This week I got a chance to talk with Grammar Girl (Mignon Fogarty) on the phone. She was interviewing me for her Behind the Grammar podcast. The interview we did was for episode 18 which is scheduled to come out on Tuesday has been released. I have been a big promoter of her podcast and her whole network since I first heard about her over 4 years ago.

I mentioned the interview on Facebook and a friend commented about her own personal “Grammar Girl” in high school. I too had my own Grammar Girl in college.

English never was one of my strong subjects (come to think of it, I don’t know that I had any except skipping classes). I guess I speak English well on a basic level, but knowing the rules and making the right choices on tests always eluded me. High school English did not go well and neither did college.

Since then I have had good friends who have helped me clean up several usage errors. Learning a foreign language has been a huge benefit too. However, before I got to the point of getting help I had to take freshman English in college. Mrs. B was my tormentor teacher.

I sat on the last row to the teacher’s left. We were in alphabetical order and Penny O sat in front of me. Mrs. B allowed us to grade each other’s quizzes. We were welcome to trade papers with anyone around us. I found a sympathetic soul in Penny, so always chose to trade papers with her. I never remember Penny ever making a mistake on her quizzes. However, she almost ran out of ink each time she had to correct mine.

The fact that she never missed a question impressed me enough to soften the blow of how much work she had to do to grade my quizzes. She would turn around with a very sympathetic look on her face as if to say “Oh, you poor boy.”

Maybe I am the reason Penny became an English teacher. Perhaps she couldn’t stand the thought that there were other people in the world like me.

Categories: Books, Podcasting, Websites, Writing
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Life of Pi by Yann Martel was a fascinating book that completely pulled me into the story after it finally got interesting. But it took a long time to get interesting.

The first 120 pages of the story is about a teenage Indian boy (dot, not feather) who believes completely in three main religions: Christianity (Catholic), Islam and Hinduism. Pi, the main character, grew up as a zookeeper’s son. The family sold the animals and closed the zoo to move to Canada. While on the journey from India to Canada, along with some of the animals, the ship sank. The story is put to paper at a later time by a writer based on interviews with Pi and others related to the events.

The next 280 pages is about the sinking of the ship and how Pi, and his lifeboat companion Richard Parker, survived for 227 days at sea. Richard Parker was a 450 pound Bengal Tiger. There were other companions on the lifeboat, but they either died, were killed or drowned before too many days had passed in the lifeboat.

One of my favorite parts of the book is when Pi goes into a nine step process as to how you, the reader, should go about taming the wild animal (i.e., tiger, rhinoceros or wild boar) in the boat with you. It is funny in that I hope to never find myself in need of such information, but he describes it with the passion and factuality that any 16 year old would bring to something so serious.

As stated earlier, the book pulled me along when it finally got interesting. But that did not happen until after page 120 (in my edition of the book). The book is broken into three parts. If you take my second paragraph above as a summary of the first section of the book you can save yourself all the boring parts and not enjoy the book any less. But you are going to read it anyway, aren’t you? Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

While I can’t say that it was the most thrilling or immersive book I have ever read, it was very hard to put down towards the end.

I have heard many good reviews of the book and have to agree that it is well written and will probably become a classic. But, like most classics, unless you struggle to get very far into the book, you will probably put it away disappointed that you didn’t see what everyone else saw in the work. If you are struggling to get into the book from the start just take my advice and skip to part two and prepare yourself for a great story.

Life of Pi, Yann Martel. Mariner Books. 2003. 326 pages (in the linked edition, mine was 401 pages).

Categories: Books
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I read Freakonomics a couple of years ago and was eager to get my hands on the new book, SuperFreakonomics. I managed to snag a copy at a Walden Books (RIP) that was closing in Chicago a few months ago. This book was a touch edgier than the first one, which was a bit out of my comfort zone to begin with. The first book spent quite a bit of time talking about drug dealers while this one gave the inside scoop on prostitution.

The subtitle of the book is: Global cooling, patriotic prostitutes, and why suicide bombers should buy life insurance. With a subtitle like that you can imagine my heart skipped a beat when I got stopped by airport security to have my bag full of books inspected one by one. Fortunately the “SUICIDE BOMBERS” phrase did not catch their attention.

The premise of the book is to show how that not every conclusion is as simple as seeing a few facts and making assumptions. The first book was subtitled A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything and gives you an idea that the purpose of these books is not really to solve any specific problem, but to let you know that sometimes there is much more to an issue than what you might first conclude. Some of the topics discussed in the book I imagine are, or will be, subjects of much discussion since the authors contradict conventional wisdom and popular myths in several areas. One of the controversial topics I hoped would be in the book was the subject of a TED Talk that one of the authors, Steven Levitt, gave a couple of years ago. He shows the power of scare tactics and powerful lobbyists. In that talk Levitt goes against what we “know is true” about the effectiveness of car seats compared to seat belts.

I enjoyed the book, but I have to say it is not for sensitive eyes. I had to make sure no one was reading over my shoulders at different points in the book. It is quite graphic in some areas. I don’t know if I can say it is a must read, but I did like many of his conclusions.

SuperFreakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. William Morrow Publishing. 288 pages. 2009.

Wanna Trade?
I am offering this book to anyone who wants to send me a good book. This is an experiment to see how long it takes to send a book from Argentina to wherever you are and vice versa. Leave a comment with what you have to offer in trade.

