I’m reading Malcolm Gladwell’s new collection, What the Dog Saw, and just had to stop to comment.

It’s no wonder this guy’s books seem to defy the laws of gravity, hovering at the top of the New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller lists for dozens of months on end without visible means of support. The man can write.

It isn’t just his unconventional choice of topic; it isn’t just his fascinating conclusions; and it isn’t even just the way he weaves puzzles and draws out his mysteries, holding the crucial revelations and answers to the very end, like a great detective story.

It’s the way he uses words to paints pictures: the writing offers food for the ear, eye and palate, and not just the brain.

In “The Ketchup Conundrum,” his dicussion of why there are many varieties of mustard but very few of ketchup, he introduces a character with the undistinguished name of Andrew Smith. This man’s claim to fame is that he knows a great deal about ketchup, hardly what one would think of as the most memorable trait — but look at what he does:

“The world’s leading expert on ketchup’s early years is Andrew F. Smith, a substantial man, well over six feet, with a graying mustache and short wavy black hair.”

What does his physical description have to do with his expertise on ketchup? Nothing whatsoever. But it sure makes the whole passage that follows easier to grasp, enjoy and remember.

Later, in “Blowing Up,” his essay on financial forecasting, while discussing three workers at a little financial firm that specializes in options trading, he describes them this way:

“Taleb was up at a whiteboard by the door, his marker squeaking furiously as he scribbled possible solutions. Spitznagel and Pallop looked on intently. Spitznagel is a blond and from the Midwest and does yoga: in contrast to Taleb, he exudes a certain laconic levelheadedness. In a bar, Taleb would pick a fight. Spitznagel would break it up.”

Did he actually see these guys at a bar? Of course not. He’s visiting their office, not going out and carousing with them: but what a great image. And why does Taleb’s marker squeak “furiously”? (Why not just “noisily”?) And why even mention his marker? Does a furiously squeaking marker offer a window into Taleb’s personality, or at least, his mood at the time? (Cf. previous comment about bar fights.)

And by the way, did you notice the alliteration in “squeaking furiously as he scribbled possible solutions” and “Spitznagel is blond … a laconic levelheadedness”? The bar-fight-starter is all sibilants, and and the bar-fight-stopper is all retroflex “l” sounds.

The passage continues:

“Pallop is of Thai extraction and is doing a PhD in financial mathematics at Princeton. He has longish black hair and a slightly quizzical air. ‘Pallop is very lazy,’ Taleb will remark, to no one in particular, several times over the course of the day, although this is said with such affection that it suggests that laziness, in the Talebian nomenclature, is a synonym for genius.”

This is the reason The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers have been such enormously popular bestsellers: he makes his people come to life on the page.

He doesn’t just tell you about a subject: he makes a movie of it.

I’ve thought about doing this for years, but never got around to it before: noting down which books I’ve read recently. I think I “never got around to it” because it always seemed a bit self-indulgent, like declaiming to the world what I ate for breakfast: who cares?

But I’ve had a change of heart.

Here’s the thing. The past few years, I’ve noticed that every so often, something happens and I sort of run into a brick wall where I don’t seem to be able to write anything.

I have two or three (or more) book projects going, and there’s both passion for the topics (on my part) and urgency about their completion (on circumstances’ part) — but I hit that wall anyway. Lunch is over, I go downstairs to my desk, flip on the laptop, and my eyes promptly glaze. As Curly (of the Three Stooges) once so poignantly put it:

“I’m tryin’ ta think — but nothing happens.”

What’s wrong? Why can’t I write? Because: first I have to read.

Such a simple thing, but it’s taken me a while to figure it out. If you want a fireplace to give you heat, first you have to give it logs. If you want words and thoughts to come out of your head, you have to put words and thoughts into it. Reading: feeding the furnace.

Hence my change of heart: since I tell you all about the books I’m writing, wouldn’t it make sense also to mention the books I’m reading?

Surprisingly, although I mostly write nonfiction, most of what I read is fiction. I think that’s okay: the logs you put in a fireplace are the same energy as the heat you get out of it—but not in the same configuration. As long as there’s something interesting going in, we should have something interesting coming out.

So, here we are, first installment: the books I’ve happened to read in the past month or two, starting with the most recent (finished about 15 minutes ago) and progressing back in time to October:

Deadeye Dick, by Kurt Vonnegut.

I got inspired to read more Vonnegut in part because he makes a cameo in John Irving’s latest novel (see below) and Irving studied with him; and in part because a brand new collection of previously unpublished Vonnegut short stories just appeared …

Look at the Birdie, by Kurt Vonnegut.

