• The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption © 2012
• O’Reilly Media
• ix+160 pages

What would the world look like if information sources—television, websites, newspapers—had an ingredients label on them like our food has?

In The Information Diet, Clay Johnson examines the link between the obesity epidemic and information gluttony. The parallel is interesting. For example, just as it’s healthier to get food straight from the source, it’s better to get our information closer to the source. It’s time we stopped eating junk information that just reinforces our beliefs, and began to understand and filter data for ourselves.

This topic interested me immediately since I’ve been reflecting on Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows. While Johnson acknowledged his debt to Carr, his analysis of the information differs. Carr, in line with the work of McLuhan, argued that the medium is damaging our attention spans. Johnson argued that it’s our fault as consumers. This sounds a little naive to me. I think of the analogy to nicotine addiction. To be sure, the smoker is responsible for their actions but cigarette manufacturers and marketers surely share some of the blame!

Johnson wrote this book for highly addicted info-consumers. In his chapter on “Attention Fitness,” he suggested training your mind like a runner trains his body. Set an interval timer for a five minute interval followed by a one minute break. Do your best to focus for five minutes straight before flaking out for a minute. You can grow your attention span from there. I would suggest there are some underlying psychological or physiological issues that should be dealt with first for people who can’t focus on something for more than five minutes.

My only real problem with the book was the bait-and-switch marketing. The full title is: The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption. It would be more accurate to call it: The Information Diet: How Becoming Better Informed will Help You Become a Better Political Citizen. I understand that Johnson’s background is politics and you write what you know. That said, it felt disingenuous to get to the final chapter of the book to find an essay on how the United States government doesn’t have enough politicians to represent the needs of its people.

In the end, Johnson’s argument was very thought-provoking. If you’re curious about why and how to reclaim your attention span from time-sucks like Facebook, Twitter, and the television, The Information Diet is an excellent source of … well … information.

Disclaimer: A review copy of this book was provided at no cost through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer’s program.

• Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen © 2009
• Vintage: Random House
• 287 pages

“It simply makes you want to run.”

I bought this book because of that blurb from Outside Magazine on the inside of the cover.  They’re absolutely right. After all the chapters are read and all the information is digested, the desire to run sticks with you. McDougall has written some strong motivation here.

Born to Run is a collection of narratives thrown together into one perfectly balanced package. There’s the meta-narrative about the author who sought to discover why he couldn’t run very far without injury. This question led him to the reclusive Tarahumara tribe that live in the Copper Canyons of Mexico. Their running ability is legendary—what’s their secret?

From the Tarahumara, McDougall branches out into ultramarathon culture, introducing the reader to a diverse cast of hard-core distance runners. One of these runners is a devoted bare-foot enthusiast.

Compelling tangents such as Mexican drug-runners, the nefarious role of Nike in running injuries, and the human ability to run down wild game round out the package.

This book is equal parts travel, adventure, science, and sport. If you run or have ever thought about starting, enjoy this book!

• Player One: What Is to Become of Us © 2010
• Anansi
• 246 pages

This book started off very promising.

I’ve read almost everything Coupland’s written—certainly all his fiction. Like an band that’s been around for a few decades, he’s become a bit predictable. I keep reading him for the flashes of penetrating cultural insight he manages to describe so perfectly.

Player One started off with a string of metaphors that only Coupland’s mind can produce. Here’s an example:

Warren — her highly anticipated date — is wearing the bland politician’s smile of someone who knows that the bodies in the car trunk are, indeed, dead.

Unfortunately, after the second chapter, the characters started to feel like all the other characters in Coupland’s Novels. The moment that turned the book for me was when he used a long sentence from a previous work verbatim:

What separates humanity from everything else in this world — spaghetti, binder paper, deep-sea creatures, edelweiss, and Mount McKinley — is that humanity alone has the capacity, at any given moment, to commit all possible sins.

It’s a fantastic sentence … the first time you read it. Coming from the mouth of a second character in an unrelated book is just a little sad.

I’m not sure if Coupland will be able to extract himself from the role he’s typecast himself in. Right now he’s like REM and U2. A brilliant world-altering artist who needs to explore a new direction.

• Outliers: The Story of Success © 2008
• Little, Brown and Company
• 309 pages

Some people see the world differently. Instead of accepting long-standing assumptions they challenge accepted knowledge. Instead of admitting coincidence, they search for patterns where none were expected. Malcolm Gladwell is one of these people, and Outliers is the fruit of his labour.

In Outliers, Gladwell looks for the true causes for success underlying Hollywood-style rags-to-riches stories. Here are some of the questions he tackles:

• What roles do inherent genius and practice play in a success story?
• Why are the majority of successful hockey players born in January and February?
• Was Bill Gates’ wild success with Microsoft due to his brilliance, luck, or something else?

He even asks some questions that makes politically correct society squirm:

• How did a disproportionate number of Jewish immigrant descendants become lawyers?
• What role did Korean culture play in their (former) horrible airline safety record?
• Why are people of Asian descent better at math?

If you want to look deeper at what makes a modern hero, this book is a fascinating and sometimes quirky guide.

• The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment © 2009
• Simon & Schuster
• 236 pages

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you always told the truth (“Does this dress make me look fat”)? What if you outsourced your entire life—including arguments with your wife—to a call centre in India? Well, wonder no more. A. J. Jacobs has vicariously performed the sort of experiments on himself that we would never have the courage to try!

Jacobs has made a career out of experimenting on himself. His first book was the fruit of reading an entire encyclopedia. His second book recounted his year of Biblical fidelity. His current book, The Guinea Pig Diaries, collects a variety of different shorter experiments into one volume.

