The Decision Book: post IV

The second section of the Decision Book, which is where the next couple of posts draw their inspiration, looks at how you can understand yourself better.

Cognitive dissonance are not two words I use that often. But they are ones I will remember now because it describes an interesting idea. How can you carry on doing something that you know is wrong with self justification is what those two words describe.

"How can we overcome this dissonance? Either by changing our behaviour or our attitude."

Not an easy thing to do.


There will be more posts about this book throughout the month with a chance for a lucky insidebooks reader to win a copy of the book.

The Decision Book: post III

Setting goals is one of the most oft couple of words that you expect anyone talking about personal development to say.

The Decision Book contains the advice that goals should be challenging but also achievable. if you set a goal too high then it can have a demoralizing effect.

The example given is of running a marathon. I like running and might well want to run a marathon one day but more achievable goals of running more regularly and further distances are needed first.

It's like setting out to read 100 books a year having been nothing more than a casual reader before. You won't know how to pace yourself or recognise the danger signs that you are falling behind. Not that I have ever reached 100 books but just getting to 80 plus last year was a challenge.

There will be more posts about this book throughout the month with a chance for a lucky insidebooks reader to win a copy of the book.

Thoughts at the halfway point of Lineman Thiel and Other Tales

This short book contains three stories that the blurb on the back describes as being typical and influence by the German romantic movement.

That influence seems to be most clearly seen in the response of the characters towards nature with nature playing more than a backdrop role.

In the first story the iced over lake plays a crucial role in deciding the fate of the sailmaker and his wife. They are portrayed as earthy and greedy but sympathetically so compared to the grandmother who lives with them hoarding her coppers and silver in a box.

The idea of living for now and enjoying life is contrasted with the decision to wait. Ultimately both approaches are wrong.

Then the title story starts with poor lineman Thiel finding comfort from widowhood then a second marriage to a bullying wife in the woods in his hut next to the train track.

His life could carry on with his wife bullying him but you sense that as she turns her temper on the son the linesman had with his first wife the clock is ticking for their relationship.

A full review will follow on completion...

The Decision Book: post II

Another post from this highly informative book. This model looks at the project portfolio matrix.

if you think of your life as a project, or a particular aspect of it in that way, it is useful to try and prioritize activities.

Cost and time are the two examples of potential sides of a scale that can be used to measure whether or not something is useful to a project.

For me it is often a question of time that dictates my decision, particularly around reading.

There will be more posts about this book throughout the month with a chance for a lucky insidebooks reader to win a copy of the book.

Thoughts at the half way point of the The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum

A woman kills a reporter and then turns herself into the police. It's an interesting way to start a story and you want to know why she pulled the trigger.

Boll starts with the crime and then works backwards describing what led Katharina Blum to get to a stage where murder seemed to be an appropriate response.

It seems strange that this quiet and diligent house keeper should find herslef in trouble and the start details how her friends are motivated to rush to her side to support her. But as the days leading up to the killing are detailed it's clear that underneath calm outward appearances not all was going well.

Blum is involved with a criminal who spends a night with her before escaping police capture. It is for this initial crime, aiding and abetting a felon, that Blum is involved with the police.

But the press starts to create havoc and the seeds for the reasons for Blum to murder a reporter start to be laid down.

A review will follow on completion...

book review: Next World Novella by Matthias Politycki

"There were not many, barely three pages. Doro's final set of comments began on the the third page. He could cope with her comments now too. He put all the pages in the correct order. And then? He would be done."

Big ideas don't have to be told in big books if the writing is as skillfully delivered as here in Next World Novella.

A professor wakes to find his wife has died of a stroke in the evening and he takes in the shock of the situation reading through the last notes that she was editing. As she usually edited his reports it is his material she was found slumped over.

But the work that Schepp finds his wife Doro was concentrating on is an old story that he wrote years before and never published. The story about a drunk who hangs out in a bar lusting after a waitress mirrors the professors own fixation with a waitress in a bar he stumbled into one afternoon after eye surgery.

What becomes clear is that the wife knew about the affair, at least the dream of an affair that was harboured by her husband, and it drove a wedge between them.

One of the promises they made was to enter the next world together and to hold each other's hands as they swam across the lake of the dead to try and reach the land in the distance on the other side. That promise is ruined by the secrets Hinrich kept from his wife.

That story contains enough food for thought but the way the novella ends leaves you with the distinct impression that even near the end all it would have taken is for Hinrich to have shown a bit of notice and the love would and could have been rekindled. Failing to listen and failing to notice are the real crimes of the lutsful professor.

The Decision Book: post I

When to make a decision is a rather useful thing to think about. Everyday we face the need to make decisions but the challenge is perhaps to think about the right way to respond to them.

The Decision Book is a collection of different models for strategic thinking and one of the first you come across in the How to improve yourself section is about the way decisions should be timed.

Referring to the Eisenhower Method, coined by the former US president, he talked about the need to determine which things were critical and which could be delayed or deferred, which will help determine the priority of a decision and as a result help you work out how long you should take to make it.

There will be more posts about this book throughout the month with a chance for a lucky insidebooks reader to win a copy of the book.

Decisions, decisions...

It's sometimes strange that you can be sent a book that seems to resonate because of a stage you are in your life or thought process.

