Wabi Sabi: the Japanese art of impermanence, by Andrew Juniper

This is a short book, 160 pages, that probably covers a bit more than it should in order to provide the depth that Wabi Sabi requires. But in doing so it also manages to approach Wabi Sabi from many different angles. I would say it is a very good introduction to Wabi Sabi and Zen culture for those who do not know much about it.

For those who do know some, I think Juniper, manages to apply Wabi Sabi in so many unusual ways that I think almost everyone will find something to enjoy.

For me the book felt like four parts (not always in chronological order). 1. An general introduction to Wabi Sabi, Zen and Japanese culture 2. Specific examples of how related practises, like the tea ceremony and Kintsugi, fits in. 3. A guidebook for designers 4. A bridge to concrete issues today

I found the guidebook for designers a little unnecessary any “un-zen” in the way it lists “what is Wabi Sabi and what is not”, but apart from that I enjoyed the other parts of the book.

In particular I enjoyed the last part where Wabi Sabi is discussed in relation to some of the main challenges we face today. So many books about esoteric and complex concepts hide behind layers of philosophical arguments, without daring to relate them to current challenges. This books oversimplifies in a good way, and by that I mean that anyone can start to think about the challenges we have in our society, and how even with a glimpse of an interesting concept new ideas can emerge.

There is a longing for quality throughout the books that is also refreshing in an age where many cares about Twitter or a TED-talk. Quotes like this are frequent: “There is an expression in Japanese that says that someone who makes things of poor quality is in fact worse than a thief, because he doesn’t make things that will last or provide true satisfaction. A thief at least redistributes the wealth of a society.”

There is also a short part that touch upon commitment that I really like, where the following can be found: “A man called Shang Kwang, who sought the wisdom of Bodhidharma, asked that he might be admitted to study under him. Though he waited in the freezing snow for a week, it was not until he had cut off his own left arm and presented it as a symbol of his determination to learn that Bodhidharma relented and passed on his wisdom to the man who was to become his successor.”

The idea that you have to work hard for wisdom and that there is no easy short-cut is so at odds with our current culture that it is refreshing to have a book that briefly opens up a door to another world.

There are unfortunately also some language about modern physics and its relation to old wisdom that is not very good. Even if it is well intended it looks very much like the Deepak Chopra new age . e.g. “A solid particle has yet to be found, and instead scientists are coming to the realization that matter as we know it may not actually exist but is rather a movement of energy. Time, space, and mass are all relative concepts, and the view that the world in real, solid, and out there has become untenable to the scientific community, too. Despite these discoveries there still seems a dogged determination to hold on to the old views of reality, which tend to provide a rather comfortable haven for the frail intellect that feels the need to hold on to its view of the world.”

Language like this invite people who know nothing about physics to dream up their own “energy” theories where “quantum” can be used for anything where “God” was used earlier. I don’t think that this is what the authors intended, but it is how it can be interpreted.

In a consumer society where more is more, the following observation is interesting:

“An English flower arrangement may, for example, take up two thirds of the area directly above the vase with an abundance of extrovert flowers, but a nagaire flower arrangement from the tea ceremony may take up less than one tenth. Again, the space afforded to the single flower forces the attention to focus on the smaller details, and in so doing the life of the flower becomes imbued with far more poetry.” Or as they say in fewer words towards the end “a beauty without need for splendor.”

I was happy to see an attempt to link Wabi Sabi to global sustainability. This is what Juniper writes: “There are in fact three ways in which the philosophy of wabi sabi relates to environmental issues:

• Minimizing consumption
• Choosing quality products that come from sustainable organic sources
• Respecting nature”

If Wabi Sabi sounds interesting this is a very good introductory book that does not claim to be anything else. It is written by a person who is clearly passionate about the subject and who is not afraid of try8ing to make it relevant, even in ways where many others would hesitate to apply the concept.

Remembrance of Earth’s Past (地球往事), a trilogy by Liu Cixin

The trilogy, Remembrance of Earth’s Past, by Liu Cixin is fantastic and anyone with an interest in the future, physics, and/or China should read it.

