To do good writing, read good writing. Here’s the good writing I’ve been doing this week:
I’ve spent a lot of time in the air in recent weeks, which has given me the chance to partake in a pleasure I have too little time for in my everyday life – books.
Here are a few books that I’ve started, am in the middle of or finished. Though they’re on completely different subjects, all feature writing that’s well above average and definitely worth checking out for the language or style alone. I’m a die-hard fiction reader, but lately my tastes have turned to nonfiction, and all of these are of that genre:
Big in China: My Unlikely Adventures Raising a Family, Playing the Blues, and Becoming a Star in Beijing – After freelance basketball and music writer Alan Paul became what’s known in expat circles as a “trailing spouse,” moving to China so his wife could become the Wall Street Journal‘s Beijing bureau chief, he started a blog and column about his life there and at the same time started an Anglo-Chinese blues band, and was more successful in each than he ever dreamed. In time, Woodie Alan, the group Paul started with Chinese bandmate Woodie Wu, became one of the city’s hottest blues acts, and his expat columns for the Journal won him accolades as the paper’s columnist of the year. Paul recounts it all in Big in China, published this month by HarperCollins and written in such vivid style it made me hungry for the cheap Chinese noodles he writes about slurping down so regularly. My only quibble: that the book didn’t include pictures of the band or a CD of their music. News Flash: It looks like I’m not the only one taken with Paul’s memoir. According to just-published news reports, Montecito Pictures has optioned the picture as a possible vehicle for director Ivan Reitman. You can read Paul’s behind-the-scenes account of how the book was born in this piece on Huffington Post.
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine – Best-selling business journalist Michael Lewis picks up in The Big Short, published last year, where he left off two decades ago in Liar’s Poker to tell the tale of the country’s recent financial crisis and collapse of the real-estate market from the viewpoint of some of the insiders who made it happen. And an idiosyncratic bunch they are, including the tell-it-like-it-is money manager who famously shorted subprime home mortgages and the doctor turned investor who was one of the first in the world to recognize the impending mortgage crisis. You don’t need to be a Wall Street trader or have an MBA to appreciate Lewis’ ability to weave a complex narrative through the stories of the people involved.
The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife – Funny, it never occurred to me until now that all three of these sections have “Big” in the title – I guess “Big” is big. Civic Venture founder and pioneering encore careers proponent Marc Freedman uses his latest book to discuss why America (if not the world) needs to start thinking differently about its 45+ citizens so governments and social institutions can do a better of job helping them navigate the new stage between midlife and old age. I’ve interviewed Freedman for SecondAct, and The Big Shift, to be published next month by Public Affairs, mirrors what he’s told me in person about why the world’s thinking about boomers – and almost boomers – is all wrong and what needs to change. It’s a smart read on a timely subject.