This is a funny book: not the sort of “funny” you’d pick up off the humour shelf at Chapters, but genuine intelligent laugh-out-loud funny. Jacobs doesn’t pull out of character when life gets awkward—he follows his experiments through to the end (and makes appropriate apologies after).

If you’ve read his earlier works, you’ll know the punishment his wife has had to endure. Jacobs listened to the emails of sympathy for his wife, and concluded this book with a month of doing absolutely everything she asked him to. That final essay alone is worth the price of admission.

• Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites…and Other Lies You’ve Been Told: A Sociologist Shatters Myths From the Secular and Christian Media © 2010
• BethanyHouse: Baker
• 249 pages

As the title suggests, Wright decided to set the story straight on Evangelical Christianity. Too many statistics are misinformed and misinterpreted. A sociologist familiar with the proper use of statistics, Wright provides the reader with up to date stats and interpretation.

Did I mention that he’s genuinely laugh-out-loud funny? Here’s my favourite quote:

At this point, allow me to interject that there is a crucial distinction between extramarital sex and extra marital sex. One is committing adultery, the other represents a better-than-average week, and they have very different consequences.

At times the sheer volume of stats and graphs became overwhelming. This isn’t a criticism—it’s the nature of the book. This is a volume worth pondering by anyone frustrated with the negative views of Evangelical Christianity portrayed by the media, and indulged in by ourselves.

Disclaimer: A review copy of this book was provided at no cost through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer’s program.

• The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith © 2010
• Zondervan
• 224 pages

Peter Hitchens will likely sell a lot of copies of this book because of his brother, famed atheist Christopher Hitchens (I’ll be honest, that’s why I snagged a copy). Fortunately, this book stands well on its own.

Peter uses autobiography and argument to make this point: Societies founded on atheism fail spectacularly. Having lived as a journalist in the Soviet Union, he witnessed the results of Lennin’s failed enforced-atheism. Upon returning to England, he was shocked to see the culture he was raised in degenerating in similar fashion.

A major pillar of radical atheism is the premise that religion causes suffering. This book undermines that pillar and actually proposes the opposite. Most wars fought in the name of religion are not really religious, but ethnic wars with religious labels. The worst suffering is found in atheistic societies.

I’d like to believe his argument but there’s one big hole unaccounted for. He nowhere accounts for the role that government style has to play in the situation. Can he really say that theistic societies are more civil than atheistic ones, or is it simply the case that democratically governed societies are more civil than communist-run states?

My last quibble is the way this book was marketed. The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith is not the main point of this book. A more accurate title would be The Rage Against God: Why Societies Founded on Atheism Fail. He really said very little about how his atheism led him to faith.

While I didn’t agree with all of his ideas, the overall argument of the book has certainly forced me think. What more can you ask for in a book?

Disclaimer: This review copy was provided free of charge by Zondervan.

• The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible © 2007
• Simon & Schuster
• 388 pages

While browsing through Rivendell (a great second-hand bookstore in Barrie), my friend Brian plucked this volume off the shelf and told me I had to buy it. Since he knows my sense of humour better than pretty much anyone, I brought it home.

This book is hilarious. I don’t use that superlative often, but it’s apt—apt, I tell you! The Year of Living Biblically is Jacobs’ attempt to follow every rule he could discover in the Bible, especially the odd ones. He devoted two thirds of his time to the Hebrew Bible, and the last third to the New Testament.

His sense of humour makes this book worth buying, but it’s his honesty that empowered the experiment. As a self-admitted agnostic, it was interesting to see how habits like daily prayer modified his outlook on life. As a pastor, I could only wish that the believers I know would approach their spiritual journey with such candor.

He wrote a book before this one (The Know-It-All), and another one after (The Guinea Pig Diaries). I’ll be launching into them soon.

• Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music © 2009
• Scribner (Simon & Schuster, Inc.)
• 262 pages

Ripped is 262 pages of the most compelling music-industry journalism I’ve ever read. I know that’s a big statement, but it’s true. I’ve read my fair share of Rolling Stone and other music ‘zines, and this outclasses them all. Here’s what I liked:

1. Kot knows his music. He’s telling the meta-narrative of the music business, but he never hesitates to dive into an analysis of a main player’s album.
2. Kot uses quotes well. When you finish a chapter on NIN, for instance, you really fell like you’ve heard from Reznor.
3. Each chapter is a self-contained article, tied thematically to the overarching story. You could pick any chapter out of this book and enjoy it alone.
4. Kot’s analysis of the music industry explains the Top 40-Style slop we’ve been bombarded with since the turn of the century.

If you’re interested in music, business, or both, you’ll enjoy this insightful book.

• Generation A © 2009
• Random House Canada
• 297 pages

Generation A is the story of how five young people’s lives become entangled after being stung by almost extinct bees. The plot’s little more than a vehicle to relate the meta-narrative of life in crumbling future. In the book, each of the five characters take time telling mini-stories which swirl thematically around this central thought: life is 95% suck and 5% hope.

The title of the book is an obvious nod to his brilliant Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. I was expecting the same piercing insight on the current generation that he offered to us Gen Xers a couple decades ago. Unfortunately, Coupland did little more than transplant the Generation X mindset into younger bodies.

In the end, there was too much plot to consider this a mere social commentary, but not enough plot to make a 300 page book very interesting. I’ve read everything that Coupland’s published, and would have to encourage a Coupland-virgin to begin elsewhere.

(If you are new to Coupland, start with Girlfriend in a Coma or Hey Nostradamus!.)