Henry Hagnäs

Daemon

Seth Godin's Linchpin

Transition

Transition is my first Iain Banks novel and he, and the book, comes highly recommended by friends. Unfortunately I have to disagree with the praise. I like the writing style and lots of the ideas but the book failed to move me.

The book tells the story from the eyes of several different persons and weaves a story back and forth between different actors, times and places - indeed dimensions. Because of this its harder to read that most books that present with a clearer narrative and only a few viewpoints, the story is weaved together in the end but fails to impress. Somehow roughly the same story in fewer viewpoints could have been quite enjoyable but because of the several stories told from the eye of several main characters you never really feel connected to a central protagonist and left not really caring what happens. The battle to stop the evil machinations fails to feel important and I ended up reading through the whole book, waiting for it to start.

What leaves me perplexed is that the book is just the type of book that I could've and should've liked - the theme and lots of the ideas in it are just the kind of things I find enjoyable and there's nothing wrong the writing either. But somehow because of the discontinuity of the story and lack of reason to find the actions of the protagonists important, or like-able, it just fell flat to me.

I will, however, give the author another chance since several of my friends like him. In my pile of recently purchased books is Iain M Banks "The Player of Games" which sounds promising, hoping to like that one more and perhaps yet become a fan of mr. Banks.

Så länge jag minns

My grandfather is the kindest, gentlest and most humble person you'll find. He has worked hard all his life and never once complained. I now know why...

"Så länge jag minns" means "As long as I remember" and is my grandfather, Ole Hagnäs', story from when he was called upon to protect his country in 1942, at just 18 years of age, until the end of the war. Our country owes so much to him and his generation, they made the greatest of sacrifices for our freedom and asked for nothing but peace in return.

Ole, "Faffa" as we grandchildren call him, never talked about his experiences in the war. This book is for all of us the heart-wrenching explanation as to why he doesn't want to talk about it - it describes events no one should be force to witness and the feeling of helplessness over what is happening around him. War is hell and there are very few heroes, mostly just young men dying.

Writing this book caused many sleepless nights for Ole as he was forced to remember things he spent over 60 years forgetting, yet we are all so happy he wrote it down so it will never be forgotten.

The book is written in the clear and simple swedish of an uneducated but thoughtful man and doesn't pretend to be anything but the personal memories and recollections of a simple infantryman. Obviously it has personal significance for me as the several close calls with death that Ole had show me how lucky I am to even exist!

While I am hopelessly biased towards the book, it has been my most emotional reading experience ever, I also think that the book will be an interesting read for people that have grandparents with similar experiences or just wants to read a very personal account of the war from a simple infantryman's viewpoint. There are enough history-books and biographies of the leaders and heroes - this is from and about the people who actually fought the war and dug the trenches.

P.s.. The book should be on sale at "Luckan" at the Kokkola Library soon or if you are further away I can arrange a copy for you, price is 25 euros.

Book review: 59 Seconds

As mentioned in my review of "Finding Flow" (http://www.henryhagnas.com/book-review-finding-flow ) I prefer self-help books that are based on actual science and gives real, practical, suggestions on what to improve. Professor Richard Wiseman's book, "59 Seconds - Think a little Change a lot," most definitely belongs in the science-based self-help section. It is in fact a study in what parts of what self-help books tend to tell you are actually based on science.

Instead of concentrating on one or a few topics of improvement, Professor Wiseman takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of all kinds of little nifty and scientifically proven ways to think and act to improve your mood, creativity, cognitive ability and motivation among other things. He has condensed hundreds of articles into an easy and fun to read format of just over 300 pages, naturally with all the footnotes and source-information necessary. Each chapter has a general theme, "Happiness," "Persuasion," "Motivation" and "Creativity" just to name the first four. Every chapter begins with an overview of what modern science thinks of the subject, before going into more details about some of the main research and then ends with a "59 second"-howto on what you can do. If you are a busy person you can just skip to this part and read his suggestions.

As an added bonus, Professor Wiseman also touches upon the most popular myths of psychology that you might have read about or heard from someone - such as playing Mozart to your baby will make it smarter (sorry, won't help) and so on. It's really interesting how some things just end up in the popular zeitgeist without being based on much facts at all.

Very interesting topics in a fast and easy to read format, I would recommend this to anyone who likes to know more about psychology and the world around us. Myself? I moved my favorite potted plant to my desk for a 15% increase in creativity.

Book review: Finding Flow

I like the idea of self-help/self-improvement books, some would argue because I need help but I'd like to think of it as improving myself :)

The problem with this subject is that there are as many opinions as there are people, lots of books are written by "gurus" that really have no business trying to tell people how to live their lives, some are even detrimental in that they build up false hopes and dreams that can, and will, be shattered before long. Basically you should avoid books that promise things to be easy or sounds too good to be true. Try figuring out if they are based on actual science and if the person writing has any credentials in psychology or a related field. Just being a successful human being doesn't translate into being a good teacher of how to be human so avoid reading books by celebrities that want to tell you their secret (or read them as autobiographies to see how one person did it, don't try to copy them).

"Finding Flow - The Psychology if Engagement with Everyday Life" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is one of the ones based on real research and years and years of experience. Dr. Csikszentmihalyi has written many books and hundreds of articles about psychology and is a leading researcher on positive psychology as well as the main proponent for the concept of "flow" which is described in this book.

