books – Page 2 – Tiana Feng

Quoteskine Volume 1 by Lee Crutchley

February 12, 2014Art, Books, DesignLeave a Comment

I forgot how exactly I stumbled across Lee Crutchley’s Quoteskine project but I loved the idea and bought the book.

Crutchley started the Quoteskine project on Tumblr as a creative way to visualize thoughts and quotes. Some were completely random and others were from songs, TV shows and movies.

The book is collection of his best works (at the time of publishing). The Tumblr is still going so maybe there will be a Volume 2.

The drawings in the book retain their original hand-drawn quality. You can see marker and pencil crayon lines and I adore that he left them unpolished like that. It has convinced me to start my own quote drawing. I have already written down a few ideas. Maybe I’ll share them with you in a later post!

What’s Your Evil Plan?

September 20, 2013Books, Business, Entertainment, Inspiration, ThinkingLeave a Comment

“Evil Plans- Having Fun on the Road to World Domination” is a cleverly titled book from comic writer and entrepreneur Hugh MacLeod. In fact, I actually discovered the book because it was sitting in the discount book section at Chapters and it sounded both adorable and intriguing.

To those unfamiliar, MacLeod is the artist behind gapingvoid.com. He creates original art for businesses in hopes to spark creativity, not sit in the background like the majority of mountain-climbing motivational posters.

In Evil Plans, he encourages those who are unhappy in their careers to take the risk of leaving and to figure out their life calling aka “evil plan”. The book is written in short chapters, or tips which are then elaborated on with examples and anecdotes. Oh and of course MacLeod’s signature comics.

I think my favourite tip by far was:

“Don’t worry if you don’t know absolutely everything before starting out.”

It’s something many of people struggle with (I know I do) when changing career paths, or starting their own businesses. However as MacLeod states later in the chapter,

“Interesting destinies rarely come from just reading the instruction manual.”

We may not be the most skilled or talented in whatever it is that we enjoy doing, but it doesn’t validate whether we’re able to do those things. The choice we can make is to find something that matters to us and well, just do it.

What is your evil plan?

Moleskine Celebrates The Cassette

September 6, 2013ShoppingLeave a Comment

I love Moleskine notebooks and I usually have one in some shape or form around me at all times. During NXNE, I lost my mini-staff paper ruled book I was using for concert reviews. Funny story, it’s actually somewhere on the other side of the world. A musician had found it while in town for the festival and I told her she could keep it.
To celebrate the cassette’s 50th anniversary, Moleskine recently released this Limited Edition Audio Cassette Notebook. I bought the pocket one to replace my old concert notebook but a full-size is also available.
Inside the covers are some cassette and analogue-style decals. The spine even has player controls.
They included some stickers and of course their official booklet. Tomorrow is Cassette Store Day but I think this is the farthest I’ll go in supporting the cause. The only cassette I’ve ever owned is Pokemon the First Movie’s soundtrack.

The Art of War For Writers

September 3, 2013Books, InspirationLeave a Comment

I’ve never really considered myself to be a writer. I sort of just fell in to it through blogging. I’m continually growing, finding my style and turning to others for inspiration. I read obsessively about anything and everything.

I picked up The Art of War for Writers, mostly because it would look awesome on my someday office desk. It wasn’t until recently that I picked it up and read it.

The little reference book by James Scott Bell focuses mostly on novel writing but a lot of it can be applied to other circumstances. Like the title of the book hints, it compares writing a novel and getting it published to fighting in a war.

There are three sections in the book. Reconnaissance deals with the mental game of writing. This was probably my least favourite section as I found it obvious and fluffy. It might be a proper push for those who are afraid to write in fear of judgment. As a blogger, I feel like this fear is close to non-existent or I wouldn’t be a very good blogger.

The Tactics, the most resourceful section, is loaded with tips to improve as a novel writer, many of which can be translated into writing in general. One of my favourites tips is when you have writers block, call on a word and its cousins (synonyms or related words). They can strangely open you up to new pathways.

The final section is Strategy, where Bell gives tips on entering the publishing world including finding the right agents.

The book reads a lot like a series of 78 short blog posts. They get the point across and there are plenty of examples from existing fiction. I recommend this book to any writers (not just fiction) looking for quick tidbits of inspiration. Bonus, the book has a lovely design.

The Power of Habit

July 3, 2013July 3, 2013Books, Business, Inspiration, Life, ThinkingLeave a Comment

In The Power of Habit, Chris Duhigg looks at how the smallest act of habit can have a huge impact on our lives. It also delves into how businesses build marketing plans around our studied human habits. For example, when you walk into a grocery store the first thing you see are fruits and vegetables. They are purposely arranged this way so that we will buy healthy things first and can later convince ourselves to buy junk food.

He also looked into how Febreeze began from failure to a now conscious habit as well as how Target knows what you want to buy, before you even do. There’s plenty of unlikely anecdotes from Starbucks to Martin Luther King Jr and the Indianapolis Colts.

At the end of the book, there’s an appendix that teaches the reader how to integrate some new habits in their lives. There are 4 overall steps:

Identify the Routine – Look at any bad habits you want to change or a good habit you want to add in your life
Experiment With Rewards – Why did you do the bad habit? Did it give some type of satisfaction? Identify how to gain that sensation another way, or to replace it with another reward.
Isolate the Cue – What makes you keep up the habit? Perhaps a friend? Location or time of day? State of mind (ex bored)?
Have A Plan – figure out exactly how you are going to rid a bad habit or add a good one. When will you start?

