One Hundred Books in A Year: 17 Lessons Learned

Pexel

1.     Readers will read. Regardless to format or income or legality.  

2.     Something to remember: The Prophet was illiterate.

3.     The first verse the Prophet received was: “Read.”

4.     You don’t have to finish every book you’ve started. Time is valuable, books are endless. Even if you’ve spent thirteen hours trudging through the Infinite Jest. When it’s time to quit, quit.

5.     Guilt is a useless emotion. There is only one course of action to deal with it: Learn. Move on.

6.     Sometimes it’s alright to trust the Bestseller lists.

7.     Not a lot of books on the bestsellers lists have the power to educate, entertain or express eloquently. That said,

8.     Even some bad books have something to teach. Even if the only lesson they teach is “How to write a bad book.”

9.     There is no such thing as wasted time reading great literary fiction. The most obvious effects from reading well-written fiction is the changes in the quality of your thoughts. The second best thing is the quality of your conversations. Hence, the improved quality of friends you keep. (Three cheers to the Sekuts.)

10.  Minds evolve with books. The more books you read, the more you know. Eventually…

11.  The more you know, the richer a heart you grow. A rich heart is visibly less bored, never lonely even in solitude. (This is why readers make highly-adjusting world travelers.)

12.  Some books have the power to reassess the way you look at the world. You're generally fucked when this happens. Fucked and very lucky to bask in that renewed sense of wonder.

13.  If you only have space for one self-help book for the rest of your life, read something written by a formerly Jewish Atheist, whose hypotheses on happiness are firmly based on religious script and social sciences. If you have room for THREE self-help books, read something by a Nobel Prize winner and this thing by a Stanford University lecturer. All three books honor the biology of human behavior.

14.  There is no point in overdoing the book recommendations. You need to find your own groove in the world.

15.  Intelligence is overrated. More powerful than IQ is the compassion to say NO to a lot of things. Saying NO takes muscle. Muscle takes practice. You get where I'm going?

16.  Reading is a skill; it can be learned. You can train to read faster, or deeper. You can train to read from audiobooks, ebooks and on the go. You can learn to forgo paper books and social media because you know your limits and priorities. You can might never get used to the sacrifices you make in order to keep doing the things you love. But you do anyway. Growing up is a skill.

17.  It’s not about quantity of books. It’s always about quality and your relationship with the books you read. It’s about what you do with what you know that matters.

Books I've read in 2016.

451

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Couple of years ago, I wrote a series of blogposts, trying to understand that elusive creature: The Reader.

I was trying to motivate myself to write my sub-sub-genre literary stories. When I learned who and where my ideal readers were, I relaxed. Instead of trying to write, I found out that reading could almost be just as good. I kind of said,
Fuck writing. Let's just read and see what happens.


Read I did. In hundreds and hundreds. Every day. For two years. On every book format. From every field, even those that obscurely made sense. And with jealous possessiveness for all the books I have not yet read, stacked and saved and sorted in boxes, ebook readers, MP3 players, phones and computer screens.

What relaxed my overachieving drive to write, and pumped my overdrive to read, was the realization that when the student is ready, the teacher will show. That when readers are ready, the books will be printed and reprinted, distributed and hoisted on shoulders and bandwidth, voiced through and in spite of brick and censorship barriers. When readers are ready, there will be no law too restrictive or expense too high or income too low.

Then, and only then, I read "Fahrenheit 451", and it said: "You can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up under them."

Like, it took two years for me to finally find the book that verbalized a vague belief about why it doesn't matter who reads or when or how. That when someone is ready to ask that very specific question, she would have already been stung with the wisdom that'll allow her to swallow the truth. That there will be someone who'll whisper to her that very passage, from that particular book, through that secret, soft spot.

That "The most important single thing we had to pound into ourselves was that we were not important, we mustn't be pedants; we were not to feel superior to anyone else in the world. We're nothing more than dust-jackets for books, of no significance otherwise."

This writing? I'll probably share and link the heck out of it on every social media I'm part of. I can't just let a good story pass through me without tapping on the social spheres. But if nobody ever reads, I can be perfectly alright with that too.



