Category Archives: Aspirations / Inspirations

The gift of a book is a gift for many

It’s my birthday this week.

The greatest gift I can imagine is if you give yourself the gift of a book. Here are my suggestions about how to go about that. Add your comment here (or visit me on Twitter @bookgaga or Instagram @vzbookgaga) and let me know what you got, OK?

Happy birthday … to all of us!

Stack of books with purple ribbon

If you purchase from an independent bookseller, it’s also a gift to those hardworking people and businesses. Maybe you already have a fave that you support, or you can find one here:

Pre-ordering books is not only “a present to your future self” … it’s also a gift to tireless and determined authors and publishers.

Learn more here (via The Week) and here (via Book Riot).

If you can meld your book purchase with support for Ukraine, how beautiful that would be.

Some ideas? The Kobzar Book Award (launched in 2003 as an initiative of the Shevchenko Foundation), which celebrates Canadian literary works with tangible connection to the experiences of Ukrainian Canadians, has winners and shortlists spanning genres.

Literary Hub has some tantalizing suggestions, too.

Books are always vital, perhaps now more than ever. Whether we turn to them for diversion, solace, education or inspiration, they are what bolster us to face the world’s challenges. Their essential truths help us to discern and to combat when words are twisted to undermine and harm what we respect and hold dear.

How to Read Books in a Pandemic in the Digital Age

Guest contributor Liza Achilles

Guest contributor Liza Achilles

by Liza Achilles

I keep hearing the same lament, over and over.

I host a Silent Book Club, which means that I meet weekly with people who love to read. We talk about the books we are reading … and not reading, as the case may be.

During club meetings, I keep hearing people bemoan their lack of concentration. Everyone’s brain is going haywire. Everyone’s worried about COVID-19. Everyone’s worried about politics. Everyone’s stressed about social distancing and the shuttering of schools and workplaces. On top of all this, everyone’s being bombarded with phone notifications, social media messages, and news alerts.
It’s not surprising that sitting down and calmly reading a book is starting to seem like a quaint luxury, something that old-fashioned people did in previous centuries.

But reading full books — and not just snippets of news or gossip — brings massive rewards. Many of us want to read more books. We just need to figure out how to hack our personal systems, how to reconfigure our brains, to allow it to happen. Following are solutions that work for me.

How to Have a Shot at Reaching Your Reading Goals

You aren’t going to reach your reading goals if you don’t have any in the first place! So that’s a good place to start.

All of the most avid readers I know track their reading. Some people track their reading on Goodreads. Other people use digital spreadsheets. I, personally, am analog: I use a notepad in which I write down, by hand, the date I finished a book and its title and author. Simple.

Tracking your reading is great for motivation. You can learn how many books you typically read in a month or a year. And you can set goals to increase those numbers. On days when you don’t feel like reading, you can think about your goals, which may prompt you to sit down with a book.

A friend of mine doesn’t track number of books read per year, but rather number of pages read per year. She uses the page count supplied by her e-reader, so it’s a consistent measure. This, she feels, and I’m sure she’s right, is a more accurate gauge of how much she is reading.

I like to have daily page count goals in addition to my monthly and yearly goals. I try to read at least 40 pages a day. This doesn’t always happen, but having the goal helps.

How to Start Reading

There are always a hundred things I could be doing. Dishes, laundry, cooking, cleaning, exercising, texting, going on social media … the list goes on and on. I have noticed that there are points in my day when I think, “I should read a book,” but instead I end up clicking on each of my phone apps, in turn, to see what’s new there.

I have discovered that, nowadays, I need a motivator to inspire me to sit down with a book. Once I start reading, I’m often swept away by the joy of reading. But I need something to get me there in the first place.

For me, the best incentive is something to put in my mouth. (I’m like a baby!) My beverage of choice is tea, either caffeinated or herbal, depending on the time of day. My food of choice is a piece of hard candy.

I say to myself, “If you sit down to read, you can have this savory drink or sweet candy!” I don’t allow myself to eat an entire jar of candy, mind you — only one or two pieces per day. It’s just a brain boost to get me started.

Once I get started, I often forget about the tea or candy as I get engrossed in the book. Sometimes I look up an hour later and notice a full mug of cold tea, tea bag still dangling over the edge—how silly is that?!

How to Keep Reading

While reading, I often feel the urge to check my phone. I have tried turning it off or putting it in another room; but inevitably, I will need it, wanting to look up a word or a reference in the book I’m reading.

Instead of banishing my phone from my presence, I tell myself, “This is your reading time. Try not to check your phone. But if it rings or beeps, or if you can’t resist and pick it up to check it, put it down as soon as possible.”

Sometimes I give myself permission to click around on my phone only after I have read a certain number of pages, or gotten to the end of a chapter.

