I love learning.
I listen to podcasts in the bath.
I watch webinars while I eat breakfast.
Digital consumption can be great but nothing beats a good hefty book in the hand.
I read business books for most of the year along with personal development books. I love them and highly recommend this as a practice if you are a freelancer or entrepreneur or small business owner looking to attract your Dream Clients. On-going learning is essential to business growth.
Beautiful August is here and that’s when I like to throw in just a tad more fiction too. Normally at this time of year I ‘nom-nom’ my way through at least 5 novels on a deck-chair while holidaying for a week abroad, (I’m a very fast reader where fiction is concerned).
This year the summer scene will be our tiny, sunny garden. I know it will be just as enjoyable as travelling elsewhere- when I’m in a novel, I’m happily lost in another world.
Until I started to write this blog I hadn’t realised just how many books I have on my continuum of read, reading, about to read, about to buy. I walked around the house collecting them up from the bathroom, the bedroom, my office, the living room…and OMG…so many!
Here’s my list, how many of them have you read already?
I’m currently reading…
- Building a Story Brand by Donald Miller. I’m absolutely loving this book which made me laugh out loud within a few minutes of reading it. Miller is a highly engaging and quotable writer, “People don’t buy the best products, they buy the products they can understand the fastest”. I agree, easy to say, but takes time to master.
Some books I read very quickly, some take me longer. These two fit the latter category:
- Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff & Mark Johnson covers a subject that fascinates me: the language we use and how it shapes our experience. As a Coach, I need to listen very deeply to my clients to hear how they represent things and situations in their minds so this book is super-useful to me. It’s quite academic hence the slow-read factor but full of things that make you re-think our world such as ‘Love is Magic, (‘She cast her spell over me’), Wealth is a Hidden Object, (‘He’s seeking his fortune’, ‘She’s a ‘gold-digger’), Life is a Container, (‘I’ve had a full-life’, ‘Life is empty for him’).
- Daring Greatly by TED speaker Brene Brown – I’ve been reading this for about 3 years now! It’s great and a fairly easy read but somehow I never get round to finishing it even though I’ve only got another 20 pages to go. Based on solid research, this book is all about recognising our vulnerability as a strength that can bring us wisdom and growth.
I’ve recently read…
- Chillpreneur – reading upbeat business books is one of my happy-places. This one by the fab, self-confessed ‘lazy millionaire’ Denise Duffield-Thomas has been on my wish list for ages. It’s a fun, brilliant read both on money mindset and on how to deal with the tricky conversations that money can bring up for entrepreneurs. My copy is now marked all over with highlights and post-its reminding me of all the stuff I want to put into action.
- 10% Happier by Dan Harris. This New York Times bestselling author is so honest about his own personal foibles and his growth journey. As a TV anchor, he had a full-on panic attack on live national television. His meltdown forced him to re-think his approach to life and led him to the peaceful practice of daily meditation. It’s funny, insightful, thought-provoking and made me want to meditate immediately.
Moving on, I’ve read a lot about racial injustice in my lifetime and will probably always continue to do so. I starting reading about racism in my early teens because it helped me to understand and articulate my own experience of being verbally abused, stereotyped and side-lined.
Understanding the origin and history of racism gradually helped me to stand up for myself. Now reading about it helps me to help in particular those of my clients who are large organisations who are serious about tackling institutional racism. I just finished these two recently:
- Why I’m no longer talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge. First of all: best book name and graphic ever. Whatever your background, it got your attention right? The visual design is rightly provocative and visually clever. Again it’s a very quotable book, ‘White privilege is an absence of the negative consequences of racism…It is of course much easier to identify when you don’t have it’.
- Me and white supremacy by Layla F Saad. Reading this book was like reading a catalogue of the many ‘subtle’ and overt incidences of racism I and others like me have experienced. It also forced me to look at where I have been acculturated to place ‘whiteness’ at the centre of my own thinking. If you are white and new to looking deeply at racism it will probably be a very challenging but necessary read.
And I’m about to read…
So now on to the fiction. I can’t wait to read these. I’ve only got a few novels on my list this year, mainly because I normally buy my light holiday reading in bulk at the airport!
I was gifted these three novels respectively by two friends and my sister. The subjects are all potentially quite heavy – TRIGGER WARNING – but I’m still looking forward to diving in:
- The Closer I Get by Paul Burston – described as a ‘psychological thriller’ it’s about a woman who stalks a male author but things are apparently not as they seem. This arrived just as I was dealing with a form of cyber-attack so the timing was a little unnerving.
- The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. I’ve been wanting to read one of his books for ages. This was gifted to me by my sister and she always picks out the best reads, (…she told me the work of celebrated author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was brilliant and my goodness she was right). This one’s a re-imagining of the Underground Railroad, the name in 18th century America for a network of secret safe houses and routes organised by ‘conductors’ – including most famously, Harriet Tubman – to help fugitive slaves escape to freedom. In this novel, the railroad is re-imagined as a literal rail-carriage.
- I Choose Elena by Lucia Osborne-Crowley is the true story of the author who was violently raped at age fifteen and later came to realize that her chronic illnesses were as a result of that trauma. The book shares the story of how she began to heal. I don’t share her story but as someone who has a chronic health condition (‘GERD’), I’m curious to hear what she has learned.
I have yet more non-fiction and business-focused books stacked up to read.
So many people have raved about these two tomes to me that I just had to buy them in the end. I’m sure I’ll be sharing my thoughts about them on social media towards the end of summer:
- Atomic Habits by James Clear. The cover blurb says it is ‘a revolutionary system to get 1 per cent better every day…these small changes will have a transformative effect on your career, your relationship and your life’. Sounds amazing! I already subscribe to the ‘little bit of improvement everyday’ approach: I do 5 minutes of yoga every day and after a year I am definitely feeling more energised and flexible. So I’m pretty sure I’ll enjoy this one.
- The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson. One of the cover reviews says it, ‘will show you how your daily decisions can be the ultimate key to your success’. Ok Jeff, I’m interested, show me how!
I’m excited to buy…
Finally, my real ‘about to buy’ list is well over 100 books long and counting, too long to list here. So here’s just a few from that list that I’m itching to get stuck into.
Have you read them yet?
- How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi. A bestseller about race by a leading American author, historian and race scholar. I watched a talk he gave recently and really liked his thoughts and approach to ending racism. One of his key messages is that the opposite of being racist is not identifying as ‘not racist’ it is ‘being anti-racist’. His biog says he is a ‘hardcore antiracist and softcore vegan’. The X. in his middle name which he changed in adulthood stands for Xolani which means ‘Peace’ in Zulu. How beautiful.
- Radical Candour by Kim Scott. I keep coming across this book and two colleagues have recommended it. It’s about finding the balance in communication between ‘caring personally’ and ‘challenging directly’, in other words, how to find your sweet-spot between being a people-pleasing avoider and a soul-crushing brute when giving others feedback.
What’s on your Summer Reading List?
Please do share, I’m always happy to add yet more titles to my long wish-list.
