In which journalist Tom Vanderbilt follows the lead of his grade-school-age daughter, who apparently takes endless lessons, as good Brooklyn children do, and sets out to cultivate "beginner's mind"—the cognitive shift that comes with learning a new skill, and the benefits that accrue when doing it at age 50+. It's pop-psychy, which I didn't mind, and you have to maneuver around the fact that his learning process, while enjoyable to follow, still involves a succession of fabulous teachers, coaches, surfing camp in Costa Rica, "swimming wild" off the coast of Corfu on vacation with his family, etc. But hey, either he's got the resources and time or he's spending down his book advance, and either way more power to him—they're interesting experiments, and I enjoyed the book. ( )

I liked hearing the little details that Vanderbilt picked up while learning his chosen skills. I disliked the occasional pseudoscience he inserted. While the story is very self centered, Vanderbilt tries to balance this by giving detailed descriptions of some of the other beginners whom he meets. Especially in the swimming chapter, this got tiresome and didn't add much.

> In the larger chess world, I was a patzer—a hopelessly bumbling novice—but around my house at least I felt like a sage, benevolent elder statesman

> In addition to chess, I chose singing, surfing, drawing, and making (in this case, a wedding ring to replace the ones I’d lose surfing). Oh, and juggling

> you may be wondering about your own singing ability. I would urge you to take the online test that Steven Demorest helped create. It’s based on pitch accuracy, the easiest-to-measure, most fundamental variable in singing quality. No matter your score, remember one thing: It can be improved.

> More than simply learning how to produce consistent notes, I needed to work on another key singing skill: listening. Danielle designated an octave on the piano, running from C3 to C4, with C3 being 1 and C4 being 8. It was a simplified version of solfège, or what we know as do-re-mi.

> The tongue, called "the worst enemy of the singer" for its tendency to get in the way of exiting sound, seemed on some days to consume the bulk of our time. Nowhere but the dentist did the inside of my mouth receive such careful scrutiny. But it was important: A raised tongue shifts air toward our nostrils and makes our voices sound nasal.

> "The vowel is the voice," writes one vocal pedagogue, "and the consonant is the interruption of the voice." In English-language speech, we spend five times as much time producing vowels as consonants. In singing, that ratio can hit two hundred to one.

> Lyrics were to be avoided; they harbored bad habits. So Danielle would have me go through songs singing only simple vowels; during one solo car trip I sang the whole Chet Baker Sings with "oohs" and "aahs," an exercise that had a pleasing purity to it.

> When I tried to sing a higher note, my whole body would tense as I attempted to scale the musical peak, craning my neck upward like a giraffe reaching for high leaves. This only raised my larynx, making it harder to produce that very note. Rather than trying to suppress this habit, Amedeo had an elegantly simple solution, the one hinted at in The Inner Game of Tennis: Replace one habit with another. When I hit a high note in a phrase, Amedeo would have me do something counterintuitive: Go down. The act of slightly bending my knees was a physical cue to keep my larynx down.

> Resonant. To create "space" in my mouth, I would do the little prescribed exercises, like starting a yawn (but not going all the way) or speaking like the cartoon character Yogi Bear to help lower my larynx. Another favorite was exhaling and then inhaling on a k sound, in an effort to lift my sagging soft palate and make my voice rounder and more resonant. Give this a try. Make the sound kuh-kuh-kuh; then do the same on an inhale. As you do, try to imagine the back of your mouth gently inflating, like a frog's

> a strangely named app called "Smule." It was simple. You only had to plug some earbuds into your phone, search for a favorite song in the site’s database, and then start singing. After recording a tune, you could tweak your performance with a variety of Auto-Tune-style filters and effects. You could film yourself or simply record an audio track. I recorded a few solo songs. It was easy, and the sound was decent. It was fun, if a bit sterile. Then I discovered the "duet" option and felt as if I had unlocked the magic of the service

> "On average, level one will take you, surfing every day, a week or ten days. Level two, a month. Level three, a year. And level four"—he paused to reflect on the answer—"like a decade."

> It often seemed like high-stakes game theory, the "surfer's dilemma" of how a growing pool of surfers could share a finite supply of waves. Surfing, to a strategist, is what’s known as a "mixed-motive game"; it's best if at least someone catches a wave so it's not wasted, but each person would prefer it was them

> As Danny had told me, his least favorite part of learning to surf was the idea that "others in the water would typically prefer me not to be there."

> The first step was to sketch the basic "envelope," the geometric shape that connected the furthermost points of the figure and would establish the proportions. It looked vaguely trapezoidal. From there I would look for various "landmarks," things like the highest or lowest part of the drawing, and start to sketch quick lines between them.

> Curves were to be drawn not as curves but as a series of small, straight lines. "It's a much faster way of approaching a drawing," he said. "It takes a long time for our eye and hand to draw a curve."

> Artists tend to look at their subjects much more often than nonartists. By doing this, one argument goes, they reduce the need to keep the image in their working memory, where it very quickly becomes prone to biases and misperceptions.

> Like many novices—or people stuck in the novice stage—I'd been trying to inhale and exhale as my head came out of the water on a front-crawl stroke. Exhaling, I learned, should be reserved for underwater, via what's called bubble breathing

> All this self-exploration, admittedly, has the whiff of indulgent self-absorption. But for all the inward focus, these activities actually brought me outward. One of the greatest joys in being a beginner, it turns out, is meeting other beginners ( )