I have a friend, Justin, whose wife, Heather, wanted to write a book. Now, sure, lots of people want to write a book, but Heather wanted to so much that she actually did write a book. After writing it, she sent it to a load of publishers, all of which, in return, sent her their boilerplated rejection letter.

Justin wanted to help, but Justin has no experience with writing or publishing bo...

Below is one of my favorite book openings. I’m posting it now as it relates, albeit loosely, to Halloween (I know this is a June gallery entry—but it is being posted in October).

There are some who might think a book written about checklists was specifically (and only) written for me, and I was for-sure plenty geeked to put hands on it, but then to have it start with a memorable stor...

I added a few of the books I read while at summer camp to What I’m Reading.

Had a nice mix this summer. I’m still wrapping up a few of them which will be added soon. But enjoyed my first two Harlan Coben reads, and the Silent Patient was crazy good. But as for memorable, it would have to be, once again, the work of Morgan Housel. So, so good. In demonstration, here’s a quote I didn’t include on the book overview—as it is I only shared a handful of my marked passages as there were so many.

The last few years I have spent the month of July tent-camping in Michigan. Parts of the family will join me for much of this but I usually spend a week or two alone. Every morning of this month begins with a 3-4 hour reading and writing session on the beach. As for what I’m reading, each year I choose a different topic to research and I will have a few books on that subject and will spend my mo...

if you think people bristle at lists, just ask them about self-help books. i will confess to not understanding the stigma and baggage wrapped around them. especially when therapy in comparison, in some circles, seems like a status symbol. but from the first time i ran across one, i instantly became intrigued by their composition and objective. for me they served a mentorship role i was in dire need of. that said, most self-help literature is admittedly like eating chicken wings—lots of work for minuscule chunks of meat. but, oh my, can that meat be a tasty and memorable morsel. and that is what keeps us reaching for that next one in the basket.

one lesson i've learned in life is the importance of timing. my first and most powerful dose of this came when i first met my wife. i knew in a single breath that she was the one for me but after five painful and awkward dates, anyone could see it was just not clicking so we threw in the towel. i called her a year later for a follow-up date, mostly because i couldn't stop thinking about her. this do-over date began as each of the prior ones did, painful and awkward but then, forty minutes in, for reasons i've never understood, the world fell away and at that precise moment the rest was irreversibly set in stone.

self-help books possess this timing quality. there are many times i've started a book and it just didn't speak to me. i pull it off the shelf years later and it owns every ounce of my attention. while this applies to all sorts of books, it is doubly applicable to self-help books. further, i have recommended some of these books to people and to my knowledge, aside from the third one listed, they have never helped anyone to the degree they have helped me so in that vein i do not recommend reading them on a whim or simply based on them being listed here. it would be akin to taking Nyquil medicine when you are not sick. Nyquil is a violently foul thing to swallow when you need it and know it will help you. it is an unfathomable thought when you are doing ok and don't need it. so please peruse this list with that understanding in mind.

SELF-HELP BOOKS THAT HAVE HAD THE LARGEST IMPACT ON MY LIFE

(in order of their import/impact)