Flow is the state when a person is fully concentrated and focused on a task that is challenging but manageable. According to Dr. Csikszentmihalyi its one of the most positive and rewarding states to be in but surprisingly hard to reach. According to his and his colleagues research not everyone experiences flow-state very often, or ever.

The book is a short and easy read in around 160 pages (with some tens of pages with notes and source-material). It contains different insights about how we reach flow and what we can do to enter flow-state but it's not an easy how-to book. You need to digest the material and compare it to your own life and make changes in your life and ways of thinking to be able to use these insights in your day to day life. Reading books like this can make you mindful of what you can do and think differently about and can be useful pointers if you want to improve your life quality.

What the book brought to be was a reminder of how important (and fun) it is to enter flow and made me think about ways to add more flow-moments to my life. While I do have these moments at times, when running, reading, writing and programming I could try to master more of my skills to a level where I feel in control and have more personal (and professional) projects that have clear and attainable goals that are easy to get into and work on. Creating time and space where you can concentrate fully on the task is also important so less twitter & Facebook, more single-tasking! I'll also probably re-read this book a month or two from now too because it feels like one of those books that have more to give than can be gleaned from just one reading.

Happily recommending this for most of my peers, I think we all enjoy flow-states both personally and professionally even if we don't know what to call it and being more mindful and controlled about it can only be a good thing!

Book Review: Death from the Skies!

Book review: The Men Who Stare at Goats

“The Men Who Stare at Goats” is written by Jon Ronson and currently being turned into a movie, soon to be released, starring George Clooney and Ewan McGregor (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1234548/). The book is said to be a true story but it feels more like a “Based on a True Story”-movie. Annoying in the way that you don’t know if some parts are modified or exaggareted and what parts have not been told.

The story is that within the US Armed Forces there has been extensive experimenting with different weird and unplausible methods based on paranormal or new age thinking. Remote viewing, killing with your mind and all sorts of things. This in itself shouldn’t be surprising and researching into different modalities, however unlikely, is understandable. What seems tragic, as suggested by the book, is that some of these thoughts and experiments would have found new life under the War on Terror and the Bush-regime. Torture by music, possibly using subliminal messages in interogations etc. Even some of the Abu Ghraib-torture would be based on psychological warfare that was first discovered while doing cooky experiements after the Vietnam War.

The book, however, makes this connection very strenuously - based on the earlier research done and what has trickled out through the media aswell as suggestions by some clearly paranoid or delusional people. That is, in fact, my main annoyance with the book - it gives alot of space for some clearly delusional people to tell their story, a story that they have been making alot of money on by telling it to weak-minded people. According to the book, the remote viewing-experiments for instance gave rise to the charlatans that have since made alot of money pretending to be able to remote-view. The “Heaven’s Gate”-suicides are supposed to, again - according to the book, be connected to remote viewers who said that they could see/sense the aliens on the Hale-Bopp comet.

So I guess that is why the book is so annoying and not even funny to me, while the writer clearly isn’t a believer in the nonsense he has to give too many delusional people space in the book to make it work. The fact that the book isn’t much fun to read almost gives it a credibility it would’ve lacked if it had been made more interesting… Sad but true..

The book is, however, only around 250 pages and a quick read so if you want to read to book after you seen the movie that’s fine, you won’t loose too much of your life to it. If you live around Turku you can come get it from me, I won’t be reading it again :). Not recommending it though.

Book review: The Best Camera (is the one that's with you)

Chase Jarvis is a creative and talented photographer that is very active and popular on the Internet. Personally I don’t follow everything he does but my brother is a big fan and has shown me some of his best work. His latest project has been the combination of an iPhone application for taking and editing pictures on the go, aswell as a book to present them. All the pictures in the book have been taken and edited with his iPhone over the course of the last year. The application, along with the social community built around its users, has gotten alot of attention.

I ordered the book as a birthday present for my brother (at his suggestion) but had to thumb through it before giving it away…

The whole idea around the book is, like the title suggests, that the best camera is the one that is with you. Chase lives a way more interesting life than I do, with pictures from Alaska to Chile and so on but also presents them in the book very nicely. The application has lots of very “artsy” filters which are almost annoying to the layperson, I think with all the travel and eye for good opportunities he has the book could’ve been just as good without all the effects. That said, it’s a cool application (that should be used with moderation).

What the book does best is, however, to inspire you to use whatever camera you have at hand and look for fun photo opportunities in your daily life. The pictures are just Chase’s examples and by showing his pictures he in effect gives you permission to take pictures with your own crappy camera and reminds us that its the content that matters - not the megapixels and lenses.

Now I just hope that someone writes a similar application to the Maemo-platform so I have something to play around with on my N900, when it comes..

Book review: The World According to Twitter

As mentioned earlier, one of my tweets was published in David Pogues twitter-book and as a result I got a free copy of the book. That’s obviously a huge bias so you should probably ignore this review completely :).

Anyway, the book is a collection of the best answers to 95 questions David asked his followers via twitter. The questions, and answers, range from quirky to funny to surprisingly serious and even at times useful. For a book written in a medium that embraces a short attention span it’s surprisingly readable and even captivating.

It’s a fun book that is an excellent gift, especially to someone who is a twitter-naysayer as it actually does show how twitter can be a fun and useful medium. You don’t need 500 000 followers to get good support, help or comic relief but it does help if you are writing a book :).

The twitter-natives might walk past it and I’ll admit, I would probably not have thought of buying it myself. That said, I laughed out loud several times and smiled almost all the way through the book and realised that we should all make room for happy, silly and fun books like this in our bookcases!