“There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides.”

The Great Gatsby

In September, I read a sub-standard autobiography, and afterward, I thought: I don’t want to read bad books anymore. Why read trash, when there is so much excellence available all around me?

So I started the month with a new reading strategy: first, I would read only excellent things (based on either awards or recommendations from people whose opinions I respect). Second, I would read one short (300 pages max) book each weekend – generally non-fiction, where I might want to get information from something but I don’t feel the need to savor the experience. I often pick these kinds of books up and start them, hoping to get through them and enjoy them, but so often the are unenjoyable, so I stall, getting stuck on them, thinking that I need to finish them before I move on to a new book. What if I just crammed them, looking for utility? With only two or three evenings to finish them, I wouldn’t have the luxury to look for enjoyment.

Meanwhile, my weekdays would be used to read longer books, taking the time to let them sink in, to enjoy them; these would be either biographies or novels. That would mean my weekday reading would not feel rushed – and I would get to the longer books, too. I often put big books off, thinking, “That will take way too much time, and I wouldn’t be able to learn all the stuff I can get from shorter ones…” – an obviously short-sighted viewpoint, but one I nevertheless consciously and sub-consciously used to order my reading life.

I should really look up how smart people choose books to read books.

Anyways: I am now well into two longer weekday books, Moby Dick and The Power Broker, and finished five shorter weekend ones in October, too.

Unfortunately, I started my first weekend with Start with Why. This is so popular in the tech and startup community, and comes so highly recommended, which is why I picked it up. It is absolute trash. It is SO BAD. The idea feels good – if you start anything with a “why,” it is more likely to stick, and you will get more followers, more adherents, more customers, more fans. If you want to sell an idea to business, don’t just launch into the “what” of the idea – here it is, what do you think? Start with why you had it: we are here to make more money, and here is how to do so. The thing that sucks about this book is the writing, the organisation, and the support behind it. Sinek keeps telling stories like Steve Jobs starting Apple Computers with a big WHY – to challenge the status quo – when that is factually inaccurate (as Isaacson details at length, Jobs was actually scrambling to make money). Then, he offers no support for his statements, just lines like, “(story of a successful man) – he started with why.” Martin Luther King, Junior, almost certainly had a good why for his leadership of the civil rights movement, but just saying “He started with why” does not prove it, or even say what the why was, or how we can know that. There is a complete disconnect between the examples used to support his thesis and he thesis itself, and that makes the entire book incredibly weak. Plus, there is often a complete disconnect between the subject of a chapter and its contents – the chapter on communication had almost nothing to do with communication. All in all, it is a good idea, poorly executed.

I do believe in the message, but I just wish someone like a chastened Malcolm Gladwell had written it.

Clearly I was doing a poor job of picking books, so the following week, I let Daniel pick for me. His choice: Between the World and Me, which connected to last month’s The Underground Railroad quite nicely. Also, as Daniel is my son, and the book is a gorgeous sort of letter to Coates’ son, the selection was touching. A few pages in, it reminded me of some of Bianca’s letters to me – full notebooks, spanning weeks or months, that are intimate confidences, insights into her life, her beliefs, her thoughts, her whys. But this was so much more – a personal, lived experience, detailing how the past is not even past, as well as explaining such touching concern of a father for his son that it broke my heart. I have done this in the past, since Daniel was born, and Alice has mentioned it to: we sometimes see people and think that they were once little babies, or toddlers, and parents felt as strongly about them as we do about Daniel. The shopkeeper on the corner; the homeless junkies in torn sweatpants; the guy in the Jaguar, going 40 in a 20 MPH zone – they were all wearing nappies once, loved, adored. Reading this, suddenly, there were more layers on that: not only do millions of people around the world feel that way about their children, but they also recognize that their children are being brought into a world heavily stacked against them, heavily prejudiced against them, where they can be beat or shot just for the color of their skin or the slant of their eyes or the curl of their hair or any other arbitrary reason. When I look at Daniel, I have the luxury and privilege of seeing a kid whose horizons are limitless; how did that happen? How did I get that lucky? And am I deluding myself? In Scotland, I am part of an immigrant community; are we also an underdog community, a community where many of the locals seem prejudiced against us? Will Daniel face problems with the other kids at his school because of his last name? His accent? His clothes and shoes? Is that why I am so eager to get him into BJJ classes – so that if needed, he can defend himself in the schoolyard in a way I never could? So that he has the confidence to handle himself?

