Do you really listen to those around you? Family, friends, employers, employees, clients, acquaintances, bartenders, would you say you actually know how to and can really listen to them? I’d say that theoretically, a lot of us know how to. Everyone who had a few college classes talking about active listening, please raise your hand now! But I think we phase out our knowledge, the very same way as we tune out commercials, product placements in movies, people we’re not interested in, things that bother us. And I also believe we sometimes overlook and downright forget the benefits of opening our mind and souls to those around us by listening.

It took reading a great book, Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone by Dr. Mark Goulston – to remember the benefits of listening, the techniques and the investment it takes to make it all work. I know what some of you would say! All shrinks think they know how to listen and help you, but what does it have to do with business? I for one know for sure you can pretty much find valid business advice almost anywhere, so a psychiatrist that gets hired by businesses to get them to work better sounds like a sweet deal to me.

Just Listen has got it all, explanations, how it all works scenarios, tips, tricks and you can take it all, learn it and apply it in both your business and your personal life. Reading the book will make you a more effective listener, that meaning you’d also be a more effective communicator, problem solver and basically you’ll lead a happier life. As an added benefit, it will also help you rid yourself of all the toxic people in your life.

What most captured me while reading this book was the wide range of applicability in business: sales, negotiations, motivating employees, getting through to unresponsive clients, getting audiences on your side, getting noticed by powerful people or by the trend setters in your field, it all can be eased into by listening first and then knowing what and when to say it. Because you see, knowing how to listen is one thing, knowing what response would be best at a certain time, that’s something else and mixing the two skills can be a little tricky.

Dr. Goulston is great at explaining why things happen in a certain way in a language that’s easy to relate to for those of us lacking proper medical training (and who weren’t listening during a few anatomy lessons). While the book is divided in a way that allows you to skip to the  juicy recipes and overlook the explanatory part, I advise you to go through all of it. It will make up for a complete, wonderful experience.

“How to Be Good” is a book about morals, about saving the world, about what people are really willing to do for others less fortunate. It’s about being angry, about the homeless, about drugs messing someone’s head but also giving them supernatural powers. About London, about families and religion. It’s about what being good really means, on how hard people find it to know how to be good. About the helping hand they’d need on becoming good. It’s about facing an important question: can you make other people’s lives better, when your nearest and dearest are going from bad to worse?

Or it would seem the book is about all of the above. Nick Hornby actually tells the story of a failing relationship between “the Angriest Man in Holloway” and his wife, Katie Carr. Tired of his anger, sarcasm and general dislike and dismissal of everything around him, Katie has an affair. They talk divorce and just when you think their relationship is over, David’s anger gets miraculously cured by a certain DJ GoodNews, who later comes to live with the couple and their two children. David and GoodNews start to work on their mastermind plan to end homelessness in their neighborhood and then make the world a better place, and they do have some luck with it.

The cured anger, although it gives the couple a second chance, is diminished by the ever present GoodNews, whose powerful powers to ‘heal’ came from substance abuse, and David’s strict views on how they should all live their lives. During all this, Katie is the only one working and supporting the family and GoodNews, handling the problems her son and daughter are having. She’s also constantly concerned about her not being a good person, although she’s a doctor and she helps people, and about how exactly to make it work with David. Should she move away, should she ask a vicar about what to do? I invite you all to find out for yourselves.

And here are two quotes from the book that I find very interesting. I’ve finished the book a couple of weeks ago, and I still think about them quite a lot.

“Sometimes we have to be judged by our one-offs.”

“Love, it turns out, is as undemocratic as money, so it accumulates around people who have plenty of it already.”

As for the very copy I’ve read, well, there’s a story of a traveling book to it

Naomi Dunford, who’s a never ending source of small business marketing ideas, is right when she says that SEO is scary. It is at first, second and maybe third. It is when you run into a complicated article and although you know the words, you really don’t understand them in the given context. It’s even scarier when you start grasping what kind of work you should really do to be able to say your site is pretty much optimized for the search engines without having experts laugh at you. And it is scary when you look at a new book you’ve just purchased wondering when exactly you’ll have the time to read it. It’s 50 pages, but still, you’re a busy bee!

Well, Naomi manages to solve the time issue for you with her SEO School ebook. After a few pages, you’re laughing so hard, you can’t stop yourself from making time to read it. It’s a trick! She wants you to read the book, fall in love with SEO, or her style (this works if you don’t read her blog), and gets you to learn what you need to make your website better.

Cover Shot Credit IttyBiz

I have to confess I am a little biased. The first time I read a text book that was funny as hell was in my first year of college, when i was studying to get my Journalism degree. It was a book giving us the journalistic writing basics. But it was so funny, it read like a completely different kind of book. And I had little to no experience with such effective teaching methods. It worked great for me! I didn’t feel the least bit inclined to take one our breaks after every 30 minutes of studying. If helped me relax, laugh at myself and learn at the same time.

And the second issue that might add to my original bias: have you seen Naomi’s sales emails? You kind of feel compelled to buy something. And I was just waiting for a chance to find something perfect for me to buy. I had been planning to start learning more about SEO for over a year, so when the book was back on her site, I just bought it.

