Summertime and Reading is Easy

My wife and I are powerless to withhold our wallets when in a charming independent bookstore.*

And our eyes are bigger than our literary stomachs since we buy faster than we read.  

As a result, our home library swells like a merciless tide, spilling out onto unoccupied surfaces: it feels like heaven.

New ideas seed fresh growth

Reading stimulates the mind and stirs the spirit.  It presents ideas which challenge our assumptions and beliefs.  It's also fun.

All of these are key elements of what I do for my clients: helping them find new ideas to break free from old ways of thinking and being.

Hence, I’m always interested in what they are reading and like to share as well what’s on my table!

Since it's summer and many of you will have vacation, I’d like to share a couple of works which have fired my imagination of late in case you have a little extra room in the suitcase!

Non-Fiction

I am about 350 pages into Joan Didion’s collection, “We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live” published by Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. 

This one bent my shelf for some years, but until recently I lacked the time to give it the attention it deserves.

Didion, who died in 2021, was a novelist, screenwriter, essayist, cultural critic/icon and participant in, and illuminator of, the zeitgeist.   

She has a lot to say about California, writing, Hollywood, war, New York, art, Hawaii, love, death, US politics, culture, literature, etc.  

She is a literary surgeon, laying open the national corpus, political and cultural, with a scalpel like eye and incisive pen.  She pokes, prods, and then explicates the world she experienced.

Often what we hear from political and organization leaders today are verbal confections and tropes depressingly cribbed from social media feeds:  two dimensional blather which moves to action neither heart nor mind.

By refreshing contrast, a writer like Didion is an exemplar of clear thinking and writing.  She uses the power of her words to bring the reader into her world of complex ideas and in order to convince one of the arguments she makes.  

It's a pleasure to follow her mind,  read her amazing sentences and swim in her sea.  Reading her work improves the clarity of my own writing and thinking.

A different time and place: a recent read of an old novel

A work of fiction I recently finished is “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman,” a novel written in serial fashion between 1759 - 1767, by Laurence Sterne.

I was ignorant of the book until seeing the 2006 movie, “Tristram Shandy: a Cock & Bull Story”, starring Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Keeley Hawes, Gillian Anderson et al., a comedic mockumentary about the making of a movie from this, it turns out, rather challenging work.

The movie was enjoyable so I thought I’d buy the book.  

Well . . .

Turns out it's a book which requires that you pay some attention, which I had little of circa 2006.  As such, I put it away unfinished, only recently rediscovering it when unpacking boxes after our household move.

17 years later I finally had the time to settle into Sterne’s world and what a world it is!

The characters are well drawn and the depiction of their lives is funny and wonderfully bawdy. Ironically, Sterne was a Clergyman and caught no small amount of trouble for his literary naughtiness. 

Spoiler alert: it is unlikely you will think of noses or the winding of a clock in the same way afterwards.  

The characters' hopes, fears and vanities ring true and even modern.  

Sterne is inventive with time and leverages a digressive narrative style to comic effect (e.g. the eponymous protagonist narrates his own conception, birth and christening, among other improbabilities).  

With sufficient time to enjoy his art, I found reading Sterne to be a pleasant vacation to an 18th Century British village populated by sympathetic, if idiosyncratic, inhabitants. Upon reflection, we’d all likely fit in there rather well.

And time is the point after all.  

Among the joys of my current post-company professional life is having the time to work my way through non-fiction and fiction alike which requires some brain power to fully appreciate.

Hopefully this reading expands my own capacities, challenging me with fresh ideas, making me more effective at the coaching and consulting I then do with others.

If you would like to discuss how coaching and consulting can bring in fresh ideas to challenge you or your team to improve performance, Let’s Talk.  If you’ve got a great idea on a good book you’d like to send my way, please click HERE and drop me a line.

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Bon Voyage!