Good books are antifragile

I carry a large wheeled suitcase mostly filled with books on almost all my travels. It is heavy (books that interest me when I travel always happen to be in hardcover).

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Books figure prominently in the life of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, professor of risk engineering at New York University's Polytechnic Institute, as they do in his book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. Let's consider some of the fascinating things he says about books.

I feel corrupt and unethical if I have to look up a subject in a library as part of the writing itself.

His point is that libraries "should not be the source of any idea," at least not after he has started writing. He does not want to write anything he has not previously studied, digested and made his own.

Criticism, for a book, is a truthful, unfazed badge of attention, signaling that it is not boring; and boring is the only very bad thing for a book.

This is an idea Taleb might have found in a library, for it has been noted many times before. Yet it is amazing how it never seems to occur to those determined to ban or otherwise discourage the reading of certain books. Such actions always call attention to those books (or movies) and attract people who otherwise might have ignored them. Bad reviews, although most authors hate them, serve the same purpose. They attract attention. Most books get almost no attention at all, so a bad review can have a positive impact on sales.

Curiosity is antifragile, like an addiction, and is magnified by attempts to satisfy it -- books have a secret mission and ability to multiply, as everyone who has wall-to-wall bookshelves knows well.

This probably needs no comment. But I do love the phrase about books having "a secret mission and ability to multiply." That certainly seems to be the case.

What I was given to study in school I have forgotten; what I decided to read on my own, I still remember.

I'm not sure this is strictly true. I learned basic math and history, as examples, from textbooks, and I remember what I learned even if I have forgotten those textbooks. Yet I do have more vivid memories of my extracurricular reading and what I learned from these books. Unfortunately most students read only what has been assigned, if that.

If a book has been in print for forty years, I can expect it to be in print for another forty years.

Books "age in reverse," Taleb says. To Kill a Mockingbird has a longer life expectancy now than when it was published 54 years ago. Most books disappear from bookstores within weeks after they appear. If people don't buy them, the stores stop trying to sell them and publishers give no thought to subsequent editions. In 1964 Harper Lee's novel would have seemed to be one of these books. Instead it caught on big with readers, got made into a great movie and quickly became a classic. People may still be reading it a century from now.

Books that are one year old are usually not worth reading.

Books that are a year old actually have some staying power, just not enough for Taleb. For him, C.S. Lewis and a few others, books have to age much longer than that to have great value. So many books once thought to have been important have eventually fallen away. Taleb prefers books that have survived centuries. If they are still in print after all that time, they must have something important to tell us.

Asked by one of his students for a rule on what to read, he replied, "As little as feasible from the last twenty years, except history books that are not about the last fifty years." Obviously I don't subscribe to the first part of that comment, or I would not have read Taleb's book. The second part seems wise however.  Historians do best when they have no memories or prejudices, political or otherwise, to color their writing. It is still probably too soon for a really good history of the Watergate era, but we have seem some good studies of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations.

The opposite of fragile

What is the opposite of fragile? We might come up with words like strong, stable or robust, but professional contrarian Nassim Nicholas Taleb disagrees. If what is fragile weakens under pressure, then the opposite would be something that becomes stronger under pressure. That which is strong, stable or robust merely withstands the pressure. So Taleb coins the word antifragile in his 2012 book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.

This book follows in the footsteps of his best known work The Black Swan in which he points out that unexpected things happen. Just because most swans are white doesn't mean some can't be black. Hurricane Florence, the 9-11 attacks and the 1929 stock market crash are examples of black swans. If The Black Swan was short on practical advice, Antifragile is loaded with it, covering what we should eat, when we should seek medical care, what we should read, how we should get an education and how we should make our living, among other topics.

Taleb has little use for economists, big business, college professors and other intellectuals, politicians, doctors and virtually anyone who claims to be only trying to help. "This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most," he says. Thus he ignores modern advice, except to ridicule it, and consults the wisdom of the past, such as Seneca, Cato the Elder and the Bible. That such writings still exist and remain helpful proves to Taleb that they are antifragile.

One finds wisdom here too, but also a bit of hypocrisy. After all Taleb, like those he criticizes, is only trying to help.

A is for atmosphere

Atmosphere can make a good murder mystery better. That's why so many memorable mysteries are set in stately country homes and foggy London streets. There's plenty of atmosphere in Charles Todd's new novel, A Forgotten Place, and it's one reason this book ranks among the best in the Bess Crawford series. There's so much atmosphere, in fact, that the novel might more accurately be termed a thriller than a mystery.

