You’ll forgive me for going on a bit of a rant here, but this is something that while I recognize it is highly illogical, it’s still something that bugged me when it happened. I don’t know about you, but I (despite my best efforts) sill get ridiculous amounts of junk mail. I do what I can to weed it out, but notifications that there are sales everywhere on the planet and people who want to offer me all manner of things never truely seem to stop. I got one a while back, and merely the subject like caused me to furrow my eyebrows and ask myself what the heck they were thinking.
“Here are 12 books for you to read this month.”
Now, the logical side of my brain recognizes that what they meant to say was that there was a selection of books that they were featuring this month and you could pick one or two. Unfortunately, the logical side of my brain isn’t the side that reacted to the e-mail. The side of my brain That is still concerned about being kidnapped by pirates (like with the parrots, eye batches and Peg legs) is the side that stepped up to bat for this one. I will admit, I looked at the e-mail and thought to myself “12 books? How the F*^% am I supposed to read 12 books this month????” I will admit that I hadn’t had my coffee yet that particular morning so I wasn’t thinking clearly, but the crazy side of my brain isn’t the side that requires coffee.
I don’t know how you feel about this, but I think that there are too many books to go through them all. I’m going to be honest here, historically I’ve not really been the biggest reader. I am comparing myself in this case to my wife, who has been known to read large books (or what I consider to be significant books) in the course of an afternoon when it would likely take me a month or two. I want to be clear, while I don’t typically read books often, I still think that it’s a good thing to do. I feel like you can always get something out of reading a book. It may just be mildly entertained by some fiction book that you go through, or it could be an interesting piece of information that you can hang onto and use in conversation (i.e. “Hey, I read recently that….).
Now you’re probably expecting me to launch into a track about e-books and how you should be getting a kindle or something like that. Yes, you should get some e-reader because it does make reading books (to say nothing of carrying them around) easier, but that’s not where I’m going this time. This is going to be the one time you’re going to see me have the hard copy and digital on the same level. For Christmas last year I got a book from my father which I read in January. I liked the book, and I may be talking about it later this year (as it was about IoT). Now I’m getting close to finishing reading my next book, which is on my Kindle.
The e-mail stuck with me though (as you can imagine, I’m writing the post a few months later) and I was thinking recently that I would take up a reading challenge of my own (for those book works in the crowd, settle down Dexter, I didn’t read 12 books in a month). My plan is to read a book a month in 2020. So far I” m 2 books (and two months) in and I’m enjoying getting into these books.
I know I’ve been talking about how there is so much information and data out there, and there is no way to get to everything. Perhaps though, you don’t need to get to everything. Maybe if you do your best to pick your spots and dig in, that perhaps you will be able to gain a lot of information that way.
Would you like me to comment on the books I’ve read? Or Perhaps make some recommendations?
Let me know in the comments section below. If you like this blog post and want to see more, you can follow me on Social Media (LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @jasonlovefiles) or Subscribe to my blog to get new content delivered directly to your mailbox.