The three books are: 1. The Three-Body Problem 2. The Dark Forest 3. Death's End

The first book, The Three-Body Problem, blow me away. The second, The Dark Forest, took a step even further. While the final book, Death’s End, released now in September 2016, did not manage to continue the positive trajectory (that would have made the final book one of the best sci-fi books I have ever read), but it is still much better than most books in this category. Without any experience of Chinese I think the language might come across a little strange, but there are so many things in this book that captures different aspects of China in very good ways.

While I have not read the Chinese original I feel confident to congratulate Ken Liu for the translation.

The books are such a joy to read on so many levels. As many good science fiction books this trilogy inspire on so many different levels. Below are some of the things I appreciated with the book:

1. The overall narrative The story begins during the Cultural Revolution in China and tells a story of our first encounter with another intelligent species from another planet. The story around the encounter is one of the best I have read. The way a very different culture is described and how we as humans try to cope with the threat of our own extinction are just two examples of well-crafted stories. The gaming aspect (you will understand when you read it) is also great.

How society explore different paths in order to avoid being extinct is written a little clunky, but also in a way that reflects how many of our institutions operate. If the way of writing in the way that reflect the institutions being discussed is very clever, or just an accident I don’t know, but it worked for me.

Perhaps what I enjoyed the most, in terms of narratives, is the story about the universe (or universes). This story, is described and experienced through multiple encounters and it is about how the universe is going through different phases with reduced number of dimensions, and that the reason for the reduction of dimensions, and corresponding reduction of the speed of light, is short-term aggression. How the need to dominate results in a race to the bottom, in multiple meanings of the word, felt like a very passionate plea for wisdom.

In terms of current discussions, the ways universes can be created in parallel was inspiring.

One link to the current mainstream discussions relates to simulations. Thirty/forty years ago, when the first computers did the first advanced calculations and helped put humans on the moon science fiction authors discussed how we could create new worlds by simulating life in computers and that we might live in a computer. Perhaps it is the fact that computers now can create lifelike objects in movies that has resulted in the current mainstream discussion about the probability that we live in a simulation.

I’m actually a bit surprised that even clever persons like Elon Musk is talking about living in a simulation in a serious way without reflecting on the underlying assumptions http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/2/11837874/elon-musk-says-odds-living-in-simulation. Of course, if we make simple extrapolations of current trends it is easy to argue that any intelligent species is likely to develop technologies that is capable of simulations and therefore that we are likely to live in a simulation.

The problem with the argument is that it is possible to make a similar argument for world making on the scale of planets, universes, or dimensions, if we assume smart use of our current technological knowledge. So thirty forty years from now we can assume that mainstream “thinkers” will make similar arguments for how inevitable it is that we live in one of many planets, or even parallel universes, created by a curious species that use the next generation of technology.

Taking a step back it is easy to argue that many of the “thinkers” tend to be extremely limited in their thinking, or just happy to make a media friendly argument, or being used by journalists who wants a good story, or a combination of the above (after all we live in a Twitter/TED/Trending world that is in love with the Spectacle).

The way we use our current level of intelligence, knowledge about science and tools, as if we are the centre of the universe and that our time is the one that will define how everything will end is fascinating. I think good science fiction books like the “Remembrance of Earth’s Past” can help us move beyond the massmedia narrative.

If we want to expand the horizon, the fact that our intelligence in relation to ants might be similar to an another civilisations intelligence is to us, is also worth considering. It does not really matter if we look at the last 300 000 or 3 million years as a reference for how our intelligence has evolved. If we consider that other species might have evolved millions, or even billions of years ahead of us it becomes cute to think that we are at the ultimate threshold now and that our current technology is what defines our existence at all levels. If we add to that an exponential development during parts of the later development it becomes even more absurd to claim that we can understand how civilisations evolve.

Neil deGrasse has highlight the fact that our level of intelligence might be very simple, or very different, compared with other lifeforms so making us the reference and expecting us to be able to communicate with an intelligence that could come and visit us (or that is capable of communicating with us in real time in some other way) is not really based on any logic. And even less likely is that civilisations way ahead of us would be any more interested in talking to us than we are in talking to a worm.

