I Decided to Read 200 Books This Year, And This Is What Has Happened So Far — Part 2 of 26
If you have not read the first post I made in this series; I think you should read it first before you go on with this one. Read Part 1 here.
If you had asked me whether I would have read 16 books November last year, I would have laughed hard, given you money, and sent you on your way. I
I am proud of myself. My reading habits are better, and I feel less pressure. My moods are so good, and I have joy in my heart. I enjoy publishing this series.
So much activity went on in the past week. I have started only one book this week because I was reading a book from last week, and it is one of those books that are so good that one dared not contaminate it. It took nine days to finish, and it was a lot of time, but I did not mind. This fortnight, the selection was wilder than last week’s. I cannot wait to get into them.
I am chronicling the books I read from 26th January — 10th February.
It is a good thing I am recording my thoughts as I read the books in real-time. They help me to write these mini-reviews.
9. The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle, Steven Pressfield
I am going to write a manual someday. The tone of voice used in this book endeared it to me. Having been a reluctant artist for a while, I understand entirely what Pressfield says about Resistance.
Resistance is undoubtedly the thing that has stopped me from writing for years. When I read this book at the start of the week, I suddenly found it very easy to push against things that stopped me from doing my work. The week I read this book, I finished four more books and had three days to play without reading anything. Even writing about this book is currently melting any resistances that existed at the start of this article.
Honestly, this book gets a solid recommendation from me. I will give it to any artists I meet. There is no complicated way of writing things. Pressfield wrote about the demon that had stopped him from finishing his works, how he dealt with them, and nothing more. I like a book that does what it is supposed to do. And I think that if more artists write like this, we would be able to understand and implement their lessons, more than when they fluff it up.
Key Takeaway;
Creativity is not always a battle, go to war if it would help you create.
10. The Secret. Rhonda Byrne
The Secret is also one of the books I had vehemently refused to read. I would often physically resist the book wherever I saw it. Popular or mainstream philosophy has always embarrassed itself, even if they made a fine point. Their need to appeal to all and sundry could lead to extreme derivations. I was very unwilling to inherit that. Reading Byrne’s The Secret has not changed me, but I have softened.
The Law of Attraction indeed works in a very complex way that includes a lot of factors — the environment, prevailing societal mores, and constructs. Certainly, it cannot be this simple. At the risk of sounding political, it feels the very first world. I’m thinking about how much of human history conjunct with my personal experience can influence the workings of this “law” make this complex. Am I overthinking things?
Key Takeaway;
Maybe the point of life is not to overthink things.
11. Friend of My Youth, Alice Munro
Alice Munro is a god-awesome writer. A short story specialist, Munro wrote short stories that carried the depth of novels. She did to the short story art form what the steam engine did for the industrial age. Rising from the end of a Munro book is one of a reader’s best feelings.
That said, there were undoubtedly a lot of cheaters in Friend of My Youth. It makes me wonder if that is all what coming of age as a woman means. My favourite from the collection is Oranges and Apples. The characters in these stories are colourful. Not much happens, but the web woven is thick, and Munro immerses you deeply in the world she has created. I often wondered if the people she was writing about were real.
After reading Friend of my Youth, I intend to read everything she has written throughout my lifetime. As for the novel, we see the coming of age of different women. As excellent as these stories were, I could not relate to them. I live in Abuja and not a tiny town in the U.S.
Key Takeaway;
A ‘Munro’ will thrive in the Nigerian Literary scene.
12. The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Noam Chomsky
Here, Chomsky poses many challenging questions about intellectuals; who they are, what they do, and if they are doing what they should be doing? This brilliant essay, which I hope to understand fully one day, gives the gist of what intellectuals have been up to since the 1960s.
Chomsky’s essays build on other articles inspired by other material, and to get to the real meat of Chomsky’s meaning, one has to meander through tons of other people’s work. I usually would do that, but I am on a time crunch. Nevertheless, the message is still evident. If intellectuals are parading around the title of intellectuals and drinking from the gourd of power it affords them, they better act the part.
