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

“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.

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.

Remember yesterday’s challenge? Well, this is the first review I’m publishing, with high hopes of turning this intro a weekly habit.

On Beauty is the type of book that you start reading, just to get a feel of it, and wake up 100 pages later. It intrigues you, it saddens you to tears, it makes you smile, it makes you laugh, it makes you angry. The states characters are in are described in such detail their imaginary feelings are passed on to you.

It’s a story of a half white, half black family and the world they live in, a small town built around a university – Wellington. The personal tragedies of each member of the family are interlinked with those of their friends, enemies and of plain strangers.

Political debates, family problems, art, culture, drugs, sordid affairs, theft and love, all are part of this book’s world. And everything seems to be treated in pairs of opposites: the intellectuals and those less interested in academic debate; those entitled to an education, but who lack talent, and those who have the talent but lack the right or means to an education; the beautiful and the less good looking, the wifes and the mistresses; the popular and the hated.

Zadie Smith‘s book will take you from the cultural issues of a US small town, to the political hassles of Haiti, and to the poor neighborhoods of London. It will make you think of the human condition, of what big messes we can make at times, of how easy it is to hurt people or to make them happy, of how fragile lies and lives are.

Some passages of the book are so common, they are predictable, but they are described in a way that does not bore you. It all seems so natural, so human, a part of our souls that we cannot reject.

My favorite character is Kiki Belsey, the black wife of a university professor forced to live in a world where the only black people are those she hires to clean her house, mother of three, each child with their difficult problems. An extremely strong woman, with an incredible will and sense for what’s right. An amazing friends that we’d all want around.

If anyone has read the book, I’d appreciate your thoughts on it. If you haven’t, consider this on your list of book recommendations.

Thank you and see you all next week,
Alina