A couple of (intelligent) people have misunderstood the above argument and used it to dismiss the dangers of general level AI, including Neil deGrasse himself. I think that is very dangerous. While we might not be as intelligent as we like to think, our capacity to kill ourselves seems to be greatly underestimated by most. It is difficult to comprehend that we are “intelligent” enough to have the capacity to kill ourselves as a species, and still on a worm’s level compared to other civilisations.

The above dilemma has interested me for some time, and was highlighted with reading this trilogy, and one thing that I think would be interesting to do is to develop an index for civilisations where the capacity to manipulate matter (perhaps a mixture of the Kardashev scale with the capacity manipulate matter on smaller scales, i.e. microdimensional mastery”) is combined with 1. The capacity to destroy the civilisation 2. The relation in the civilisation between solutions aiming at destroy and those aiming at evolve.

The benefit with such an index would be to encourage a discussion about how we as a civilisation are directing our knowledge and how we can avoid a situation where our capacity for things like reflection and empathy are so far behind our capacity to do destroy things. It would also be a measure of how vulnerable a civilisation is to small groups, or even individuals, that want to kill everyone.

By measuring the difficulty to deliver civilisation ending technologies it would also indicate how prone a civilization is to a mistake/freak accident. It is a big difference to have the capacity to destruction is that require a number of people collaborating and using very sophisticated technology that few have access to (say large scale nuclear war) and the potential possibility in the future to use a future 3-d printer that is available on the open market to manufacture a tailor-made virus that could kill everyone.

2. The role of science in society When the aliens are able to block our frontiers in science (on the quantum level) this is described in a way that oozes of love for science and the scientific process. The way the lack of progress in science does not only brings much of the development to an halt, but also results in deep depressions is fascinating reading.

3. The nods to history and culture As many good books this provides fun links to literature and art. Sometimes it feels as a fun idea that got a little shoehorned into the story, but as many of them make you smile that is more than OK.

An example is how they discuss that some of Van Gogh’s paintings can be described as portraying a two-dimensional sky.

Another example is how a story (unknown to me), Ivan Turgenev’s “Threshold", is used: “People dug up an ancient story, Ivan Turgenev’s “Threshold,” and used it to describe her. Like the young Russian girl in that story, Cheng Xin had stepped over the threshold that no others dared to approach. Then, at the crucial moment, she had shouldered an unimaginable burden and accepted the endless humiliation that would be her lot in the days to come by refusing to send out the signal of death to the cosmos.” 4. Nods to the author’s experiences in China So much of what we read is still from the west and while most western authors (especially the English speaking) does not reflect on the language or references they use, it is very clear that Liu Cixin has. The way key characters in the future have names that are a mixture of western and Chinese, how rituals like the tea ceremony are described when we meet alien cultures, and also small references to the bad air in contemporary China, are all obvious example of a new set of references. References that are aware that they might be part of the future, but not necessary. And this is very refreshing.

”Cheng Xin could not imagine a more perfect beauty, a beauty animated by a lively soul. She smiled, and it was as though a breeze stirred a pond in spring and the gentle sunlight broke into a thousand softly undulating fragments. Slowly, Sophon bowed to them, and Cheng Xin felt her entire figure illustrated the Chinese character 柔, or soft, in both shape and meaning.”

” “Luo Ji, who had said nothing so far, seemed relaxed. He appeared familiar with the Way of Tea, and holding up his bowl in the palm of his left hand, he rotated it three times with his right hand before taking a drink. He drank slowly, letting time pass in silence, not finishing until the clouds outside the window were colored a golden yellow by the setting sun. He set down the bowl slowly, and said his first words.”

5. Basic scientific “facts” As all great science fiction books scientific facts are included in a way that makes you smile. The speed of light and the number of dimensions have been used before many times, but the way they become the very core of the story is really well done. The number of dimensions also gets a link to Chinese philosophy and our search for beauty.

“The universe of the Edenic Age was ten-dimensional. The speed of light back then wasn’t only much higher—rather, it was close to infinity. Light back then was capable of action at a distance, and could go from one end of the cosmos to the other within a Planck time.... If you had been to four-dimensional space, you would have some vague hint of how beautiful that ten-dimensional Garden must have been.”

Now over to the “negative parts”. Note that they are minor grievances in relation to the overall story and should not be seen as a reason not to read the books. I should also add that they manly refer to the last book, so there is no excuse for not starting (and after the first two books you will read the last).