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How to Read 9 Books in a Year: 10 Minutes Daily (No Speed-reading required)

Why does it take so long to finish a book?

The most common answer I get is “Distraction”.

Why do we get distracted? 

Mostly because we think that other things are more gratifying than reading. 

• Other things such as social media, cooking, TV, miumiuing.

Compared to the shallow instantaneous gratification we get from the things that distract us, trying to finish a book seems too big an investment to make.

What if the gratification from the time spent on reading equals the gratification we get from being on social media? What if it's even better?

How 10 minutes are enough

For example, let’s take Harry Potter’s the Philosopher’s Stone.

• The whole novel’s length is around 78’000 words.
• Assume that your speeding read is 200 wpm.
• Say that you only have 10 minutes/day to read.
• In 10 minutes, you would have read 2000 words.

Which means that by reading for 10 minutes every day, the Philosopher’s Stone would take 39 days to finish. 

How to Read 9 Books in a Year

• Let’s say that reading a book takes 40 days to finish.
• Say that we divide the year into 40-days blocks, one book for every 40 days. 
• 365 days ÷ 40 days = 9.125 books
• By the end of the year, you’d have read at least 9 books.

Nine stories, man. 

You know what it's like to finish reading 9 novels?

It’s like having 9 extra lives added into your frame of mind. Like having 9 loyal friends to accompany and advise and feel you. These friends will always be with you, regardless to internet connection and popularity.

Better than getting likes on Facebook, the pleasure we get from reading a good fiction novel is constant.

And you don’t even have to be nice to them. You only need to turn off the internet for 10 minutes every day. (Dare you?)

Need to get gratified quick? 

Here's a list of famous novels organized by word count (a lot are shorter than the Philosopher’s Stone).

Go ahead, read the shortest ones and finish fast. See how you'll like it.

Then, if you please, add me on Goodreads. 

2016 Reading Challenge

Alia has
read 6 books toward her goal of 100 books.

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6 of 100 (6%)

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reCAPTCHA, repeat and recount

image: pexel

1.
In this garden,
You're irreplaceable:
With you, I'm thankful.
Without you, I'm thankfully missing you.

Either way, I'm taking the flower.

2.
Couple of days ago, Ben wrote a thought about reCAPTCHA.

The idea is this: Google Books scans using OCR. But OCR is still an imperfect technology. So sometimes it reads something but isn't sure about it.

Book Prints	OCR Reads
from	fnom
and	amd

So Google uses RECAPTCHA for human eyes to verify the words. Every time we enter reCAPTCHA, we're helping Google verify its OCR scans.

3.
I wondered,  "How does reCAPTCHA know that our verification is correct? How does it know that we're not just fnoming around?"

Two ways:

One: Two-word verification
reCAPTCHA comes with two words. One word is verified by the system. And the other word is the word that the OCR isn't sure about.

Two: Algorithms.
If a lot of people enter the same word verification, then it's likely that it's a correct reading.

But, goddamn irrepressible curiosity, that made my head explode with crowdsourcing math.

4.
How many people do you need to amass the credible opinion that their reCAPTCHA entry is correct? How many votes does the engine need to gather to finally concede with the anonymous entrees claiming that the word reads "from" not "fnom"?

The answer:

"reCAPTCHA takes only 10 seconds to solve. There are 200 MILLION  reCAPTCHAs getting solved every day. A problem that would take 50'000 hours gets solved in a day."

5.
That last factoid closed the nagging questions that Ben triggered a week ago. And it came through a book that bored me to death.

It's not a bad book, mind. But after reading "Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow" and "Willpower Instinct",  the current book I'm reading, "The Organised Mind", felt repetitive. I GET IT!

But even repetition has its values. The book offered insight on how many people solve reCAPTCHA

Without breaking my flow to google the answer, it came to me through force of habit. That's one less nagging question obstructing my flow. So I took it as a flower from the Universe. A tip that I'm doing the right thing even though I've read the same book a million times.

6.
Yesterday, I asked for a flower.

I felt shitty all morning. The book isn't coming out. The story isn't working out. The trip is debilitating the rest of my mental capacity. I wasn't just hysterical, I was a hysterical failure.