Also: I silence almost all notifications on my phone. There are literally only three types of functionalities or people that I allow to make a noise that might disturb me. Some people might say even three is too many. You might try putting your phone in Total Silence / Do Not Disturb mode if being interrupted while reading is a problem.

How to Combat Reading Fatigue

I find that it’s helpful to space reading throughout the day. Read a few pages in the morning, a few pages at lunchtime, and a few pages before bed.

Making it through a massive chunk of reading all in one sitting can work if the book is a real page-turner. But there are lots of great books out there that need to be digested, so to speak. Spacing out the book’s consumption helps your brain process what was read and recoup before the next session.

Additionally, one of my favorite times to read is in the middle of the night. Sometimes I wake up late at night and read for an hour. It’s a time of day when I don’t feel at all distracted. There’s no breaking news; little is happening on social media; all my friends are asleep. I always get a lot of reading done when I read at 1 in the morning. Waking early and reading at 5am is also productive for me.

How to Get Through Reading Slumps

Sometimes it’s hard to get reading done because you just finished a good book, and no other book seems interesting.

Or maybe you are in a slump because you tried reading one book, but it was boring, so you picked up a second book, but it was boring, too, and you feel guilty about not reading either of them, and you wonder whether you should try a third book, or plug away at one of the other two, and you can’t make a decision, so you give up and take a nap.

In my experience, the best remedy for this problem is to have lots of books at hand. Always have at least 20 unread books lying around. These can be books you own or books from the library, real books or e-books.

Book reading is extremely personal and circumstantial. If you don’t feel like reading a particular book, it could be simply the wrong book for you, at this point in your life. I recently tried to read a book multiple times, but failed each time … until the political climate changed. Suddenly, I was able to read about that topic again. Before that, the topic felt too painful and raw. Afterward, I devoured the book.

However, in the thick of things, I did not realize that that was the problem. I just thought I was having a problem with reading in general. In reality, I was having a problem with a particular emotional trigger.

The lesson is, have a bunch of books around, and keep trying to read one, and then another one, and then another one, until you find one that resonates with you, right now. That’s the book that you should be reading.

And I wish you the best of luck in reading it!


Liza Achilles is a writer, editor, poet, and coach based in the Washington, D.C., area. She blogs about seeking wisdom through books and elsewhere at lizaachilles.com.


It was such an honour to collaborate with Liza, developing reciprocal pieces on the challenges of reading during these unsettled and unsettling times. It was fun, too! We wrote our pieces independently, exchanged them and then opened and read each other’s pieces at the same time. It was thrilling to see how what we observed and how we were dealing with it had common threads and complementary strategies, creating a really interesting balance that we hope all our bookish friends will appreciate. Liza beautifully presents my piece on her blog here: Clutching Our Books While Riding a Rollercoaster: the Solace and Challenges of Reading During a Pandemic.

Silent book club – looking for time to companionably read together

silent-book-club1

How did it go?

The inspiration started here … and then it came up in conversation with some neighbourhood friends this summer after a lovely yoga-in-the-park class. We’re now starting to organize our first silent book club get-together at a neighbourhood coffee shop. We’ve scheduled it for early November, when the weather’s getting cooler and folks might be seeking cozier indoor pursuits, still coupled with an excuse to get out of the house and get out and about in the neighbourhood.

As the description at the link above reinforces, a silent book club is a completely no-pressure version of the traditional book club. The idea is that people still gather with books, and do so at a local cafe, watering hole, restaurant or the like, but …

  1. Everyone shows up with their own book or books, whatever they’re reading at the moment or want to start reading.
  2. At the start of the silent book club, you do a quick survey around the table so everyone can introduce themselves and speak briefly about what they’re reading.
  3. Once the introductions are done and refreshments are ordered and in place, everyone puts their noses in their books and reads – for an hour.
  4. When the hour is up, folks can stick around to chat about their books or whatever, or they can be on their way. No pressure!

I recently heard an item on CBC Radio about something called The Loneliness Project. In my mind, the plight of contributors to the project connected with the reference on that Silent Book Club web page to “introvert happy hour”. I certainly don’t want to downplay or oversimplify why people are lonely and how difficult it is to remedy that … but maybe little gatherings like this are a modest possibility.

I’m guessing you come away from a silent book club gathering having enjoyed some quiet fellowship and perhaps having picked up some leads on future good reads. If you hold the gathering in a neighbourhood establishment, you’re helping support your local businesses while you’re at it. Well, this is my humble hope as we anticipate our first gathering. I’ll be sure to report back.


How did it go?

Splendidly! We held our first silent book club meeting on November 4th at local cafe Press Books Coffee Vinyl. Four of us gathered with books in hand – three reading paper books, one reading on iPad and phone. We settled in by the front window with coffees and chai lattes. We not only discussed the books we were planning to read during the upcoming silent reading hour, but other books we’d read recently. We all compiled lists of recommendations and ideas. And then we got to it, engrossed in our reading for the next hour while other cafe customers wandered in and out, the cafe’s resident dog trotted about and the Tragically Hip’s Phantom Power played in the background. The hour went quickly. I felt I’d gobbled great chunks of the novel and poetry collection I brought along.