The Great War has recently ended as the story begins, but Bess, a nurse, remains in France caring for those British soldiers still not well enough to be sent home. Of particular concern to her are some Welsh soldiers, mostly coal miners who, as amputees, no longer have jobs waiting for them. For some, suicide looks like their best option.

When she's given a few days leave, she decides to track down Captain Williams, one of these soldiers, to determine how he and others in his unit are faring. Not finding him in the mining town where he had lived before the war, she follows him to that "forgotten place," an isolated seacoast village subject to violent storms, both the natural kind and the human kind. She finds the captain living with his brother's widow. She, the widow, seems in love with him, while he still searches for a purpose to his life.

Abandoned by the man who takes her to the village, Bess can find no way to leave. What's more, the people of the village seem to not want her to leave. Men, including Captain Williams, are being seriously beaten at night, while Bess observes other men being buried in the darkness, their graves left unmarked. What's going on here, and can Bess discover the answers and still get out of town alive?

Todd builds the suspense gradually and, for the most part, believably.

In praise of good manners, leisure and tolerance

Eric Hoffer

My recent review of Eric Hoffer's Working and Thinking on the Waterfront ("Working and thinking," Sept. 10) failed to mention many of the most interesting things he says in the journal entries compiled for this book in 1969. So allow me to go back and highlight a few of them now.

Good manners are inconceivable without a degree of objectivity, and the give and take of compromise. He who clings with all his might to an absolute truth fears compromise more than the devil.

Remind you of anything, like the current political environment, for instance? Good manners are lacking in Washington and elsewhere because there is no objectivity and no willingness to compromise ... on anything. Transfer that attitude to the dinner table, which may be the first thing we think of when we hear the phrase "good manners." Imagine if someone at the table decides the mashed potatoes, which happen to be near his plate, belong to him and he sees no reason to pass them down to the next person. Or because he wants some salt for those potatoes simply reaches down the table, his arm over another's plate, to claim it. No, Hoffer is right. Good manners take compromise, and compromise takes objectivity, the willingness to see another person's point of view.

In an optimal milieu there is considerable leisure. Where people are engrossed in some feverish pursuit so that they are neither bored, nor dream dreams, nor nurse grievances, creativeness will be anemic.

I get some of my best ideas in bed in the early morning when I am still half asleep or later during a leisurely shower. I sometimes think the most creative period of my life was my teen years when more hours were spent daydreaming than working. Later in his book Hoffer comments that "most utilitarian devices had their ancestry in playful practices." Amateurs, such as the Wright brothers, are responsible for many of the greatest inventions. Youngsters picking at their guitars in basements and garages write some of the best songs.

This view doesn't negate Hoffer's claim that working as a longshoreman helped him write. Unloading ships must be boring work, and boredom offers opportunity for both daydreaming and creative thinking.

Actually it is not a question of love but of tolerance -- of putting up with people, and managing to be pleasant and benevolent.

I am all for loving one another, as Jesus commanded, but I think Hoffer is right. In practice love  comes down to tolerance, or as he said earlier, good manners. He goes on say we should all think of ourselves as tourists, as travelers on a journey. "Tourists are usually brotherly with each other," he writes. I noticed that on our recent river cruise down the Rhine. We travelers were mostly strangers. We all got along famously. There was no strife, no grumbling, no ill tempers. All was smiles, concern for the comfort of others and, yes, good manners.

The compost of the imagination

Perhaps a novelist has a greater ability to forget than other men -- he has to forget or become sterile. What he forgets is the compost of the imagination.

Graham Greene, A Sort of Life

Graham Greene

When novelist Robert Olen Butler spoke at the Festival of Reading in St. Petersburg in the fall of 2011, someone asked him how he managed to capture his Vietnamese characters so vividly in the short stories in A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. Butler replied that he spent a year in Vietnam during the war. He thought he had forgotten most of what he had experienced there when, decades later, he wrote those stories. To him they seemed to come out of his subconscious.

And then he added, "Writers write what they have forgotten."

This idea that writers, especially novelists, write what they have forgotten crops up again and again, suggesting that there must be some truth in it. In his book Patience & Fortitude, Nicholas A. Basbanes tells of visiting novelist Umberto Eco in Milan and viewing his personal library of some 30,000 books.

Among those books was an ancient and worn copy of Aristotle's Poetics. Eco said when he acquired the book he wrote down a detailed description of its condition and placed it in the book and promptly forgot about it. Decades later when writing The Name of the Rose he described an old manuscript important to the plot. He was shocked when he later opened that copy of Poetics and discovered that his descriptions of that book and the manuscript in the novel were virtually identical.