Previously unpublished short stories by the master. I wrote a eulogy here when Vonnegut’s peephole was closed two-and-a-half years ago (to use the poignantly silly terminology from Deadeye Dick). Vonnegut was one of the most brilliant wordsmiths who ever lived, and also an extraordinarily decent, compassionate human being with an enormously aching heart for the foibles, kindnesses and tragedies of humankind.

Last Night in Twisted River, by John Irving.

Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany is one of my favorite novels of all time. This latest comes perhaps closest to that book in tone and overall flavor. I absolutely loved every riotous, tragic minute of it. Irving’s recent several novels (Until I Find You and The Fourth Hand) were disappointments to some; this one has the master back in perfect form.

In viewing some Irving interviews on YouTube (here’s an excellent one, 40 minutes’ worth at the October 2009 National Book Festival), I learned something fascinating: with every one of his twelve novels, he has started crafting the book with the last sentence (“and once I’ve got it, it never varies, not even a punctuation mark”) and then works backwards, outlining the story from back to front, until he has “found” the first sentence — and then starts the actual writing of the book: “By then, it’s a story I already know; all I have to do know is focus on the sentences themselves.”

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wrobleski.

This debut novel won overwhelming critical acclaim (including being an Oprah’s Book Club pick) when it came out last year. [Note: Not a Pulitzer, as I mistakenly wrote earlier — oops.] It’s not easy reading, because the writer sometimes writes a bit impressionistically, so you are not entire sure if what you just read is what you think you just read—but it is gorgeous, magnificent writing and a powerfully moving story.

Relentless, by Dean Koontz.

“What?!” you say, “from Wrobleski to Dean Koontz?!” Yup. Ana and I raced through this latest Koontz together last month on our trip to Malaysia — and we had a blast. Koontz is very uneven: some of his books are just mediocre thrillers, others are masterworks. The Odd Thomas series is the latter, and this one is up there. (How can you not love a thriller about a novelist who discoverss that a reviewer who has just panned his latest book turns out to be a homicidal psychopath who is genuinely out to get him?)

Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans, by A. J. Baime.

The only nonfiction in the bunch (though I read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers before this, and am just now starting his new book, What the Dog Saw). This is the wonderfully told tale of the glory days of the Mustang and how the two auto giants fought to reign speed supreme. Baime’s prose is mostly delightful, sometimes delicious. Check out the opening sentence:

“In 1963, following a business deal gone sour, two industrialists from either side of the Atlantic became embroiled in a rivalry that was played out at the greatest automobile race in the world.”

Look how much information, drama and suspense is packed into those 33 words—and not a one wasted!

My Deadly Misunderstanding coauthor Mark Siljander has a wonderful perspective on the implications and aftermath of the recent violence at Fort Hood, Texas. You can read about it here, but we also reprint it below:

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Once again the country recoils from violence, this time the deadly shooting that occurred last week at Ft. Hood. I am deeply saddened to see this violence, as in other incidents, being linked to Islam, raising concerns against Muslims living in the U.S. and in the military.

As always, I hear the question from my Christian friends: “Why don’t we hear condemnation from the Muslims for such horrific acts?” In fact, there are many Muslims who denounce the violence every time it occurs, as demonstrated by Muslim leaders in a press conference on November 5.

On the other hand, some Muslims feel that others must know they are people of peace and lament how the minority of extremists are causing the name of Muslims to be tarnished as a whole. Some of them spoke out in the Indianapolis Star this week:

“There is no room in Islam for this kind of behavior. These people keep doing it, and it is unfortunate,” Siddiqui said. “We can only do our part and live our lives and live what we believe is true.”

One of the two Muslims in Congress, Rep. Andre Carson, expressed concern for those impacted by the violence, but followed up with a further concern:

“[He] finds hypocrisy in the fact that faith has been at the heart of the discussion of the Fort Hood shootings when little has been said about the faith of a man who is accused of killing one person and injuring five at an office in Orlando, Fla., on Friday.”

We are wrestling as a nation; it is so tempting to pigeonhole religious beliefs as a motivator for this violence. In reality, both religion and unnumbered other factors are possible motivators in a person’s decision to inflict such horrible destruction on himself and others. Do we oversimplify to make quick sense of the unexplainable?

I must repeat that in all my relations with those of the Muslim faith, the few I have encountered who think violence and God go together have twisted the truth. It is a perversion of Islam, and a pervision in other religions or belief systems as well. As a Sudanese sheikh once told me, “True religion is a state of being — a state of submission to God.”

Where does this leave us? We would do our best to view Muslims just as any others, free to live as any other American. This is essential and a core of our constitution.