We’ve already made a date for our next silent book club meeting, in about a month. I can’t wait for what I know will feel like an oasis of calm and thought, just as it did today.

Here are the books the members our silent book club meeting read and/or discussed today:

No TV For Woodpeckers by Gary Barwin
Bella by Terri Favro, illustrated by Ron Edding
In the Cage by Kevin Hardcastle
Next Year For Sure by Zoey Leigh Peterson
Son of a Trickster by Eden Robinson
The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer
Medicine Walk by Richard Wagamese

See also:

Sustained silent reading (Wikipedia) – thank you, Gary Barwin!

A Rewording Life, by Sheryl Gordon

A very special journey celebrating words and memory, in support of research into dementia

When Sheryl Gordon witnessed her mother, Yolande, losing her words to dementia, Sheryl developed a wrenchingly acute appreciation for the meaning of words … and that bittersweet realization inspired the creation of A Rewording Life. Sheryl reached out to over a thousand Canadians for whom words are vital – writers, editors, poets, journalists, performers, musicians, as well as sculptors, fashion designers, teachers, comedians and more – and asked them to contribute vibrant, unforgettable sentences using out of the ordinary words, to fight back against an affliction that makes words disappear.

rewording-bookMany of the contributors are well known, including Yann Martel, Terry Fallis, Miriam Toews, Measha Brueggergosman, Tony Dekker, Emma Donoghue, Joel Plaskett and many more. Some of the contributors are, well, folks like me. Like many, I have family and friends who have been affected by dementia, so it feels particularly gratifying to try to strike back at it with the power of words.

I’m not even sure the title of “writer” really fits, but heck, I wrote this sentence:

rewording-zaftig

Two yoga mats over, the rosy-cheeked zaftig woman energetically, if clumsily yet cheerfully, went with the flow.

Interwoven among the myriad lively contributions are eight essays by Sheryl, the initial letters in the titles spelling out dementia. Scattered as the concept might seem, Sheryl hopes readers will embrace it. As she points out, confusion is, after all, the nature of this disease.

So, embrace it you should. In the process, you can help support organizations battling dementia. Half of the profits of each book will go to the Alzheimer Society of Canada.

Learn more about Sheryl, A Rewording Life, its worthy cause and all its amazing contributors at

www.arewordinglife.com.

Spring/summer 2013 reading aspirations and inspirations

Cottage shoreline, to eventually include dock

Unprecedented high water levels on our lake this year could mean a bit of a delay getting the cottage dock installed and ready for another season of sunny lolling and reading. That doesn’t mean I can’t start thinking about what books I hope to be devouring in the midst of our Canadian spring and summer splendour. I did that in delicious anticipation last year, and I thought it might be fun to reflect and plan (and salivate a little) and do it again this year.

This is an ambitious list, but I know it’ll give me lots to choose from – new reads, overdue reads, and maybe even a reread or two.

Coping with Emotions and Otters, by Dina Del Bucchia

  • Clear Skies, No Wind, 100% Visibility, by Theodora Armstrong ✔
  • Coping with Emotions and Otters, by Dina Del Bucchia ✔
  • Journey With No Maps, by Sandra Djwa ✔
  • We So Seldom Look on Love, by Barbara Gowdy (reread)
  • Music For Torching, by A.M. Homes
  • Rosina, the Midwife, by Jessica Kluthe ✔
  • The Miracles of Ordinary Men, by Amanda Leduc ✔
  • The View from Penthouse B, by Elinor Lipman
  • Monoceros, by Suzette Mayr
  • Discovery Passages, by Garry Thomas Morse
  • Bone and Bread, by Saleema Nawaz ✔
  • In the Skin of a Lion, by Michael Ondaatje (reread)
  • Your Call is Important to Us – The Truth About Bullshit, by Laura Penny
  • The Soul of Baseball – A Road Trip Through Buck O’Neil’s America, by Joe Posnanski ✔
  • The Truth About Luck, by Iain Reid
  • Studio Saint-Ex, by Ania Szado
  • Bender – New and Selected Poems, by Dean Young

(As I read them, I’ll tick them off my list … ✔)

Dock reading in July, 2013
(July update: Here is some of the reading material that made it to the dock.)

Is there anything else you’d recommend that I really need to read and that really lends itself to an accompaniment of summer breezes and beverages?

What are your spring/summer reading plans and desires? Please share them here in the comments, or send or tweet me (@bookgaga) a link to your list – would love to compare notes!

