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I don’t have much to say about this book. Originally called The Psychology of Everyday Things, it’s a long musing on the poor design that surrounds us. I found it reasonably interesting, but I think I’d have preferred a more rigorous approach than the loose and chatty style Norman uses. All the same, it’s certainly affected the way I look at things around me and it’s going to have a permanent place on my bookshelf for whenever I’m called upon to design stuff.

My first encounter with Michael Chabon’s work was the film adaptation of his second novel, Wonder Boys, which I saw on video while I was working in a video rental store. I watched a lot of movies in the six months I was there (free rentals were one of the perks) otherwise I might have missed it entirely, as so many other people did. It was one of my favourite movies for quite a while after that. I get into quite a few authors through film, but for some reason the fact that Wonder Boys was an adaptation completely passed me by. In fact, I still haven’t read it (though it’s on my list). So the first Chabon novel I’ve read is his debut, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.

It’s a coming-of-age story. The feckless Art Bechstein, recently graduated student of the University of Pittsburgh spends the summer falling in love with a Machiavellian young man and a strange-but-interesting girl. Chabon’s style is elaborate enough to entertain. Unfortunately the plot is slight enough that it nearly collapses from the weight of all those baroque descriptions.

I really like the way Chabon writes, but in this debut novel, what he writes about just isn’t satisfying. There are several threads to the novel that slowly draw together, but they lumber along and the final collision is predictable and unspectacular. As the novel progressed beyond its lively opening chapters, I found it increasingly difficult to care about the events. Maybe the bisexual plot-line was more interesting in 1988, but twenty-years on there’s bisexual characters even in TV shows like Doctor Who.

But it’s Chabon’s first novel, and despite the nitpicking above, I did enjoy it. So I’m definitely going to pick up Wonder Boys at some point; after all I already know that enjoyed that plot.

Che Guevara’s never been one of my heroes and I’ve never owned any item of apparel, any badges, or any poster featuring the famous portrait captured in Guerrillero Heroico. I tend to associate that photo (I bet you know which one I mean without clicking on that link) with a rather shallow affectation of rebellion. It’s not that I revere him, or think his image needs protection, but if I had my way anyone wearing a t-shirt featuring El Che’s image should have it confiscated if they can’t provide brief biographical details.

“Yes officer, certainly, Che was born in Argentina, met Fidel Castro and joined the 26th of July movement, helped overthrow Batista, the Cuban dictator and was killed while trying to foment revolution in Bolivia.”

I think this rule should apply to anyone who wears someone else’s image, but Che Guevara is a morally complicated figure, who had people executed – which makes it slightly more important than knowing who, for example, André the Giant is. I’m sure that plenty of people who do have more than a cursory knowledge of Guevara choose to wear his image, but I’m far from certain that they’re in the majority.

I don’t approve of Guevara’s actions or his philosophy strongly enough to wear his image myself (I’d also prefer people like me to not assume that I’m shallow). I do think he was a courageous man who remained true to himself and his principles, even if I don’t like where those principles led him. Not that my opinion on him is all that important, but that’s what I brought with me when I started reading The Motorcycle Diaries, the travelogue of his journey across South America as a young man.

Guevara’s travels and adventures are charming and laddish, full of drama, narrow escapes and the brief friendships of the road. Guevara has an eye for detail and presents a ground-eye view of 1950′s South America, with all its post-colonial poverty and majesty. While the adventure stuff is pretty standard fare, Guevara is at his best when describing the people and places he finds himself in. I particularly like his description of a festival in Lima:

We arrived as the bullfight was starting and just as we entered, a novitiate was killing a bull, but not in the normal way by a coup de grace. As a result, the bull was suffering, laid out on the ground, while the toreador tried to finish it off and the public shouted. For the third bull there was considerable excitement in the air, but that was it. The fiesta closed with the almost unnoticed death of the sixth bull. Art, I see none; courage, a certain level; skill, not much; excitement, relative. In summary, it all depends what there is to do on a Sunday.

It makes for interesting reading, but if they had been written by someone other than Guevara, I’m not sure that it would have the same effect. What makes The Motorcycle Diaries interesting is the knowledge that this twenty-three year old boy would, just a few years later, become an armed revolutionary, then a martyr, then a cultural icon. As the book progresses you get the feeling that Guevara’s political views are slowly forming as he becomes more worldly and meets with poverty and injustice.

I’d probably have got more from the book if I bought into the pop-culture status of Guevara as Saint of Revolutions. As it is, The Motorcycle Diaries were an enjoyable distraction from a miserable British winter. And if I do ever find myself in a Che t-shirt, I’ll be justified in keeping it.

