seem to ignore the hard work that has to take place in order to be successful. In discussing Outliers, I wrote, "While [Gladwell's] theory may be true, I felt that it lacked personal responsibility, that duty to get up and do your best to do your thing every single day." And about The Secret, I said, "I think my biggest issue with [it] is that it ignores the work and actions that have to take place for anything to happen, much less to achieve success. I mean, I can visualize a best-selling novel all day – I can believe it with every fiber of my being – but I can't attract those 80,000 words. Maybe I can attract an agent and a good review from Michiko Kakutani and an appearance on Oprah, but I can't attract the creation of a book – I will actually have to sit down every day and write it and there's no magical formula for that." And even The Power of Habit downplays the work changing a habit takes.

 

Hmm, so where does that leave us? Still struggling with the complexity of trying to be great, creative and successful. Alas. I suppose this is why everyone wants the magic pill.

Let's take the Entertainment Weekly book quiz

I subscribe to Entertainment Weekly's Shelf Life blog on Google Reader and I noticed earlier today that they seem to have started an occasional feature called the EW Book Quiz. A book quiz - what fun! From what I could tell, they've only done three installments, with Jackie Collins, then Mindy Kaling, and most recently Gregory Maguire. The questions have been similar but not always the exact same.

I love quizzes like this - Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire springs to mind - and I thought we could play along. Leave your answers in the comments!

EW Book Quiz (with questions compiled from the three interviews):


1. What was your favorite book as a child? This is a really hard one because I had so many favorite books as a kid. But I'll have to go with a couple of Madeleine L'Engle books. I absolutely loved the Wrinkle in Time series which was full of vocabulary words I didn't know and made me feel smarter (kid-level astrophysics, yo!) and A Ring of Endless Light which convinced me that I could communicate with dolphins if I tried hard enough (and I tried once at Sea World in Orlando and felt like I was just inches of brain power away from success). My current favorite book for children is the awesome Pirate Soup.

2. What’s a book you come back to over and over? I don't usually read books more than once but I've read The Great Gatsby, Sleeping Tiger, and Eat, Pray, Love twice each because they give me the warm and fuzzies. I'm also pretty passionate about Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist and even more, The Pilgrimage, and read them when I feel the need for some serious spiritual guidance and a jumpstarting of faith that everything will be alright.

3. Is there a book you’ve never read that, for whatever reason, you’ve pretended to have read? This hasn't happened since college when I was enrolled in a Russian lit class. We were reading Anna Karenina or War and Peace (can't even remember which) and my roommate stole my copy off my shelf and gave it to her best friend. When I went looking for it, she confessed but was pretty mean about it, saying that I wasn't using it so it was hers for the taking. So I had to pretend I was going to read it so that thieving bitch would give me my property back. Still haven't read either of them though War and Peace is on my revised list for the remainder of this year.

4. What’s a classic or much-hyped book that you’ve never quite understood the merits of? The Scarlet Letter, The Crucible, and The Stranger. Omg how I hate those books. Even worse, because I changed high schools, I had to read The Scarlet Letter twice and The Stranger three times, absolute torture. As for modern-day books, pretty much any Oprah selection fits the bill.

5. What is a book you would kill a bug with? Seems like Atlas Shrugged would be big enough to kill a mouse even.

6. What’s a favorite book that you’ve read for school? It's not a favorite per se but Julio Cortazar's freaky short story "Axolotl" has stayed with me since I read it in a college Spanish class. It's about a man who has a special moment with a salamander. I also gained a newfound appreciation for the merits of Dracula in a feminist Gothic lit class.

7. Which fictional character do you most identify with? I really have no answer for this; I don't usually connect with characteers this way. I like them often but I never feel like they're me - except maybe for Vicky Austen, the dolphin-loving heroine mentioned above.

Now it's your turn!

What is a book?

As I previously blogged about, I've already reached my goal of reading 30 books this year - or did I? I feel genuinely conflicted. If I count literally every book I finished, I'm currently on #34...but if I start getting picky, I'm only on #27.

The problem is those damn Sweet Valley High books that I read in June, that bubblegum for the brain. Should they count? That is the question. Obviously, they are actual books, as thin and shallow as they might be. But I feel guilty counting them, like I'm gaming the system - because if I just read books like that, I could probably read 300 books a year, at least. And in fairness, in other years, young-adult novels have pumped up my tally.

I also read Blake Snyder's awesome screenwriting book Save the Cat at the end of May (though I didn't blog about it - hence the missing #15). I counted that too - but should I? It was a real book but pretty focused on how-to. I also debated whether or not to count the Genesis and Exodus, which I read with my students - I decided not to include them individually but instead bundled them with Robert Alter's Genesis commentary, which I read every word of.

