[This is so late that I am going to back-date it so that all the BBGMBC posts stay together. Here we go!]
Today, July 15th, we continue the discussion for the Beyond Busy Global Monthly Book Club’s fourth book.
Anyone who has read our current discussion book can participate by commenting. You can also join our public BBGMBC Facebook group, if you would like to join us in reading one excellent quality book per month and then discussing it here.
And without further ado, let’s keep the discussion of Imagine: How Creativity Works by Johah Lehrer going.
It’s been over a week now since I finished reading this book and I have to ask myself what has stayed with me from what I read?
I’m happy that I have my notes from the book because I do find the book rather difficult to remember. But one chapter sticks out in my mind most. I feel like I can recall many of the points without having to go back to my notes. It’s the chapter about Shakespeare becoming a prolific writer in Elizabethan England. This section stood out for me because Lehrer seemed to be answering a long-standing question that many have always wondered about Shakespeare. That question is: how the heck did he become so prolific?
The way Lehrer explained it, I found his explanation to be credible. It was the perfect cultural combination of time and place and economic opportunity. When Lehrer talked about how so many of these opportunities to succeed as writers would not have existed only a few decades before, I felt moved. I felt like, wow, we might have missed out on Shakespeare. I could not even image that.
Think of how much Shakespeare has contributed to theater and literature. It’s impossible for me to imagine either without his works. So of all of the sections of the book, this one made the greatest impression on me.
Another part of the book that made a big impression on me was the section where Lehrer talked about the guy who moonlighted as a bartender and came up with the idea of a bacon-infused old-fashioned.
My parents drank old-fashions when I was a kid, so I know exactly what they taste like. And I have to say, that I found the idea of a bacon-infused old-fashioned absolutely fascinating. But mostly it stayed with me because it was like I could taste the drink while I was reading the book. I’m not sure if every reader had the same experience. In fact, I saw that one book reviewer was really annoyed with this example in the book. But I have to say that it must have meant something to the author because he wrote about it so compellingly and memorably.
And, reluctantly, I have to admit that there was one more section of the book that has stayed with me. It was the part about the invention of The Swiffer. I don’t use a Swiffer Sweeper. I find them annoying because they force me to buy into a whole system of products that I don’t necessarily want to support. However, I was hooked on the Swiffer dusters until I hired a cleaning team that believes in a washable mop head and good old-fashioned rags for dusting. So when I need to do a little spot mopping, I grab some Mrs. Meyer’s spray (because it smells really good) and an old-fashioned sponge mop. And it’s good enough for me.
However, I found the discussion of how the idea for the Swiffer mop was born to be very interesting. And what I got out of it more than anything is that if you want to revolutionize anything, you need to think outside the box. And thinking outside the box might seem easy, but it’s always much harder than you might expect. And it requires a ton of observation and analysis. And that makes sense to me.
So how about you. Without looking back at your notes, what sections or images come back to you from Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer?
And thanks for joining the discussion!