There is a conversation of Deborah Meyler at the end of the paperback edition of her novel The Bookstore. There she says "I think so many of us let events and funny moments slip through our memories into oblivion, like jewels into the dirt. I always mean to keep a journal and never do. My solace is that perhaps the memories really do merge over time to make something else, something new."

And this would seem to bring us back around to Graham Greene's idea of a "compost of the imagination." This is why those who write biographies of novelists study those novels so carefully. They often reveal details about the author's life that the authors themselves may have not been aware of. (The danger, of course, is that biographers can often be totally wrong.) Sometimes real people known by an author claim they were the model for some fictional character, which the author denies. But perhaps they actually were the model for that character, and the author has simply forgotten where the idea for the character came from.

Because experience turns into compost for imagination, it is vital that a novelist have experiences, lots of them, rather than just sit in a room somewhere and try to write. Many of our best writers, such as Greene, Hemingway and even Wodehouse, moved around at lot, often from one country to another, soaking up experience, which they converted into compost, so to speak, which then nourished their imaginations.

I doubt that novelists are alone in having compost heaps for brains. Most of us, I suspect, have as the source of most of our likes and dislikes, opinions, beliefs, biases and even basic knowledge (can you remember learning to count?) not memory itself but that melting pot of memories we call the subconscious.

Two extremes

When it comes to buyers of books, there are two extremes, and Deborah Meyler shows us both in her novel The Bookstore.

At one extreme is Mitchell van Leuven, who manages to be both the protagonist's love interest and the novel's villain at the same time. This being a novel that celebrates books, one should not be surprised that Mitchell has little use for books or bookstores. "Why do people still buy books?" he asks at one point. "They just take up space."

Today even people who read books may share this attitude. The public library has books to lend. If one must buy one, it can easily be discarded after one has finished with it. But you can so easily read or listen to books on various electronic devices, why buy printed copies in the first place? As Mitchell says, they just take up space?

At the other extreme, just a few pages later, Meyler gives us an elderly woman who, because of declining health, must sell her books before moving into a much smaller residence. Parting with them may be more painful for her than whatever physical condition she has. "They are all my life," she tells those who come to haul away her library. "These books are all my life."

Most people, of course, fall somewhere between these extremes. They may buy a few books, but very few. They may buy them, then get rid of them after reading them. Or get rid of them after realizing they will never finish them. They may keep a few that have sentimental value, such as a favorite children's book. They may keep some just to accent their living room, to give houseguests a positive impression. If they even have a bookshelf in their homes, it is likely filled mostly with something other than books.

There is no question where Meyler falls in this spectrum. It has to be the same extreme where we find the elderly woman. You'll find me there as well.

That mystical smile

"How do you know what to pay for the books, then, if you're so uncertain about what to price them at?" I ask.

George smiles mystically.

Deborah Meyler, The Bookstore

I am naturally "slow to anger," as the King James Bible puts it. The above lines from the middle of Deborah Meyler's novel, however, act as something of an accelerant each time I read them. They remind me of my many frustrating experiences trying to sell books at secondhand bookstores.

In the novel, Esme Garland is a new employee at the Owl Bookstore in New York City. Her question is a natural one for someone trying to learn the business. George's mystical smile, while seemingly ambiguous, actually says a lot. You pay as little as possible for books, then sell them for as much as possible. That's how secondhand bookstores stay in business, those fortunate enough to stay in business.

I understand this. Still, in bookstores as in other commercial actives, there is a difference between sound business practices and taking unfair advantage of others. I am reminded of those American Pickers episodes I've seen where the owner of an object sets a price far below what the object is actually worth. Mike or Frank will then offer to pay significantly more than that, but still only about half of what they expect to charge in their store. Of course, there is a camera focused on them, so they have every incentive to not take advantage of people who do not know the value of the things they own. Honest dealers, however, will act ethically even when cameras are not directed at them.

In my last experience selling books at a store in Columbus, I had a box full of what I considered choice volumes, all in good condition, each book worth something to somebody. Not to this bookstore, however. The price they offered amounted to less than a quarter per book. I was told these were not books their customers were looking for and they would be difficult to sell. Yet I had purchased some of those books in that very store, paying as much as ten dollars apiece. I was living proof they could sell these books, maybe not to the typical customer but to the right customer at the right time.

Most of us who shop at secondhand bookstores do so not to find books we can find everywhere else, including the garage sale next-door, but to discover those rare, hard-to-find books we desire. Often we find books we didn't even know we were looking for. The books I sold that day would, I'm sure, someday find a happy home, and the bookstore would make a tidy profit.

As I remember leaving the store that day, I imagine someone there watching me go and smiling mystically.