Here are the books I read in January:
- No One Is Too Small To Make A Difference by Greta Thunberg
- Room by Emma Donoghue
- The First 20 Minutes: Surprising Science Reveals How We Can Exercise Better, Train Smarter, Live Longer by Gretchen Reynolds
- Conviction by Denise Mina
- Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life after Which Everything Was Different by Chuck Palahniuk
- Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
- Outliers:The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
- Between The World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Who doesn’t love traveling? Airplanes are one my favorite places to read. Traveling can also be one of the best opportunities to unplug from your digital lifestyle and dive into a good book… if you can just resist the urge to binge watch Game of Thrones or start a new TV series. This January, work travel provided me with plenty of reading time. Planes, train, and automobiles. I took advantage our long flights, including two different 9+ hour flights over the Atlantic, daily shuttle bus rides, and spending our layovers in the lounge. I listened to half my January books using the Overdrive App for audiobooks that I checked out from Multnomah Country Library.
Note: If you have a library card at your local library, be sure to look into Ebooks and Audiobooks before your next trip. This is a FREE way to bring books with you on your travels. You can read them on your iPad or tablet. Audiobooks can be listened to straight from your phone. It also helps to lighten your luggage.
I kicked off my new year with Greta Thunberg’s book No One Is Too Small To Make A Difference. Thunberg’s book is a collection of her speeches from the last couple of years. They include her 2019 address to the United Nations. Greta is a 17-year-old climate activist from Sweden. She was named Time Magazine’s 2019 “Person of the Year.” She wrote all of her own speeches. I was impressed with how passionate and well spoken she was for a 15 or 16 year old (at the time).
The First 20 Minutes was a book that my fiancé had been recommending to me to read for some time now. Running actually makes your knees healthier? This is the best news I’ve heard all year! I listened to this one on audiobook during my commute. Gretchen Reynolds references numerous sports science studies helping to dispel myths we have about sports and activity. John, my fiancé, loves this book for the study about HIIT (high intensity interval training) and the benefits of such workouts for endurance training. After reading it he developed his own “No Running-Running Training” to prepare for relay races like Hood to Coast. According to Reynolds and the studies in the book, athletes can achieve endurance benefits equal to that of running for 90 minutes by instead doing six INTENSE 60 second interval sprints on the CrossFit type assault air bikes. This study and a variety of others share the importance of moving our bodies for better overall health in the long run. My favorite study discovered runners in their old age actually have healthier knees than those of non-runners. Looks like I should keep running, running, and running, running!
Room and Conviction were my fiction books for January. Room had been on my bookshelf for some time and I was hesitant to start it, based on the heavy nature of the plot line. The book is about a young woman kidnapped and held captive in a backyard shed, or “Room” for seven years. She gives birth to a child while in captivity. Room is told from the perspective of her 5-year-old son. I love the narration and seeing the world through the eyes of someone discovering the outside and often scary world for the first time. Room was adopted for screen in 2015 starring Brie Larson. Her performance won her an Academy Award for Best Actress. I have yet to see the movie but may watch it later this year.
Conviction was chosen as our January Book Club Book. I was super excited about this one. I found it on on Reese’s Book Club list. Reese Witherspoon picks a book each month with a woman at the center of the story. Reese’s Book Club is a division of her media company Hello Sunshine. You can follow her on social media @reesesbookclub or follow #readwithreese. Denise Mina’s story is another creative use of storytelling. The book flips back and forth between the realtime plot line and a true crime podcast that Anna, the main character, is listening to. I’m a big fan a podcasts and true crime mysteries, so it had all of the ingredients I needed to be a good book.
Chuck Palahniuk’s Consider This was my favorite read of the month. Palahniuk is my favorite author, and in his new book he is dishing out advice for aspiring writers. Finally. I began this blog to share my adventures, be it running, reading, or travel. I also started this blog to dust off my writing skills. Reading anything by Palahniuk leaves me wanting more. The same goes for Consider This. He goes back and forth between doling out advice and sharing stories from his book tours, many of which I have attended in Portland, OR. If you have never been to any of his book tours, they are unlike anything you have ever experienced. If you are curious about them, many people have uploaded them to YouTube. There you can find a taste of his wild creativity. Be forewarned his content can be graphic in nature and people have been known to faint at his readings. Guts a short story from his novel Haunted has caused more than 100 people to faint in live readings. I could go on and on about my love for Chuck Palahniuk, but I had better save that for another post. In Consider This, Chuck shares insider tips for writers and his distain for author photos. He encourages writers to go out and find a workshop, to read their work aloud, and try “dangerous writing”, which is writing about a deep, dark secret or unresolved anxiety. Even if taking up writing is not for you, this book has some amazing stories and lists of fiction and non-fiction worth adding to your reading list.
Last year, I read Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers and really enjoyed it. I think I actually flew through it within a couple of days. Other physical books by Gladwell have been hard for me to get into, so for Blink and Outliers thought I would try audiobooks. Both were available to borrow from the library right before I took off on my international work trip. In a world where we have so much data at our fingertips, Blink asks us to reconsider the importance of our first impressions and snap judgements. He also provides instances where snap judgements or “thin slices” were more informative than many months of deliberation and analysis. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman can observe a couple’s interactions for only a couple of minutes and predict if they will last. Outliers is also very interesting, but it I found it less inspiring to hear how the best hockey players happened to all be born in January or that there are underlying success factors that are responsible for the success versus hard work. I agree with Gladwell that it is a factor that we should consider when celebrating someone’s success, but I also think it is much harder to find such correlations. I commend him for the analysis he has done to find these so called “outliers”.
I listened to Between The World and Me and Ta-Hehisi Coates read it. It was a profound letter from father to son of the history of racism in America. Coates shares his own coming of age experiences and difficult lessons his son will have to learn in order to understand ‘what it is like to inhabit a black body’ in America. Coates does an excellent job of sharing his heartbreaking perspective, one that is easy to turn a blind eye to occupying my own ‘white body’ and ubiquitous systemic American whiteness. It gave me an opportunity to step outside my own body to feel his fear and experience his anger. Beautiful and painful. It is eloquently written, and I wish that I had the physical copy of the book to see how the sentences and paragraphs strung together. The author reads the book like poetry. Toni Morrison described this book as “required reading” and I very much agree with her. It is a short, but moving book, which attempts to enable the reader to walk a mile in another’s shoes.
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