A Pair Of Recent Reads

For some reason I decided that I can't remove a book from the Currently Consuming section until I talk about it. Here's two that need off the list.

Mastering Virtual Teams: I'm working on three projects right now where we don't have everyone in the same place (two at the day job plus the Origins Awards), so I was hoping for some good answers from this book. What I got was two general principles with some specific advice. The principles are these:

• Different tasks have different needs when it comes to collaboration and communication technology. Choose technology appropriate to your tasks.
• Be aware of how different cultural backgrounds (be they national, organizational, or functional) will affect aspects of you team dynamics.

This is good stuff, but I did find myself hoping the book spend more time showing how these ideas apply to particular situations than it did. It also suffered from some organization problems. The big one was that in the section on tech, it showed for each technology what its strengths and weakness are. That's fine, but if I'm choosing a technology based on the task I have hand (as the book recommends I do), I need the lookup table to go the other way. If I know we need to brainstorm, I want the book to tell me what my best choice for that task is; I don't want to have to look at each choice in turn and see how it compares in the brainstorming category.

Overall: Worth reading if you're completely new to the topic (e.g. you haven't seen Geert Hofstede's framwork for assessing culture before), but probably not the Single Most Indespendible Book On The Topic.

The Thin Man: I picked this up from Borders last weekend because it (and The Big Sleep) jumped off an endcap at me. (I mean this metaphorically, not that I'm notably clumsy.) I'd never actually read any Dashiell Hammett, nor had I seen any of The Thin Man films. (This latter fact left me at considerable disadvantage during the drive from Chicago to GenCon last year, when Greg Stolze and Ken Hite were discussing at some length a hypothetical remake of the series.) I enjoyed it, though I found the nigh-constant use of dialogue vaguely disorienting.

Overall: It was nice quick read, so I'm tempted to go back and fill in with Hammett's other novels.

Comments

[Carl Rigney]

Hammett is excellent. I've enjoyad all of his books, but I'd especially recommend <A HREF="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679722580/ptevis-20"><EM>The Continental Op</EM></A>, <A HREF="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679722610/ptevis-20"><EM>Red Harvest</EM></A>, <A HREF="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679722629/ptevis-20"><EM>The Glass Key</EM></A> and of course <A HREF="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679722645/ptevis-20"><EM>The Maltese Falcon</EM></A>. Amazon has a 5-volume set of all the novels for $23 or so.

[Carl Rigney]

Comments seem to be fibbing about supporting HTML (and preview didn't work), so let's try that again:

Hammett is excellent. I've enjoyed all of his books, but I'd especially recommend The Continental Op, Red Harvest The Glass Key and of course The Maltese Falcon. Amazon has a 5-volume set of all the novels for $23 or so.

[George Andrews]

Good choices! Hammett and Chandler were both wonderful writers of genre fiction in the heyday of the pulp era. IMO, Hammett transcended genre to become one of the greatest English language writers of the 20th century. Case in point: the Continental Op series (mentioned above) is written in 1st person objective style, meaning that the narrator tells the story through the point-of-view of the main character, but never reveals any of that character's thoughts, feelings, or inner dialog. The reader sees and hears what the narrative character sees and hears, but without any cues to what the character is feeling. It's a testament to Hammett's craft that he's able to pull this off, which he does--masterfully. His best known work is probably the Maltese Falcon. He published the novel in 1930 and he is also credited with the screenplay for the 1941 film.

Chandler enjoyed a successful career as a pulp author, but also worked as a writer for Hollywood and then for TV in the early days. While not the astounding craftsman that Hammett was, he was a master of the potboiler, as demonstrated by not only The Big Sleep, but also Farewell, My Lovely and The Long Goodbye, among others.

Today's successful mystery writers and crime dramas owe a huge debt to these two writers, who helped create the film noire category as a new art form between the two World Wars. One of the reasons for the heavy use of dialog you mentioned is that, as with a play, the dialog is the primary vehicle for carrying the story. Probably, it's also partly because of rejection of the at times florid styles of the nineteenth century novelists, and perhaps because even early on these writers were targeting movies (and later TV) as a potential market.