1. Word explosion As many authors with a brilliant idea and a compelling story Liu falls into the trap of expanding the books in quantity rather than quality. The first book clocks in at 300 pages, and the expansion of the second book is more than welcome, I even think the 400 pages could have been extended. However, the third book could have been cut in half to 300 instead of 600 pages.

2. Boring/irritating character The third book manages to create the first character in the trilogy that is both boring and irritating. The fact that she is the main protagonist who is at the centre of many of the key events makes it difficult to ignore her. All other characters are interesting in some ways, or help move the narrative forward in fascinating ways, but she is given a personality that is not only boring but also irritating. It is as if she was created to push the story in the most uninteresting direction and do so in a boring way. On top of that, she has a way of talking that is hard to describe, but it is like a bad movie with a bad actor reading from a bad script. Sometimes this happens when sci-fi authors are accused of having to little character development and they try to develop characters that focus on the more “human aspects”, usually resulting in clunky dialogue related to romance. Perhaps this is what happened in the last book?

3. Lost opportunity for an interesting ending It is hard to write a really good book, and even harder to end such a book in a way that is inspiring. The good thing with this book is that up until the end it is hard to know where it will end, but then it just takes a standard route.

I want to end by stressing that I think the book should be read by almost everyone today.

Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension: A Mathematician's Journey Through Narcissistic Numbers, Optimal Dating Algorithms, at Least Two Kinds of Infinity, and More, by Matt Parker

This is such a wonderful book. I started to read this as I wanted some inspiration for how to communicate math to children who are just begin to explore mathematics, long before they move into formal education, to see if I could find a vaccine against boring teachers. What I found was much more.

It is not often you read a book about math that is not oversimplifying interesting areas, while still making you laugh. Too many of the books about math tries so hard to make people interested that it feels as if the book is written by a group of PR people without knowledge or interest in math.

I find it hard to pick any particular favorite areas so I will just leave two examples of the kind of style of writing in two of my favorite areas:

1 “Infinity” for an example of the short and brilliant explanations “People seem to have the idea that if you keep counting up along the number line past bigger and bigger numbers, in the end, the numbers just give up. They can’t be bothered to go on, and there’ll be an infinity sign (∞) there to mark the end of the number line. This is not the case. There is always a bigger number. Infinity is not safely contained at the end of the number line. Infinity is not a big number. Infinity is actually a measure of how many numbers there are. The number line never stops, so we say it is infinitely long. Just like we said before that the number ‘five’ is the size of any set of five things, infinity is the size of a never-ending set of things.”

The whole chapter on infinity is very good. Infinity has been almost a hobby for me for a long time and I think the way Matt captured what infinity is, and what it is not, is a good example of the straight forward language that this book excels in. I’ve been surprised over the years of how many people that does not understand infinity, as they think it is a large - but impossible - number, rather than a description of a certain situation. This is true for some academics as well. The people I had the hardest time explaining infinity to has been philosophers who considered themselves experts on extreme risks and neoclassical economists who consider themselves experts on math. I wonder if “infinity” is extra hard for people who are control freaks and struggle to think outside a very specific box.

2. “Ridiculous shapes” for an example on how complex issues are brought into an everyday situation “I had seen a few knitted Klein bottles online, so I asked my mother if she could knit me the 3D immersion of the 4D Klein bottle so I could wear it as a hat. She just looked at me. We then had a long conversation where I was talking Maths and my mum was speaking fluent Knitting, but because she is quite the dedicated knitter, she eventually got it to work. The first one she knitted for me (the prototype, as I called it; or as she called it, a perfectly good gift) worked well, but it was all the same colour. I asked if she could knit me one that was stripy. Apparently, this is easy enough to do when knitting – you just change colours after a few rows – so I gave her a long list of numbers for the thickness of each stripe in the hat. The photo here is me wearing my Klein hat. The stripes are the digits of pi. Should anyone have a nerdier hat than this, I’d like to hear. ” For me the two texts above represent the core of the book. It is a book written by a passionate person who loves to share his experiments and ideas. If the tone in the book seems off sometimes (it did for me at first) have a look at Matt’s YouTube channel and you will understand how you should read the book. https://www.youtube.com/user/standupmaths

My only frustration with this book was that it was too short. I particularly would have liked one, or a few, chapters about fractals. In the next books it would also be great if Matt could include even more great ideas for making math physical, like the Möbius loop suggestions in the chapter “Ridiculous shapes” and how to make a four-dimensional cube by straws and pipe cleaners in the chapter “the fourth dimension”. Matt has already done a lot in the area of fractals, and I really like the fractal Christmas tree.