You’ll learn everything you need about what kind of site you run or want to own, about how much SEO you are really ready to handle, about keywords, research, tools, strategy, links and everything else shinny in search engine land. But it will be so fun you’ll never know what has hit you.

P.S. If you feel you must have SEO School now, feel free to join my Blogging and Relationships group writing project for a chance to win it, along with two hours of PR consulting from yours truly!

“A Book a Week” is back after a short break with a wonderful novel, “Life of Pi” by Yann Martel. I’ve read it after hearing a few colleagues talk about it at work and the details they gave were so engaging I just have to see what was said in there for myself.

It is the amazing story of an Indian boy from Pondycherry. He has a strange name, Piscine Molitor Patel, that has caused him great distress in school, as the French pool name was mispronounced as “Piss”. So at a certain point, the smart little boy changes his name to Pi Patel.

What builds his character and prepares him for the scary adventure he is going to face is, on one hand, the time spent in the Pondicherry Zoo, managed by his father, and on he other hand, his neverending interest in religion. By the time he becomes a teenager, Pi is a fervent Muslim, Hindu and Christian at the same time, praying to God in any way he can.

When turning sixteen, his parents and older brother start preparing for a permanent move to Canada, caused by India’s political issues. The animals from the zoo are sold to new zoos around the world and some of them start their voyage accross the Pacific along with Pi’s family, on the Tsimtsum, a cargo ship that suddenly sinks in the middle of the ocean.

Pi makes it to a life boat, along with a zebra, an urangutan, a spotted hiena and a Royal Bengal tiger called Richard Parker. And here is where his amazing adventure begins, strengthening him and teaching him to survive with some wild beasts aboard.

The ending is extremely troubling and no one who wants to enjoy the book shoudl know about the actions unfolding in the last part of the book. This is why I won’t link to Wikipedia’s entry on the book this time.

When I read the last page, I had a really weird feeling. Hope, mixed with a strong desire to cry, admiration for what few humans could achieve, a feeling day to day problems are so insignificant. Hope you read the book and let me know what you think of it and what you’ll be feeling like after finishing it.

Relentless is a crime/thriller novel written by Simon Kernick. I discovered this book (mine has the exact same cover) in front of a pet store in Oludeniz. The owner was selling used books for one Turkish lira each (about 1.5 EUR) to raise money for an animal charity. I got three books from there and gave an extra lira for the sake of the animals.

It was an interesting read about what cruel, scary and out of the ordinary things can happen to careless man who has no idea what crimes are going on in near him. It is also a story about what seems to be a perfect relationship is actually on the verge of a major break down, with hidden affairs and divorce plans.

Everything happens in a few days, the rythm is allert and it really is the kind of book you can’t put down once you’ve started it. But I don’t know if I’d read a second book by Kernick. At the end of Relentless, there was an excerpt from his recently published (at that time) novel and the beginning seemed to follow the same pattern as the book I had finished. An initial paradise that turns into the mother of all crimes, all happening in a couple of days. It’ reminded me of Dan Brown, whose Angels and Demons is written using the same type of pattern as The Da Vinci Code.

I did love reading a book in British English for a change, I missed both the spelling and some of the phrases .

Have you read a different book by Kernick? What do you think?

The Thirteenth Tale, the debut novel of Diane Setterfield, is one of the most intriguing, entertaining and troubling stories I’ve read in quite a while. It is a story of shadows, twins, strange children and even stranger parents, of ghosts, fears, and a search for the truth.

It all starts when Vida Winter, said to be one of the most famous writers in UK and the world, known to be feeding amazing yet untrue stories, always different, to the press and to biographers when asked about her life, contacts Margaret Lea, the daughter of a bookstore owner, to write her biography. Although all her books are famous, Vida Winter is also well known for publishing a book whose title refers to 13 stories but only contains 12. The stories are strange real-life interpretations of children’s fairy tales, such as Cinderella, who’s a simple farmer’s daughter raped by the prince and never searcher for the next day. And everyone is anxious to find out which is the 13th story.

Vida reveils the strange story of the Angelfield family which she’s supposedly a part of, a tragic tale of affairs between siblings, strange twin girls that spread fear on an entire village, a fire that takes down the Angelfield mansion, love stories and much more. It all builds up towards an unexpected ending, a truth revealed by Margaret after facing her own twin ghost. I whole heartedly recommend the book to you if you want to know the secrets, mysteries and pain of the missing thirteenth story.

Warning! Link to book description contains spoiler!

My first John Fowles experience was The Magus, a very troubling book that I’ve enjoyed to the extremes in my third year of high-school. I had heard of The Collector, Fowles debut novel, back then from my Math teacher, but for some reason I only bought it in 2008. And reading it was an interesting idea.

It’s the story of a simple clerk, Frederick Clegg, a buttefly collector and the woman he becomes obsessed with, Miranda Grey, a well-educated art student whom he’s known all his life but never spoken to.

