A reading in New York

August 21st, a Thursday, at McNally Jackson in Soho. 7 p.m.

Thank you, Google Alert

“An inspiring read,” says The Hindu Business Line.

from the Shanghai Daily, July 13th

In this Sunday’s Buzzwords (”In this weekly column, we try to improve the English rendering of new Chinese phrases or terms popping up frequently in the local press or daily conversations), I found this:

post-it girl (bianlitie nuhai)

It refers to those kind-hearted, usually plain-looking young women at a workplace who are always ready to help others and then almost immediately forgotten after the help. They are like the post-it notes people use and then throw away.

Tough crowd, man. Though I like the bluntness of Chinese phrasing. In the Midwest, people just call such a young woman “sweet” and ignore her ambitions all the same.

from the China Daily, July 11th

“At least 5.59 million students will graduate from college this year, 13 percent more than last year, the Ministry of Education said.”

Impossible Is Nothing

I’m in China. Books on success are huge in China, and if I had my scanner with me, or a digital camera that didn’t shoot RAW files that my PowerBook doesn’t know how to handle, I’d post the cover of Born to Win, a slim paperback I picked up at Yunnan University’s bookstore. I bought it because, oh goodness, inside, in side-by-side Mandarin and English, is Andrew Carnegie’s “Road to Success” (HTBU ch. 1), a passage from Orison Swett Marden (HTBU ch. 2), something from Samuel Smiles (author of the first self-help book, aptly titled Self-Help). And then also some Bertrand Russell, John Ruskin, Thoreau, and a bunch of people I’ve never read. (Mildred Cram? Steve Porter?)

A selection from W. Somerset Maugham is illustrated with a photo of William Faulkner. The last selection, starting on p. 134, is JFK’s “First Inaugural Address.” Perhaps the second edition of Born to Win has his second? I’d pay good money to read that.

When I told people I was headed to China, several asked if HTBU was going to be published here. It’s not — not that I’m aware of. I flirted with the idea of bringing some copies of the U.S. edition and scattering them, leaving one in a book shop, or on a park bench, in a Shanghai hotel, and then seeing how long it took before the book got pirated. But the suitcase got heavy.

*This slogan appears on many official Beijing 2008 billboards here. No relation to this, sad to say.

Blog Love

A couple of months ago, Google Alerts alerted me to the existence of the paragraph below. It appeared on a blog that has since been dismantled. But darn it all if the author wasn’t generous in his assessment of my work. So, because the ego is brittle today, and HTBU isn’t being advertised elsewhere, and because I haven’t gotten around to making any adorable HTBU-related videos for you to enjoy — I was going to ask friends to do dramatic reenactments of their first job horror stories, but in 9 to 5-era skirt-lengths — I’m overriding my reluctance to post it:

“Finished ‘How to Be Useful’ last night, and it really lit a fire under me. Or stoked the fire that was already lapping at my heels. It’s unprecedented, at least in my experience: a self-help book whose author I trust not to make suggestions that, when followed in the hardscrabble real world…fall utterly flat. And a book that instills in you a real desire to do better, to work harder, to have a better attitude, without resorting to mind-numbing mantras that will inevitably be abandoned after a day or two of heavy repetition.”