Chomsky has consistently criticized the politics of the U.S., and a considerable part of this book contains Chomsky’s vehement criticism of the Vietnam war. In truth, I am still unpacking a lot from this book, and, unfortunately, I rushed through it without digesting it properly. Chomsky’s works ar one of those that take years to chew. There are many things to understand here, and I am not a political scientist yet. Give me some time and I will be able to kill it. This may be the only Noam Chomsky in the list of books I plan to read this year.
Key Takeaway;
I am not yet knowledgeable enough to digest a Noam Chomsky in a short time.
13. Dangerous Love, Ben Okri
Something guttural about the story written here…
When Ben Okri writes about hopelessness, it is beautiful. He is not afraid to show us the ugly things; frayed slippers, mushrooms growing on a mattress floating in an algae-ridden pond, ramshackle huts, boils on the skin. All of Nigeria is laid bare in his writing, and it often hits harder than most because Okri writes from the truth we see every day. No Nigerian, no matter how rich or insulated, has not witnessed the horrors in the middle of our streets; the daki biyus, the corner shops in Ikoyi.
Just like reality, Okri hides nothing. And it is a good documentary for the Nigerian experience. For I would want my future Nigerians to understand what we went through, the harsh treatment doled out to us.
Key Takeaway;
If you are going to be a writer, keep a journal.
13. Sankofa, Chibundu Onuzo
Onuzo’s third offering does the trick. Sankofa is a book I intend to podcast about, and it is my fictional read of the month. I love it when I find a good novel written in current times. I often distrust modern reads because they feel watered down (I feel like a boomer). They often are. A lot of writers are optimizing their stories for an audience. We are in an age where there is no objective reality, and it is beginning to minimize the influence of authorities that enforce standards. By focusing on hooking an audience, a writer finds it difficult to tell the story how they would say to it, reduce cognitive load, and all that.
That said, Sankofa deals with themes of race and finding oneself across cultures and ethnicities. Even with so many colorful characters, the writing never edges the main character out of the spotlight. The story doesn’t stretch into the nonsensical places despite the temptation to. It is also a lovely reflection on interracial relationships.
Key Takeaway;
Even at 50, you can still discover yourself.
15. Nigger: The Strange Career of A Troublesome Word, Randall Kenny
Randall Kenny makes a fine point in this book about the N-word when one looks at its history. The problem is he only discusses this through the eyes of the law. There is so much more to consider when dealing with a sensitive issue like this. I could sense that he did not consider culture or social politics in his research. It is often easy to forget how much these feminine aspects of our society influence our high regard; law, order, government, etc.
Coming off the Joe Rogan fiasco, I think the N-word is fine where it is, and it cannot give away more ground. We have not even begun to process the deep wound of the transatlantic slave trade.
Key Takeaway;
It would seem that educated reality is often racist.
16. The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg
This entire book was like a Key Takeaway. I have not researched what Duhigg wrote, but some of his stories check out.
Key Takeaway;
You cannot extinguish a bad habit. You can only change the routine while maintaining the same cues and rewards. At your worst moments, these bad habits can rear their ugly heads again. This kind of like the law of addition that briefly proves that nothing can be subtracted, its counterparts can only be multiplied to balance out the effect.
The simplest way to establish a habit cycle is to have Cue-Routine-Reward. That is, you discover or choose something (cue) to trigger an action (routine) and when the action has been done, you mark the end of it with an event (reward). The routine is where productivity or destruction happens. So, we should pay attention to our routines.
Final Note
The climate seemed to be a little bit more politically charged this week. The onset of Black History Month in the U.S. adds some energy to our collective consciousness.
I have begun to read my books for the week, though I have little time left. Pressfield lives in my head now. Anyway, let me know what you think. Have you read any of these books? What did you learn?
Do you have a book you would like me to read? Leave a comment below or send a mail to shammahgodoz@protonmail.com. The shorter, the better.