The last three pages were not to the same standard as the rest of the book, but I still closed it with the thought that any American who is not deeply ashamed of America’s history has no understanding of America’s history.

I digress: when I first came to Europe, in the 1990s and early 2000s, many Americans thought that Europeans would be deeply prejudiced against them, either as the sole hegemonic power or because of the endless wars that Bush got us into. There were rumors that many Americans would put Canadian flags on their backpacks so that people would think they were Canadian and would treat them well. It was bizarre to me, because it seemed that the only people who had Canadian flags on their gear were North Americans; Europeans wanted to do everything they could to seem American, from wearing Levi’s to using Zippos to light their cigarettes to having American flag shirts and hats that would look completely appropriate at a Trump rally. They wear baseball hats with real teams, and plenty of sweatshirts with completely made-up teams. Rather than try to look non-American, and thus stand out, Americans travelling over here should bring a New England Patriots hat, a UCLA sweatshirt, and American Flag pants, and they would look perfectly European.

I ended the month with The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Jiu-Jitsu University (recommended by Sunny), and Strengthsfinder 2.0 – all excellent for their purposes, but not as thought-provoking as Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Fifty-two books for the year so far. For that I am grateful. What would life be like without reading? Will Daniel love reading, too? I hope so. He is already showing incredible ability with words – he can recognize certain written words from Alice writing them on the side of the bath in bath crayons, words like Aga (our cleaner), Meg (our babysitter), Alex (a character in one of his books), Volvo (from the side of diggers and busses). And we have started a game when we are out: I will say a word, and then he will rhyme with it. Sometimes, it is a real word, but often they are made up. Then I rhyme with his word. When he is done with the back and forth, he will change the rhyme, and, after a few minutes, go to two-syllable words. When it is a particularly good rhyme (“good” based on some internal criteria that he has yet to divulge to me), he will giggle; when he makes a good one (my criteria: complicated real words), then I will laugh, or high-five him. So a round might go:

• Him: Cat
• Me: Rat
• Him: Bat
• Me: Matt
• Him: Goat
• Me: Moat
• Him: Boat
• Me: Loat
• Him: Soat
• Him: Big soat
• Me: Mig Tote
• Him: Wig Wote
• Him: (seeing something) Big Big Hill
• Me: Fig Mig Mill
• Him: Big Big Cat Digger
• Me: Big Big Bat Trigger
• Him: Big Big Bat Rain
• Me: Big Big Bat Train
• Etc.

So far, the most impressive:

Me: Claude Monet

Daniel: Claude Bouquet

He often looks at me as if he is disappointed that I am impressed.

And he has suddenly decided that he can do everything – turn on lights, operate the oven, open and close doors – and, when we stop him, he says, “I can see it, though.” He is testing boundaries, testing his own abilities, his own initiative, our limits, our patience. I love it, except when it is either dangerous or potentially destructive. I have to always be on alert, though, which is probably good.

Every Saturday, we make pancakes from scratch – inspired by a book that Sarah sent us. We go for walks, him in the sling on my front, which makes people smile. Sometimes, in the apartment, he tells me to follow him; sometimes, he runs behind me because he wants to follow me. He knows what he wants to listen to at different times: often Thunder Road or Twenty-First Century Digital Boy when we are cooking breakfast, or Miserlou when we are eating. He no longer likes Taylor Swift, preferring The Beatles. He doesn’t like listening to All About That Bass, but he loves muttering it while he is playing with blocks.

And tonight, Alice came to the kitchen while I was cooking. She had been putting socks on Daniel before he went to sleep, and she must have touched him in a particular way, because he said to her, “I put my hand up on your hip; when I dip, you dip, we dip.”

He is really cute, and I feel like his education is going well.