The 10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management (Hyrum Smith) this book started it all for me. it was recommended by a friend i approached who seemed to be the most engaged and energized human i ever met. i've recommended it to dozens of people over the years. it has impacted exactly ZERO of them the way it did me. as for how it touched me, i vividly remember reading it on the subway going into work and without realizing it, i had had tears running down my face. this book is namely why i make the red-text note above that your intersection with anything, be it people, a film, a sentence you hear, a job you get has more to do with the timing of it in your life than the actual payload it carries. i found this book when i needed to and it began a life reclamation project that continues today. Let me share an experience that suggests the potential power that the natural laws discussed in these pages can have in your life. An executive with the Merrill Lynch Corporation attended our seminar several years ago at their corporate training facility in Princeton, New Jersey, as part of the advanced training Merrill Lynch provides its brokers after their first year with the firm. A year after this gentleman had gone through the seminar he wrote me a four-page handwritten letter that, even as I think about it today, makes me emotional. In his letter he said something to this effect: "Hyrum, I went to your seminar a year ago in Princeton. It never occurred to me that what I do on a daily basis ought to be based on my governing values. I found that to be a very exciting idea. I came away from that seminar and identified my governing values, the things that really matter most to me. In the process of that introspection, I discovered that one of my governing values was a good life for my son. When I admitted that to myself, I also had to admit that I wasn't doing anything for my son. This past year, I decided I would dedicate my life to making a good life for my son. He then described several fun things that he had done with and for his son. On the third page of this handwritten letter he said, "Hyrum, last week my son, eight years old, was killed in an automobile accident. I have experienced some real pain at the loss of my son. But I have to tell you that I have experienced no guilt. For the first time since your seminar, I realized what you were talking about when you discussed the idea and concept of inner peace." He then closed the letter by saying, "Hyrum, thank you."

Aging Well (George Valliant) the primary lesson i took from this book deals with the devastating and irrecoverable toll poor and immature decisions can take on a life. its impact on me was near immediate. days after digesting the core message i received a combative email from a difficult colleague. moments after reading it i pushed back from my desk to begin a heated march to his office. the notions from this book played across my mind's ticker-tape machine. i stopped myself and decided to wait out this initial reaction and consider what a "mature" response to this push in the shoulder might be. by the next morning my cooler mind had found an elegant and reasoned course that spared me (and my foe) from an unprofessional and time-consuming (and pointless) dust-up. the ease of this alternate path made an immediate convert of me and i work hard to view all of my more important and consequential decisions through this measured prism. What follows is not an excerpt from the book but from an Atlantic article about the book (and ultimatley what led me to the book) The story gets to the heart of Vaillant's angle on the Grant Study. His central question is not how much or how little trouble these men met, but rather precisely how—and to what effect—they responded to that trouble. His main interpretive lens has been the psychoanalytic metaphor of "adaptations," or unconscious responses to pain, conflict, or uncertainty. Formalized by Anna Freud on the basis of her father's work, adaptations (also called "defense mechanisms") are unconscious thoughts and behaviors that you could say either shape or distort—depending on whether you approve or disapprove—a person's reality. Vaillant explains defenses as the mental equivalent of a basic biological process. When we cut ourselves, for example, our blood clots—a swift and involuntary response that maintains homeostasis. Similarly, when we encounter a challenge large or small—a mother's death or a broken shoelace—our defenses float us through the emotional swamp. And just as clotting can save us from bleeding to death—or plug a coronary artery and lead to a heart attack—defenses can spell our redemption or ruin. Vaillant's taxonomy ranks defenses from worst to best, in four categories. At the bottom of the pile are the unhealthiest, or "psychotic," adaptations—like paranoia, hallucination, or megalomania—which, while they can serve to make reality tolerable for the person employing them, seem crazy to anyone else. One level up are the "immature" adaptations, which include acting out, passive aggression, hypochondria, projection, and fantasy. These aren't as isolating as psychotic adaptations, but they impede intimacy. "Neurotic" defenses are common in "normal" people. These include intellectualization (mutating the primal stuff of life into objects of formal thought); dissociation (intense, often brief, removal from one's feelings); and repression, which, Vaillant says, can involve "seemingly inexplicable naïveté, memory lapse, or failure to acknowledge input from a selected sense organ." The healthiest, or "mature," adaptations include altruism, humor, anticipation (looking ahead and planning for future discomfort), suppression (a conscious decision to postpone attention to an impulse or conflict, to be addressed in good time), and sublimation (finding outlets for feelings, like putting aggression into sport, or lust into courtship).

