Fire and Knowledge

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, 188 pages.

The other night I started The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin. I read for a few pages and struggled to pay attention. My thoughts wandered. There was nothing there to hook me. It was boring. I put it down.

The next day I started The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. I was hooked by the second page. I stayed up late to finish it.

The book is about Sam Spade, a detective agent in San Francisco. Spade is hired by multiple people to find a statue falcon and results in murder, double-crossing, and betrayal. You know, all that good stuff. It is said to be one of the best detective mysteries written, but I don’t read enough of them to know. I do know it was very good.

It’s not a profound book. It doesn’t deal with many “great ideas.” It’s not going to change your life, but it will be a great experience.

Look Me in the Eye by John Elder Robison, 304 pages.

John Elder Robison has Asperger’s Syndrome, but didn’t know until his thirties. Asperger’s is a form of autism that wasn’t labeled or understood until 1981. Those with Asperger’s are usually smart but have a difficult time understanding social cues and thus establishing relationships. They don’t express emotions like most people do, and when they do, they often appear to express the wrong one (like smiling when someone dies). It is often a lonely life.

John decided to write about his life with Asperger’s as a way to deal with his father’s death. His home life was tragic. His mother was crazy and his father an abusive drunk. He dropped out of school at 16. He had a genius for electronics and began an accidental career fixing and improving musical equipment. He did so well that he worked with KISS making their dazzling (and dangerous) guitars that smoked, lit on fire, shone hundreds of lights, or flew in the air and exploded.

Describing John as eccentric is gracious. He gives a nickname to those close to him that he insists on using. (His brother starts out Snort, then becomes Varmint. His parents are Slave and Stupid.) He seems to think of his brother, and eventually his son, as pets. He delights in elaborate pranks and tricking people. He rambles on for pages about “mate selection” and how to know if you’ve really selected the best sister (or, as he calls them, “unit”). And sometimes I wondered if his main point in the book was to show what an awesome guy he was.

It’s a bit disturbing, and many things struck me as wrong. Maybe some of it was. But after thinking more about it, I think most of it is just different. John Elder doesn’t think like I think, and if I was like him I would probably think the same way. He’s certainly unconventional and isn’t as culturally aware as most of us, but different isn’t always wrong.

And in many ways, I sympathize. I too had trouble relating to other children. I had few friends and many enemies, even though I was a nice kid. I was also diagnosed with a form of autism, though different from his, called sensory integration dysfunction. John’s story made me want to learn more about sensory integration, something I have never researched on my own.

I’d recommend this book. Be warned, though, that it is often profane. But it is a rare glimpse into a mind groping to understand the world around it. It just may cause you to do the same.

Eight Steps to Seven Figures by Charles Carlson, 293 pages.

What does it take to be a millionaire when you retire? Less than you think. Certainly less than I thought.

Charles Carlson gives eight steps to achieve that goal:

1. Start investing right now. Every day you wait is lost money.
2. Establish a goal that matters to you. If possible, make it measurable so you can track your progress.
3. Buy only stocks and mutual funds. Forget about the rest.
4. Buy only high quality stocks that are leaders in their field or, if you know the area, you are sure will be leaders. Buy what you know and when you don’t use no-load index funds.
5. Invest monthly, no matter how small. It adds up through compound interest and forces you to invest when the market is down. Diversify through time, not assets.
6. Buy and hold. Sell only when necessary. Never daytrade, which just makes your broker and government rich. Buying and holding makes you rich through better returns and tax reduction. And it’s less stressful to boot.
7. Limit taxes as much as possible by taking advantage of tax breaks. Hold stocks for at least a year (though the longer the better) and put in the maximum legal contributions into your 401(k) and/or IRA, or as much as you can afford.
8. Live a stable and simple life. Limit shocks to your finances – don’t divorce, don’t job or house hop, don’t get into debt, don’t have ten kids, don’t daytrade. Dare to be boring.

Sounds simple enough. Here’s an example. If a 20 year old invests just $67 per month into a 401(k) (assuming 11% average annual return), he will have a million-dollar portfolio by age 65. That’s less than $37,000 turned into $1,000,000, the magic of compound interest.

But the longer a person waits, the harder it gets. By age 30, the monthly requirement increases to $202 per month. By age 40, it’s $629 per month. That’s why the number one step is to start now, especially if you want to retire early.

If you want to be a millionaire, it isn’t that hard. It just takes a willingness to contribute regularly to your retirement account and live on less than your income. That’s something even I can do. And so can you.

The Sparrow (1996) by Mary Doria Russell, 408 pages.

Summary: After intercepting alien radio waves, Jesuit scientists are sent to the planet Rakhat on an anthropological mission of contact. They travel on an outfitted asteroid and arrive many years later. While learning about the sentient species and their cultures, things go terribly wrong. Emilio Sandoz is the only survivor of the mission, and he doesn’t want to explain why.

It’s an interesting, easy, disturbing read. The friendships that are formed by the main characters make the reader long for similar companionship in life. The priests are shown as real people with real struggles (though perhaps a little too much so).

The most weighty questions addressed are the existence, goodness, and plan of an omnipotent and compassionate God. Is everything that happens the plan of God? Fr. Sandoz, after much doubt and wrestling, comes to believes this. And as he comes into the culmination of God’s plan, he is spiritually broken when it turns out to be his worst possible nightmare.

Anne, the doctor, also struggles with the age-old question of theodicy. For example, after a teammate dies, she says:

“Why is it that God gets all the credit for all the good stuff, but it’s the doctor’s fault when [death] happens? When the patient comes through, it’s always ‘Thank God,’ and when the patient dies, it’s always blaming the doctor. Just once in my life, just for the sheer … novelty of it, it would be nice if somebody blamed God when the patient dies, instead of me.” (198)

I’d cautiously recommend this book. The vulgarity can get annoying and feel forced, but the book is challenging and perspective changing. It made me wrestle through theodicy along with the characters. If there is a loving God, why is there so much suffering? “Perhaps we can’t understand the answers,” says Fr. Marc Robichaus in his eulogy for Alan Pace,

“because we are incapable of knowing God’s ways and God’s thoughts. We are, after all, only very clever tailless primates, doing the best we can, but limited. Perhaps we must all own up to being agnostic, unable to know the unknowable.” (201)

And yet, we press on.