It’s an interesting idea. If you are like me and interested in evolution, but haven’t read much about Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, you should take a look. But I’ll leave it Miller to actually lay out the argument. He does a much better job than I could.

Near the end of the book came the following passage. As an artist, this passage jumped off the page.

Among competent professionals in any field, there appears to be a fairly constant probability of success in any given endeavor. (Psychologist Dean Keith) Simonton’s data show that excellent composers do not produce a higher proportion of excellent music than good composers—they simply produce a higher total number of works. People who achieve extreme success in any creative field are almost always extremely prolific. Hans Eysenck became a famous psychologist not because all of his papers were excellent, but because he wrote over a hundred books and a thousand papers, and some of them happened to be excellent. Those who write only ten papers are much less likely to strike gold with any of them. Likewise with Picasso: if you paint 14,000 paintings in your lifetime, some of them are likely to be pretty good, even if most are mediocre. Simonton’s results are surprising. The constant probability of success idea sounds counterintuitive and of course there are exceptions to this generalization. Yet Simonton’s data on creative achievement are the most comprehensive ever collected and in every domain that he studied, creative achievement was a good indicator of the energy, time, and motivation invested in creative activity.

Let that sink in a little bit. No really. Let that sink in. Ponder it for a little bit before you read on.

I think most creative people I know would think something similar to this. If you want to be good at something, do it as much as you can. But I think we all tend to temper this by thinking that there is such a thing as talent, and talent is what separates the great from the good. Of course there is some truth to that. We have all met people who seem to have some special innate talent for music or art or comedy. We think they are great, just because they have a great talent.

In my field of comedy, I’ve often heard it said that some people are just funny. You can’t teach it. There have been a number of people I’ve met who were hilarious in their first improv class. I met Tina Fey and Jack McBrayer (of 30 Rock) years ago, when they were just starting out in improv, long before they were famous. They both seemed amazingly talented right from the beginning. Comedy seemed natural for both of them, and their success is no surprise to anyone who knew them years ago.

But maybe even then, they were simply more prolific than the rest of us. Perhaps they spent a lot more time when they were kids making people laugh or telling stories to their friends. By the time I met them in their early 20s, they had already spent much more time and effort developing their sense of humor than the average competent improvisor, as a natural part of their daily interactions.

Of course, we are talking about a correlation here, not necessarily a causation. It may simply be that those who are great at something are driven to be prolific. Perhaps those who are merely good are just naturally less prolific. In fact, that thing we call talent might not be what we think it is. Instead of talent being this innate ability to create, maybe talent is simply the drive to devote lots of time and energy to the things we feel passionate about. But I don’t that is the right conclusion. That’s not what Simonton is saying. He is saying that as long as you have reached a certain competence the chance of any one piece of work being great is generally about the same. Since we can’t really know if there is a causation either way, it’s reasonable to suppose that being prolific has a good chance of resulting in greatness.

I’ve always thought that determination and perseverance are much more important than talent. Writing is a great example. I’ve known lots of people who dabbled in writing and seemed competent at it. I’ve also known people who are great writers. What is the difference between the two? The great writers have spent much more time and energy writing. If you are competent at writing and think you can’t be great, you are wrong. The only thing that separates you from being great is time and energy.

Want to be a great actor? Act in a lot of plays, the more the better. Want to be a great playwright? Write lots of plays, hundreds of them if you can. Want to be a great songwriter? Write a new song every day. Eventually you will write some great ones.

The book is a short one, telling the story of a professor from a South African technical college, David Lurie, who falls into disgrace. The story begins with the dissolution of his relationship to a prostitute, then leads into a rather tactless and boorish attempt of his to start an affair with a young student. When the affair is revealed, he deals with the inquiry badly, leading to his dismissal. From here the professor goes to the South African countryside to live with his daughter on what remains of a communal farm.

