6 posts tagged “books”

J.K. Rowling

When the Harry Potter author, J. K. Rowling, was asked by the Royal Society of Literature to make reading recommendations, this was her list:

Wuthering Heights • Emily Brontë
Charlie & the Chocolate Factory • Roald Dahl
Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
Catch-22 • Joseph Heller
To Kill a Mockingbird • Harper Lee
Animal Farm • George Orwell
The Tale of Two Bad Mice • Beatrix Potter
The Catcher in the Rye • J. D. Salinger
Hamlet • William Shakespeare

Rowling's Official Site  http://www.jkrowling.com

Is there anything left that Amazon.com doesn't sell?

It seems like they have become the superstore of the web. Anyone who thinks that "they sell books" hasn't been to the site lately.

How about Annie’s Homegrown Mac & Cheese, Starbucks Coffee or Altoids candy & Wrigley and Orbit chewing gum. Even pet food!

And you thought that all they wanted was to have the Kindle take over publishing!

According to author Malcolm Gladwell (via an interview on GoodReads), you will only reach a level of mastery if you are willing to devote essentially 10 years (10,000 hours) to a particular discipline.

There's nothing special about when you devote those 10 years. Those 10 years can be between the ages of 40 and 50, or 60 and 70. It just so happens that many of us who achieve great things put in those 10 years early in life, but there's nothing special about youth. Youth is not necessary for the process; what's necessary is time and honest effort, which is heartening.

So, if I can hang on until retirement, and get in 10 years after that, I can master a new discipline.

Hmmmm.... what should I choose?

He says that his inspiration for the new book came from the question "Is it a fair assessment to say that highly successful people deserve all the credit for their achievement?"

"I started with the lawyers chapter [Chapter 5], which looks at a group of people who have reached the very pinnacle of their profession. They were the first to tell me about all the extraordinary opportunities that came their way—that was very instructive and humbling. There was none of the self-serving clapping themselves on the back. The fact that they were discriminated against turned into their greatest opportunity. I interviewed one of the most powerful lawyers in the world and he told me, "At the time, it was the worst thing in the world not to be able to get a job at a fancy law firm, but it's the greatest thing that ever happened in my life." It was a humble acknowledgment of how forces much larger than himself shaped his career. I really wanted to bring that point home."

I wonder how he squares up those forces larger than yourself with the ideas in his first book,The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference?

Pollancvr

It's coevolution. And he wrote a book looking at the natural world from the perspective of plants.

THE BOTANY OF DESIRE  (great title) focuses on the relationship between humans and four specific plants: apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes.

Some interesting bits:

• Human manipulation of apples has weakened it, so that "modern apples require more pesticide than any other food crop."
• Tulipomania in 17th-century Holland - the markings that made the tulip so attractive to the Dutch were actually caused by a virus
• In looking at how biotechnology is changing our relationship to nature, he visited the Monsanto company headquarters and planted some of their NewLeaf brand genetically-modified potato seeds in his garden.
• A global desire for consistently perfect French fries contributes to both damaging monoculture and the genetic engineering necessary to support it.
• And marijuana?
  

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, in all cases, we're talking about desires. The book is as much about our human desires that nature gratifies as it is about the plant. And I guess my premise is that by looking, you know, in the same way you look at a flower and you can learn something about what a bee thinks is beautiful and that a bee has a sweet tooth, if you look at marijuana, you can learn something about our minds and how our minds work and why we should be, like all cultures, you know, every human culture with one exception has had a psychoactive plant. The one exception is the Eskimos. And the only reason they didn't is because nothing grew where they were. And as soon as they discovered alcohol, that became their psychoactive plant.