Category Archives: reading

reading

Books and reading and who I was

I went to see Mathilda in London about a year ago. I’m not about to say I loved it – I did really enjoy it but I’ve never read the book because it was published at a time when it just didn’t quite hit my age appropriate reading levels.

But I bought a Mathilda tote bag in London last week for two reasons: a) it’s illustrated by Quentin Blake (hero) and b) I was probably every bit as insufferable as Mathilda as a child. I Read Books. Lots of books.

I bought a lot of books during Covid but somehow, I never read them. Covid was a time o worry and not much to do for some people but I worked the whole way through the pandemic and there was no time for {re]learning Python, learning Japanese, At a point, because the bookshops in Brussels were the only things that were open, my book buying exceeded my bookreading by a substantial amount. My TBR is, at current rates, unworkable. Nevertheless, I am now working through it. There is a hell of a lot of non-fiction there.

Something like eight of them are lined up.

In fairness, I do still read a lot of stuff on social media, but I’ve found that there is never much closure to that. Reddit goes on forever. You cannot finish things on Reddit. I think this is, in a sense, one of the problems with Social Media reading. There is no end. And when we didn’t have online advertising, we didn’t need clickbait titles on news coverage as well. Things have changed, changed utterly, to quote an old man I never really liked all that much.

I’m middle aged now (young according to my mother but old according to the twenty year olds) and some of my time, now that I have some, is spent in reflection about who I am, who I used to be, who people think I am. I spend a lot of time in bookshops. When I go travelling I always want to go to bookshops. I still somehow wind up buying books despite having a monumental amount of books to read.

When I was a child, I used to plough through books. I used to read a lot of children’s fiction until well into my twenties, but also a lot of non-fiction, especially around history. I borrowed books from libraries by the new time and I do have a library card now. But I find actual books are not always practical for me. Those last two words are important because, for example, I see people reading on the metro. I don’t – and have never – really read in 5 minute blocks of time. It’s too short. I’ll happily read on 3 hour train journeys (but it’s been a while since that I have to do those regularly).

Middle aged me would like to go back to ploughing through books. I’m not all that interested in BookTok or Bookstagram per se. There are some booktubers who are fun. I’m just not sure I’ve found my own community. I have friends in bookclubs but that hasn’t really been anything I wanted to do – I was a solitary kid growing up, surrounded by books. I don’t really need help here in terms of access to books as I already have a substantial collection of my own thanks to Covid.

It’s aligned with something else that happened: I used to write stories. I’m not sure how or when that stopped. I know there were notes for two kids novels somewhere in my boxes of notebooks when I was backing up after Dublin. Most of the writing I’ve done in the last 20 years have not been “writing” as in “writing a book, or trying”. I have:

  • kept a diary for more than 30 years
  • written any amount of technical documentation
  • written any amount of governance documentation
  • written any number of formal proposals
  • written an unholy number of professional emails
  • written an unholy number of text messages.

When I was 8, I bought a notebook in the local stationery shop and started working on what was to be a girl detective series called Barbara Nash. I kind of liked Nancy Drew a lot, and the Blyton detective stuff, but I was a kid in rural Ireland, and I absolutely could not relate to a 16 year old in America with her own convertible car. I never wrote that series in the end.

I want to write again. I’m not sure I care about getting a book published but I’d like to get it written anyway. I’m struggling a lot with time management so that’s not helping. Nevertheless, I’ve read two books [at least] this month, and there are a few I am considering finishing that were started further back in the past.

One of the books I read was Diana Wynn-Jones wonderful Howl’s Moving Castle. The most recent one is The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. What stands out is that both are fiction – I haven’t read two fiction books in a row in an awfully long time, aside from some romance, which I consider to be pure escapism in a way that Howls Moving Castle is not.

One of the things I’ve toyed with doing over the years is buying some key books from my childhood = a couple I read from the library when I was a young teenager – from AbeBooks. I’m still considering it but in one way I’m afraid. Reading books at different stages in your life can be challenging, particularly if those books were written for children. In particular the books I am interested are the hardback editions of Lorna Hills Sadlers Wells books because they have truly beautiful dustjackets illustrated by Eve Guthrie. I’ve never forgotten them.