What is there to say about Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, his chaotic, semi-autobiographical rant of a novel? Since it’s widely regarded as one of the more important works of 20th century literature, probably very little that’s new or interesting. But here goes…

It’s interesting how Tropic of Cancer encapsulates the essentials of gonzo journalism nearly forty years before Hunter S. Thompson came up with the term. With his goal of “recording of all that which is omitted in books”, Miller engages in a hyper-real blending of fact and fiction, with prose that veers between confessional and psychedelic. Like Raoul Duke of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, he’s a morally questionable, yet eminently likable protagonist. In every way, Tropic was way ahead of its time.

If I knew more about 1930′s literature, I’d situate the book in the context of its times. But the best I could do is some vague babbling about D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce, so I won’t embarass myself by trying. But I prefer Miller to either of them. Lawrence feels so much more self-conscious and Joyce much more impenetrable. Miller’s work remains accessible today in a way that other literature of the period hasn’t, at least for me. While there’s not really a coherent story, there’s certainly a coherent philosophy and it’s expressed in every way that Miller can find. I think this passage sums it up best:

Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but I see now that it was meant to destroy me. Today I am proud to say that I am inhuman, that I belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds and principles. I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity – I belong to the earth!

Tropic is a manifesto of liberation, it’s about Miller’s struggle to break free from every kind of repression. The many explicit and often-crude sexual references are justified in a way that would be prurient in most other works. It’s not the celebration of sex that Lawrence wrote about, or Joyce’s symbolic sexuality, it’s sex as a rejection of repression, as a blatant and fierce act of rebellion. It’s not all about sex – again and again in Tropic Miller breaks free from every attempt to constrain him, culminating in an frenetic episode in which Miller becomes a liberator, decisively getting a friend out from a marriage he was forced into. The intention of the novel wasn’t just to describe freedom, but to actively inspire it in others.

It’s compelling and direct. Maybe it’s just as powerful a book today as it was when it was published in 1934. I don’t know – it’s not like I was around then to compare. But it’s as powerful for me today as it was when I first read it at 16.

The greatest tragedy about Ben Goldacre’s book Bad Science is that the people who need to read it the most won’t. It’s a sustained argument against nonsense masquerading as science, but as Goldacre himself says: “You cannot reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into.” And this is an eminently reasonable book.

I like science. I’m not a scientist, but I like to think that I understand it pretty well for a non-scientist. Most of what gets taken for science is actually engineering. The Large Hadron Collider? Engineering. The space programme? Engineering. It’s the process of ideas being tested that give us the ability to build things like the LHC and space rockets and mobile phones and medicines. Science is essentially the set of methods we’ve developed over the last thousand or so years to test ideas rigourously. Humans are easily fooled and science is the best way we know how to not decieve ourselves.

Goldacre uses subjects like homoeopathy and nutritionists to demonstrate the many ways in which people fool themselves and fool others. He effectively takes apart the claims of homoeopaths and nutritionists like Gillian McKeith as a demonstration of how such claims can be taken apart. In other words, it’s a training manual to spot this kind of nonsense-presented-as-fact and argue against it effectively. It’s the exact reverse of these self-appointed authorities’ intent – Goldacre is trying to empower the reader, not deceive them. Because Goldacre’s background is in medicine, his examples are exclusively health related, but health is the field of science that most directly impacts people’s lives.

This is really only one of two threads that the book is weaved from; the other is a critique of the media’s tacit role in the acceptance and promotion of nonsense, the misrepresentation and dumbing down of science in public life. See, for example, Language Log‘s many posts about the poor science reporting of the BBC, and Goldacre’s own blog for many, many examples. This culminates in an analysis of the 9 year MMR vaccine debacle, where British media – and especially British newspapers – waged a campaign against the MMR vaccine as a cause of autism for the best part of nine years, on the basis of very little and very poor evidence.

Goldacre doesn’t take an entirely uncritical view of science. He draws attention to the ways that scientists have screwed up, making the wrong decisions. He also examines the way that science is sometimes distorted by powerful financial interests. The point is that these are things that scientists have fixed or want to fix, whereas the promoters of nonsense have no such desire.

Much of the material has its roots in Goldacre’s Guardian column of the same name, but it’s more of a distillation of it than a compilation. In many ways it’s a manifesto. Bad Science is one of the best science books I’ve ever read. It’s stunningly relevant, clearly written and often funny – although as a humanities graduate, I’m not entirely sure that Goldacre’s ire against humanities graduates is entirely warranted. Nevertheless, it explains what science is and why it does it far more clearly than any science lesson or textbook. It’s important stuff. If you know why homoeopathy and vitamin pills and detox are bad things then you should read this book to better understand the extent of the problem. And if you take homoeopathic remedies and your multivitamins and follow a detox plan twice a year, you should read it to understand why you’re wrong.

