What are You Reading?
The recent holiday break found all three of us – wife, son, and self – sipping tea and napping heavily as we recovered from the pandemic’s latest variant.
We’d done so well up to now…
The good news? We did a spectacular job of keeping our beds from floating off-planet. You can never be too careful that way.
The other good news, for me at least, was that I was able to catch up on dozens of the latest sci-fi shorts on YouTube and, wait for it…
I read a novel.
One of the occupational hazards of my line of work is falling down the bottomless rabbit hole of nonfiction. It’s not that that stuff is bad. Quite the opposite.
However, like any diet, the more colors, the healthier it is.
Sidebar: I got to spend ten days in Seoul back in 2009. Never ate more colorfully – and my guts were never so happy!
And yes, the people were delightful.
But back to the books.
I happily burned through Dead Lies Dreaming, one of Charles Stross’ Laundry Files books, in record time. Then I launched into Samantha Shannon’s The Priory of the Orange Tree. (Making good progress, though at over 800 pages, I’m just past halfway through.)
I haven’t figured out how to keep fiction in regular rotation, but it’s one of the things I want to do. I find novels keep the imaginal juices flowing nicely, and I do get some useful real-world inspiration from made-up stories.
I’ll let you know how it goes as I work more fiction into the rotation.
Meanwhile, here’s a short list of nonfiction I’ve got lined up for 2023:
· Be More Pirate : or How to Take on the World and Win – Sam Conniff Allende
· Citizens : Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us – Jon Alexander and Ariane Conrad
· The Healing Organization : Awakening the Conscience of Business to Help Save the World – Raj Sisodia and Michael J. Gelb
· Honest Sex : A Passionate Path to Deepen Connection and Keep Relationships Alive – Shana James, M.A.
· The Leveraged Business : How You Can go from Overwhelmed at Six Figures to… – Fabienne Fredrickson
· Of Boys and Men : Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters, and What to Do About It – Richard V. Reeves
· Spunk : A Manifesto Modernising Fatherhood – Danusia Malina-Derben*
I could offer a brief explanation of what landed these titles on my list and in my library – or as my wife calls it, “that growing pile next to your side of the bed.” The short version is that some were recommendations, some the work of friends and colleagues, and others found me.
I trust you to check them out for yourself!
Oh, and feel free to share your list and recommendations, too.
*Note: Spunk is currently available only through UK sources: Triumph Press and Amazon UK