Getting Things Done (David Allen) this is the one and only book i've ever read that i think could help all people (that live in a first-world society at least). every other book on this list deals in the perceptual and abstract. this is the only brass tacks book on the list. i've read others which have helped here and there, but this one offers the tools to do a complete makeover of your organizational life. allen's methods are shockingly mature and tested. it seems most of these books are penned on the quick trying to beat others to market. unlike those, allen's methods were in play for a good long while before the notion of documenting his approach gained traction. and it is his comprehensive and proven model that lets you hit the ground sprinting with confidence. The purpose of this whole method of workflow management is not to let your brain become lax, but rather to enable it to move toward more elegant and productive activity. In order to earn that freedom, however, your brain must engage on some consistent basis with all your commitments and activities. You must be assured that you're doing what you need to be doing, and that it's OK to be not doing what you're not doing. Reviewing your system on a regular basis and keeping it current and functional are prerequisites for that kind of control. If you have a list of calls you must make, for example, the minute that list is not totally current with all the calls you need to make, your brain will not trust the system, and it won't get relief from its lower-level mental tasks. It will have to take back the job of remembering, processing, and reminding, which , as you should know by now, it doesn't do very effectively.

Flow (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) for someone into time and life management, this work is breathtaking. you can tell how much a book spoke to me by examining it physcally and observing the number of dog-eared pages and how marred the margins are with my excited scrawls. this book is devastated. in short, the author, with an unfortunately unpronounable name, teaches you how to bend time like neo does in the matrix. flow is something that has happened to all of us, but it is an elusive experience. here the phenomenon that happens to our time and experience is documented and described in a way where you can not only better understand what is happening BUT have the potential of cornering it in the paddock and riding, even taming, it like the wild and ever-moving creature it is. Although, as we have seen, people generally long to leave their places of work and get home, ready to put their hard-earned free time to good use, all too often they have no idea what to do there. Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback, rules, and challenges, all of which courage one to become involved in one's work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed. Hobbies that demand skill, habits that set goals and limits, personal interests, and especially inner discipline help to make leisure what it is supposed to be—a chance for re-creation. But on the whole people miss the opportunity to enjoy leisure even more thoroughly than they do with working time. Over sixty years ago, the great American sociologist Robert Park already noted: "It is in the improvident use of our leisure, I suspect, that the greatest wastes of American life occur." The tremendous leisure industry that has arisen in the last few generations has been designed to help fill free time with enjoyable experiences. Nevertheless, instead of using our physical and mental resources to experience flow, most of us spend many hours each week watching celebrated athletes playing in enormous stadiums. Instead of making music, we listen to platinum records cut by millionaire musicians. Instead of making art, we go to admire paintings that brought in the highest bids at the latest auction. We do not run risks acting on our beliefs, but occupy hours each day watching actors who pretend to have adventures, engaged in mock-meaningful action. This vicarious participation is able to mask, at least temporarily, the underlying emptiness of wasted time. But it is a very pale substitute for attention invested in real challenges. The flow experience that results from the use of skills leads to growth; passive entertainment leads nowhere. Collectively we are wasting each year the equivalent of millions of years of human consciousness. The energy that could be used to focus on complex goals, to provide for enjoyable growth, is squandered on patterns of stimulation that only mimic reality. Mass leisure, mass culture, and even high culture when only attended to passively and for extrinsic reasons—such as the wish to flaunt one's status—are parasites of the mind. They absorb psychic energy without providing substantive strength in return. They leave us more exhausted, more disheartened than we were before. Unless a person takes charge of them, both work and free time are likely to be disappointing. Most jobs and many leisure activities—especially those involving the passive consumption of mass media—are not designed to make us happy and strong. Their purpose is to make money for someone else. If we allow them to, they can suck out the marrow of our lives, leaving only feeble husks. But like everything else, work and leisure can be appropriated for our needs. People who learn to enjoy their work, who do not waster their free time, end up feeling that their lives as a whole have become much more worthwhile. "The future," wrote C. K. Brightbill, "will belong not only to the educated man, but to the man who is educated to use his leisure wisely."