So I yelled. I asked for a sign, a flower, a friend. I was desperate, so I didn't care where it came from. I didn't care who brought it in. I was losing my mind and I needed help. And dared asking for it.

It came.

It came in volumes. In this auditorial hell of a village, help arrived. It arrived in metta and conversations. It came in naps and stories. It kept pouring in until I went to bed. And I kept pouring out with gratitude. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Hamdillah. You are a Godsend.

7.
This morning, I did my accounting.

You know what I do in real life? I listen.

I listen to stories and try to reframe them in a gentler another format. My main tools of creation are basically mouth and keyboard. I read and talk and write. That's it. All day. Every day. With all the tangible gifts and wealth and books I got, my results are mainly intangible. No thousands of followers. No millions of riyals. Not even an ISBN number to tag on my gajillion of words.

The accounting doesn't seem to add up.

Nevertheless, when I got stuck and hopeless, I was showered with help and love. So much love and hope that I managed to practice my asanas for another day. I managed to reopen that story I've been struggling with for another week. So much love and aid that I had to tell you about it.
(وَأَمَّا بِنِعْمَةِ رَبِّكَ فَحَدِّثْ)

I can't tell you the numbers. But I can show you how it works. How it has and will always work.

"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are." - Theodore Roosevelt

You do it all day, every day. You don't worry about results or recognition. You don't worry about past or future. If you're really into your work, in flow with your work, you really won't care. It isn't work if you love it, right?

If the Universe would help me, someone whose main output are just words, then how could the Universe not aid you? How many people have you met with kindness today? How many tasks have you crossed out? How much temptation have you averted? With all that work, how could the Universe not notice and take into you into its account?

Your work, your service on Earth, is your heart reaching God with your hands, thoughts and words.

And when you get stuck, He will come. And when He comes, you don't ask questions. In God's presence, you don't ask questions. You only say, Hamdillah.

((َمَا يَزَالُ عَبْدِي يَتَقَرَّبُ إِلَيَّ بِالنَّوَافِلِ حَتَّى أُحِبَّهُ فَإِذَا أَحْبَبْتُهُ كُنْتُ سَمْعَهُ الَّذِي يَسْمَعُ بِهِ وَبَصَرَهُ الَّذِي يُبْصِرُ بِهِ وَيَدَهُ الَّتِي يَبْطِشُ بِهَا وَرِجْلَهُ الَّتِي يَمْشِي بِهَا وَإِنْ سَأَلَنِي لَأُعْطِيَنَّهُ وَلَئِنِ اسْتَعَاذَنِي لَأُعِيذَنَّهُ وَمَا تَرَدَّدْتُ عَنْ شَيْءٍ أَنَا فَاعِلُهُ تَرَدُّدِي عَنْ نَفْسِ الْمُؤْمِنِ يَكْرَهُ الْمَوْتَ وَأَنَا أَكْرَهُ مَسَاءَتَهُ ))
(صحيح البخاري)

About Reading 125 Books in a Year

How reading a hundred books in a year feels:

1. it felt rushed there were times when i wished i could have paused at a page and memorize the lines. times when i wished i could live and bed and sing certain lines by heart. but with so many books, i didn't have that privilege. i had to let go often. hold it for just as long as short-term memory allowed, and then move on to the next passage.

2. the things that mattered, stuck anyway.  memory is a muscle. i used to be afraid that my brain would run out of memory space if i stuffed it with too many stories. but memory isn't only lodged in the brain, right? memory also takes space in bones and muscle tissue.

i can't tell you details or even chronological orders, but i can still tell you how the books felt. i can still summarize the contents of a book just by looking at the cover. i can tell you the parts that made me cry in the depths of the Lords of the Rings series.

and you can't find your feelings in search engines. so reading still beats the internets. hallelujah

 3. great books make great company.  great books form great relationships. and that kind of relationships last through the years, long after the bitterest and saddest notes have been forgiven.  (here's a gentle pat on your butt for every time you remember me next year, babe. obviously.)

and just like how every person you meet enriches and adds something into your life, so did every book. i read 125 books. at least a hundred of them made me a better, happier, bigger, grateful-er nerd.

