Whirl recommended the recent Stephen King novel to me, Under the Dome. As the book weighs in at just around twenty-five pounds, I’m somewhat concerned that she may be trying to throw my back out as I haul it around. — Okay, it doesn’t weigh twenty-five pounds, but this book is big. This book is heavy. There is no mistaking this for anything other than a book. A very big book.

The premise is simple: On an entirely normal fall day, a small town in Maine (of course) is suddenly and inexplicably sealed off from the rest of the world by an invisible force field. King gleefully, masterfully provides over a thousand pages to tell you what happens next.

In May, 2009, six months ahead of the publication of Under the Dome, Dan Simmons mentioned receiving the manuscript from King as a gift. Simmons’ reaction:

What’s amazing to me is that Under the Dome is the kind of huge, generous, sprawling, infinitely energetic novel that we (or at least I) associate with gifted young novelists in their 20’s—all energy and enthusiasm, the young author having not yet learned a long-distance novelist’s greedy trick of holding back characters or plot or techniques for future novels—and yet here with a master’s total control of the telling, myriad of characters, tone, and effects.

Do I have your attention now?

The latest novel from Douglas Coupland opens with a quote from Kurt Vonnegut. Coupland takes the quote from the commencement address Vonnegut gave to the 1994 graduating class at Syracuse University.

“Now you young twerps want a new name for your generation? Probably not, you just want jobs, right? Well, the media do us all such tremendous favors when they call you Generation X, right? Two clicks from the very end of the alphabet. I hereby declare you Generation A, as much at the beginning of a series of astonishing triumphs and failures as Adam and Eve were so long ago.”

Fifteen years later and Vonnegut was right. The name didn’t stick, but Vonnegut’s claims were spot on. All the claims about triumphs and failures have come true since 1994. Certainly the part about jobs was true. The less predictive elements about jobs are true again at the end of the first decade of the third millennium. A curious anecdote: most people I talk to directly attribute the title “Generation X” to Douglas Coupland and his first novel of the same name. Sure, Billy Idol’s punk band had the name fifteen before the novel, but it didn’t stick. No, it’s Generation X: Tales of an Accelerated Culture that fixed the label.

Coupland has checked in on his generation many times in the intervening years. Microserfs gives his vision of us working in the venture-capital driven days of the first dotcom boom of the early 90s. JPod chronicles the everyday lives of a group of six GenXers and Millennials working at a video game company in 2005. The protagonists are grouped together in a pod of cubicles, all their last names beginning with “J”. These short one- and two-sentence summaries do not do justice to the aptitude Coupland has with recognizing the pulse of time and culture on people. I want to use the adjective “uncanny” and then find myself consumed with uncomfortable laughter at the irony of that description. Coupland does that to me. There has not been a book of his that I have not thoroughly enjoyed. I cannot wait to read his latest.

From the back cover:

Generation A is set in the near future in a world where bees are extinct, until five unconnected people all around the world — in the United States, Canada, France, New Zealand, and Sri Lanka — are all stung. Their shared experience unites them in ways they never could have imagined.

Generation A mirrors Coupland’s debut novel, 1991’s Generation X. It explores new ways of storytelling in a digital world. Like much of Coupland’s writing, it occupies the perplexing hinterland between optimism about the future and everyday apocalyptic paranoia. imaginative, inventive, and fantastically entertaining, Generation A is his most ambitious work to date.

When I saw Chuck Klosterman last year he was promoting his novel Downtown Owl but his reading was from the as-yet unpublished collection of essays, Eating the Dinosaur. That was alright. I picked up the novel and waited for the collection to be published. Somewhere along the line I must have gotten distracted by shiny things and forgotten all about the other book. (I’ve noticed that happens to me a lot. The distractions and the shiny things, I mean.) So when I was at the bookstore the other day picking up Rework I noticed that not only had Eating the Dinosaur been published, but it was out in paperback as well. The dinosaurs followed me home.

