George Orwell wrote the perfect short novel.

John Knowles’ A Separate Peace is one of classic American novels that all high school students must read. I read it once in high school and even then it seemed like the Devon School was a cover for my school, Thayer Academy. Reading it again is a refreshing reminder that books can be written about high school and the subtle changes of the hours between childhood twilight and adult dawn that is not silly, campy, crass, dumbed down, or overwritten.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni – Your classic airplane book, read in the 1 1/2 flight from Jacksonville, Fla to Washington, DC. The story tells what the 5 dysfunctions are and how to combat them.

Who should read this book: A business flier with a 2-hour flight and a dead laptop battery, ScenicSoft circa 2000, the Democratic National Committee

I read this after reading Steve Pavlina’s entry on “The Power of Now”. Steve’s entry, while good, is not exactly an accurate description of the book’s contents, but rather how the content of the book remained with Steve and manifested in his life. The book is still an interesting read, for the content, your personal reaction to it, and the entertainment value of Eckhart Tolle’s pompous writing style.

On one hand, I’ve read some Zen materials and they were a bit too far out of my range to fully understand and apply or even consider. This book presents the same ideas–Zen for dummies. For some reason the content of this stuck, mostly likely because it’s the same point repeated over and over for 200 pages. I’ve gotten some value out of considering the difference between “life” and the trappings of life, my “life situation”, on a more daily basis. Individual reactions to the book are interesting, particularly given one of the main tenets of the book, which is that any resistance to the suggestion of disidentifying with your “life situation” (your ego’s doing) is put up by your ego to defend itself.

On the other hand, for over 200 pages, you’re subjected to an obnoxious writing style and illogical presentation of the content. While Tolle received his enlightenment after sitting on a bench, he knows how to teach you to achieve it without spending 2 years full-time at the park. Tolle frequently sounds impatient, having to teach to such unconscious beings the simplest of lessons. More frequently, however, he sounds like a nutjob with a theory. Is there much of a difference between Gene Ray and Eckhart Tolle, except that Tolle’s book has been featured on Oprah and the NY Times bestseller list and has sold 2 million copies?

A tough slog full of details and proof of theory with a large section in the middle on the genetic history of grains. Worth it — I certainly feel more informed, but don’t plan on a quick read.

I had only seen Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday, a movie I could watch 100 times over, and thus had not seen the full range of his abilities. The adaptation of the book was incredibly tolerable given the requirement of using child actors, the issues at hand, and the time period in which the film was made. Peck comes across as one of the few intelligent and compassionate men in the film, and in that a man ahead of his time, while wearing quite a weight of the loss of his wife and the sorrow and difficulty of having to raise 2 children as an only parent. The children do not ruin the film–the most you can usually say for children in films. And the sets and cinematography convey a poor small town Southern America at its finest in 1962.

Interspersed with the AFI films, we’ve been watching some documentary films. The first was Paris Is Burning and the second Devil’s Playground. Of wildly different subcultures, the 2 films were stunningly similar in some ways. The ethnic minority gay community of New York at their balls and the Amish teenagers on rumspringa explore the meaning of community, ecstatic celebration, and the pressures of making a more or less permanent lifestyle choice at a fairly young age. Both are good (and short), though Paris Is Burning is less predictable and more contextualized, largely because the community is.