4. not every book is worth the time.  out of hundreds, there had been at tiny percentage that bombed. like, just krflynkd. dead. unpickable. ever.

i started reading those books for the sake of expanding my horizons (an experiment which went really well with the Hunger Games series and Gaiman's books).

unfortunately, not everything improves with time, no matter how drunk you get. and it gets more obvious jarring when you've already been reading few dozens of classic literary works. you can't unlearn what you've learned. so when the blasé exposition, the cliche abuse, or the impatient build-up begin to flaunt their hideous hides, there is nothing else to do but die trying.

or put that damn book away.

5. there's always another book.  this is something i need to correct about my past conviction on reading only books by dead writers. some of the books on the best selling lists aren't so bad.

so instead of worrying about running out of Steinbeck and Austen novels, reading books by living authors reversed that sense of scarcity. that there will be more books to read next year. and forever. and since there are so many books to read, we must read fast. and plenty. and always.

maybe next year i'll read 130 books. or just 50. the point is, there will be plenty. and everything wonderful that happened to me this year can repeat themselves next year. as long that i'm reading.     

and if this is what growing up boils down to, i'm glad. if reading so much has taught me to be less afraid, more forgiving, and less lonely, then it hasn't been such a bad year at all.

here's list of the books I've read in 2015. Where's your list?

Time: Keeping - Daily Practice

Philosophy can only do so much in alleviating anxieties. In the long run, nothing beats the jitters like a relative sense of control over self and time.

And if we can’t stop time, then we might at least keep a watch*.

Big Clocks: Age Cycles

From longest timespan to smallest: 7000 years of human civilization. The Aquarian Age. Human life cycle. 10’000 hours of practice. Being stuck at a boring meeting.

Point is: If you see the big picture, the small stuff will stop sweating and stinking.

Medium Clocks: Annum Lex

• Imagine no more than five major objectives to achieve every quarter.
• The simpler the goals, the easier done.
• Imagine the year broken down into three-acts: 
1. First Act: Planning
2. Second Act: Application
3. Third Act: Revelations!
4. That extra act that nobody wants to talk about: For backup. And second-chances. And vacations.

Small Clocks: Monthly Calendars 

(The smaller the clock, the more obsessive I seem to be with timekeeping.)

I made a 2015 calendar that shows the Jawi, Gregorian, Hijri and Lunar calendars on a single page. Printed out all the months in A5 papers. Stuck it in my daily grimoire. Happiest Muslim Witch alive. 

Gregorian, Hijri, Day, Jawi Pasaran and Moon Calendar

What’s with the Lunar Calendar?

• Some habit cues are spread throughout the month.
• Writing is creative work.
• Creativity is in the domain of the Moon.
• Women follow a monthly cycle.
• Farmers, the Javanese, Wiccan and Muslims observe the Lunar Calendar.
• There is just too much lateral culture and tradition to disregard lunar energy effects.

As far as witching goes: 

• From the New Moon until Full-moon (waxing moon), I tend to produce fast and energetic writings.
• This blogging daily thing was started around the full-moon, when the creative energies were at their peak.
• From the Full-moon until the New Moon (waning moon period), my writings adopt a psychotic calmer tone.

Very Small Clocks: Timers

Once, I heard Tony Schwartz talk about the ultradian energy management, and then my brain broke forever.

I apply Schwartz’s Ultradian thingy in combo with the 30/30 Timer App.

Schwartz's method on 30/30

Notes on Timers:

• To differentiate the cues between Tick and Tock, don't use the same productivity timer for your down time. Use, for example, Ensō instead. 
• Or, if you're really good, don't use a timer at all.
• There’s only so much that a timer can do. It’s a timer. Its job is to ding and ring. Not motivate or compliment or punish you emotionally, intellectually or sarcastically.
• If you happen to still want to do this after three months of trial, you probably don’t need that much external help. 
• Likewise, if after a couple of weeks, the voices in your head are still dissatisfied, you probably need more help than a timer and productivity techniques. Hire a new choir. 
• Thou shall not overdo it. The productivity gurus and meditation teachers have talked about it, only your bosses will love you for it, when see your body screams it: Slow down, you overachieving fiend.
• Try the clocks from the biggest to the littlest. Try the quarter annum calendar. If, after a week, it still makes sense, break it down to monthly tasks. Then, if you’re brave, you might try the daily calendar, fill it in retrospect. Divide 24-hours into sleeps and naps and Schwartzes.

