Review: Transcription

Transcription by Kate Atkinson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"It was a cruel thing, trying to sprout and find the light of day. It was truth. She wasn’t sure that she wanted it."

Spies. Double Spies. The Blitz.

A not-so-ordinary girl is recruited into a network of clandestine operatives working to infiltrate secret Nazi sympathizers and fascist circles in England. This girl, Juliet Armstrong, possesses an odd combination of naiveté and cut-throat. If you like the idea of an incurably polite young woman carefully washing blood off her hands, you might enjoy Transcription.

Juliet (the only character we actually get to know well) at first has the unenviable task of typing up the transcripts of secretly recorded conversations. So, she knows a lot. This leads to her general traipsing around fifth column schemes, sometimes purposefully, sometimes not. Events were often implausible, but it is fiction, after all.

The writing is reliably eloquent – Kate Atkinson is a crackerjack wordsmith. However, there was not enough action in the story for me, and the topography of the overall plot was disjointed. A strictly linear narrative can be boring, I agree, but the hopscotching timeline and delayed reveals were frustrating.


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Review: Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout, and Thrive with the New Science of Success

Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout, and Thrive with the New Science of Success by Brad Stulberg
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book falls into one of my favorite genres, which is best described as how to be the best you can be. Peak Performance is authored by two guys, Brad and Steve, each of whom peaked rather dramatically (in business and in sports, respectively) but burned out. They met, shared beers and bios, and teamed up to write about a topic they both love – the science of performance.

What this book offers, which many others of this type do not, is pace and balance. It has the perfect combination of anecdote and science. The authors found the optimum time and space to devote to each topic. And the delivery is downright neighborly without sacrificing any of the heft one seeks in a book on best practices in productivity.

They refer to some of my very favorite authors/researchers and that made me smile: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Roy Baumeister, Kelly McGonigal, Adam Grant, Daniel Kahneman, Mason Curry, Walter Mischel, Tim Noakes, Daniel Pink, Viktor Frankl …. and many, many more.

Topics discussed included the importance of balancing rest with stress for success, establishing routines for minimizing decision fatigue, failing productively (struggles give birth to skills!), and becoming a minimalist in order to get the most bang for your attention-buck. Each chapter is summarized at the end, which is not a huge thing, but I found it useful, I did.

Peak Performance is a nifty distillation of the best current human performance science in both physical and cognitive realms and I enjoyed it from start to finish. You will be reminded about your potential, and you when you finish it, you will have more resolve to chip away at the nonsense and time-wasters which keep you from meeting your goals. You will feel ready for change.


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Review: The Woodlanders

The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The late 19th Century teemed with Hardy’s words. He wrote heaps and it is all good. This book, The Woodlanders, was his own personal favorite.

Set in an isolated, slightly backward village known as Little Hintock, it tells the story of a bright young woman and her always "too little, too late love life", which seemed destined for tragedy due to a serious problem with timing.

This quote really sums up the infernal, ever-present puzzle in this book: “Such miserable creatures of circumstance are we all.”

Grace Melbury is the objet de désir throughout. She was sent away to boarding school because her father wanted her to rise above her circumstances. He did not want her to be a commoner, he wanted her to advance beyond the culture of their little village. She returns bright, refined, and cultured. Now, she is caught between two worlds. She loves a commoner as well as a promising, well-educated doctor (or at least she thinks she does).

Grace is a principled young woman who has great difficulty resolving the unprincipled forces in her life, constrained as she is by the intractable subjugations of women at the time. In other words, she is not really free to fix this up to her own satisfaction. Add to this general problem of emotional bondage, the interference from the world outside of Little Hintock and interference from her meddlesome father (whom she is absolutely bound to obey) and you have a perfect storm for the tragedy of unintended consequences.

Some of the players: Giles (the commoner/a woodlander) was a breath of fresh air but extremely dense at times. Edred (an outsider/doctor) needs very much to get over himself. Marty (a poor woodlander girl) made me smile; she was pure strength.

I love Hardy but I was grateful that this story was not as solidly tragic as Tess of the d’Urbervilles. I did find the plain satisfaction I typically seek at the end of a major work, but not until the end.


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Review: Bruno's Dream

Bruno's Dream by Iris Murdoch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As gold is to the Midas-touch, so words are to the Murdoch-touch. This writer rounds up words so keenly - beautiful constructions do result. After finishing The Sea, The Sea last month, I officially began my Murdoch bender, and, oh, it isn’t over yet. I have just acquired The Philosopher’s Pupil, but first things first. Here are my impressions of Bruno’s Dream.

The notion of a dying old man who hopes to find closure and understanding with his only living child, was deeply appealing to me. But, this old man is a scabrous thing, unlikeable and needy. Apart from his clumsy and impatient attempts to mend bridges, paucity of merit alone marks his character, and, somehow, whatever ails him (other than old age) has deformed him horribly.

The cutlery of Murdoch’s character development is devilishly good. There is no one we dearly love and no one we actually hate. There is a ball and chain fastened securely to the heart of each character. Baggage they have each lugged through life. Then, through Bruno's wish to make amends, crazy stuff begins to happen. They each go through a personal crisis which loosens each ball and chain. They change.

We can identify with each of these characters, just a little, which is what casts the spell so well. Ok, the creepy, elfin-like and puzzling Nigel is an exception. I did not like him and can’t imagine anyone who would.

It is possible that there are too many characters. It is also possible that the zany channeling of Twelfth Night-like switcheroos gets tiresome. But, with quotes like this peppering each page, I can overlook those teensy aggravations:

“Brooding about the past is so often about how one might have won and resentment that one didn’t. It is that resentment which one so often mistakes for repentance.”

You will be moved by this book.


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