The Obstacle Is The Way (Ryan Holiday) this book kicked open doors in my mind i didn't even know existed. and thankfully so, because i can already see the thinking that got me through the first half of life is probably not going to serve me equally well in my second leg of life. this book, i believe, is sharing some tools i'll need for this next bit of road. it has also led me to a extensive bank of exciting authors and writing that will surely have me occupied for decades to come. What is Perception? It's how we see and understand what occurs around us—and what we decide those events will mean. Our perceptions can be a source of strength or of great weakness. If we are emotional, subjective and short-sighted, we only add to our troubles. To prevent becoming overwhelmed by the world around us, we must, as the ancients practiced, learn how to limit our passions and their control over our lives. It takes skill and discipline to bat away the pests of bad perceptions, to separate reliable signals from deceptive ones, to filter out prejudice, expectation, and fear. But it's worth it, for what's left is truth. While others are excited or afraid, we will remain calm and imperturbable. We will see things simply and straightforwardly, as they truly are—neither good nor bad. This will be an incredible advantage for us in the fight against obstacles.

---

Have a book that changed your life? you know i'd love to hear what it is and what it did for you.

from seneca's On the Shortness of Life - life is long if you know how to use it

highlighted passages represent my notes

excerpt from Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

opening passage from karl ove knausgaard's My Struggle (book 1)

i participate in a reading program at the university i work for. the program instructs all incoming freshmen to read a book, a book chosen by a committee of folks. the book is meant to stimulate thought and conversation about a range of topics. on the day before classes begin the freshmen attend a discussion group with around fifteen of their new peers. the talk spans one and a half hours and is l...

excerpt from Brain Rules by John Medina

in partial regard to the book i posted about yesterday, i remember when my former boss and mentor turned fifty i asked her if there was a best part of hitting this lofty milestone. she had an answer ready and looked happy to share it. with more than a small hint of excitement in her voice she said it was the realization, finally, that everyone is not talking or thinking about you and that in the rare moments that they actually might be, knowing that it doesn't matter, that it doesn't matter one iota.

for her, this epiphany proved one of the most liberating and meaningful parcels of wisdom ever set before her. the fact that my boss and mentor was an african american, female executive in a wildly conservative banking environment should add some weight to this discovery. while not yet fully there, i can sense myself trending in this direction. i can also sense the saliva building around my mental jowls at the thought of biting into the philosophy whole.

part one is over here

towards the end of king's memoir he penned a sample passage of a bar scene. in reading it bella ran into a number of words she didn't know. this turned into concern about fighting with the language and that this struggle might take away from her enjoyment. she expressed this to marty first. marty said she should maybe wait to read them. bella agreed.

when she mentioned this to me i reminded her we would be reading them together and i could help with any words she didn't understand. she said it wouldn't be the same and we should wait.

i'd be lying if i said the notion of sitting in bella's new bunk bed reading stephen king books with my daughter every night of the summer didn't have me bristling with anticipation. i already had it planned out. we were going to start out by reading them in the same order i met stephen king: pet semetary, it, tommyknockers, needful things. from there we'd branch out. i saw a large part of my summer hopes slipping away with my daughter's prudent decision making.

seeing my uncertainty, bella said, "it's like you say dad, sometimes wanting is better than having".

boy do i hate it when my good advice sinks its teeth into my own buttock.

update: in the end the pull of trying him out proved too enticing so on saturday june 8th at 10:03 pm, my daughter and i began our first joint-reading of stephen king beginning with the same book i first read when a little older than her, pet semetary. we would have started at ten on the dot but i had to pee. unfortunate timing that. but we sat on the porch with multiple candles burning. i read the first chapter, using my clearest and most measured reading voice. when i finished the chapter i excitedly looked over at my daughter who was sitting on a deck chair facing me. her hand extended toward me, palm up, requesting the book. she said, "nice try dad but you don't have what it takes. hand it over." so she now has the reading duties and she is quite good at it. i'm convinced she learned most of her character voice skills from her mother when marty read all seven of the potter books to alex and bella a few summers back, employing a wildly impressive array of voices and energy. after i handed the book over, bella leafed through the pages i just read, finding passages and telling me "this should have sounded more like this dad" and would then re-read the lines with am admittedly higher level of enthusiasm and skill. aside from struggling with the elderly neighbor Jud Crandall, who via bella sounds more like a young hiphop artist, she's knocking it out of the horror aisle.