Off Topic:

• What a funny twist of language: Time is passing. Can’t save it, can’t multiply it. It’s going, going, gone. Except for those who believe, who can reclaim the time they spent in goodness. Except for those who remind and encourage each other to persevere in spending time on the true, worthwhile things.

Off Off-Topic:

• [I nicknamed my master the Timekeeper because he is the authority who keeps watch of the local azan times. Maybe the name bears more than one meaning, more than one side of his story.]
  
  • [Is that why they’re called the Watchers on the Wall? "The snowy stillness marks the near-absence of time, or the ultra-awareness of every minute passing in the monotonous white."]

Cliodynamics of Literature: Mass Amnesia

What I love about studying cliodynamics under the patronage of Google is not finding, evaluating and applying meaning to data. The main struggle is actually to stop expanding on the chain of ideas.

That's how things have gone so far, at least. Until I started writing about this elephantine of a nation: Writing about Indonesia's state of literature brought me to a standstill. 

1. Cliodynamics of Indonesian Literature

AD	Major Event	Psycho Stage
17th - mid 20th Century	Dutch rule.	Adult
Mid 20th - Early 21st	Everything! From war, coups d'etat, massacre, crises, reformation, natural disasters, etc, you name it, Indonesians have done it.	Zift
21st Century (so far)	Recalibrate everything!	Infancy

My maternal ancestry lists veterans, politicians, royalties and witches among its ranks. The main reason why my family remembers this fact is in due thanks to the Dutch governance. If it weren't for Dutch education, Indonesians would not have moved on from the archaic lontar (palm leaf manuscripts). Okay so education came at the cost of a lot of nutmegs and the loss of a lot of our relatives to Christianity, but at least people read.

Then the second World War broke. Remember how war, as the dark patron of the arts, has the power to catalyze literature? It didn't happen in Indonesia mainly because Indonesia is too big.

For so many reasons, in less than 20 years since her independence, a tyrannical regime had to be established. That regime caused a general amnesia by butchering at least half a million of the the population, then brainwashed the rest of by censoring, detaining and silencing the Indonesian Vox Populi for the length of a whole generation.

The movement was justified as an effort to protect religion from Communism. Take a moment to associate freely.

2. Size Matters

A few things. Indonesians aren't dumb. Unlike the entitled Saudis, Indonesians have every reason and mean to produce mean literature, win gold medals at science olympics, and run major corporations in their countries of origin. But they don't because, the social structure doesn't encourage it.

It's not that Indonesia is poor (far from it).  It's only a matter of logistics: The larger is a country, the harder it is to control the distribution of resources. The harder to implement quality education upon all. The harder to maintain a standard for evaluation and reverse the widening inequality of income. You get my drift?

Compare to its population size, the Indonesians are not writing well enough. And how could they, if they don't read well enough? And how could they read well enough, if the writers themselves are still struggling with their basic and security needs?

The 30 years of illiterate silence systematically erased whatever memories and stories that the people might have learned from the past wars or occupatioons. for independence and Dutch maturity in Indonesia's literature.

Fortunately, like the rest of ASEAN agricultural nations, Indonesians are pious and mild-mannered enough to take things as they go. And, thanks for the steady stream of natural disasters, rural Indonesians are rarely so bored to be motivated to fulfill beyond their basic physiological and security needs. For a while, at least.

3. Why should they read?

I'm writing this from an idyllic village. The land is good and yielding and the people are obedient and yielding to their crops. Whatever is their religion, it has not made them fanatical or argumentative, because religions here are congruent with the laws of nature.

The people's disagreements are petty, their pleasures simple, their days and nights are monotonous and repetitive. The educated classes, the ones who have traveled far for their education, their main work is to maintain this idyllic peace. To keep the farmers farming, the mothers feeding, the husbands caring.

This has always been the state of things in this village, for many generations past, through the fall and raise of governments and kingdoms, since the formation of the Ring of Fire. 

Steadfastness too is a kind of Grace. 