At the end of the day, this debate matters little as this list is only for me, myself and I. I don't begrudge others their 100 books a year and the junk lit it takes to get there - to each his own reading experience. But this has really made me think again about what I read and why I started keeping track in the first place. I guess to me, when I say I want to read 30 books, I mean I really want to read 30 pieces of literature. That's why I feel icky about the Sweet Valley High books and unsure about the Bible or Save the Cat. They're books (duh) but not the kind of books that I'm trying to motivate myself to read.

Author Laura Fraser tackled these same questions on her website; she said that writing down her books read has made her much more picky, as it brings home the truth that there are only so many books you can read in a lifetime. At the time when I read that (all of two weeks ago), I said that my list hasn't kept me from reading crap but I've been thinking about this quite a bit since then.

The truth is, I don't want to read Sweet Valley High and crappy chick-lit (though it can make for some fun posts!). So I've regrouped and really looked at what I'd like to read in the remaining weeks of the year. My original list had 18 books on it. After a good think, I narrowed it down to the following nine +, a goodly feat in itself: Persuasion, The Iliad, The War That Killed Achilles, Bossypants, Divergent, Brothers Karamazov or War and Peace, The Submission, A Farewell to Arms and the Game of Thrones series.

I also decided to split the difference on my book list and will consider the year a reading success at 35 books total. Which is pretty much a given at this point - huzzah! - since Persuasion is #34 and I'm about 30 pages from the end at the beginning of November.

An Aside: All Over the Map cover error and Laura Fraser's book lists

A good chunk of Laura Fraser's All Over the Map takes place in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, which is why I was surprised to see that the art director decided to go with a photograph of a different Mexican city on the cover. The top photo is bizarrely of the neighboring city of Guanajuato and the only reason that I know that is that I took a nearly identical photo when I was there a year and a half ago. Maybe the stock image was mislabeled? That's the only explanation I can come up with.

 

In other news, as I was browsing the web a moment ago, I discovered that Laura Fraser is a dork like me and also keeps lists of the books she's read. And apparently she's grappled with similar questions that I've had about my list and plan to blog about, which essentially distills down to this: Do all books make the list or are some not worthy? However, she says her list has made her pickier - "seeing the titles line-by-line brings home the realization that the number of books one can read in a lifetime — maybe 5000? — is finite" - while I'm still reading utter crap. Alas.

An Aside: Stealing Athena in photos

In photos and going chronologically, Karen Essex's Stealing Athena is a novel about the Parthenon and two women who had a major impact on its state of being.

[My photo of the Parthenon in 2004]

Perikles began building on the Athenian Acropolis in 447 BC.

[Roman copy of Pericles bust, from The Elgin Marbles by B.F. Cook]

He put the sculptor Pheidias in charge of artistic decisions and according to the book, Pheidias decided to use Perikles' mistress and Stealing Athena's protagonist Aspasia as his model for his glorious statue of Athena, known as Athena Parthenos. (Pheidias was also accused of hiding portraits of himself and Perikles in the massive statue.) Although the original statue no longer survives, today you can see Alan LeQuire's replica (based on historical writings and artifacts) in Nashville's full-scale Parthenon. (Why Nashville has a full-scale replica of the Parthenon I do not know.)

[The photo of Athena comes from the city of Nashville's website.]

Fast-forward about 2,200 years to first years of the 19th century. There was a man named Lord Elgin. He loved the Parthenon more than he loved his wife, the heiress Mary Nisbet and the other protagonist of Stealing Athena.

The photo of Lord Elgin, attributed to a 1795 drawing by G.P. Harding, also comes from Cook's book. The drawing of Mary Nesbit, Countess of Elgin, is found on the cover of Susan Nagel's awesome biography, Mistress of the Elgin Marbles.]

But by that time, the Acropolis had been used and abused. After the fall of the Greek gods, the Parthenon had been turned into a church; when the Turks arrived, they turned into a mosque. Later, they used it to store gunpowder and half the building exploded during a Venetian siege in 1687. So Elgin made it his life's mission to cart what he could back to England, thus beginning one of the art world's biggest controversies. Since he didn't have much money of his own, he used his wife's fortune. Ironically, saving the Acropolis marbles from further ruin helped destroy his own marriage. In the wake of a scandalous divorce, he was forced to sell his beloved marbles to the British Museum in 1816.

According to the British Museum, about half of the marble sculptures from the Parthenon survive. They have a good chunk of what's left, including about 60 percent of the remaining frieze and "much" of what remains of the East Pediment.