Much of my reflections lately have centred on how much I may have left my younger self down by wandering away from who I was then. It isn’t helpd in certain respects by seeing some of the book reading accounts where I’m clearly not really a reader in comparison to some of the high profile bookfluencers. But they are reading books I don’t necessarily want to read. There’s a whole industry around YA books which just don’t talk to me. In the way I felt outside, reading as a child, I feel outside reading as an adult too. I’ve a lot more to think about here, I suspect.

life in general, reading, stationery

inspired by Walter Mitty

I saw a thread on Reddit today where the Secret Life of Walter Mitty was recommended. I have some troubles with the idea of the film – I loved the novelette by James Thurber as a child and of course, they messed with the plot significantly. But I discovered it was streaming on Disney so I had a look at it. I haven’t watched all of it because I did my watching from the end trick.

I was a child with a big imagination. One of the stories I wrote as 12 year old I still feel like expanding into a kids’ book. I grew up in a small town in rural Ireland in the 1980s. Very often, my imagination was about the most exciting thing happening in my life. I identified a lot with Walter Mitty. I’m not a fan of Ben Stiller but he turned that character into something interesting – someone who did get to live life. I think about that sometimes.

I’ve written a personal diary for about 30 years now. I haven’t stopped yet and since I have a shops worth stock of notebooks, I need to do a whole pile more writing. Circling around my head lately has been the idea of travel memoirs. My mother says it’s a tragedy I wasn’t sketchbooking at the time that I was doing what seemed like more exciting travel. I get what she is saying. I documented them with photographs and around the time, with photos. I think I’d prefer sketchbooks too. I have a troubled relationship with all that at the moment. I’m working on fixing it.

Some time during the pandemic lockdowns, I realised that I was very deeply stressed, and doing very little for myself and I was not even finding the time to write my own journal. So I had picked up some A6 notebooks (pretty ones) at some stage and I pulled one out to be a five minute diary. The idea was that I would write into this little notebook for at least 5 minutes; in theory in the morning although that doesn’t always happen. I don’t often forget. I think it’s a habit I’ve had in place for around 3 and a half years now and I’m pretty sure I started this after I moved to Brussels. I also occasionally did a ten minute one at night time; I think I completed about 5 of them and there is one still by my bed that I am not writing in regularly at the moment, mostly because I actually have more time to write in what I call my big journal; the series that has been more or less unbroken since 1992.

I think a lot about writing and reading at the moment. Mostly because the person I am now is not necessarily the person that a 12 year old Treasa envisaged me becoming. I never did write the kids books I wanted to, never wrote the opinion pieces I wanted, nor the adult romantic fiction or indeed the fantasy. More oddly, I’m not reading much fiction (apart from escapist romantic stuff when I can’t sleep). There are a couple of reasons linked to that: a) I read a monumental amount of non-fiction in fits and starts and b) Terry Pratchett died.

I can’t emphasise how much the loss of Pratchett impacted my fiction reading. I don’t think I’ve read Snuff through yet and like a lot of Pratchett fans who have one or two left to go, it’s hard to do it, knowing that that will be it.

For a lot of the period 2003 to now, I blogged in one form or another. I had a long running photoblog as well, and there were variants linked to this domain name as well. In the grand scheme of things, I have been writing all my life, and a good chunk of it I self published. And then I wound up on Twitter for a long time. In a way I miss Twitter as it was and then I think that the loss of it is probably a good thing for me. One of the things that happened to me between having to snatch time to find out what was happening in the world, getting it from Twitter and not watching much television, my attention span shortened. I think this, again, was linked to stress related issues but I do think short form media did not help.

I own a monumental number of notebooks and sketchbooks at the moment. I bought a lot of them during the lockdowns, not so many since but even so, I have lots of them. Not all of them are lined so they will eventually be sketchbooks. I’m back sketching for myself [which means my Instragram followers don’t get to know much about what I am doing] and I am hoping they will get used up. I don’t need to save them for special occasions; I have so many now that it doesn’t seem like they are so special. One or two maybe.

On one of the shelves where I keep “live” notebooks is a sketchbook that was started during the pandemic of places I would like to go. I think the part that makes me most sad (aside from the fact that the sketchbook isn’t finished) is that my expectations of a post covid world were somewhat different to what the post covid world would turn out to be. I think about that sometimes too. How we figured out that if we got the world vaccinated maybe this immense economic and mental health stress would be replaced by something better. It wasn’t really.