Cliodynamics of Literature: Saudi Vox Populi

In the last three posts, the main theme was about process theories. A person needs to go through stages in order to self-actualize and understand literary novels. Civilizations need to go through stages in until it can write up lasting literature. Even members of the book industry, with every book, need to endure exhaustive processes; from writer to market to reader.

The understanding about book writing process will help us detach from our diagnostic biases. Detaching from diagnostic bias might allow us to respond more objectively to the state of literature anywhere. Instead of reacting defensively or boastful about the state of literature, levels of productivity, or nationwide stupidity, we might say, "Oh, considering how far they have gone, it's only normal for them to be where they are on the hierarchy of needs."

1. Saudi Literature Since Gutenberg

Similar to the times when the printing machine was strictly regulate by the Kings and Popes of Europe, so is the printing machine in Saudi today. And it is a natural thing to happen when the majority the population doesn't know how to constructively control their voices. Not until it learns how to play fair. Not until it knows the shape and idiosyncrasies of its own identity and the modulations of its voices.

AD	Major Event	Psycho Stage
15th-18th Century	Ottoman Empire bans the printing machine on penalty of death	Nil
18th-19th Century	Tribal unification and division of Arabia	Nil
20th Century	Saudi Arabia founded. Girls allowed to go to school. Seige of Makkah. Fine, we'll let you educate them a little bit.	Infancy Childhood
21st Century	INTERNET! 9-11. Okay, we'll let you educate them a lot. But not at home.	Adolescence

2. Child Phase

The rulers of Saudi aren't idiots. They would not be rulers if they were. They understand that the majority of Vox Populi (Voice of the Population) in Saudi is still in its child phase.

One thing that makes children frightening to me is that they can see through facades, but lack the wisdom and discernment to control their responses, no matter how harmful. Like children, the majority would collect viciousness to thwart their heroes and foes with. Then throw fits of anger without trying to understand the reasons why things happen, or even offer regard to how hurtful their remarks might be, then sulk at the corner until Kingdom comes. Pun intended. Haha.

Until the end of the 20th century, vox populi of Saudi was still in its child phase, which is a period of self-discovery: A phase that precedes social awareness and identity formation. At least, this is how I explain why the syllabus of history in Saudi Schools, from grade 4 until grade 12, repeats on a three topics: My religion, my prophets, and my country.

Grade Lvl.	Study Topic	Grade Lvl.	Study Topic
Grade 4	History of the Prophet	Grade 9	History of Saudi Arabia
Grade 5	History of Islamic Nation	Grade 10	History of Prophets and Spread of Islam
Grade 6	History of Saudi Arabia	Grade 11	Aspects of Islamic Socio-Political History
Grade 7	History of the Prophet and Khilafa	Grade 12	History of Saudi Arabia
Grade 8	History of Islamic Nation

3. Adolescent Phase: Control vs. Autonomy

Around the end of the twentieth century, when the internet arrived in Saudi, the ability to test one's voice in public became a common privilege. Whatever effort the lords and masters were spending on controlling the printing machine was then shifted to control the internet.

And faithful to the theories of psychosocial development, being able to test their voices in public (on social media), created a sense of self-awareness. A lot of self-awareness. And...Blasphemous Blogs! The world doesn't revolve around your self and awareness, oy!

Ahem.

Happily, a lot of Saudis in this adolescent phase are smart and motivated enough to move on to the adolescent phase. And the Saudi government is all the happier to facilitate the transition for their entitled children toward self-recognition and identity formation. This is one the good side-effects that 9/11 triggered in Saudi; it became necessary and justifiable to send millions of the young Saudi population abroad for their higher education.

We know ourselves better by interacting with others. We understand the value of our privileges when we lose them. We develop empathy when we bear the full consequences of our autonomous actions. Which, by the way, is one of Erikson's themes of adolescence: Control vs. Autonomy.

A lot of the Saudis who return from their foreign education have better awareness of themselves. They are more articulate in presenting their ideas. They marry and procreate with calculation. They value their personal freedom and opinions, which epitomizes adolescence. And you cannot underestimate just how good an education does a Saudi boy and girl by living without a maid at their constant behest.

And it's actually nice to be able to see this progress in my lifetime.