[My 2004 photos of the Duveen Gallery (top) and East Pediment (bottom)]

Now we're going beyond Stealing Athena, but the rest of the remaining frieze is in Athens. When I was there, in 2004, it was housed in the old, small Acropolis museum that was on top of the hill. (As I recall, the overflow was kept in storage.) The British Museum refuses to give them back to Athens and for a long time, one of the arguments was that Greece didn't have a proper facility in which to house them. Although the spectacular new Acropolis Museum opened in 2009 (alas, I haven't yet been), the B.M. still isn't budging - and I imagine they never will.

This subject of location is highly controversial and while I've tried to keep my own opinions out of this post, the one thing that sticks out in my mind from my trips to Athens and London is the difference in the marbles' condition from one location to the next. Say what you will but Elgin's actions led to a better preservation in the long-run - and it's obvious in pictures:

[My 2004 photos of a frieze section in Athens (top) and a metope in London (bottom)]

Anyway...that would be the end (and I am reminded once again of why I hate trying to input photos into Blogger...)

Three Cups of Tea: True or False?

I've been pretty fascinated by the brouhaha over Three Cups of Tea since the controvery hit about 10 days ago but I've resisted posting because I don't know what to believe. Anyone else with me on this? But I'm starting to doubt Greg Mortenson's intentions, mostly because his new explanations aren't holding up either - and if that turns out to be the case, I'm angling for my $10 back, to spend it on a piece of fiction that actually says fiction. [Full disclosure: I personally know all the Outside people mentioned herein as I used to work at the magazine.]

In a nutshell, author Jon Krakauer and 60 Minutes go after Greg Mortenson on two main points: that he fabricated significant events in Three Cups and that he has mismanaged his charity's funds, both refusing to document expenses and using the charity's dime to promote his books and then pocketing the proceeds. The first charge, that he made up events - including the origin story of how he wandered into the Pakistani village of Korphe and discovered his life's mission - appears to be true. In an interview with Outside editor Alex Heard, Mortenson blames his co-author David Oliver Relin, saying that he synthesized events to create a stronger narrative and no one cared when Mortenson complained. To the second charge, Mortenson acknowledges in the same Outside interview that he did use charity funds to charter a jet for the sake of time management, that people are misreading the charity's tax records, and that an independent law firm has established that they've done nothing wrong.

I think I've fairly synthesized both sides of the argument...and it's still hard to know what to believe. In a lot of ways, it's a he-said-she-said involving a very remote part of the world. Add in a heap of commentary from everybody from the New York Times to your ordinary blogger (hello, world!) and the water just keeps getting muddier and muddier. Interestingly though, Mortenson's side has remained mostly quiet in the face of some pretty damning financial evidence. (If you read Alex Heard's interview, you'll see on pages 4 and 5 that Mortenson doesn't deny using the charity's funds or refute Krakauer's main argument; rather, he justifies it in the way that many of his Internet defenders have, that the ends justify the means.)

I think it's fair to say that Greg Mortenson had good intentions to change the world but he lost them in the hustle-and-bustle along the way. The mismanagement of the charity seems pretty well documented. Whether he absentmindedly misplaced those intentions when things got too big or discarded them when he became a millionaire remains to be seen.

Personally, I'm leaning toward the "changed by fame" interpretation - but then, I was never a big fan of Three Cups of Tea. As I said at the time, the text struck me as manipulative, like a very long PR manifesto. But the biggest issue now, it seems, is that Mortenson's new and improved explanations don't seem to hold water which in my opinion is the thing that makes him look the most guilty.

Take the debate of the origin story, how he got to Korphe and how long he stayed there. In the greater scheme of things, it's probably irrelevant if Relin condensed the incident. But the fact remains, as the 60 Minutes mash-up (start at minute 1:30) adequately proved, that Mortenson repeats Relin's version of the story on tour as truth. Now, he blames Relin for the inaccuracy and says he voiced concerns - but if that's true, why keep repeating an inaccurate tale? (Interestingly, in an interview with the University of Oregon's Etude in 2008, Relin gives a remarkably different account of how he and Mortenson came to work together, compared to Mortenson's version in the Outside interview.) But now it seems that the revised version of the Korphe tale - which Mortenson provided to Outside - isn't plausibly true either. A second Outside article posits that geographically, the facts don't line up.

What can I say, I have a hard time having faith in someone whose story keeps being disproved. I don't know what the truth is, but it's not looking good for Mortenson.

An Aside: Great Gatsby video game

Yes, there's a Great Gatsby video game that you can play on the Internet! In this supposedly original Nintendo game (Mediabistro doubts the "I found it at a yard sale" origin story), you take on the persona of Nick Carraway navigating his way through the world. The game starts out at one of Gatsby's parties, where Nick's goal is to dodge waiters (or take them out with his flying hat weapon) in an attempt to locate Gatsby.