There are several reasons this book produced such a good discussion I think. First, the general opinion of the book was all over the map with some people absolutely loving the book and other despising it. One woman said that when she finished the last chapter, she threw it across the room in disgust. While another woman said that she was mesmerized by the prose. Several people agreed with her and it seemed that a few people finished the entire book in one night, in one sitting.

Another reason the book produced a good discussion was that nearly all of the characters, besides the professor, were difficult to fathom. The motives, desires and intentions of the student who sleeps with the professor, of his daughter Lucy and of Petrus, Lucy’s nearest neighboring farmer, are all hard to discern. While there are plenty of salient hints as to what they are thinking and why they make their choices, they remain just beyond our understanding. It is clear that Professor Lurie does not understand those people who are close to him, and so these characters also remain partially closed to the reader. This left a lot of room for us to discuss these characters and try to figure out what was going on.

One thing that we all seemed to agree on is that Lurie may be the most unlikeable character in any book we have read. There are other characters in the same book that do more despicable things, but Lurie is unable to recognize that he has done anything wrong and his arrogance in dealing with the college authorities, his daughter and Petrus is particularly unappealing. Still it is different to dislike a character than to dislike a book. This is definitely a book I would recommend for a book club if you are looking for something that will spark an interesting discussion.

In college I was an English major, but I never loved literature back then. I had a great class my Freshman year called Introduction to Poetry. This was mainly because the instructor, a grad student at the time, was so jazzed to teach the class. He also held office hours at the local bar. He would make you play pinball with him while you discussed your paper. It was that first semester that I decided to couple an English and Rhetoric major with a Cinema Studies minor. Despite many tedious English classes to follow, I plowed ahead with that plan.

I did have a few other good experiences in literature classes. I spent a year in London studying lit and there were a few lectures that stick with me to this day. But somewhere along the line, I lost my love for reading fiction. Oh sure I would occasionally pick up a book and read it. Mostly I read a book it was non-fiction however. I read plenty of books about science, math, poker, current events and politics, but novels were rare.

Then last year I was in a book club and when I moved back home I started one here in Peoria. Here are the books we have done and are scheduled:

• June: Little Children by Tom Perrotta
• July: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
• August: Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
• September: The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
• October: Old School by Tobias Wolff
• November: The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory

The discussions so far have been some of the most interesting and pleasant conversations I’ve had in a long time. Books provide a context to have intelligent, impassioned conversations, where everyone can have a point of view and get behind it without stepping on each others toes. I’m sure it’s possible to leave a book club offended, but it certainly doesn’t have the inevitability of a discussion about politics or religion.

If you are looking for a good conversation with some interesting people, a book club is probably a good bet.

We have just given Amazon permission to create kindle-books from Hold ‘em Poker for Advanced Players and The Theory of Poker. We’ll see how these do and then decide if we should do any more.

Finally some decent quality books on poker will be available for the Kindle. These two books by David Sklansky are must reads for any student of poker.

What are the requirements for inclusion on my list? Books must be in paperback and ubiquitous enough to be found in a local library. A big bonus if they are available for the Kindle (I may only use Kindle-available books for purely selfish reasons). Oh and they must be good books, hopefully with a bit of an edge.

I’m also considering doing some kind of virtual version of the book club. Perhaps I would do it in SecondLife, or via a group in Facebook or on my message board. Sounds like fun and not that much more work since we would read the same book in the different locations.

The book is dense, bringing together a huge number of scientific studies that date back to the beginning of the the 20th century. His goal seems to be to overwhelm the reader with evidence that many of the assumptions about diet, obesity and disease are wrong. He isn’t content to give you one or two examples of studies that suggest that carbohydrates are the primary factor behind obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer and a range of other modern illnesses that were rare before the 20th century. He piles it on, determined to make sure that someone can’t read his book and dismiss it as “some fad diet book.” If you say he is wrong, you better bring your citations with you.

