In the introduction, the author Paulo Coelho declares that The Alchemist has sold more than twenty million copies worldwide. Even Bill Clinton read it and Julia Roberts adored it, yet he honestly doesn’t know “What’s the secret behind such a huge success?” After fallen for the hype and read the entire book, I really don’t know either. The story is about a shepherd boy who sets out to search for his “Personal Legend” and along the way he falls in love with any women that would talk to him or look at him. What the book tries to point out is to trust your own heart. It sounds more like a self motivation than a novel.

I was in Las Vegas’s Barnes & Noble looking for a book to kill my flight time back to New York. I encountered David Sedaris’s Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim on a bargain table and decided immediately it was the book to accompany me after reading the following passage:

Lauren was Walt’s sister, who was born prematurely and lived for less than two days. This had happened before the Winterses moved onto our street, but it wasn’t any kind of secret, and you weren’t suppose to flinch upon hearing the girl’s name. The baby had died too soon to pose for photographs, but still she was regarded as a full-fledged member of the family. She had a Christmas stocking the size of a mitten, and they even threw her annual birthday party, a fact that my mother found especially creepy. “Let’s hope she don’t invite us,” she said. “I mean, Jesus, how do you shop for a dead baby.”

Because of his articulate writing, he could make his dark humors lid up. With a collection of 27 essays, Sadaris takes us into the eccentric stories of his family. The book sure helped me get through the three-hour delay from Chicago to New York. This is definitely a perfect traveling read.

In the concise biographical chapter of Lester Young, jazz scholar Lewis Porter emphasizes that the language used by one of the best saxophonists of his time was, “sprinkled generously with four-letter words,” but never offensive. As quoted in Reverend John Gensel’s statement, “Lester’s flow of obscenity was magnificent. Nor was it really obscene, because it was not aggressive and was said as his personal poetry. No one, surely, but Prez could say ‘mother-fucker’ like music, bending the tones until it was a blues.” As for his music, Young was an original artist. At the time when jazz musicians were under the spell of Coleman Hawkins, Young leaped into the jazz scene with a style of his own. To prove the distinction between the two tenor saxophonists, Porter points out that Hawkins had “a rich, guttural tone, a wide, fast vibrato, and a stunning command of his instrument” while Young had “a softer tone and more legato articulation until, by 1939, he had developed the famous ethereal, feathery quality that inspired Stan Gets, Zoot Sims, and thousands of other musicians.” As always, Porter’s meticulous technical details are both pleasure and insightful to read.

Practice makes perfect. With John Coltrane, practice made him a world-renowned jazz legend. In John Coltrane: His Life and Music, a remarkable biography on one of the best jazz saxophonists of the twentieth century, Lewis Porter delves deep into the development of Coltrane’s music and how his obsessions with practice refined his style as he moved from bebop to avant garde. On the life portion, Porter traces all the way back to southern roots to show how Coltrane was named after a Scottish ancestor. On the musical part, Porter’s meticulous and accessible analysis of Coltrane’s accomplishments, including My Favorite Things, Giant Steps, Kind of Blue (his contribution to Miles Davis), and his most famous suit A Love Supreme, through note and scale demonstrations makes the book both fascinating and informing to read. If you have loved Coltrane’s works, you’ll appreciate them even further after reading this book.

Originally written in German by a jazz journalist Thomas Fitterling, Thelonious Monk: His Life and Music is divided into three parts. The first part on Monk’s life is rather brief since Monk was an introvert who lived in his own world and could go on for days without speaking. The only language he would speak was his music. Because of his strange personality, Monk’s music reflected his idiosyncratic character. His style was full of angularity and way far from the standard sound of bebop. Beside his original compositions—”Epistrophy,” “Straight, No Chaser,” “Well, You Needn’t,” “Bemsha Swing,” “Blue Monk,” “Brilliant Corner,” “Crepuscule With Nellie” (a hymn for his wife), “Criss Cross,” which became jazz standards—Monk’s recompositional technique made him an unmistakable ballad player. Monk’s catalog, the third part of the book, featured Fitterling’s listening guides to Monk music. Although his writing is a bit technical, it would be helpful if you have the albums to accompany his commentary. This book is a pleasurable reading material if you would like to learn about Monk.

In “White America,” a song from Slim Shady’s The Eminem Show, he raised a question: “Sitting back looking at shit, wow, I’m like… my skin… Is it starting to work to my benefit now?” No Em, your skin has benefited from black art and culture for years according to essays, poems and a conversation in Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture edited by Greg Tate. In the book intro, Tate points out:

Readers of Black music history are often stuck by the egregious turns of public relations puffery that saw Paul Whiteman crowned the King of Swing in the 1920s, Benny Goodman anointed the King of Jazz in the 1930s, Elvis Presley propped up as the King of Rock and Roll in the 1950s, and Eric Clapton awarded the title of the world’s greatest guitar player (ostensibly of the blues) in the 1960s. Whatever Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Chuck Berry, B. B. King, and other African-American pioneers thought about these coronations, they seem to have wisely kept between pursed lips—at least until Little Richard declared himself “the architect of rock and roll” rather than announce the winner at a late-eighties Grammy Awards ceremony.

