My reading life: James O’Rourke IV ’68

This interview launches a new feature about what Mendoza professors read.

Ask James O’Rourke IV ’68 about books and you’ll hear
everything from a touching story about a woman who personally shopped for books
for him in Cambridge, England; a rundown of his daily reading routine; a few
rants about Jeff Bezos and Amazon; and a confession about his inability to get
rid of his piles of books.

The sole author, coauthor or directing editor of 17 books
and more than 250 case studies, O’Rourke is a teaching professor of management and
the Arthur F. and Mary J. O’Neil Director of the Fanning Center for Business
Communication.  He teaches communication
courses to most undergraduate and graduate students at Mendoza, where he has
taught for 24 years.

In this Q&A, O’Rourke gives a glimpse of how bone-deep
reading and communication are to his life.

What do you read regularly?

My guiding premise is that if you want to become a better
writer you should read better writing. 
So I seek out sources that I know have good writers.  Each morning I read The New York Times before I
go to class.

Usually over lunch I read The Wall Street Journal.  In the evening I read the local paper, The South
Bend Tribune, so I know what’s going on locally.  I then wait until after dinner to get to the Financial
Times.  And I don’t read
everything.  I read all of the
headlines.  For half the stories, I’ll
read the first paragraph, and for three or four select stories, I read all of
it.  And I have some favorite columnists,
Gillian Tett, James Mackintosh.  I think
the writing in the FT is really quite good.

I read a number of magazines, some weekly, some
monthly.  I look quickly through Bloomberg
Businessweek.  I still look at Fortune.  I look at The Economist, and at The
New Yorker.  I choose at least one New
Yorker story a week to read the whole of the story.  My favorite New Yorker writer is Jeffrey
Toobin.  He’s awfully good.

I look at a number of blogs, including Bloomberg.  I check in on the
HBR (Harvard Business Review)
blogs.  The daily HBR blogs have several
sections, the Daily Idea, the Daily Stat and then a few features that are
focused on research that has practical applications for managers.  Then, I’ll look at Gizmodo, which is about tech devices, and Jalopnik, which is about cars.

What have you read
recently?

I try to read one hardcover book a month.  I don’t always succeed.  In the summer or over Christmas break I can
sometimes do three or four a month.  That gives me 15 to 18 titles a year, so I
try to choose carefully.

Malcolm Gladwell’s David and Goliath is really
interesting.  It’s filled, of course,
with Gladwell anecdotes but they’re all cleverly written; they’re interesting
and highly entertaining.

Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking
Fast and Slow looks at cognitive processing, looks at how we perceive,
process, learn, recall and forget. 
There’s a lot of new information in Kahneman’s work and it’s very
accessible.

Michael Thomasello has written a book just released by
Harvard University Press, A Natural History of Human Thinking.  It really is, frankly, evolution’s way of saying, “Here’s our principal
advantage.  First we had opposable
thumbs, now we have a frontal cortex. 
There are a lot of animals that can outrun us, but not many that can
outthink us.”  It also has important
implications for education.  What do we
keep?  What do we toss out?  What do we
refine?  And how do we pass that to the
next generation of young philistines who know absolutely nothing?

How do you choose
books?

There are three ways to choose books; one of them is seriously imperiled.  And that is to go into a bookstore and pick
up a few and thumb through them and see what you get.  There is a serendipity to a bookstore,
finding a book that you would never have known about sitting right next to the
one you think you want.  But bookstores are an endangered species
thanks to Jeff Bezos and everyone else who thinks they can deliver groceries by
drone, and that we don’t need bookstores. 
It’s really disconcerting.  I love
bookshops.

I read the reviews of new titles
that are thoroughly and thoughtfully done. 
I look at The New York Times Book Review, I look
at the weekly book reviews in The Wall Street Journal.  Those are quite good.  And I look at the reviewers in the FT because they include a number of British
publishers that I would not otherwise hear about.

I do ask my friends what they’re
reading, and I keep a very, very wide, eclectic group of friends that I talk to
nearly every day, by phone and by e-mail. 
I probably make a dozen calls a day and maybe that many e-mails and just
check in with people and ask how they’re doing and what they’re reading.

I had a dear friend at Bowes &
Bowes booksellers in Cambridge (England). 
Her name was Josephine Dawson and we met in the summer of 1979.  She looked for books for me for more than a
dozen years.  She would go to estate
sales, she would look for interesting titles and mail those to me.  She would say, “Oh, Mr. O’Rourke went to
Christ’s College, I know he’d like this book; it’s about Sir John Plumb.”  Or she’d
pick up books by a professor of mine, S.
Gorley Putt.  Mr. Putt taught
language and literature at Cambridge, and she knew that I had an affection for
him.

She was on the money with her choices, and it was a good
business model for the owners.  More to the
point, Mrs. Dawson got a book into the hands of someone she knew would
appreciate it.  I didn’t hear from her
one year [1992], so I wrote.  The manager
wrote back to me and said she had died. 
The news was crushing.  I enjoyed
long conversations with her.

I desperately miss Mrs. Dawson and
her kind help.  And now what I get is
Amazon saying, “Oh you might like this.” 
Yeah, well, I might not.  I don’t
think Amazon’s software is nearly as good as Mrs. Dawson.

Do you go to the
library often?

I’m a bookstore guy, not a library guy.  It’s a failing, a character flaw.  I buy books and keep them and then my wife
gathers up books she thinks I might like to give away.  She’ll come up with a list of a dozen or
15.  So I’ll pull out two or three and
say, “No you can’t give these away.  The
rest are fine.”

Are there books
everyone should read?

It’s presumptuous of me to say every human should read
through a particular book.  You have
different interests, you’re just a different person.  But I think there are some books that are
really damn good.  I think the best piece
of fiction written in our language in the 20^th century was The
French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles.  Brilliant book, absolutely brilliant.  It’s a book about writing books in which he
takes time out to explain the process along the way.

Why do you read so
much about the brain?

I’m interested in how we learn because our behavior is a
function of what we know.  And I’m
interested as a teacher in how I can make the process of learning less painful
for students, more productive, more interesting.

There are some works that are so thought-provoking, they
deserve a couple of reads.  One of them
is a book by Julian Jaynes, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at Princeton
[now deceased].  And the title of his
book is The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.  His theory is that early humanoids had
bicameral brains, that is, two halves that were unconnected.  The corpus callosum is the tissue mass that
now connects those two hemispheres.  And
it made them very, very different people from the people we know today.  It’s a book worth reading.

Do you read more
fiction or nonfiction?

I’ve got to roll in a good novel now and again.  But I read
mostly nonfiction.  You know, Niall Ferguson’s
The
Ascent of Money is awfully good. 
It gives you a sense not only of how modern commerce and banking
developed, but it’s also about human behavior and human greed.  And it shows us how all of  those function interdependently.

Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity & Grace by Joseph Williams
[University of Chicago] is as good as anything ever written about how to write.

Do you prefer reading
or writing?

Writing is hard work. 
Anyone who tells you differently either (a) is lying to you, or (b) has
never written anything.  So it’s far
easier to read than it is to write.  But
there’s a certain sense of satisfaction that comes with having produced a
really good piece that will be valuable to someone, that will move information
or move them to action.  So, good writing
is more satisfying than just reading, but it’s a lot more work.

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