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Originally uploaded by lippo

At hockey tournaments, especially travel tournaments, there’s a lot of down time between games. I usually bring a book to the rink so I have something to do. Nobody else does this. Nobody. In hockey circles, I’m known as the guy who brings books to the rink.

This weekend, we’re at a tournament in San Jose. One of the dads from our team — I think he’s a copier salesman — says to me, “I can’t understand why anyone reads fiction.”

He says it, not in a rude way, but not in a complimentary way either.

I say, “Oh. Well, I can’t understand why anyone lives his whole life inside his own head and never gets curious about what life looks like to other people.”

So I probably won’t have to talk to him the rest of the season.

Later the same day, this guy knocks back a couple of double Scotches at a team dinner and proceeds to make gay sex jokes — loudly — the rest of the evening.

I was reading a Tolstoy story called “Family Happiness” in bed last night. It was close to midnight when I finished it.

“Good story,” I announced to my wife, although she was 90 percent asleep by that time.

Without opening her eyes, she asked, “What was it about?”

“A man and a woman fall in love and get married. They’re very happy for a while but then the marriage starts to come apart.”

“Because the husband spends too much time on Facebook?” she asked.

“No, they didn’t have Facebook in 1860. What I didn’t see coming though is that the story turns out to have a happy ending after all.”

“Perfect,” she said. “What did you learn from it?”

“The past is gone, but you can still find a new life and a different kind of happiness.”

“With the same wife?”

“Yes.”

“Perfect,” she said.

From Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler:

• Books You Needn’t Read
• Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading
• Books Read Before You Even Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written
• Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered
• Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First
• Books Too Expensive Now And You’ll Wait Till They’re Remaindered
• Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback
• Books You Can Borrow From Somebody
• Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Had Read Them, Too
• Books You’ve Been Planning To Read For Ages
• Books You’ve Been Hunting For Years Without Success
• Books Dealing With Something You’re Working On At The Moment
• Books You Want To Own So They’ll Be Handy Just In Case
• Books You Could Put Aside To Maybe Read This Summer
• Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves
• Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified
• Books You’ve Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It’s Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them

From the weekly Northwood High School bulletin:

Do you like reading? Do you like children? Do you like children but not reading? Or reading but not children?

Come to the Giving Tree meetings every Monday in Mr. Emery’s room 1103.

As I’m writing this article, I’m trying to formulate ideas, understandings, and experiences into words. When you read this article, you try to understand what I’m saying within the context of your experiences. In the process of narrowing my bandwidth to words, and you trying to expand the bandwidth from words to your understanding, a lot is lost. No matter how well I write and you read. And, most of us are not superb writers and readers.

— Ken Schwaber

The average software developer reads less than one professional book per year (not including manuals) and subscribes to no professional magazines. These developers are not developing or advancing themselves professionally. About 75% of these people do not have a degree in computer science or a related field. They learn by trial-and-error and on-the-job training, which means that they risk learning other people’s bad habits rather than industry best practices. This method of professional development perpetuates ineffective, inefficient practices that hinder the success of software projects.

— Construx.com