Issue 49; The Morning Read Book Review

Words by T W Coombs

In this section I give my thoughts on the books I have been reading over coffee and breakfast in the morning.  This month three books were consumed, “When the Going was Good” by Graydon Carter and two Self Help style books by Mark Manson, “Art of Not Giving a F*ck” and “A Book About Hope”.

When the Going Was Good (pictured above)

Graydon Carter

Name dropping ego maniac, with humility, humour and a whole lot of winging it, minus the actual super ego that is.

This is how I describe the autobiography of Airmail Editor and ex Vanity Fair Editor Graydon Carter.  Not being a reader of Vanity Fair or being part of that time of publishing power houses the name Graydon Carter has only recently been known by me.  His name appears on a weekly basis since I started reading Airmail Weekly, an online weekly world news editorial magazine.  So when it was mentioned an autobiography was to come out, I thought why not for a morning read, not knowing a thing about Carter.

I now know a lot more about his time in publishing and being Editor of various magazines, with “When the Going Was Good”.  It is a well thought out and planned book, surely a nod to putting together Vanity Fair for twenty five years.  The writing is very conversational, like I am sat at lunch with Carter himself as he tells me his life story, without all the boring bits.  As truly no one usually cares about the exact time you joined this world.  But we do care about why you are disliked and possibly hated by Donald Trump, an award of its own, one to be applauded, and he really does have small hands.

From early life in Canada to running one of the most influential magazines ever in a time when the expense accounts were the size of a small nation's GDP.  Writers being commissioned and paid huge sums of expenses whether they needed them or not.  The journey goes through the magazine life crashing and his move to creating Airmail, after trying to “retire”.  Graydon Carter is now 75 and what a life lead and many years of Editoring still to come.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck and Everything Is F*cked (A Book about Hope)

Mark Manson

Sometimes a book comes along and is just fired into the stratosphere of consciousness, something that gets mentioned a lot, by so many different people.  In the media, by friends, by acquaintances.  So when the same two books were discussed by no less than four different people and they were mostly not known to each other, I thought I would just give them a go.  The downside was that both were in the realm of “Self Help” , the quack filled pool of made up nonsense and badly written books.  I thought about it for a few seconds, saw that they were cheap and bought them anyway.

As I was new to the current realm of self help style books I had no idea what was good or bad, so I was not starting out with the reason to advise you how wonderful or terrible this was from a help point of view.  However, I have read so many things over my many years that I can tell a good book from bad, whether you agree with me or not, I have a standard of writing that I require in anything I have handed money over for.

Let me give the brief versions of both books by Mark Manson, the “New York Times Bestseller” listed, “The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck” and “Everything Is F*cked (A Book about Hope)”.

We start with the idea to choose what you care about in the ‘Subtle Art’ and do not worry or care about things you have no control over in your life, no matter what.  A loved one leaves you, it is up to you how to deal with it and react, you can’t change the outcome or the past so maybe careless about it.  And that takes two hundred and ten pages.  Most of this is using known buddhist and psychological ideas and writing them in the way of a blog, where this all started, using made up characters so say the same thing over and over.

This is then intermingled with self-boasting how much of a “player” our author was, the amount of women he apparently slept with.  This book is written for the Bro mentality and teaches nothing.  It may be helpful to the younger generation who struggle more with life than my own, or I am maybe more enlightened in my thoughts of recognition of the world around me as it exists.

‘Every thing is F*cked A Book About Hope’, is more blog-like than the previous and is a bit erratic in the way it is planned out.  The book basically tells you that things are not as bad as they seem and everything used to be much worse.  Death, war, disease and the rich poor divide used to be off the scale of terrible, but now actually in comparison everything is okay, less famine, less poor, less war but we are just more aware of what is going on due to the internet and twenty four hour news.  So nothing is that bad.  And there you have it, simple, but this is said in two hundred and thirty two pages with made up terms like “Newton's Law of Emotion”, something that doesn’t exist and has been laughed at as a term used by pseudo-psychologists that write bad books.  I struggled heavily with this second book than even the first, it was not well written and had some good ideas but was very simple and still unsure who this would help.  Maybe the anxiety driven GenZ of the world or whatever we are calling the younger generation who have only known a world of “Social” media as it is today.

I know I may sound bitter and twisted, I am much older than maybe the target audience but I am not much older than the author, who also wrote a book about dating women, by being honest, note, just be yourself, that is honesty. And “Love is Not Enough”, where I guess he explains you need to be a good person and communicator to have a long term relationship and love is just the feeling part of it.  I didn’t realise men needed so much help with such parts of their lives, maybe talk to someone but do not go to Mark Manson.

I truly didn’t understand the hype and yes both had some good ideas but they are not new or unique, they are just wrapped up in a lot of pointless swearing.  Then the rest is filler and do not forget the Bro bragging at its finest.  Like the majority of “Self Help” books, in my personal opinion, these are not worth the time.