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.

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“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

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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.

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A little before Christmas, Mig of eWritings tagged me with an interesting meme, one aimed at preventing people from wasting money on books that have no real value to offer them.

I’ve been lucky enough to have only bought books that either taught me something, or made me dream, or laugh, or think. I’ve never seen a book as a bad investment, unless I count some crappy text books. But those don’t count, as I didn’t exactly bought them because I really wanted to.

In order to complete the task, I thought of helping book lovers save money by offering advice that’s in the spirit of the meme, but doesn’t quite follow its guidelines to the letter. I hope Mig does not mind, as she means the world to me.

So here it goes: if you’re Romanian and want to buy a translated book but speak the language it was written it, don’t waste your money! Buy the original version through Amazon of whatever comes to mind and read it. It will save it quite some disappointment. Continue reading

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“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.

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