I would even like to challenge Matt, or anyone else with a similar skill set, to develop a toolkit for math. Something like the Snatoms, but for different themes in math… I’m sure that would be a successful Kickstarter project.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, By Steven Pinker

steven-pinker

First of all I want to clarify that I highly recommend Pinker’s book. When I read reviews back in 2011, when the book was released, it felt as if this was another of the “optimistic” books that floods the market where authors confuse their unwillingness to accept serious threats with optimism. Therefore I ignored the book for five years, until I picked it up to check out one of Pinker’s arguments after a discussion. Reading the book I was surprised how interesting and well researched it was.

Pinker is not a person who confuses ignoring scientific facts, with being optimistic. He does cherry pick data occasionally, but it is done in a systematic and transparent way (i.e. scientific way) so that is not a problem. I would actually argue that a broad approach to changes in society, along the lines that Pinker is presenting, is impossible to conduct without a cherry picking process (or to be more scientific, iterative process based on intuition). Many authors try to pretend that their assumptions are objective, but Pinker is transparent and tells us that the structure he presents is the result of a process that he think is worth presenting.

Pinker is nowhere close to the simplistic media pundits dominating media when it comes to statistics. Pinker’s approach and findings are much more interesting. The transparent cherry-picking result in significant oversimplifications in a number of areas, but even those simplifications are inspiring as it is easy to see what happens is you change the key parameters Pinkers use.

Pinker’s book provides a lot of material for a conversation about global priorities and it also provides countless nuggets of fun information.

The following two random quotes from the book are good examples of the kind of style he uses: “It’s safe to say that the pilot of the Enola Gay who dropped the atomic bomb over Hiroshima would not have agreed to immolate a hundred thousand people with a flamethrower one at a time”

“Paul Slovic has confirmed the observation attributed to Stalin that one death is a tragedy but a million deaths is a statistic. People cannot wrap their minds around large (or even small) numbers of people in peril, but will readily mobilize to save the life of a single person with a name and a face.”

He use proper footnotes and usually have decent sources for the facts included. This is something that I think should be standard, but it feels as if people are becoming more and more sloppy with sources and footnotes.

When it comes to the basic structure of the book it structured around six trends. Pinker presents them in the following way: “To give some coherence to the many developments that make up our species’ retreat from violence, I group them into six major trends.”. These six trends are illustrated in the graph below.

pinker Timeline

The first trend, the Pacification Process, is mainly outside the graph as it “took place on the scale of millennia, was the transition from the anarchy of the hunting, gathering, and horticultural societies in which our species spent most of its evolutionary history to the first agricultural civilizations with cities and governments, beginning around five thousand years ago. ”. This trend started 3000 BC and ended around 1000 AD. This is the only trend that does not overlap with any other trend and is also the trend where data is most difficult to get.

The other five trends are overlapping and as in most simplified overviews the trends gets shorter and shorter as they get closer to todays date. Of the six trends, four are still ongoing and often difficult to separate.

The second last trend, the rights revolution, is different. All others focus on reduction of traditional violence (basically armed groups fighting in different shapes and forms), but the rights revolution focuses on the more cultural/institutionalized violence against “ethnic minorities, women, children, homosexuals, and animals.”. The last is also the one where Pinker has to admit that the trends are pointing in the wrong direction regardless on how you play with data when it comes to our relation to other animals.

He then creates a framework where he identifies the forces that can help us reduce violence. He calls these our four “Better angles”: 1. Empathy 2. Self-control 3. Moral sense 4. Reason

The forces that needs to be tamed/addressed he calls the “Five Inner Demons”: 1. predation, 2. dominance, 3. revenge, 4. sadism, or 5. ideology”

In the end he tries to identify (five) historic forces that have helped us reduce violence: 1. Leviathan 2. (Gentle) Commerce 3. Feminization 4. Cosmopolitanism 5. Escalator of reason

It is when he comes to the concrete forces that things become interesting, but it also then where the weakness of the book becomes evident. The forces are poorly defined, and how they have impacted society is not very clear.