After winning the lottery, Clegg decides to kidnap her and have her be his guest in the basement of a solitary house he has bought. The first part of the story, told by Clegg, describes his state of mind and what he thought of Miranda every step of their forced relationship. For a person not keen to believe getting what you want any way you want, it can be a little infuriating, as the clash of views on the same situation can have such an effect. The second part is told through Miranda’s journal entries, the other, sane side of the story. It is a beautiful story through her troubled soul, the love she never manages to spread and her struggles as an artist-to-be.

Caliban, as she had nicknamed him, bring both the best and the worst in her. Trapped and full of fear, she even decides trying to kill him would be the way to win back her freedom. Attempt after attempt, her escape plans fail and no one seems to come and save her.

Fowles explained his story and characters as a warning to the dangers that lay in creating great differences between classes of society. As mind blowing as the reality Clegg lives in can be and whether or not the circumstances in which he was brought up explain his behavior, Fowles raises an interesting issue: if all people would have the money and time to do whatever they wanted and were devoted to their sick dreams, how many would follow in his footsteps or worse?

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is the kind of book that would make you feel sad or even cry if you’re a little like me It’s a great story of how a 9 year old boy, Oskar, copes with his father’s death in the 9/11 tragedy, with his mother having a new friend, with getting standardized letters from famous people, in a word, with life.

It’s an incredible story of how things can go wrong, on how cruelty, war and terrorism can affect lives long after they take place and about how people help each other get through such horrible times. Oskar, his mother, his grandparents, they’ve all experienced tragedy, be it war, being left by the ones they love, a terrorist attack that shook the entire world. They are all looking for a way to accept what happened, deal with it somehow and go on.

Most of the other less prominent characters that Oskar runs into in his journey to solve a mystery related to his father are some how affected by personal physical or psychical tragedies. A man in a wheel chair, another who filled his bed with over 9000 nails measuring the time since his wife had died, a woman on the verge of a divorce, they all face life’s challenges, much like the little boy and each member of his family.

The feeling I was left with when finishing Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is hard to distinguish. It’s not hope, it’s definitely not dispair, it is closer to realizing that no matter what personal or general tragedy we face, there is a way out, a way to move forward. It’s not always the best way, it’s quite often not the worst, but as the world never ends or stops for you unless you die, and as it movers along with or without you, it’s better to get back on your feet and embrace what’s to come next.

I read Jonathan Safran Foer is a quite debated writer, some praise him, the rest criticize him. I for one love his style and would like to know what you think.

Kurt Vonnegut‘s novel Bluebeard, the Autobiography of Rabo Karabekian (1916-1988), is the story of an Abstract Expressionist painter searching for his soul. The lack of soul is the missing ingredient of his paintings and the search for it is not a willing one. It is just one man’s life taking him from the USA to Europe and back, in both times of war and peace.

The resemblance to the fairy tale of Bluebeard is not very strong. In his old age, Rabo Karabekian has become the guard of a significant Abstract Expressionist paintings collection that he shows to visitors from all over the world. His old studio, placed in a potato barn, is locked and he tells everyone it will only be opened after his death.

Rabo Karabekian’s is an interesting story, combining his Armenian roots and tales of old and never forgiven deceits, with art, love, the war and best friends who sometimes kill themselves or go crazy. Although he doesn’t give that impression, he is a devious character who has plotted a whole plan to get his sons who hate him to change their last name back to Karabekian.

A light yet complex read, Bluebeard is a book you should definitely put on your summer reading list.

I had seen Haruki Murakami novels of book store shelves years before I bought my first. Quite a few of my friends had read one or more and warmly recommended his works. So I finally bought one of his novels a few months back. The title simply took me by surprise: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. An interesting combination of words as Joanna Young mentioned on Twitter. And you can’t imagine what a special sound it has in Romanian!

This is the story of two very different worlds: the first one, Hard-Boiled Wonderland, is what the world we know is supposed to be: modern Tokyo ruled by a war over information. Its System governs everything and sends out its Computecs (human data processor/encryption systems whose unique encryption key is their mind) in search for fresh information, while the Semiotecs, who are mostly fallen Computecs are trying to steal data from them. Incredible research and modern technology mixed with underground, human eating creatures of extraordinary and terrifying beliefs, the INKlinkgs.

The second world, the End of the World, is actually a city surrounded by a dark wall, where everyone has their given place and follow strict rules. Unicorns come inside the city every day and have to leave it at night. No one can leave the city and once you arrive there, you are separated from your shadow. The shadow dies and once it’s dead, you lose your soul. Every rule seems normal to the inhabitants, no one doubts them or even things of changing them.

Haruki Murakami creates two amazing worlds and takes readers by surprise with the twisted yet clear plot, the complex possibilities and the simple life choices characters make. I’d tell you more of this troubling book, but I’m afraid I’d allow too many important details to be guessed, when discovering them page after page is much more entertaining. If you come across this book, you should definitely read it and let me know what you’ve thought of it.

Disclaimer: I haven’t given up on the initial challenge, but as my glasses are broken and it takes three weeks to get new ones, each book might take longer than a week