I talk about that part with friends, sometimes. It may be a measure of getting old or something else but I’m not alone in thinking that the mental health of the lockdowns at a social level remains to be quantified.

And so, I think of Walter Mitty a lot lately, even the original Thurber persona. We used to talk about how much of the world was a known entity now, and how little exploring there was to be done. My mother would have given anything to see glaciers; I go to Zermatt in Switzerland twice a year and I’ve seen the glaciers in Iceland as well. They are accessible in a way that they weren’t to a woman born in 1930s Ireland. I don’t know what constitutes “adventure” any more.

One of the prices 50 year old women pay for perimenopause is highly frustrating insomnia. I’ve found I can deal with it more effectively if I can wander off in a daydream. I don’t always find them. It’s somewhat not reassuring when I look at the notebooks I tidied today and thought about feeling with imaginary adventures. What adventures?

One of my friends gave me a most excellent notebook for my birthday and it was hidden in my stash to be used for something special. I came across some piece of life advice (instragram is so full of this, it’s not even funny) about making a list of 100 things you want to have done by the time you die and of course, based on when you were making the list, it could include things you have already done; that were on your list. Anything else should be something that you have a realistic shot of making happen.

So I decided to set that book aside for it and will also journal the ones I have done.

The thing about that is that realistically, there are things you don’t know about and then don’t know you want to do…until a moment. It’s like walking into a book shop. I never knew this book existed but now I have to have it.

I’ve had some fantastic opportunities in my life. A lot of adventure is sanitised. Much of what isn’t is not an adventure I’d like to risk. If you asked me whether I would be photographing kitesurfers in Brazil or Western Sahara or at world championships, I would have laughed at you. Things like that don’t happen kids from rural Ireland, not much.

But beside that, I will think about the impossible dreams too, and write them as narratives and see where that brings me.

book reviews, reading

Productivity and the need to speedread

Amongst the many things which the internet has brought me are productivity blogs.

I’m sure I have written those lines before but I can’t find them. Possibly I meant youtube videos but I still can’t find the post I thought I wrote about them either. So I’m guessing I deleted it from the drafts at some point and said “meh, I never did finish that post and now it’s like six months old; what’s the point

Clearly I hadn’t Dealt With My Issues there.

One of the saddest things I saw on multiple productivity blogs – and I mean multiple – like lots of – many tens of – many minutes of my life I won’t get back – was how to read efficiently.

How to read books really fast. How to get the gist of a book efficiently.

I remember thinking then; you know, they’ve lost sight of what reading is all about. It’s not something you do efficiently (and anyway if you try to, you’ll just forget the content). There’s no glory in being able to read 100 books a week, particularly all the ones by famous entrepreneurs, about entrepreneurs, about how to be get rich, be rich, be productive, etc etc etc. I got the feeling these people would have some difficulty with Pride and Prejudice.

When I say I saw many sites pushing the how to read books really quickly, I mean, I saw lots. It saddened me. There were a couple of problems with this approach, I felt.

  • you’re not going to remember much
  • you’re not going to be a better or worse person for it
  • you sound like you’re trying to impress someone.

I’m not sure how you can impress someone by speedreading a load of books. This, however, is a side issue. My personal view is that you’re better off reading fewer books, and choosing judiciously, than you are reading a load of books. I’m not against reading loads of books. I’m against the idea that you can efficiently do it as fast as you can and actually get any benefit from it other than misplaced bragging rights.

(yes, I’ll come to the Alex Stubb stuff in a bit).

The issue as I see it is that we’ve produced a narrative that Every Minute Has to Count As Productive. If you’re starting from that point of view, the more pages you read in an hour, the more productive your reading is. After all, no one is testing you on the contents of a Steve Jobs biography; what matters is that you can claim to have read it and not look completely out of it when your peer group is swapping notes on getting up at 4am.

I have issues with that narrative.  Mostly because I think it matters what and why you read, and not how much. For this reason, I think the world would be better off if more people read Pride and Prejudice and not, for example, Steve Jobs autobiography.  But that’s by way of an aside. There’s an additional problem and it’s this: sometimes there’s a focus on what people should be reading. This leads to lists of Books That Famous Rich People Think You Should Read or more to the point books that a journalist would like you to think that Bill Gates thinks you should read. Amongst others.