“The decline of violence may be the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species. Its implications touch the core of our beliefs and values—for what could be more fundamental than an understanding of whether the human condition, over the course of its history, has gotten steadily better, steadily worse, or has not changed?”

Pinker argues that from many perspectives we have seen an overall trend where organized violence between humans has been reduced over time. I would argue that as an overall assessment it is easy to argue that this is true, but that such an assessment is not always very helpful. Where such an assessment could be interesting is if measures that people want to implement to reduce current violence (or other problems) could be shown to have been part of a situation where we had much more violence earlier.

Regardless of the problems I see with the book there are a number of message that I think are important:

➢ The idea of the noble savage is a myth ➢ The period of industrialization has been very positive when it comes to reduced human-human violence ➢ The last decades have continued to deliver reduced direct physical violence against humans in most societies around the world ➢ There is nothing inherently peaceful in humans, we create different frameworks that can strengthen and weaken different parts of us. So far we have been successful in reducing many of the violent aspects. ➢ The violence against other species and nature has continued to increase. While general acceptance for such violence has decreased, the industry so far have mainly responded by hiding the problems. Some improvements have been made, but the rapid increase in volume has more that offset those improvements.

Bad books: Some initial thoughts

I’m not sure if there is a reason, but lately many have asked me I read any bad books; and if I do, why I don’t write about them. These are both good questions and I spent some time thinking about them over summer.

The simple answer is that I do read (especially start to read) a lot of what I call bad books. The second question is more difficult to answer as it almost implies that books I write about are “good” and those that I don’t write about are “bad”. This is not true in my case. Anyone who has read my book reflections knows that I do not review books in the traditional sense, e.g. I would never dream of using a ranking systems as there are so many different aspects that make a book worth reading. What I try to do is to use books to discuss subjects I find interesting and important.

First I would like to clarify that many of the books I read and write about are ”bad” in a way that I’ve seen others define bad books, i.e. they belong to one or more of the following categories:

1. I don’t agree with them
2. They are simplistic books with just one idea (often by a journalist) that is basically an op-ed extended to a book and often also incoherent.
3. The grammar/language is poor

The first category I don’t consider bad in any way at all, on the contrary. In the current society when social media and the web support simple group thinking by creating echo chambers that reinforces people’s existing beliefs we need to challenge ourselves. Books might be one of the best antidotes to cyberbalkanization.

I think all books that argue for something in a good way and/or tell an interesting story are good books. I tend to appreciate books that I disagree with more than books I agree with, as long as they address important issues. Books that argue for things I don’t agree with, or argue for things I agree with in ways that I disagree with, helps me to revise my knowledge and opinions if I find good arguments. I also think it is important to read books where you don’t agree with the author as you often realise once you have read the book that you are closer than you though initially.

On a more fundamental level I think a healthy society should have a lot of different voices, including those that argue for really unsympathetic, or even dangerous, things. It can not be said often enough; the freedom of speech is only really important when it comes to protecting very provocative voices, and that includes those you most disagree with.

The second category is more problematic as one part of me feels frustrated with the “sound-bite” focused society we have today. I also feel bad for giving more attention to people who write books to get attention rather than actually writing about something they care about and think is important to share.

In the best of worlds I would not spend anytime with these books and instead only focus on books written by people that really have deep knowledge and help expand our knowledge, but as these “sound-bite” books influence decision makers and the general discussion in society I often write comments about these books. Perhaps I should begin to indicate when I think it is enough to only read a summary of the book (as they lack substance) so that it is clear that my comments is meant as a comment on just that (often very simple) idea? I came across a “review” that I think capture many of these books very well (see below under the *).

The last category I find totally irrelevant in most cases. A knowledgeable person arguing in a convincing and passionate way, or telling an engaging story, is often the most important thing for me when I read a book. Still in fiction it can be disturbing with sloppy writing, especially in the cases where I suspect that it is a bad transition to e-books that is behind the spelling errors. The fact that my own grammar and spelling is really bad and that I myself like to focus on content rather than style might contribute to the fact that I tend to be generous in this area.