Categories: Argentina, Books
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I knew my friend Garvin Dykes had been working on a book, and was excited to see him mention that it was available for the Kindle. I purchased it that day and started reading it on my iPhone.

I don’t read much fiction, so I surprised even myself as to how fascinated I was with the story of Sunday’s Child. It only took me 2 days to consume the book.

The story involves a college student in the south who meets a girl during his first few days at school. She is from the Middle East and is Muslim. The boy is a Christian, but tries to be a friend to the girl and help her feel comfortable in her new surroundings. The book is set in the early 80s and goes through the early 90s. The plot involves their growing relationship through the time when radical Islamic terrorists begin to attack the United States.

Besides being from two very different cultures geographically, they are also religiously very different. They seek to work through their differences.

As I read the first few pages I thought the book was going to spend more time on separating Christianity from Patriotism. While I love my country, I often feel that American Christians think their Christianity and love of country go hand in hand. When someone culturally worships the Lord in a different manner, they fall back on thinking that it is because the person is not a mature Christian. However, the book did not deal with that aspect of Christianity.

What I did learn from the book is a perspective of all the stories I heard in the news through my teenage years. All the conflict with Iran, Iraq, PLO and the fight for the land that Israel occupies makes more sense to me after reading this book. My school principal would share the news with us about what was going on over there, but it seemed so far away from me at the time. Of course we are still involved in the same conflicts today in that region as we were back in the 80s. Through this book I now understand where it started and how it developed.

I am not sure if the Kindle version is different from the printed version, but I did find several inconsistencies in the storyline. Apparently the author and editor made some last minute changes to the military rank of the hero in the story. He is a Lieutenant, then Capitan (then Lieutenant again) and twice he was called Major even though he only advanced to Capitan in the story. The printed version may have those inconsistencies cleared up.

The author told me these are “developing characters.” I take that to mean he has another book planned to follow this one. He mentions in the introduction that the story started forming with him as he was stuck in Africa during the September 11, 2001 attack on the US. Since this story ended in the early 90s, then there must be more to take us up to at least to 2001. I look forward to it.

It was refreshing to read a book that had no cursing. Since the author is a long time conservative preacher I expected nothing less. However, I did not even really notice that it was missing until I sat down to write this. More proof that a good story–even involving the military–can be told without stooping to filthy language.

Sunday’s Child. Garvin Dykes. Tate Publishing. 2010. 296 pages.

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At the recommendation of a missionary friend I picked up a copy of Made to Stick at the local library. His comment was something like: “It is not a mission’s book, but it certainly is applicable to missionary work.”

While I tend to agree with many pastors that business books can be dangerous when you try to apply the principles of running a corporation to a church, I also think that there are many good things we can glean from reading books that make businesses successful. This book is not so much a business book as it is about communication; regardless of the work environment.

The authors, brothers Chip and Dan Heath, have isolated 6 principles that help make an idea ‘sticky.’ What I loved about the way they explained the principles is they used urban legends as many of their examples. There are reasons that urban legends get passed around and tend to stick no matter how much information is on the web to the contrary. If you could communicate real ideas, stories and principles in a way that cause them to stick like an urban legend, then you would get your message across. The book is filled with real examples as well.

In Made to Stick you will find the 6 principles and examples illustrating those ideas. Not every sticky idea will contain all 6, but the more you can communicate using the 6 principles, the stickier your communication will be.

What are the principles? Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional and Story. SUCCESs is used as the trigger to help you remember these principles.

Simple: Find the core of what you want to communicate. This has to do with the idea you want to share more than the way you share it. Sometimes an elaborate story can get the message across in a more sticky way than just sharing the core. Therefore, Simple is about the message, not necessarily the way it is delivered.

Unexpected: At the end of the story did you expect that the person was going to wake up in an ice-filled tub having had his kidney’s stolen? Giving examples of how you want your sales staff to meet the customer’s needs is much more sticky than saying, “Take care of the customer.”

Concrete: Help your audience work through the thought process instead of just teaching them the bottom line. An example is how students learn math better when they think through adding members to make up a baseball team as opposed to just telling the students that 3+6=9.

Credible: Being credible is not just being able to spout off statistics that no one will remember. Credibility can come through showing an example of a person going through a similar problem and how they are dealing with it. Better yet, have that person become your spokesperson. Real people dealing with real issues.

Emotion: Help people see themselves either experiencing the problem or being a solution to the problem. Instead of asking the crowd to give money to support all the missionaries in South America, I should help you understand that if you support my ministry in Argentina I will be able to share the Gospel of Christ with a deaf boy in La Plata who may never have another person love him enough to teach him the Bible. By sending $50 a month you can help my family do just that.

Story: Take any opportunity you have to illustrate with a story as opposed to just giving the facts. In the book they say that the story and the moral are both important. However, if you just tell the story the listener can figure out the moral. But if you only have the moral (the facts) then the listener has no clear understanding of what the moral means nor a good way to remember it.

I have to say that this is probably THE BEST BOOK I have read in a long time. While I borrowed this copy from the local library, I will be on the lookout for a copy of my own. This is a book that I could easily read several more times and go back and reference often in the future. I think it is a great book for missionaries and pastors as well as anyone who needs to communicate a message.

Made to Stick. Chip and Dan Heath. Random House, 2007. 291 pages.

Categories: Books
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