Category: Books, Books, Books

Back to School Fiction

Back to School Fiction

by akc

Back to School Fiction

Even though I haven’t actually worked on a college campus in a long time, early September still brings some of that back to school energy with it. If that’s the case for you, too, you might find yourself picking up a campus novel. There are plenty of them out there, but here are four I’d recommend. 

The Secret History, by Donna Tartt
Libraries | Bookshop | Goodreads

You’ve almost certainly heard of this one, it’s the Gen X urtext for dark academia. It centers around a group of graduate students in Classics at an elite New England liberal arts college. The story is narrated by an outsider to the group, who is eventually brought in and learns that the tense group dynamics are in part driven by a horrible secret. There’s some blackmail involved and the situation escalates.

It’s long, and it seems to be one of those books that most people love, but some people hate. Publisher’s Weekly sums it up in a short but spoiler-y review. If it still sounds interesting, grab a copy from the library and give it 100 or so pages. 

Bunny, by Mona Awad
Libraries | Bookshop | Goodreads

Bunny has echoes of The Secret History (including the title; Bunny is a nickname for one of the characters in The Secret History). It also takes place at an elite New England liberal arts college, but this time the outsider is trying to break into an insular group in her MFA program. 

But it’s not pure homage. The in-group acts as a single organism, and is making inexplicable things happen at their off-campus gatherings. So in addition to being a psychological thriller, there are elements of magical realism. All of the main characters are women, which adds some threads of competing types of femininity that come into play. 

I think some may find this story to be over the top, but if this short review at Kirkus grabs your attention, definitely give it a go.

The Ninth House, by Leigh Bardugo
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Following the path of magical realism, you arrive eventually at actual magic in The Ninth House. Still at an elite New England college; but this time the outsider is an undergraduate brought in by a dean. She’s offered a full ride if she helps keep the supernatural at bay during the campus secret societies’ occult rituals. (If they aren’t done properly, they attract ghosts.)

This novel also introduces elements of widespread conspiracy. Institutional cover ups, conspiracies of wealth, privilege, legacy, the patriarchy. I thought that worked well with the type of insularity in this novel. This review in The Washington Post sums it up well. 

As She Climbed Across the Table, by Jonathan Letham
Libraries | Bookshop | Goodreads

Finally, we have a wildcard entry; this one is more of an academic spoof than dark academia. Set at a Northern California university, it centers around the faculty. A particle physicist’s lab has opened a void / portal, which they name Lack, and she becomes obsessed with it. Her anthropologist boyfriend is trying to win her attention back while dealing with all the little indignities of academia. 

If you haven’t read any Jonathan Lethem before, prepare yourself for the absurd. His characters can sometimes be a little one-note, but I find that it usually works well for his style. This review in Publisher’s Weekly should give you a sense of what you’re getting into.

We Ride Upon Sticks

We Ride Upon Sticks

by akc

Once a month I recommend a novel that I’ve recently read and enjoyed. This month’s combines witchcraft with a high school women’s field hockey team and is set in late-80’s Massachusetts. 

We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry

Pantheon Books, March 2020
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The Danvers High School women’s hockey team is . . . not great. For the 1989 season, the seniors decide to do something about this. In a notebook with Emilio Estevez on the cover, they pledge themselves to the devil in exchange for the team making it to State. 

For those who don’t know, Danvers (formerly Salem Village) was the epicenter of the witchcraft hysteria in 1692. This, of course, means that their pledge works. It probably doesn’t hurt that one of the co-captains is descended from the family of Ann Putnam, one of the primary accusers during the hysteria and trials. 

We ran off the field like a bunch of frenzied maenads carrying aloft the head of some poor slob that we’d recently torn off his shoulders.

Anyway, this is when the fun really starts. Having vowed to follow their dark urges, they begin playing pranks on their teachers. Each is recorded in the notebook, and the team starts winning. It escalates from there.

The story is told in first person plural, which works beautifully. It captures the bond between them as teammates, while subtly pointing out the possibly malevolent groupthink driving them towards what they hope will be victory. The team is an entity unto itself; while it is made up of individuals (whom you do get to know), they are all acting as one.

I cannot stress enough how fun this novel is, especially if you were in middle or high school in Massachusetts in the late 80s or the 90s. In the book, one girl’s sky-high bangs become their own character (The Claw) and I immediately pictured a specific classmate’s hair.
While I don’t like how the ending was structured, that gripe is outweighed by everything else I loved about this book. If you’ve played a team sport, were a teenager in the late 80s or early 90s, or were ever a teenage girl, you’ll probably enjoy at least one aspect of this novel.   

Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Training Evaluation

Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Training Evaluation

by akc

Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Training Evaluation, by James D. and Wendy Kayser Kirkpatrick

ATD Press, October 2016
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I picked this up looking for a framework or method to evaluate training delivered to customers and end users, since that’s my recent background. If you’re running a certification program with engaged stakeholders from your customer and access to the trainees after the fact, this might fit the bill. If you’re doing something less intensive, there are a few chapters with some useful info that you could likely put into practice, but half of the model won’t be practical for you.

Where this model is meant to be used is internal training programs, particularly those that are meant to change foundational employee behaviors. I think this is best suited to supervisory or leadership training, workshops on relationship building for customer-facing teams, that kind of thing. (Durable or semi-durable skills, if you’re familiar with that concept.) But again, for less intensive training you may still find some useful aspects.