The Happiness Project

May 27, 2013May 27, 2013Books, Inspiration, Life1 Comment

I recently read through Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project and enjoyed her journey in the pursuit for happiness. The different chapters reflected the months of the years and the many challenges she added each month. I read a month a day so that I’d have time for some of it to sink in instead of a marathon read through the entire thing. I enjoyed the way it wasn’t written in a how-to-way but instead chronicled Rubin’s own journey in hopes that someone might find their own inspiration in her examples. Like the author of the book, I am not depressed or anything but it’s always interesting to look at what someone else has done to improve their quality of life and be happier.

Here a few of my favourite points:

“You can choose what you do; you can’t choose what you like to do”
“Act the way you want to feel”
“Be Tiana”

Numbers one and three are most likely to collide with each other. In fact a lot about being happy has to do with understanding your own desires. When I was younger and started blogging, I wanted to be a fashion/make-up blogger turned socialite type deal. But that wasn’t really me. In fact I don’t really care that much about fashion. My passion was music, and that’s where it led me today. Other things I don’t like include history and geography and no matter how hard I try, I’ll never find any joy in being immersed in it. It’s important when you are making decisions to consider if you’re making them for yourself or because you think that’s what you’re supposed to do.

In reading this book, I began thinking a lot of my own happiness. Appreciating the joys in life rather than the terrible moments is ideal for a good quality of life. I know this simply from observing my dog running around the yard in circles. Something stupid, that is bound to make me laugh. Laughing out loud is important and in this fast-moving world, it’s easy to forget that and let life past by in a flash.

The Future of Virtual Worlds

May 24, 2013Books, Entertainment, Technology1 Comment

What would it be like if we were more obsessed with a virtual reality than our own? This is what Ernest Cline explores in his novel Ready Player One.

Presently we have small virtual worlds in the form of MMORPGS such as Warcraft, Everquest and Minecraft but Cline takes it further with OASIS (Ontologicaly Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation), an online world that encompasses new worlds and the fictitious ones we know from movies, games and memories. The year is 2044 and the world has run out of oil supply and faced with poverty. The world inside OASIS, where one could be who or what they wanted, became more appealing than the everyday world.

I wonder what the future of virtual worlds will be like for us. There are already people where Warcraft or Second Life takes up most of their lives. In the OASIS, making money online was synonymous with making money in real life. There was even the option to go to school online and students forced through software to pay attention. In 2010, Woodbury University in California tried to do something similar in Second Life but was banned by Linden Labs.

The OASIS Cline created was more than a game. It was a place to chat, browse the web, read books, explore and interact with many worlds without ever leaving your house. All you needed was a pair of gloves, the visor and the console. It may seem like it will be quite some time before we reach that type of technology but Google Glasses will soon be a reality.

As our world becomes increasingly more plugged in, I can only wonder what life will be like 30 years from now.

How To Create A Mind

April 15, 2013Books, Entertainment, TechnologyLeave a Comment

Fascination in the mind led me to read Kurzweil’s How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Though Revealed. The first part of the book goes into compelling detail about how the human brain stores and analyzes information.

The later half philosophises artificial intelligence. It questions and eloquently investigates the ethics behind the artificial mind. If a computer had the same power as human brain, should it be considered conscious? Kurzweil thinks it should be and makes many references to the Jeopardy winning robot, Watson.

He also questions free will, making allusions to the fact that not all human decisions are done of free will. Often we confabulate to make it seem like something was done on our free will. For example, our decisions are often made based on our past experiences. Therefore our past is influencing our decision and free will is one devoid of influences. It thought this was a quite perplexing thought.

Kurzweil explained that Watson (and even iPhone’s) Siri is able to learn from the environment and as technology grows they will be able to learn things the same ways as humans do. If that happens, would we treat computers like humans? Only in time can we truly answer that question.

For anybody who’s interested, here is a lecture Kurzweil did at Google on the topic:

Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore

March 27, 2013Books, Entertainment1 Comment

I always wondered what it would be like to write fiction that took place in today’s world. Robin Sloan pulled it off in his mysterious novel Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore.

The premise is the main character, Clay Jannon, works in a bookstore that is open at all hours of the night. He soon realizes the books in the “Wayback” catalogue are full of strange codes instead of text and story. There is a strange cult of people that take out these books and of course Clay decides to find out more about them.

Sloan writes in a way that is so believable I had to look up if some of the things actually exist. It takes place in a strange San Francisco book store, one of the characters work for Google and it also involves a reddit-style mystery man.

It’s a short easy read for those looking for a geeky codebreaking adventure in the present-day. It wouldn’t surprise me if this ever turned into a movie one day.

The $100 Startup

January 24, 2013Books, Entertainment3 Comments

I recently read Chris Guillebeau’s book The $100 Startup. It had a lot of stories and anecdotes of entrepreneurs which make a decent living (50k or more) doing what they love. What I enjoyed about the book is that it didn’t just focus on multi-million dollar startups like Facebook, but ones from regular people.

The book also has a short exercises for people interested in starting their own business. I emphasize short because the main message of the book is not to ponder forever on if you should do something, but to just do it.
Guillebeau mentions this quote by Karl Marx:

“Catch a man a fish, and you can sell it to him. Teach a man to fish, and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity”

I thought this was an interesting way to think of things. Consumers will buy things because they are easy and convenient. People don’t go to a restaurant because they want to be taught how to make the dish. Regardless of whether you currently have a business idea or not, the book is an inspiring read and makes you re-think what it means to be happy in life. Is it money or thought of doing something you love?

I know somewhere down the line I will probably have my own business and I will definitely give this book another read.