I’ve enjoyed the ride, but I wonder how many readers get bogged down and don’t finish it, or don’t care so much about the reams of evidence that Taubes has compiled and want to skip to his conclusions. One passage near the end that jumped out at me as something that people need to know:

By the mid-1960s, four facts had been established beyond reasonable doubt: (1) carbohydrates are singularly responsible for prompting insulin secretion; (2) insulin is singularly responsible for inducing fat accumulation; (3) dietary carbohydrates are required for excess fat accumulation; and (4) both Type 2 diabetics and the obese have abnormally elevated levels of circulating insulin and a “greatly exaggerated” insulin response to carbohydrates in the diet

He has done a good job. His book is why I’m trying a low carb diet. I’m taking a gamble, even going directly against my doctor’s orders to lower my already low cholesterol, hoping that would help my ailing gallbladder (after all, my first three gallbladder attacks all came after large restaurant meals full of carbs).

I’m going to give it a try. I’ll see how I feel in a month. Will I feel better? Will I lose the 20 pounds I have left to lose? Will I have another gallbladder attack? I’ll let you know.

UPDATE: I blogged too soon. I’m now in the epilogue and he has 7 main points he was trying to communicate in the book. I’ll add them here later.

Many of my favorite poker books are from Two Plus Two Publishing and none of them are available yet. Judging from this thread on their forums, they have no plans to release Kindle versions of their books. That’s a shame.

So what is available for the Kindle now? Well there are several books by Phil Helmuth. They all look like crap honestly. I don’t particularly like him anyway, but more importantly, I did once buy his book, “Play Poker Like the Pros” and returned it within a few hours. I just couldn’t read it and from what I did read, it was very light on useful advice.

There is one book that has his name on it that I started to read last winter, Phil Hellmuth Presents Read ‘Em and Reap. Thankfully, this was not written by Helmuth. It was better written and seemed much more useful. I’m considering buying it for my Kindle, since I don’t own a copy. Perhaps, I’ll download a sample and take a another look.

Phil Gordon’s book simply called Poker has good reviews, but it also looks very short on the kind of in depth strategy and tactics suggestions I enjoy.

Matt Lessinger’s The Book of Bluffs also looks promising but the reviews are decidedly mixed. I’ll have to find out more before I buy it.

There are a couple of non-fiction books about poker that I’ve read and enjoyed that are available. Poker Nation is a great read and Positively Fifth Street is also interesting. Lastly, One of a Kind, the story of Stu Ungar rise and fall in the poker world looks like it could be good. I’m downloading the sample of it and of Moneymaker. I’ll let you know if they are good.

I can’t be the only poker geek out there that would love to have copies of all my favorite poker books. The current lack of titles (only 36 show up when you search the Kindle store for ‘poker’) is probably an opportunity for some secondary poker authors to get noticed. If you are one of them, plead with your publisher to release your book in that format. I hope that Two Plus Two will come around soon as well, but I fear that they just don’t get it yet. If they wait too long, they might find another publisher will come along and challenge their lead in the poker books market.

UPDATE 3/22: Both the Moneymaker book and the book on Stu Ungar looked interesting. I downloaded the Ungar book and will have a review later.

I couldn’t wait to open it up.

It’s packaging looks a bit like a book.

Just turn it on, it’s ready to go.

The manual is loaded right onto the device and ready to read. It also had a number of samples already downloaded and ready to read which I had chosen from Amazon.com

The screen is hard to describe. It looks great. The pixels are tiny, it compares well to a printed page of text. And the screen saver images that appear when you shut it off are pretty neat too.

My first impressions are very positive. Two negative things:

1. The faux leather case is embarrassingly bad. It works fine when it’s closed and in transit, but it fits the device more like a flip flop fits a foot then a glove fits a hand.
2. The side buttons are easy to hit on accident.

Both of these problems have been well documented. I’m guessing that future models will address this.

However, so far the rest is great. I love the feel of it. The screen is excellent for reading. and I love not messing with a book binding to read. It rests in my lap and I just press a button to switch pages. Perfect.

I would write about it more, but I’m eager to finish reading the sample pages from Good Calories, Bad Calories.