One of the things I liked about Alex Stubb’s reading program (and he has it on his own site here by the way) is that he made no comment about what books he was going to read, or appears to even have suggested that he’d do so over the course of the year while he’s doing this. I think this matters. Books are a journey, and reading is exploration. I think we need to recognise that. I recognise reading lists are good door openers but they should be guidance rather than instruction. The downside is that Alex is also talking about how many books he will get throughas well  and I sometimes wonder how good that is as a goal.

One of the very best books I have read is SIlk Roads by Peter Frankopan which is a tour de force of history. I strongly recommend it. I also admit it took me about 18 months to finish it because sometimes I read it, and sometimes I went on holidays from it. It doesn’t make it any less a book and since the last couple of books I read, I polished off in 3 or 4 hours, nor is it because I read at a particularly glacial speed.

The point I’m trying to make is your reading will not be any better if you are trying to fly through it just to move on to the next one. Plus, the speed at which I fly through books varies. Some things are binge read, like a back of Pringles, other things are savoured, like a box of Fazer chocolate (try getting that in Ireland). There is no productivity solution to reading other than to sit down and switch off twitter.

In the meantime, I’m putting a page on this site to cover the books I am reading, or, rereading since the start of September. I have to be honest and say the whole hour every day hasn’t been working out for the last 2 weeks despite the fact that there’s time set aside on my alarms to remind me to switch of and travel elsewhere in my mind so there is not a huge amount to report as of yet.

 

being me, life in general, personal projects, reading, things of beauty

Wandering through pages

I’m not entirely sure how but this popped up on my twitter feed this morning:

Alex Stubb wrote a piece for Finnair’s inflight magazine on the question of reading and the fact that he seemed to be doing less of it. I must confess I was a bit envious of his 4000 books. I cleared out a good lot last year when I was moving house, much to my sadness. What he said about the place of reading in his life resonated. I have been thinking about this on several fronts myself lately. I’ve recognised that I read far less than I did in the past. This despite the convenience of a Kindle which currently has a queue of about 200 books to read. The fact that I have not been reading much has not necessarily meant that I have stopped actually buying books.

So far this year, I have finished reading 12 books. This is about 8 more than usual lately and this is mostly because I decided to make a concerted effort to read more. I just haven’t formalised it in a 1+1+1 plan like Mr Stubb has. But I am inclined to follow his lead, or at least give it a shot. I’m not able to do 1 hour of exercise every day on the grounds that in theory, most weeks I go swimming 3 to 4 times and that’s a minimum 2 hour cut out of my day. I also feel that twitter absorbs a good deal of my time but not necessarily productively. So in addition to reviewing and rebuilding my reading habit, I’m also looking at chopping the number of accounts I follow on twitter.

Two things led to the loss of reading from my life. I felt the loss of Terry Pratchett enormously. Additionally, I used to read a significant amount of children’s fiction and with Harry Potter, I seem to have tapped out of that lately. Most of what I have been reading of late has been non-fiction. I’ve just finished Motherfóclóir which is the better of the two books focused on using the Irish language which I read this year. I also finished Silk Road by Peter Frankopan which is a book I had been travelling with for some time. More frivolously I have started reading Calvin and Hobbes again. But I have also drawn heavily on the field of science and genetics for escape.

I have a massive reading queue, and it is hard to know what to start with. I have some frivolous German stuff, and a classic of travel writing by Heinrich Boll lined up. In a way, I feel a bit overwhelmed by the number of books both on my kindle and on my Amazon wishlist and I wonder if that perhaps, contributes to the paralysis I sometimes now feel about reading. Like I have a lot of books to get through.

Mostly recently acquired are the memoirs of a US interpreter which I expect to be relatively easy to read, and apart from that, I have been journeying with Empire of the Word by Nicholas Ostler for some time. I think it is sometimes more difficult to make progress through very in-depth, long books on kindles. We lack the visual evidence of progress; the movement of the bookmark through the pages. I regret that and somehow, I need to be practical as well.

What I lack at the moment is a way into fiction. The last piece of fiction that I read that truly took my life by the scruff of the neck and pulled me out of reality – and it was a re-read – was Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. I have another of his other books to hand but I have somehow not found a route into them.  In a way, I think for years I was sated by the escapism guaranteed by a visit to the Discworld but I don’t think Terry Pratchett would appreciate the idea that he had spoilt me for other books.

I need to get involved in a little exploration. Just as soon as I’ve read a few more of these books I have lined up for the last 5 to 10 years.