Just like the Prodigal Son, I've returned

someone steppin' to me, ya get burned.

Since this blog has gotten more serious, I decided I needed to post some stuff.
I will start off with books.
Background: I am allowed to listen to my iPod at work all day. I work 8 hours a day and have been at the place for 7 months so I have had to start trying to find different things to listen to other than the misfits boxset all day (which I do rock on my iPod from start to finish at least once a week pretty much). So I started listening to podcasts. And after tuesday of each week I started running out of those (as they are usually updated once a week, some more... some less). Then I noticed that audible.com started advertising that they give you a free audiobook with a free one month trial of their website.

So I signed up and downloaded Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Awesome. I am a huge fan of Gladwell after reading the Tipping Point, and subsequently Blink. Nonfiction can be a difficult read, but he makes it interesting to read by skipping around and not getting too verbose on each aspect of his topic. Outliers is about what makes successful people so, well, successful. Instead of being statistical outliers in IQ or ability, it instead chooses to argue that their prowess more had to do with good timing. For example, it says great hockey players are born in the beginning of the year because that is the cutoff for the age groups in Candian Youth Hockey Leagues is January 1st, so therefore the kids born in the beginning of the year are older and bigger when they start playing at young ages where 6 months means a lot physically. Or about how Bill Gates is so successful because his junior high was one of the lucky few schools to have access to a mainframe computer while most every other kid would never have seen one until college. This book is pretty positive, it makes you feel like you still have a chance to be awesome even if you are living at home in your mom's (or grandma's) basement.

Then I got Lush Life by Richard Price. Devin wrote about this so I am just going to say I liked it. Today I was listening to the Fresh Air podcast (from 2/27) by NPR and I learned that Richard Price wrote a book called Clockers that later became inspiration for the HBO show The Wire. He subsequently wrote for the The Wire and this makes a lot of sense because I remember listening to Lush Life and thinking about how the descriptions of young project kids and cops was very reminiscent of the show. Even one of the detectives in the story is almost the same character as Det. McNulty on The Wire.

Alright, I am bored. I will talk about some other books later.
- Haymaker
aka Jonathan