A random Level Two, the Valley of Ashes, takes place on top of a train. I'm not quite sure what the ultimate point of The Great Gatsby game is - I couldn't get past the laser-shooting T.J. Eckleburg eyes to find out - but the game is quietly addicting, despite the annoying soundtrack.

Clearly I'm not the only one who feels this way. The game has garnered 126, 000 Facebook likes and 5,000+ tweets!

An Aside: Casting The Hunger Games

From what I've seen on the interwebs, there's a lot of speculation surrounding The Hunger Games casting but no actual news to report. (In December, the L.A. Times quoted producer Nina Jacobsen as saying they have no front-runners since they're still looking over the millions of young actors no doubt salivating for the star-making roles. That last part, of course, is mine; she just said they were still looking for someone who could capture Katniss' complexity.)

So, I offer a suggestion. Not for Katniss, but for the role of Panem president Coriolanus Snow. As I was reading Mockingjay, a book which prominently features President Snow and his white hair, a vision hit me. He should be played by this man:

Yes, Karl Lagerfeld. That is all.

An Aside: Mystery and Maxfield Parrish's Daybreak

As I mentioned in my last post, there are 22 art prints strewn throughout Steve Martin's most recent novel, An Object of Beauty. I loved these unexpected delights and yet....I found them a little confusing. I could never figure out if the print was the actual piece mentioned in the text or just a work by that particular artist meant to enhance the reading experience. (Or perhaps I am just way over-thinking this?)

The one that really stumped me though was the appearance of Maxfield Parrish's Daybreak, as the Parrish print in the text is the novel's smoking gun. This is what the gorgeous print looks like:

But then the text describes the scene differently: Lacey points to the painting and tells the narrator Daniel that her grandmother was a woman named Kitty Owen, who "was eighteen when she took off all her clothes for him and posed." Which then means that the "grandmother" has to be the figure standing up, since the figure lying down is clothed. She goes on to say that the now 92-year-old no longer has the red hair and the narrator Daniel writes, "I looked at the slender, pale girl on the cover of the book, who looked like a faun standing over an idyllic pool trimmed in iridescent tiles." From all that, I deduced that the unnamed painting in the book was just made-up since the standing figure isn't pale with red hair or standing over a pool or even "arching up, and facing the twilight" as the chapter ends with. And fine, this is a work of fiction; I accept this. But, but...then I found out Kitty Owen was a real woman who posed for Maxfield Parrish. So shouldn't it be a description of the painting featured in the book? I am confused.

And apparently, I am the only person confused. I tried googling this, but the only thing that popped up was middling reviews for this book (though interestingly, an Object of Beauty has 44 five-star reviews on Amazon, compared to a combined 30 one- and two-star reviews.) So, yup, perhaps I am way over-thinking this...though if anyone has a thought, I'm all ears.

An Aside: The Lacuna in photos

And now for a pictoral trip through Barbara Kingsolver's new novel, The Lacuna. One of the reasons I'd picked the book up is because I'd had such a great time in Mexico City - it's really an amazing town and undeserving of its negative reputation!

We saw this cleansing ceremony taking place on a Sunday morning behind the Cathedral. At the beginning of the book, Harrison's mother drags him along with her as she visits a shaman in the jungle and Kingsolver's description reminded me of the one we'd seen:

The next photo shows the entry to the Casa Azul (no photos allowed inside the house). This was the house that Frida Kahlo grew up in and one of the houses that she and Diego lived in. We never made it to the house in San Angel or Anahuacalli, the weird Aztec temple-house that Harrison mentions in The Lacuna. We were in Mexico City just after Dia de los Muertos and there was a large table set up outside with mementos to Frida and Diego, like this one:

We also went to Leon Trotsky's house, which is only a few blocks from the Casa Azul. The house has such a cloud of sadness hanging over it...I really do think Trotsky has the most tragic story of the 20th century. The first photo is of Trotsky's study where he was murdered by ice pick in 1940. The second photo is of Trotsky's office, where someone like Harrison Shepherd would have worked:

We tried to go see the Rivera murals at the Palacio Nacional but for whatever reason, it was closed that day. So instead, we later went to the Palacio de Bellas Artes and saw some of the other Rivera murals, including Man at the Crossroads, mentioned in The Lacuna. This is the mural that Rivera recreated in 1934 after the Rockefellers tore down the commissioned original in New York City because they didn't like its themes. In the first photo, you can see Lenin between the wings on the right. In the second photo, the man with the white hair is Trotsky.

And then last but not least, a photo of Teotihuacan. In the background you can see the Temple of the Sun. In the book, Frida takes Harrison here to visit her archaeologist friend. During his picnic lunch on the riverbank with Frida, Harrison finds an Aztec figurine of a man.