Along with the essay I heard Klosterman read last year, “The Passion of the Garth”, a criticism of Garth Brooks’ alter ego project, Chris Gaines, Eating the Dinosaur contains twelve other previously unpublished essays about pop culture. And in typical style they run the entire spectrum from insightful to silly. That’s sort of the appeal for reading Klosterman. There is a criticism of laugh tracks in sitcoms, an analysis of time travel that pays particular attention to one of the most interesting science fiction films I’ve seen in a long time, Primer by Shane Carruth. Klosterman covers a huge selection of topics. He writes about basketball, Nirvana, the Unabomber and ABBA. There’s a piece titled, “The Best Response” that imagines what the best response would be to archetypical controversial situations, usually involving some sort of duplicity upon the adoring public.

And then there’s the first essay, “Something Instead of Nothing”. This exploration of the journalistic interview is conducted as a set of interweaving interviews itself, peppered with some reflection. After discussing the difficulties both journalists and subjects have in portraying the truth about anything through an interview, Klosterman spends some trying to discover an answer to the question: Why do it? Why succumb to interviews? The essay outlines several different answers to that question before moving on to what I think is the more interesting question. How does this apply to normal people? People who have no celebrity, the millions of unfamous. Chris Heath a British writer starts with an interesting answer that Klosterman picks up and carries to a telling conclusion:

Heath: We are used to the idea of giving witness to one’s life as an important and noble counterpoint to being unheard, especially when applied to people in certain disadvantaged, oppressed or unacceptable situations. […] I’m not sure that we aren’t seeing the emergence of a society in which almost everyone who isn’t famous considers themselves cruelly and unfairly unheard. [….] And so, the cruelly unheard millions are perpetually primed and fired up to answer any and all questions in order to redress this awful imbalance.
Klosterman: There’s a lot of truth in that last bit. Contemporary people are answering questions not because they’re flattered by the attention; they’re answering questions because they feel as though they deserved to be asked. About everything. Their opinions are special and so they are entitled to a public forum. Their voice is supposed to be heard, lest their life become empty.
This, in one paragraph, explains the rise of New Media.

Naturally, once I had read that exchange, I felt an overwhelming compulsion to write about it in my obscure little blog on the Internet. It was beyond my control.

Rarely do I read business books. When I read something work-related, it is often technical: a manual, a white paper, a discussion of specific principles or process. Alternately I choose a more journalistic discussion of a catastrophic failure. The Moment It Clicks will serve as an example of the former; The Smartest Guys in the Room, the latter.

Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson is something different for me. Superficially, this is the sort of book that attempts to explain how to be a successful businessman. The sort of books that pack the stores at airports. Certainly not my usual fare. But then, Rework is not filled with your usual advice. In fact, Freid and Hansson actively argue against the conventional wisdom of writing a business plan, studying the competition, and seeking outside investors in order to be successful. The eighty-eight included essays (each two or three pages in length) address simple maxims learned from ten years of sustained business success in a software development company, 37 Signals. These short essays have titles like: “Learning from mistakes is overrated”, “No time is no excuse”, “Focus on what won’t change”, and “You don’t create a culture”.

I first came across 37 Signals a few years ago when we began using their product, Basecamp, to manage projects and information regarding our building. More recently, as my colleagues and I were attempting to navigate the the volatility surrounding working for Tribune Company, Rework was one of the books that garnered my attention when Konkol discussed it at lunch. What Fried and Hansson reiterate is all that really needs to happen is to stop talking and start working. Much of the matieral was first introduced on the Signal vs. Noise blog — a fact they acknowledge in the book itself when discussing the value of production byproducts. Much like sawdust is a resalable byproduct of a lumber yard, the book is a byproduct of their own experiences running a successful business.

Jason Fried and David Hansson follow their own advice in REWORK, laying bare the surprising philosophies at the core of 37signals’ success and inspiring us to put them into practice. There’s no jargon or filler here just hundreds of brilliantly simple rules for success. Part entrepreneurial handbook for the twenty-first century, part manifesto for anyone wondering how work really works in the modern age, REWORK is required reading for anyone tired of business platitudes. — Chris Anderson