Penn Jillette keeps talking about The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker on his Sunday radio show, Penn's Sunday School, so I figured I'd check out what all the fuss was about.

The book was a stream-of-consciousness account of a moment in the life of an office worker as he takes his lunch break down an escalator to buy replacement shoelaces. I was worried the subject matter would be pretty banal and pointless, the intelligent, thought-provoking, and philosophical writing style actually made it come to life.

It was reassuring to hear echoed by the author the same thoughts and reactions that I and others have about the little things around us in life: the straws that rise up out of drinks frustratingly, the slower cashiers at CVS, the inventiveness of the engineers who designed the perforations in toilet paper, etc. On the one hand, it seems like none of these things really matter, but this is wrong; they matter a lot because all of us interact with these things practically every day. The point isn't that the main values in life come from these small objects; the point is that these small objects shouldn't be forgotten or dismissed, and that there is a lot to appreciate even in the minutiae of life.

The real world -- nature, science, people -- is so fascinating at every level of inspection, no matter how close you look (sort of like a fractal).

I'm continuing my effort to read all the books by Ayn Rand, and the next one on my list was For the New Intellectual. It was a pretty short read and actually mostly excerpts from her novels.

It started with a high-level overview of the epistemology contained within her novels and an overview of the history of philosophy. The overall tone sounded pessimistic as her comments about the contemporary world in which she wrote implied that the morality of the majority of society was really moving in the wrong direction (I can only imagine how she would react to seeing the world today).

Even though most of the book was excerpts from other books I had read already, it was nice to see which sections the author herself wanted to highlight and to refresh my memory as well about some of the central concepts.

One of the most popular classes at Google's internal university is Search Inside Yourself, and I just finished reading its "textbook," Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace) by Chade-Meng Tan. Though I haven't taken the class (really long waiting list), I feel like I got a pretty good glimpse into how useful and interesting it would be.

Many articles recently have described Google's foray into mindfulness training for employees, citing its stress reduction qualities and the benefits it products in increased emotional intelligence and workplace efficacy. It's neat to see how such an old practice can have such practical use.

I found this book's discussions of meditation and attention training techniques really detailed and useful, much more so than the sections on emotional intelligence (and especially the sections on world peace). Those seemed to trivialize a lot of the issues and skim at a very high level some really difficult techniques (each of which is covered in multiple full-length books). But I appreciated the introduction that the book provided for these areas and the connection to mindfulness that it made.

I still think that Mindfulness in Plain English is a better introduction to meditation specifically, but Search Inside Yourself does a lot more in linking it to the corporate world and everyday applications.