Books: Blindspot

Some weeks ago, my supervisor at the college sent one of his “diversity moment” emails with a link to this article. Intrigued, I decided I needed to read Blindspot.

I was concerned that it might be a dull or dry read, but it is not. (I finished it in about a week.) I was fascinated from the first page when they show an optical illusion involving two table tops, as an example of how our minds cause us to see things in ways that don’t match reality.

A large portion of the book is devoted to the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a tool developed by the authors to uncover people’s hidden biases. Because these biases operate below the conscious level of our minds, we are not aware of them. If asked directly, people will often deny having such biases, and at the conscious level they do not.

Books: Ender’s World

Orson Scott Card is a prolific writer, and there are a number of his books that I haven’t read, but whenever I see another book related to Ender’s Game, I read it. First he wrote sequels, starting with Speaker for the Dead, then later he went back and wrote a parallel series in which the central character is Bean rather than Ender.

I don’t think any of them are as good as Ender’s Game, but I read all of them, because Card is a good writer and I’m interested in the characters and themes he explores in the series. So when I saw Ender’s World in the library, it was a given that I would read it, even before I knew what it was about.

Ender’s World is a book of essays, rather than fiction, and written by other people about Card’s classic novel (but edited by Card, who includes Q&A about how and why he wrote various aspects of the book the way he did). As one reader review at amazon.com says, it’s a bit like having a book club discussion about Ender’s Game. Everyone has a slightly different take on it.

Books: The Bookseller

I was attracted to this novel largely because of the word “book” in the title. I thought I vaguely remembered having read good reviews of The Bookseller, but I really knew nothing about it except what I could see on the cover. Books are involved somehow, and this is the first book about Hugo Marston, which implies there will be more. Good enough reasons to check it out from the library.

There really is less about books than I might have liked. The books that are discussed are prized more for their value as collectibles (or for other, mysterious reasons that may or may not be connected to a man’s death), rather than for the ideas expressed in them.

But it’s a well-written mystery. I was surprised to learn, after finishing the book, that it was Mark Pryor’s first novel. Hugo Marston is a likeable enough character, though it’s hard to know what to make of his friend Tom.

Movies: Iron Man 3

If you like nonstop action and lots of thing blowing up, you’ll probably enjoy Iron Man 3. If you’re looking for originality, character development, and a chance to give your adrenaline glands a rest – well, you probably wouldn’t be in the theater watching it. Unless, like me, you wanted to do something together with your comic-book-action-hero-loving husband and sons.

One viewer at imdb.com calls it an average movie and says that he (I’m guessing, but could be she) was hoping for a darker story. It was plenty dark enough for me, thank you, and so filled with violence that after a while I started letting my eyes glaze over a bit. I just don’t get what’s entertaining about explosions.

Special effects are impressive, I suppose, if you like special effects. Personally I don’t like watching people’s bodies look like they’re turning into molten metal.

Books: The Fault in Our Stars

When I started reading The Fault in Our Stars, I thought for a while that I would probably have quit reading if it weren’t this month’s selection in our book club. But if I had quit, I would have missed out on a moving story.

There’s nothing objectionable in the first few chapters, there’s just not much that’s particularly thought-provoking either. Yes, it’s a shame these young people are dying of cancer, but that’s not enough of a reason to want to listen in on their lives as they hang out together and watch movies or play video games.

Perhaps it was when Hazel talked about An Imperial Affliction, a book that was like scripture to her, that I began to get more interested. I couldn’t understand her obsession with finding out what happened to the characters in the novel after it ended, but I was intrigued by the insights in the novel and their effect on her.

The need to know

With my current job and longer commute, I have less time to spend looking for interesting articles on the web. But I have a supervisor who makes a habit of emailing us links to articles and websites related to education and the learning process. This one, from The New Yorker, is about the need to achieve “cognitive closure” – to replace uncertainty with answers.

It’s no surprise to learn that people naturally want firm answers to questions and dislike ambiguity. Or that people vary in their need for closure, and that for any given person it depends a great deal on their current circumstances.

Like anyone, I prefer answers to uncertainty where answers are available. But I also tend to be skeptical when the answers provided seem too full of certainty.

Runners who inspire

Last month I came across an article about a man who had recently won a marathon. I’m not sure which is more surprising – that he did so while pushing his six-year-old daughter in a stroller, or that he did it despite suffering from terminal brain cancer.

Iram Leon sometimes gets disoriented during a race, vomits, or blacks out. But he runs because “When I’m in a race, when I’m climbing a hill, for a few moments it feels like I’m pulling ahead of my problems.”

Another inspiring runner is Anne Mahlum, who was the closing speaker at the software conference I attended recently in Philadelphia. She had started running as a teenager, and found that it helped her get through a difficult time in her life.

Ten years later, she got the idea to start a running club for some homeless men, after several days of exchanging brief greetings with them as she ran by them. People told her that homeless people don’t run, but the men who joined her club disproved that claim.