Then in “The New White Negro,” Carl Hancock Rux chops up Em with quite a sharp blade:

Rappers Big Boi and Dre may go by the moniker Outkast, but Eminem proves that a real outcast has got to do more than make Miss Jackson’s daughter cry—you got to fuck the bitch, kill the bitch, dump the bitch’s dead body in the river, and not apologize for any of it.

It gets mad brutal:

Niggaz may talk bad about bitches and they baby’s mama—Eminem brutally murders his. Niggaz may have issues regarding absent fathers or dysfunctional mothers—Eminem comically exposes their dysfunctions, and hangs his mother’s pussy high up on a wall for all the world to see. Niggaz may be misogynist, may boast of sexual superiority and sexual indiscretions with a multitude of women, may commonly relegate women to just another piece of ass prime for the taking status—but Eminem drugs the bitch, fucks the bitch, moves on to the next bitch.

Welcome to the surrealistic world of Eminem! Like Sir Elton John alleviated us that we shouldn’t “take him seriously.”

Back in January 2004, I kicked off Visualgui.com with a post on Universal Principles of Design in which I reprinted a handful of principles that apply toward Web design. Since then the post has been mentioned on designer’s blogs around the world, yet it takes three years later to see a book on Principles of Beautiful Web Design.

Unlike Universal, Beautiful Web Design is brief with only five chapters focusing on layout and composition, color, texture, typography and imagery. No CSS, XHTML or Photoshop tutorials can be found in this book, but Jason Beaird (the author) gives plenty sites’ screenshots and brief explanation of the designs to illustrate how the principles have been applied.

Beautiful Web Design is, no doubt, a great book for the novice. If nothing else, the least what the book could do is steering you away from designing horrendous Web sites. Visual aesthetics, however, is only half of the web game. CSS and XHTML are equally important. I am not suggesting that this book should include the technical aspects, but you’re not getting a bang for your buck for its pricy cost ($39.95)—unless you could get a discount from Amazon, which is 34% off as of this writing.

For a book that teaches you to stay creative, the horrendous illustration and typography on the cover of Curt Cloninger’s Hot-Wiring Your Creative Process do the opposite. But don’t let the design of the book throws you off. Cloninger has enough useful materials, including guides to creative process, bypass your inertia, draw inspiration from art and design history, and unblock your imagination. One of the activities he recommends that I also encourage is to maintain a personal design playground in order to keep your motivation moving.

Like the world would really need another book on Miles Davis, Richard Cook, editor of Jazz Review, cleverly stirred his It’s About That Time: Miles Davis On and Off Record away from being another hagiography. Begin with Birth of the Cool and end with posthumous Doo Bop, Cook’s ingenious assessment of Miles’s music and life is based on his albums. What makes this book rewarding is Cook’s meticulous evaluation of the recordings. It takes me longer to read because I have to pause and listen to the albums (only the ones that I own) to appreciate the level of details and the liveliness in his writing. Without being too technical, Cook’s vivid language will help readers understand the aesthetic qualities and beauties of Miles’s works of art.

I read many American music critics—including Sasha Frere-Jones, Kelefa Sanneh, Jeff Chang, Jon Caramanica, Jon Pareles, Oliver Wang and Stanley Crouch—to get a feel for my own writing, and Greg Tate is the man that I admire most. His writing is sharp, provocative, and he always speaks his mind. Below is an except from his “Hardcore of Darkness: Bad Brains” to illustrate my point:

Hardcore? [Bad Brains] take it very seriously. You say you want hardcore? I say the Brains’ll give to you hardcore straight up the ass, buddy. I am talking about like lobotomy by jackhammer, like a whirlpool bath in a cement mixer, like orthodontic surgery by Black & Decker, like making love to a buzzsaw, baby. Meaning that coming from a black perspective, jazz ain’t it, funk it ain’t hardly, and they’ll probably never open for Dick Dames or Primps. Even though three white acts they did open for, Butch Tarantulas, Hang All Four, and the Cash, is all knee-deeper into black street ridims than the Brain ever been and ain’t that a bitch?

The essay came from his Flyboy in the Buttermilk, a book I have not one but two copies of. I thought I lost one so bought another one, but then found the other one.

Beside Tate’s book, Oliver Wang’s Classic Material: The Hip-hop Album Guide is a collection of hip-hop reviews that I come back from time to time for inspiration. One of my favorite pieces from the book is on Jay-Z contributed by Elizabeth Mendez Berry who is a brilliant critic I come to respect after reading up on her works, particularly with “Love Hurts.” In comparing Jay-Z with Che Guevara, she concludes her essay with:

Guevara abandoned a cushy career in medicine to pursue his lifelong goal, the creation of his an egalitarian society uncorrupted by decadence or deprivation, whereas Jay corrupted his community by selling street medication. Later, Che left the relative comfort of celebrity in communist Cuba to stir up revolution throughout Latin America, while Jay ditched dope-dealing for the relative comfort of Big Pimpin’ rap. Che died trying to change the world. Jay lives large in the world order. But even if you can knock Jay-Z’s logic, you can’t knock the hustle.

Damn, she sure knocked the hell out of Jay-Z’s logic, and I just love the way she ended the essay with the title of his track “Can’t Knock the Hustle” (his flow is virtuoso).