What the world needs is another blog post about Fight Club. The book by Chuck Palahniuk, not the film by David Fincher, that is. I read the book after I saw the film, so I was 18. Like Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, it defined my teenage years. I was kind of rebellious and these transgressive books of drugs, death and self-destruction keyed into that perfectly. I was an angry young man and the idea of fighting everything that was wrong with society, the dark, glistening glamour of it was exactly what I wanted to hear. These days, I don’t read it like that. Whether that’s because I’m not so angry, or because I’m not so young is up for grabs.

There’s not a whole lot of point to reviewing books like Fight Club. Everyone’s seen the film or read the book and if you haven’t and want to find out if you should, then there’s over 600 reviews on Amazon. So this isn’t a review. If I were writing a review, though, I’d point to Palahniuk’s minimalistic style and the way it condenses a novel into a series of quotable sections. I can flip to a random page and come up with some phrase or paragraph that could be slapped onto a fridge magnet and sold at a profit. Or stuck in a film and endlessly repeated by students on media courses:

Only after disaster can we be resurrected.

“It’s only after you’ve lost everything,” Tyler says, “that you’re free to do anything.”

Another reason that Fight Club hit such a deep nerve with me when I was 18 is that it’s all about growing up, rebelling and rejecting authority. The novel constantly equates fathers, God and authority figures, initially covertly, but eventually explicitly: “If you’re male and Christian and living in America, your father is your model for God.” And the lack of these things, God, fathers and authority figures is the cause of the malaise that leads to the formation of the fight clubs. The men there are “a generation of men raised by women.” The fight clubs, with their vaguely homoerotic grunting and noise and hyper-masculinity are, like the testicular cancer support group the narrator attended, about remaining men together; fighting against a world where men like the narrator have substituted IKEA furniture catalogues for pornography.

The narrator’s problem is that he can’t grow up. Because he has no father, no God and no effective authority figures, he has nothing solid to rebel against to establish his adulthood. Ever since college he makes friends, his friends get married, he loses friends. They grow up and he isn’t able to follow them into adulthood. The closest thing he has to a father is his boss – “sometimes you find your father in your career.” The death of the narrator’s boss is the end of the second act of the novel and the start of the third. The murder of his substitute-father allows him to finally start to progress beyond the angstful rebellion of Tyler.

Tyler is a seductive figure and the narrator’s relationship to him is similar to the way I reacted to the character when I first read the book. Tyler exemplifies outsider masculinity, free from the encumbrances of society. He inspires the men who join the fight clubs and Project Mayhem by sheer coolness.

I love everything about Tyler Durden, his courage and his smarts. His nerve. Tyler is funny and charming and forceful and independent, and men look up to him and expect him to change their world. Tyler is capable and free, and I am not.

But at closer examination, Tyler’s philosophising is empty. Like the advertising that he criticises – “as if being a man means looking the way a sculptor or an art director says” – he’s selling an image to the guys who follow him. His cobbled-together philosophy, a taped-together conglomeration of nihilism, anarchism, Marxism environmentalism and Zen is self-contradicting dogma. He has guys saying things like. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost heap.” At the same time, Tyler thinks the goal of Project Mayhem is to “teach each man in the project that he had the power to control history. But look at Project Mayhem’s links with Taylorism. Taylor’s ideas about “scientific management” are the key principles behind modern work and led to the assembly-line work of Fordism. It may be significant the the nameless narrator works for an equally nameless automotive company. Compare this extract from Taylor’s 1911 monograph, The Principles of Modern Management to the way that Tyler organises Project Mayhem:

Perhaps the most prominent single element in modern scientific management is the task idea. The work of every workman is fully planned out by the management at least one day in advance, and each man receives in most cases complete written instructions, describing in detail the task which he is to accomplish, as well as the means to be used in doing the work.

Project Mayhem isn’t about achieving anything. It’s about being bad. It’s about acting out: “Unless we get God’s attention, we have no hope of damnation or redemption [...] Only if we’re caught and punished can we be saved.” These are Tyler’s words, and hence they are also the narrator’s. That’s the reason that Tyler exists: To be noticed. The book charts the escalation of the badness, from the initial violence of the fight club, to the “complete and right-away destruction of civilisation” that forms the goal of Project Mayhem.

Eventually, after rejecting Tyler, the narrator finds himself in heaven (AKA a psychiatric hospital) where he meets God (AKA a psychiatrist). The narrator has finally found a way out of his predicament. He’s found his father-figure and is able to respond to him as an adult rather than a child. Rather than the adolescent rebellion that Tyler represented, he is able to disagree. He doesn’t need to be bad to get attention any more – he has God’s attention.

I look at God behind his desk, taking notes on a pad, but God’s got this all wrong.

We are not special.

We are not crap or trash, either.

We just are.

We just are, and what happens just happens.

And that’s how I’ve changed since I was an angry young man of 18 approaching the book for the first time. You realise that Tyler’s an asshole and you grow up.