Week Five: Read Good Books, Learn New Things
Week five is a combination of Read Good Books and Learn New Things. Two things I think I can accomplish both together and separately.
Things I plan on doing in order to keep these resolutions:
1. Choose books that I’m looking forward to (not just books people have recommended and I’m therefore going to read, etc.). I plan on starting with Bitter is the New Black (which I actually started 2 days early, as I was done with A Very Lonely Planet).
2. Also choose books that I think I can learn something from. After Bitter is the New Black, I may start in on Content Strategy by Kristina Halvorson, which I successfully convinced my Creative Director to purchase for our Content Department (aka. mua). I’ve also got Jewish Literacy, which is an enormous history, tradition, religion, etc. book that I’ve started before (and loved), but never finished. Mostly because it’s too big to carry with me.
3. I’ve been wanting to go to a Jewish Temple service for a while now: this may just be the right time.
4. I’m definitely NOT going to keep reading anything I find boring, trite or tedious. I frequently keep reading those kinds of books in order to “give them a chance.” But not this week. And I think this year in general I’m done with that strategy. Life is too short for bad books.
I never understood how or why people read books that they describe as “slow until the middle” or “a difficult read” or “really depressing” or “makes some good points.” I’ve found that books recommended as such tend to be atrociously boring.
Here’s what you do: give books 20 pages to intrigue you; put them down if they fail to.
Then go outside in the sunshine. You need vitamin D way more than you need to read through one more 900-pager that can be summarized as “the universe is picking on me.”
Love, RM1
True story.
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