As I said last year, this list is subject to change, whim, fancy and recommendations from my erudite and persuasive book friends. Still, it’s nice to start dreaming, isn’t it?

There are lots of nice recommended summer reading lists out there. Here are some that particularly caught my fancy (hmmm):

Cottage shoreline, to eventually include dock

Summer reading aspirations … and inspirations

The Little Shadows, by Marina Endicott

The cottage dock is beckoning. When I wander down to it for a lazy afternoon of refreshing beverages, relaxing and reading, I aim to have some of these books in my tote bag. These are all titles that have been calling to me from the tbr pile for some time:

  • Tell It to the Trees, by Anita Rau Badami
  • The Chemistry of Tears, by Peter Carey
  • The Little Shadows, by Marina Endicott
  • Canada, by Richard Ford
  • Killdeer, by Phil Hall  ✔
  • Monoceros, by Suzette Mayr
  • How to Read the Air, by Dinaw Mengestu
  • Magnified World, by Grace O’Connell
  • The Juliet Stories, by Carrie Snyder  ✔
  • Night Street, by Kristel Thornell  ✔

These ones aren’t dock books, but ones I want to enjoy on my porch in Toronto … and with a TTC pass nearby so I can leap up, inspired, to go exploring:

  • Stroll, Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto, by Shawn Micallef
  • Seen Reading, by Julie Wilson  ✔

Of course, it’s all subject to change, whim, fancy and recommendations from my erudite and persuasive book friends. What are your summer reading aspirations … and inspirations?

(As I read them, I’m ticking them off my list …   ✔)

Treasuring my Book of Books (BOB)

“With no small amount of trepidation, I lay open here the first page of my diary ­ high-­schoolish stabs at intellectualism, fleeting girlish obsessions, deliberately obscure annotations and all. After many failed adolescent attempts at keeping a journal, the summer after my junior year in high school, I finally found a format I could adhere to: Never mind describing the back-and-lack-of-forths of unrequited crushes and falling-outs with friends. I decided to list the books I read instead.”

Pamela Paul
Essay, My Life With Bob
Keeping Track of Reading Habits With a ‘Book of Books’

New York Times
April 13, 2012

Here's a page of my "Book of Books", which I started when I graduated from university in 1983 ... on Twitpic

Pamela Paul’s essay warms my heart. When our ways of engaging with and keeping track of books is becoming increasingly digital – even “in the cloud”, not tangibly or physically connected to us – how lovely is it to see a paper diary with handwritten entries capturing someone’s life in reading? As soon as I saw this picture in my paper copy of the New York Times Sunday Book Review. I immediately connected with the picture and the essay because I’ve been doing the same thing as Pamela for close to 30 years (gulp).

I have a battered little bound diary in which I have been recording my reading since I graduated in 1983 from the University of Waterloo with a BA in Honors English (co-op). Surprisingly, I was not at all weary of all the reading I did as a student, and continued merrily along right after graduation. My first few entries in my Book of Books are:

April 28, 1983
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (reread)

May 6, 1983
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

May 20, 1983
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

… and on it goes from there. (Click on the picture accompanying this post to glimpse a couple of pages from 1989.) My only regret is that I didn’t start keeping a Book of Books sooner.

The spine on my Book of Books has come unglued on one side in all that time, but it still holds a place of honour on the shelf over my home office desk. I take it down and record my latest book completed as part of the beloved ritual of adding another book to one of my fondest memory banks of all.

Twitter, Goodreads, Bibliocommons and their ilk allow me to connect with other readers, for which I’m immensely grateful. My Book of Books allows me to connect with my own personal history as a reader, which is priceless.

See also:

Book of Books (BOB) Pinterest board
I’ve started capturing pictures of people’s gorgeous, textured, much loved book diaries. If you would like me to pin your book diary to this collection, leave a comment here with a link.

 

Book manna from heaven … from CBC Books

The Culprits, by Robert Hough

By virtue of the simple acts of reading a book. forming an impression of a book, forming that impression into something expressed in 140 characters, and then sending out that impression via Twitter with the wee tag #cbc140 added to it … one can be subject to the generosity of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Book Club, who might just reward your efforts with … more books.

Thanks to CBC Books’ most recent largesse, I just took delivery today of the following:

1. More Money Than Brains, by Laura Penny
2. April in Paris, by Michael Wallner
3. The Eye of Jade, by Diane Wei Liang
4. Peddling Peril, by David Albright
5. The Culprits, by Robert Hough

I confess that – as well read as I fancy I am – I know little about any of these books and authors. That’s what makes this package so delightful and makes me that much more grateful, as I’ll now have the opportunity to read some books I might not have chanced upon otherwise, and will learn about some new authors. Yes, the ice cream headache of bookish delight is gaining momentum already!

Give it a try: tweet your mini book reviews to #cbc140, and you could soon be feeling that same lightheaded feeling of bookish delight yourself!