Does this mean we ignore warning signs of extremism? No. But a warning does not indicate we should condumn an entire people, but that we should aggressively fight to undermine the ideologies that influence a human to do evil against another person.

In the aftermath of Ft. Hood, my friend Dr. Tawfik Hamid commented on the importance of addressing the ideologies of violence that, in certain cases, infiltrate religious education:

“These educational or ideological factors must be addressed in an honest manner to avoid further calamities and to protect young Muslims from the damaging effects of these forms of teaching.”

This battle for the heart and mind is a battle only God can truly win. We do well to both leave it to God and actively become his emissaries. Not emissaries of judgment or ridicule, but of grace and mercy. We love because he first loved us. Do we have the right to any other option?

I would also like to share an excerpt from A Deadly Misunderstanding that seems particularly apt and helpful in light of recent events; you can find it on pages 219–222.

Over the last few years, I have had the opportunity to spend some time with two former prime ministers of Somalia, a nearly 100 percent Muslim country so torn apart by its warring clans that it hasn’t had a functioning central government since 1991. Their comments echoed the same thoughts: as one lamented, since civil war seized his country the late 1980s, there had been endless division, lawlessness and interminable violence. He was now in the United States, he said, on a mission to find some kind of solution to his people’s seemingly interminable crisis.

I asked him what he thought was at the root of the problems in Somalia. Was it a religious division?

“No,” he replied, “we are all Muslims.”

Did he think it came down to a conflict based on ethnicity?

“No,” he repeated, “we are all essentially the same ethnic background.”

Was it tribal? He shook his head. Cultural? He sighed, and shook his head again. Grasping at straws, I asked if there were differences in language or dialect?

“No,” he said, “we mostly all speak the same language.”

Why would the Somali people stay so alienated for so long, and over what? What would drive the rage, mistrust, and wanton killing of neighbors and friends if they are all essentially the same people? As we talked, the prime minister and I came to the same conclusion: the center of the problem was simply the dark side of human nature.

While this book focuses on bridges between the Muslim East and Christian West, the issue at its core is humanity’s historic compulsion to be at war with itself. Our excuses for war are endless, but the truth is that war and conflict, division and mutual hostility need no more basis than the stubborn human tendency that is forever splitting our world into bitterly opposed camps.

Whether Arab against Arab (Iraq), Christian against Christian (Northern Ireland), or Arab, Christian, and Jew against each other (Lebanon), it is at its core the same conflict. Beirut’s Green Line, Korea’s 38th Parallel, Germany’s Berlin Wall, the United States’ Mason-Dixon Line, and all the hundreds of thousands of similar partitions that we have erected throughout history and around the globe-they are all echoes of the same barren line of separation within the human heart, the same deadly misunderstanding.

In ancient Egypt, the heart was considered the seat of thought and emotion, and was the only organ not removed during mummification. The heart is mentioned in the Bible more than any other topic, and is discussed more than 150 times in the Qur’an.

“If we could just find a way to influence the human heart to love rather than to hate,” said my Somali friend, “then there may be hope for Somalia.”

Indeed, if we can find a way to do this, then there is hope for the rest of the world as well.

The concepts Jesus taught are as radical today as they were two thousand years ago, because they run counter to our divisive human nature-a nature that is perennially finding new Green Lines to create and then shooting across them at each other. It seems clear to me that these concepts represent the only hope of bridging the Muslim-Christian divide and subduing the shrill escalation of rhetoric, resentment and retribution between East and West. We know that most foreign ministries and formal diplomatic bodies (certainly including the U.S. Department of State) will not likely engage a policy of “loving” their enemies. But you and I can do exactly that.

How do we do this? What does this kind of love look like? Again, Paul’s first letter to his little community in Corinth provides a vivid picture of both what this kind of love is not (envious, boastful, proud, focused on its own agenda, readily provoked, always keeping a tally of the other’s wrongs, or relishing trouble and misfortune) and also what it is: patient, kind, truthful, protecting, trusting, hopeful, enduring, and finally, consistent and never-failing. I have witnessed first-hand how friendships based on these aspects of love can yield power beyond imagination, penetrating the hearts of even the most hardened despot.

Can we do this? Of course we can, and we must. The alternative is to do nothing and see our world consumed by an irrational maelstrom of hatred and violence.

(from A Deadly Misunderstanding)

If you have never seen my Secret Language of Money coauthor Dr. David Krueger speak, you’re in for a treat.

This video (also below) presents a jam-packed seven minutes that gives you a great sense of the mastery of his material that Dave brings to the topic — and the topic is you (that is, you and your money).