When it comes to books I consider bad most of them fall into one or more of four categories.

1. Basic premise illusion
2. Issue lure
3. Momentum exploitations
4. Incoherent word- and sentence stapling

Please note that the specific examples given below are not the worst books in each category. In most cases they just happen to be books I read recently so I still remember them. As the overall criteria for a bad book is its irrelevance I tend to forget bad books quite fast.

1. Basic premise illusion These are books that set up a narrative in an interesting way, but then doing nothing interesting with that premise.

Example: The Fold by Peter Clines The book is presented as if it is a riddle related to gateways to other worlds and the main character is presented as very smart, so I guess I was fooled into thinking that there would be a story that described an interesting solution to an interesting problem (folding of time-space). Unfortunately it was nothing interesting in the book at all and the writing was poor also. These books are like looking at a bad scary movie when the only thing you do is frustrated that everyone in the book is stupid. So in the end this is just a plain boring book and a book where I feel my time was wasted.

2. Issue lure This is perhaps the category with most bad books for me. It is similar to 1. but broader. Here only the title/story needs to be about a fascinating subject. My expectations when reading such a book is based on the hope that I will be inspired in some way as I find the subject so interesting. I have almost no expectation in terms of story/style etc. as long as I can get something out, it can be an idea, a fact I was unaware or, links to further reading, etc.. It is hard to have lower expectations than this as most authors usually have at least one or two ideas that can be used.

Many business books fall into this category. They tend to have a message about the need to be innovative/original/etc to be successful and use famous people to give advise to the masses (usually telling the reader that their book is relevant for everyone on the planet). Once you open them up they seem more like a desperate plea to be invited to conferences and show how many famous people you know. A funny side consequence is that the books create loops where the same group of people celebrate each others books, calling them “a must read”, etc. The latest example of a book where I struggled to find any new or interesting thinking was Originals by Adam Grant.

Example: Zoo by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge This is a book that tells the reader that it is not only about a global pandemic, it is a book about our relation to other animals and how they are react to our treatment of them. After reading the book my only question was if it was a computer that have written the story based on a simple algorithm that only included the most common clichés. It just felt like an insult to any thinking person and provided not one interesting thought related to global pandemics or our relation to other animals.

3. Momentum exploitation This is a different category as is very much self-inflicted, but is also used by some authors/publishing houses. For anyone with a tendency to be a “collector” who likes to follow a story/author the “momentum exploitation” is something to be particularly aware of. Although I suffer more in the areas of music (when I like a record I tend to listen to other things by the composer, the musicians involved, conductor, etc.) as there are more people to follow than for a book (as there is usually just one author per story). Still there are a few books where the passion has been lost and it feels like the author just write to get money, or just can’t move on. The worst kind is usually an author that writes something good, then tries a few other things without much success and they goes back (in desperation) to the original success to write a follow-up. Lately a new category has emerged when the “market” use a story developed by one person by bringing in a new person to write about it. Momentum exploitation has nothing to do with fan fiction, something I enjoy as a phenomenon even if I no longer read much of it.

Example: Det som inte dödar oss (“The Girl in the Spider’s Web” in English), by David Lagercrantz In the case of Lagercrantz and the GITSW it just feels parasitic and unnecessary. I read the book as I found Stig Larsson’s books fascinating. The fact that it was professionally done just made the situation worse, a skilful parasite feels more unpleasant than an incompetent. It left me feeling soiled by a con artist behind the scene. I want to stress that it is not Lagercrantz that I think is the parasite, but the people behind how asked him to write it, those with the strategy to make more money.

4. Incoherent word and sentence stapling This is a category where I tend to stop reading after a chapter as I think they lack any intellectual coherence. As I tend to delete these books directly (as I have enough difficulties keeping track of all the interesting books/reports I want to read/keep) I don’t remember many examples. I currently work on security policy issue in Europe right and remembered an old article that discussed the role of Germany in a way that made me wonder how it could be published in a well established newspaper.