and now that we have a few nights under our belt, i must say that these neat and tender reading moments i'm sharing with my eldest child makes all the early years, fumbles, questions, trials, sacrifices and challenges of getting to this comfortable, close spot we can share together and look forward to every day ... well ... it just makes all that early work and effort seem crazily trivial.

part one is over here

one thing i haven't mentioned through all of this is why bella is so ravenous to read stephen king. the reason is bella fancies herself a bit of a horror writer. she has written a number of scary short stories. they definitely are not what you'd expect to come out of a twelve year old girl, who otherwise seems as normal as bella seems at least.

she mostly has done this in her free time and just shared it with family and friends but one day she asked me to proof-read a school assignment for her. when i did it was one of her horror stories.

TROY
what is this for?

BELLA
english class.

TROY
you can't turn this in at school.

BELLA
why not?

TROY
because the department of family services would come here and take you away from us.

BELLA
why?

TROY
because this is twisted and deranged. i mean don't get me wrong, it's very good. the problem is its almost too good and thus twisted and deranged.

it turns out she was very excited to turn it in and had already talked it up to her friends and teachers. our compromise was she had to include an author's statement with the assignment. what she quickly penned to appease her stickler-father follows:

part five

part one is over here

yesterday's mention of bella giving up television reminded me of a related story.

now that bella is older, about a year back, marty suggested we get a proper television so she could comfortably have girlfriends over and for gatherings, sleepovers and the like. our conversation quickly and excitedly turned into a top-down redesign of our living room, sketching out a remodel to take it from its present state--which is about two steps from looking like the monkey cage at the zoo (we're missing simply a swing-rope from the ceiling)--to a fully re-imagined space that included an L-couch, a wall mounted flat-screen, surround-sound, a stained-wood mantle, matching built-in bookshelves lining the walls, and new natural-wood, functioning french doors (note: these were recently installed). marty envisioned herself curled up under a fleece blanket watching some of the series-tv she's missed over the last decade. i imagined myself buried in the couch's corner, watching weekend football, wearing a pair of tired sweats, a fresh bowl of stove-top corn on my lap and a few logs popping in the over-sized fireplace. both marty and i were plenty eager to assume these relaxed positions.

a few weeks later while out with bella on our dad-lunch, i revealed this plan to her. instead of the shriek i braced for, i received an inflectionless response that she kinda liked not having a tv didn't want to get one. i almost reached over to her feel her forehead thinking she must have taken ill in the time it took me to utter my sentence. this sorta moving target is one of the core reasons parenting is often named the hardest thing you will ever undertake.

later in the day when alone with marty i began a conversation with the words, "you're not going to believe this but ..."

TROY
you're not going to believe this but when i told bella about our plans for the living room, she said she didn't want a television.

MARTY (stopped what she was doing and looked at me)
what?

TROY
yeah, she said she didn't want a television. she liked not having one. she said having one would change, ruin even, the tenor of our home.