So it was within a week or so of the Decision Book arriving for review that my working life was turned upside down and my company division found itself up for sale.

At a time like this the one thing that you can be sure of in a time of great confusion is that decisions are going to have to be made.

Decisions that will have a massive impact on the next stage of my life both work and home as I consider a new commute, working for a new company and numerous other changes to my life.

I will be using the Decision Book this month to help crystallise that thought process and thanks to Serpent's Tail am in a position to provide one lucky reader with a copy.

Keep reading for further details...

Plans are changing

Having got stuck into Next World Novella the plans for the month have now changed and I'm going to be reading mainly German authors.

It makes more sense to try and keep the theme of the month something that relates to my TBR pile, which includes a few German authors, as well as giving me an excuse to get some more Gunter Grass under my belt.

Time to catch up on the TBR pile

April is going to be a month of catching up with some of the books I have been sent or requested. So there is no overall theme for this month other than hopefully getting on top of the to-be-read pile a bit.

Starting with the beautifully produced Next World Novella by Matthias Politycki from Peirene it's the chance to dive headfirst into something that should be thought provoking.

From there it's going to be Laikonik Express by Nick Sweeney and then from there hopefully some other new writers.

Onwards...

The month in review - March

Crime writers seem to enjoy delivering stories that come in at the 300 page mark and so the month's reading was slower going than I'd hoped. There were some good things consumed and some books were taken off the to-be-read pile but there still remain a fairly large number of crime stories and thrillers to be tackled later in the year.

March reading:

The Terrorists by Maj Sjowall & Per Wahloo
Parallel Lives by John Tagholm
The Long Good-Bye by Raymond Chandler
The Mournful Demeanour of Lieutenant Boruvka by Josef Skovorecky
Talking about Detective Fiction by P.D. James
The Suspicions of Mr Wicher by Kate Summerscale
Headed for a Hearse by Jonathan Latimer

A strange month

Haven't managed to get the reading pace I wanted this month but it's been difficult because there has been a lot of uncertainty at work which culminated in an announcement that the magazine I work for has been sold.

That has obviously led to a lot of conversations in corners and a dip in concentration as we all try to work out what it means for us all.

One fact is already clear, that it will change a daily routine I have been in for years and will change relationships with colleagues that stretch back in one case over a decade.

As a result the reading has been hard because the mind has been elsewhere but hopefully April might improve reading-wise.

book review: Headed for a Hearse by Jonathan Latimer

"'I remember Sullivan, that's the house detective, gave a sort of snort when he went into the living-room from the hall. We all ran in behind him, and there she was on the living-room rug. She looked just like she was asleep, except for her pretty brown hair.'
'her hair?'
'It was all soaked with blood.'"

It's always going to be hard to play with the hard-boiled detective format but one option, used here by Latimer, is to wait a fair bit before you introduce the private eye into proceedings.

Not only wait a bit but then even when he has been introduced play the character in a minor key until they suddenly emerge towards the last third as the principal driver of the action.

Does it work? Only to a degree. While you wait for the detective to take centre stage you naturally search for alternatives and even when the action is in full flight you find yourself as a reader holding back from giving the hero your fulsome support.

The reason for the mechanics of the book stem from the clever premise that a man who has just a couple of days before facing the electric chair suddenly decides to fight to clear his name.

Robert Westland is rich but starts the book almost happy to take the rap for the murder of his wife. But after a conversation with one of the real murderers in the cell next door to his own he decides he will fight.

Money being no object he hires a crack lawyer and a tram including colleagues, his girlfriend and a couple of recommended private detectives.

As one of the private detectives Bill Crane seems to take an age coming to the foreground of the action but once there he moves swiftly, aided by heavy doses of alcohol, to start to piece together what really did happen to Mrs Westland.

Part classic locked room part Chandler in feel the book does finally spring into life and deliver. But for me it took slightly too long and the plot twists that are unwound so quickly at the end happen before the reader is introduced to the story and as a result lose their ability to interest slightly.

Perhaps the book just hasn't aged as well as some of its contemporaries. In 1935 it might have had the reader gripped but in 2011 it struggles in places and that's not good for any 'hard-boiled' crime novel.

Thoughts at the half way point of Headed for a Hearse

A man finds himself on death row for killing his wife. But with just a few days left until his visit to the electric chair he snaps out of his shock and grief and decides to fight for his innocence.

Hiring a tough Chicago lawyer and a detective to help find out who framed him the chapters start to count down the days until hope runs out.

In-between great description of the prison and the feelings of those awaiting death there are passages that have not aged as well but overall so far it's not too bad a reading experience.

A review follows on completion...

Thoughts at the half way point of Talking about Detective Fiction

If you like reading crime and detective fiction then most of the big names will be instantly familiar but this guide fills in some of the blanks.

Starting at the most logical starting point, with the literary reaction to the creation of the police force and detectives, this charts through the ages of crime fiction.

By halfway you have been introduced to Sherlock Holmes and the imagination of Edgar Allen Poe and James fills in very concisely the features and writers that constituted the 'golden age' between the wars.

this book has the feel of being a guide that will throw up inspiration for a while to come and will be re-read.

A review will follow on completion...