I want to stress that it is not the message as such, but the fact that it is hard to find any logic or coherence in the text.

I looked up the latest article by the same person to see if the article about Germany was a mistake, but this article, about Wikileaks, was if anything even more incoherent and confused. It is the kind of text where I fail to see what argument that the person is making

The two examples are just to illustrate a category and the rest of his articles might be brilliant, but after suffering though two articles that I read multiple times I can’t take the risk…

For those who like some context for the articles please see: > The emails published

> A little information about John Brennans hacked emailsResponse to the need to rethink

> German pacifism

As I was about to post this text I started to read a book “Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the world” and it might be a good candidate for this category also (not just “issue lure”). The theme is interesting and important. The person who wrote the book seem very nice and I think I agree with him on many things, but the book is such a patchwork of sentences and feels more like a “I scratch your back and you scratch mine and let’s forget all important issues”.

I think it is because it is not a book where you are supposed to learn anything specific, it is a “self-help” book where I think you need to be a little bit desperate to enjoy. What the book it trying to say (I think) is that everyone can be more creative. I really like this message and think it is true, but unfortunately it does not make the book any less incoherent. Examples are given that does not make sense if you think about it, there are no references provided for most parts and there are so many general and vague statements that I was beginning to suspect that the book was inspired by Deepak Chopra (who is famous for writing texts that make no sense, perhaps with the exception for Chopra’s bank account).

There are also two categories that I include in books that I don’t write about, but that I don’t think are bad.

1. Fast food Occasionally I read books that are like watching soap opera on TV. These are books when reading feels as if you following a simple formula and where you just turn pages without really using your brain. In well-written cases it almost feels like surfing/sliding down a slippery slope. You just turn pages without resistance and it almost feels as if you are picking up speed so it is hard to get off. One of the best examples is probably The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. I think the small nuggets of “educational reflections” help the flow where the story has a very simple structure. Even if I don’t write about these books I think these are important as they encourage more reading in a time when many companies encourage ever shorter attention spans and where we live in a culture when some people actually think that 140 characters is enough for meaningful conversations about important issues. Any book that encourage readers to concentrate for more than 5 minutes is an important contribution.

2. Form without function This is a difficult category. I think these books often walk a thin line for me. If I’m in the right mood I like them and appreciate the way the author plays with language. If I’m in the wrong mode I only feel that they have a form but without function. As if the author had a structure for an interesting book, but could not find any content for it. Don DeLillo’s Zero K falls in this category. It is beautifully written, and it was possible for me to appreciate this for a few chapters, but eventually it just feelt like a meaningless show if writer skills. As if a skillful artist made a number of beautiful but sterile circles and squares (no criticism against Kandinsky intended, even if I don’t consider them among his best). Zero K is a good example of form without function. The books is not hard to read as the language and ways he set up the different scenes are fantastic, but the tension between the skill and the lack of content also builds up a tension within me that I find interesting.

Perhaps the contrast to White Noise and Cosmopolis, two books I very much enjoyed by Don DeLillo, contributes to the tension as these books in a very interesting way allow form and function/narrative strengthen each other. As with “fast food” I don’t see these as bad books. First of all I think these books often push the limits and it is a matter of taste and context if you like them or not. But I also think craftsmanship is always worth supporting and if 100 Zero K are needed to deliver one White Noise/Cosmopolis it is more than worth it.

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* “Take one concept from economics. Apply the didactic tools of business books - the laundry list of dos and don'ts, the capitalized letters, the end-of-chapter summaries. Transpose the whole to the field of politics, while making it relevant to people's everyday concerns. Provide a tsunami of facts and figures to illustrate each chapter. Pepper it with scholarly references. Make sure you quote important people with whom you had casual conversations - the attractiveness comes not from what they say, but from who they are. Provide the garbs of academic scholarship: a long bibliography, an index, footnotes. Impress the crowd with a statistical appendix. Et voila ! Such formulaic books may not make history or change the way we think about important topics such as power, but they will be the talk of the town during the few weeks that follow their launch by a media campaign.” This brilliant review, that I think could be copied and pasted with just a few modifications on very many of the self-help/ business book bestsellers, is written by Etienne Rolland-Piegue on Amazon.com for the book The End of Power by Moises Naim.