MARTY (after a brief pause)
well screw bella. i want a television. when she has a home of her own she can preserve the tenor of it all she wants.

this would be that target i'm trying to aim at picking up and moving again. and not just like moving two paces to the left but like moving in a fast and serpentining pattern that i'd need an uzi to hit, and as confessed before i'm working with a home-made slingshot. truth is, ninety percent of the surprises i contend with come from the two women in my life saying things i don't expect (and sometimes just the plain, darn opposite of what they said before). the other ten percent comes from the boys in my life doing things i don't expect, things like:

• dropping toys down the neighbors sewer vent.
• riding red wagons down hills while standing on top of them, surfer-style.
• climbing trees so high you can't even yell loud enough for them to hear you screaming, "get down! now!"
• or like, our six year old arriving at the dinner table with hundreds of dollars in his piggy bank and saying it's just his chore money from the last few months. of course when you combine (1) the fact that he gets fifty cents a week and (2) his brother and sister's banks are suddenly empty, his defense starts plummeting faster than his computer time over the next two weeks.

but at least with the boys, while i may not expect all the things they do, i do understand them. this is what makes raising men a more tenable undertaking for another man.

but moving back to the original topic, bella and television, don't think that the rapidity in which my daughter accepted stephen king's advice (mentioned yesterday ), which she encountered exactly once before mine (and having shouldered my advice dozens of times) has been lost on me. i see it. i see it most clearly. i also imagine it is not the last time she will accept notions from a fella new to our lives before she would take my own, identical, tested and trusted counsel. i'm sensible enough to see that coming and yes, i'm already saving money for the therapy i'm sure to need when the dark scenario actually happens for real.

and for any other people possibly fighting this fight, or other similar fights, with their small humans, i will share the closest i ever came to persuading bella to abandon her digital herion (without the assistance of a best selling author at least). the nearest my methods took me happened after we attended a school event (her induction into the national junior honor society--sorry, proud father, couldn't resist). before the ceremony began two students from the school performed for the audience, singing and playing acoustic guitar. they performed beautifully, so rife with confidence and composure, especially for two junior high age girls sitting in front of better than a hundred people. after the event the pre-show music came up in discussion. bella acknowledged who they were and said they were amazingly talented. i asked bella if she thought she would be as good as those girls if instead of watching shows on her computer time for the last two years she had practiced guitar. bella thought for a moment and said probably. i repeated her 'probably' and added had she done that people might be watching her playing guitar on television instead of her watching other people do enviable things on television. i watched her reaction, closely, and saw something happening but admittedly the success lasted about as long as a netflix login. that said, that brief moment is the closest i ever came to getting bella to put the media needle down.

part four

part one is over here

i put two conditions on bella's reading of stephen king. the first was that we would have to read the books together. the second was that before we start, she had to finish reading his memoir, On Writing, a book i had given her several months earlier.

the only issue with the first condition is she said i'd need to find five hours a day to give to the effort. i'm confident i do not need to go into the nine kinda ways this was not going to happen so we quickly negotiated that down to a more realistic thirty minutes a night, and maybe the occasional hour depending on my schedule and the plot line.

regarding the second condition, the moment we concluded our time-each-day bargaining she turned and ran from the room. over the next several days every time you'd see her she'd have king's memoir on her; either opened for reading, stuck in her armpit if walking, or resting on her thigh if sitting. a brief aside—on the top of bella's reading log for the library's summer program, she added the words 'you can't compete' followed by three exclamation points. i, the library staff, and multiple summers worth of other kids in the reading program can attest to the undeniable truth of this declaration.

an unexpected bonus from sir king totally came when he slammed, viciously, television saying time spent watching was wasted, forever lost and offered no redeeming value, namely in this case, to one's writing skills. bella said she got that and was considering fully giving up tv and computer, replacing it with reading and writing. while my mind furiously staved off a that's-what'-i've-been-saying message bella continued on, "so who would have thought you and stephen king feel the same way about television. crazy." spared.

but, for any ground i gained on the television front, my dinner table suffered as he also says that if you really want to be a writer you cannot let things like social norms stand in your way and to properly hone your craft you might need to read during certain social routines. he named family dinners specifically. bella informed me, so i wouldn't be surprised, that she will now be showing up to dinner with a book or writing pad in hand and i couldn't protest because she was just following the advice of someone i told her to read. un-spared.

