Book Review: Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport

So I've just spent a month away from pretty much all of my regular tech (including this blog!) and it's about time I explain what is what.

In late May I picked up Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, and found myself agreeing with a lot of what he had to say. At the simplest level it came down to the following three principles:

1) Clutter is costly
2) Optimization is important
3) Intentionality is satisfying

Looking at my technology usage overall I found there were a lot of things that were taking up more and more of my time with less and less return for my effort.

So, I decided to follow the author's advice and spend a month (June) in a state of declutter - I dramatically dropped my (non-work) time online, cut myself off from video games, YouTube, Facebook, and cut down TV watching to a pretty low level (for me).

The result was to find that I'd been spending much more time on being passively entertained than I was comfortable with. So it's time to make some priority changes.

Luckily for the readers of this blog - it actually was one of the big things I really missed - writing out to all of you is a fun part of my week and something I definitely want to make a higher priority for myself - so thanks for all the reading over the years!

The book itself is a pretty simple to follow guidebook on how to cut down your technology use in your day-to-day life, and my only actual complaint was that the author should have ended each chapter with key points or added an appendix putting them all together at the end. Readers can do this for themselves (I know I did), but it's much simpler if it's all spelled out in a way that can easily remind you what the goals are.

Well worth reading and full of advice I'm hoping to take going forward, Digital Minimalism was a pretty great read!

Book Review: Reality is Broken

As I’ve said in the past, I’m beginning to become a bigger fan of nonfiction writing; whether history or cultural commentary, I find it an interesting addition to my monthly readings into Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction.

Case in Point: Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World – which was a pretty interesting examination into why more and more people are spending huge amounts of their free time fighting virtual robots, unicorns and zombies. The book examines the draw that these games have (for example, feelings of productivity, useful and clearly spelled out missions, and huge emotional benefits for success and helping with the success of others) and how these attributes can be added to our real-world experience, therefore making reality an equally fun place to play.

The book reads really well – although I don’t personally have a background in game theory, I sure didn’t feel spoken down to, and I wasn’t lost in any of the author’s concepts either.  The arguments were pretty straight forward, and even though there are a few real world problems that game design might not be able to help directly, the vast number of things game design can help is pretty impressive.

I’d recommend the book for anyone who either considers gaming a waste of time, or has been told gaming is a waste of time.  The book got me pretty excited about the things in my own life I can try to modify with game design and has given me both the confidence and the interest in trying it out.

Things I’ve noticed: I do better at Nonfiction if I pace myself

Overall I’d saw I’m a pretty voracious reader – if I read less than half a dozen books over the course of a month, I feel like I’m falling behind.  (Actually, even reading my current seven books a month has me actually falling behind, but what can you do?), so in terms of reading any of my book club, fantasy, horror or Science Fiction books, I just fit in my reading into coffee breaks, lunch breaks, trips on the bus and early-morning reading sessions.

Nonfiction, however, is an entirely different beast.

Right now I’m reading Peggy Orenstein’s Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the front lines of the new Girlie-Girl Culture and I’m totally digging it!  As a father of two daughters, a book which focuses on the proliferation of princess-y images and values our culture aim at little girls is right up my alley.

It will take me about a week-and-a-half to get through, though.  Even though the book is only 192 pages of text (Big secret as to why nonfiction rules – the last fifth of the book is made up of indexes, bibliographies and other notes, so you finish faster than you think you will), I’m limiting myself to a chapter a day.

Personally, I feel that as nonfiction has so much information it’s trying to convey to the reader, I miss a lot of it if I just breeze through the book, so for me, I limit myself to a slower pace, allowing the info time to soak in.

Now the obvious question is – if I’m willing to do it for nonfiction, why not fiction?  Honestly, I think it’s because an ongoing narrative makes me interested in reading it whenever I can, because for short stories I do the same thing as nonfiction – a story a day until I’m finished.  I don’t know, for me this just feels more natural.

So there you go, some musings on nonfiction reading.