The four evaluation levels of the model are Reaction, Learning, Behavior, and Results. Briefly, you can think of them as satisfaction with the training itself, the extent to which attendees acquire the knowledge delivered, whether or not they actually apply that knowledge, and whether the training has moved the needle on specific outcomes. They are progressively harder to measure, but their impact and usefulness to the business also increases.

Reaction is easy to measure in the moment, and you can capture some aspects of Learning as well. But to get at Behavior and Results, you need to have planned the entire training with them in mind. The authors recommend that you start planning by gathering your stakeholders and identifying the specific results you need — the targeted outcomes, and leading indicators that can act as measures. There’s a lot of good info to assist with this part.

This sets you up to ensure that what you’re teaching and how you’re doing it are actually going to meet the need. It also opens a conversation that will unearth barriers for trainees when they try to apply what they learned. For example, maybe your organization wants customer-facing staff to build better relationships with customers. You’ll want to look at the KPIs those teams are supposed to meet, and adjust them to reflect the fact that they’ll be spending more time with each customer if they put these new behaviors into practice. If leaders are unable or unwilling to do that, then the potential impact of the training will be diminished. 

Overall I found the first half of this pretty engaging, as there were parts of it that were applicable to the type of training I had in mind. I also thought Chapters 10 and 11 would be a great reference, as they discuss how to approach creating measurement instruments and provide tons of examples. You’d be able to put together a decent tool pretty quickly with that information.

The second half was of less interest to me. Part 3 covers data analysis and reporting, and part 4 (which I skipped) is a series of case studies. There are also two or three chapters sprinkled throughout that were written by guest authors, and I found those to be less useful.

If you’re part of an internal training or learning and development team and you’re not already familiar with this model, this is worth a read. If you’re training customers but don’t typically have a strong commitment from stakeholders to support the training, this may still be helpful. In that case I’d recommend that you pick and choose chapters and skim or skip what doesn’t feel relevant for your situation.

The Effortless Experience

The Effortless Experience

by akc

The Effortless Experience, by Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman, and Rick DeLisi

Portfolio/Penguin, September 2013
Libraries | Bookshop | Goodreads

As I read The Customer of the Future, this book kept coming to mind so I decided to revisit it. At the time I first read The Effortless Experience, my team and I were just starting the process of choosing and configuring a new support system. It was interesting to re-read this on the other side of that experience, having overhauled the support program and gotten it to a much more sustainable place. I remember my first read of it was very positive, and it helped to develop my mindset as I went into the project.

While it’s focused on call centers and support by phone, the authors do go into some research around how consumer preferences were shifting from phone to web. For myself, I found that subbing “cases” for “calls” as I read worked just fine. A lot of the concepts apply to support in general, regardless of channel. The details would differ in implementation, but they would anyway.

One of the biggest takeaways from this is the research they did that debunks the idea that exceeding customer expectations is the best way to ensure customer loyalty. They found that customer behavior plateaus when you meet expectations, and doesn’t significantly rise if you’re exceeding them. Consistently exceeding expectations is costly, and to some extent just continues to raise the bar, constantly resetting the baseline expectations of your customers. Really, customers just want you to be easy to deal with, something I’m sure we can all agree with as customers ourselves.

They developed a measure for this called the Customer Effort Score, which you can obtain with a single survey question asking the customer how easy you made it for them to deal with their issue. You can collect that alongside your standard satisfaction measure and get a better picture of what’s going on.

The concepts presented in The Effortless Experience are well-researched and presented clearly. They’re backed up with data, and the authors include some very useful looking worksheets in an appendix.

This is a quick read, and I’d recommend it for anyone working in support, not just team leaders and managers. Re-reading it I found that I wished I’d treated it as a reference after that initial read, as there were some ideas that would have been helpful for us as we developed some training for team members and built new business processes.

For a great preview of the book, check out this article in Harvard Business Review, written by some of the book’s authors in 2010: Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers.

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Meet Me in Another Life

Meet Me in Another Life

by akc

Once a month I’ll be recommending a novel that I’ve recently read and enjoyed. This month’s blends a little bit of magic with a touch of science fiction.

Meet Me in Another Life by Catriona Silvey

William Morrow & Company, April 2021
Libraries | Bookshop | Goodreads

Thora and Santi are stuck in a reincarnation loop. In each new life they’re another version of themselves, with a different relationship. But they always maintain certain core aspects of their personalities, and they always meet in Cologne.

It was fun to see all the different relationships between them, what they’re doing in their lives, and who else reappears. Sometimes it’s claustrophobic, other times it’s surprising and exhilarating. I never quite knew what to expect in the next chapter. 

He is unflappable, relentless, a lake that absorbs every stone.

At first they don’t remember one another, or anything about their past lives. But finally, Thora begins to remember. At this point the texture of the novel begins to change, and I really enjoyed that. You’ve been along for the ride, and now the ride is changing and gaining new purpose.

I don’t want to say too much more, because one of the joys of this novel is seeing this play out without knowing why they’re stuck in a loop. I liked the ending but I do wish Silvey had left it a little more ambiguous, I think that would have been more in keeping with the mood of the story. But I definitely didn’t see it coming until we were there.

I’m guessing this will be a novel that either works for you or doesn’t work for you. It sounds like a thought experiment or a writing prompt, and maybe that’s how it started, but there’s so much more to it.