part three

bella, who just turned twelve, has been asking pleading to read stephen king for the last two years. of course, each time my response has been a wordless glance over my glasses. she knows what this means. and she hates it. still without a word from me, she exclaims, "why not!". i explain she is too young for the likes of stephen king. to her huff i explain he will still be there when she isn't too young. to her second huff i explain she needs to save some things for when she is older because if she consumes it all now there will be less to enjoy later. to her third huff, i explain she only gets one childhood and it is my job to protect her from leaving it too early, for the wrong reasons at least.

that talk happened more than a year ago. over the last few months bella has built a shrine to King on our family bookshelf, meticulously organizing all of his works, all that i own at least, onto a single shelf. i've caught her a few times either (a) re-scanning the shelves for any books she may have missed or (b) staring longingly at the bindings of the collected works and maybe even placing her fingertips on the glossy wall of bindings in a way that could only be described as reverent. the other morning i walked by while she was in the second state. i asked what she was doing. she said sadly she was waiting until she was ready. i replied i thought she might be ready. her head snapped up and her eyes shot open. she asked me to repeat what i just said. i did. she asked me to repeat it one more time just to make sure. i did again. she danced in place. she hooted. she screeched. she whirled in circles. she reached her hand out towards the books touching them softly, letting them know they'd be together soon and softly, but excitedly, ran her hand down the length of the volumes reveling in the memorable moments awaiting her.

while we walked to the bus stop fifteen minutes later she asked why i changed my mind, what was different. i said she was different. she was more mature. she asked for specific examples. i recounted the night before how i asked her to walk a dog that was staying with us (due to bella's dog-sitting business). it was late and she didn't want to walk the dog and said as much. i explained that other people in the family had taken the dog out that day but she had not and it was her turn and she told her clients she would so she had to do what she said because someone was paying her money based on that understanding. she turned and left the room. she got dressed and took the dog out. and not just for a quick circle of the block as i expected her to do but for a good, proper walk. she came home still mad but instead of injecting her mood on the home, she retired to her room, went to bed and woke pleasant as usual. i explained that one of the reasons for green-lighting her was her more mature handling of problems which even six months ago would have been a big dramatic affair.

i added that it was also her evenness and reliability. not only is she consistently responsible in her chores and duties (jobs and school) but she has also been steady in her conviction to read stephen king. she has shown it to be more than just a passing fancy.

and there is a third reason. i didn't mention it to her but it is something i've discussed here before (i think) and that is the school bus. based on her reports, the conversations are every bit as salacious as anything stephen king has ever penned ... and at least he's a grown man who has experienced many of the things he's writing about which trumps information that comes from older siblings, cousins, uncles and neighbors. so if she's going to hear such things, she may as well hear them from a human, mr. king, that has actually experienced such things (and while i'm there to bandy about the questions that remain).

part two

a neighbor sent me an email with a link to a movie trailer for enders game. i guess he and i talked about the book at one of our neighborhood gatherings. those who know me know i did not click on the link. instead i sent him the following reply: to which he replied: no matter how good they make this film, and i'd wager it will not be good at all, their effort could not possibly be better than the millions of versions that won't be imagined in the young minds that will not read the book because they saw this film. most unfortunate.

excerpt from parenting from the heart by Jack Pransky

Excerpt from It's Easier Than You Think by Sylvia Boorstein

a friend of mine who is a university philosophy professor recently asked me to pre-read a book he wrote on happiness. i think i came to mind because i've probably read more books on positive psychology and happiness than most. of all the great points he illustrated in his book, my favorite line was, "One should not be an asshole in the pursuit of happiness." while it might seem overly obvious, i reckon we've all bumped into a soul or two who would benefit from such counsel.

excerpt from uncertainty by jonathan fields

imagine if you were asked to write about a runaway horse crashing into a family's wagon on a narrow wooden bridge. would your rendition be close to this?
excerpt from William Faulkner's The Hamlet

an anthony reflection. the amulet is a graphical novel which is quite good, especially if you liked the Bone series.

excerpt from Aging Well by George E. Vaillant