Read Book Review

Before reading The Yellow Wallpaper I did not even know that a state of mind called Postpartum Depression exists. Wikipedia describes it better:

[…] is a type of clinical depression which can affect both sexes after childbirth. Symptoms may include sadness, low energy, changes in sleeping and eating patterns, reduced desire for sex, crying episodes, anxiety, and irritability. While many women experience self-limited, mild symptoms postpartum, postpartum depression should be suspected when symptoms are severe and have lasted over two weeks.

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is written in 1892 as journal of a woman who failing to relish the joys of marriage and motherhood, is sentenced to a country and is forbid by her doctor and her husband to write. The novella can be regarded as the a autobiographical work of the author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman. She was a prominent figure during the first-wave feminist movement in the United States. Much of her life’s work was influenced by the experiences of her early life. [You can read the full review of The Yellow Wallpaper here].

Gilman in her novella does justice on describing the misunderstood postpartum depression before the 1900s but operates in context of today’s world. She uses a character, the wife, in the story to shine some light on the issue that doctors, particularly men, claimed to know more than they actually did. I am sure this is still happening in some or the other parts of the world. Any kind of depression can be misdiagnosed, and is being misdiagnosed.

The whole idea behind this is to understand deeply what the depression is doing to a person instead of isolating and accusing them for symptoms that were never there. I see postpartum depression more as a society constraint in which women are made to feel as if there is something wrong with them and something shameful and they have to be hidden away from the society alias isolating them.

The Yellow Wallpaper resembles the isolation that Gilman suggests to tear it down since it separates us from each other, from ourselves and inflicts more pain.

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The post Depression and The Yellow Wallpaper appeared first on Confessions of a Readaholic.

If you are reading this post, then you are certain about the importance of ‘reading’.

To acquire knowledge with aim of increasing one’s understanding, is reading enough? The answer is yes, but the question remains, how?

We need to think about how we read and Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book is a perfect place to start with. Published in 1940, it immediately became a bestseller, and since that time the book has been updated many times, famously and notably by Charles van Doren in the 1970’s.

Most of the times, we think reading is something that you can do or you cannot – that is you can either read or not. The truth, however, is that reading is a skill that can be improved with knowledge and practice.

The goal of reading determines how you read. If you’re reading for entertainment, you’re going to read a lot differently and likely different material than if you’re reading to increase understanding. There’s nothing wrong in reading for entertainment but ask yourself, are you really learning anything new?

Adler in her book, describe four levels of readings that if practiced can help in improving one’s reading as a skill. The four levels are:

• Elementary
• Inspectional
• Analytical
• Syntopical

Elementary Level

This is the level of reading that we all are familiar with, and taught in the elementary schools.

Other names might be rudimentary reading, basic reading or initial reading; any one of these terms serves to suggest that as one masters this level one passes from nonliteracy to at least beginning literacy. In mastering this level, one learns the rudiments of the art of reading, receives basic training in reading, and acquires initial reading skills.

Inspectional Level

We’ve been taught that skimming and superficial reading are bad for understanding. That is not necessarily the case. Using these tools effectively can increase understanding. The point of this level is to examine the book.

It is characterised by its special emphasis on time. When reading at this level, the student is allowed a set time to complete an assigned amount of reading. […]

[..]Another name for this level might be skimming or pre-reading. However, we do not mean the kind of skimming that is characterised by casual or random browsing through a book. Inspectional reading is the art of skimming systematically.

Whereas the question that is asked at the first level is “What does the sentence say?” the question typically asked at this level is “What is the book about?” That is a surface question; others of a similar nature are “What is the structure of the book?” or “What are its parts?”

Analytical Reading

It is both a more complex and a more systematic activity than either of the two levels of reading discussed so far.[…]Analytical reading is thorough reading, complete reading, or good reading— the best reading you can do. If inspectional reading is the best and most complete reading that is possible given a limited time, then analytical reading is the best and most complete reading that is possible given unlimited time. The analytical reader must ask many, and organized, questions of what he is reading. […] Analytical reading is always intensely active. On this level of reading, the reader grasps a book— the metaphor is apt— and works at it until the book becomes his own.

Analytical reading is a thorough reading.

Adler further remarks:

[…]analytical reading is hardly ever necessary if your goal in reading is simply information or entertainment. Analytical reading is preeminently for the sake of understanding.

Syntopical Reading

Syntopical is the highest level of reading. The includes reading man books on the specific subject and then compare and contrast the different ideas all those books represents. The aim is not only to achieve an overall understanding of any particular book but to understand and absorb as many amount of knowledge as you can on the subject itself.

Become a Demanding Reader

This might sound hard work but you need to solve your own problems. As Mark Manson remarked in his book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck:

Happiness comes from solving problems. The Keyword here is ‘solving’.

You need to ask yourself questions when reading a book. Of course, you will have your own set of questions. Focus on your problems rather than everyone else’s. Establish your own language and your own terms instead of adapting the author’s language.

The post How to Read a Book? appeared first on Confessions of a Readaholic.

Reading a massive novel means that a reader is willing to be attentive to a period of time in which he completes the task of reading that book. In this particular period, the reader’s attention span can be distracted due to daily activities and a thing called life. What tends a reader to read such massive works? (Another question can also be put here: what tends a writer to write such a massive work? But we are leaving the writing part for some time later.) Well, the one major factor I have found in every lengthy book is the start is important. The start of the text, is what will make a reader curious about it and such that the force of curiosity drives the reader to complete the book.

The start of Infinite Jest wasn’t extraordinary but it was enough for one to be engrossed to. Many might not agree, but that is how I felt since I have never read Wallace’s works before and neither had I read that kind of writing style. I seldom think about reading Infinite Jest one more time, however I know the outcome will be again, disappointing. It was the ending that did not work for me. Yes, the ending of any text is as essential as the beginning but it is not in my hands (or yours), to end a book in a way we want. The ending of the book does not at all depends on the few mere pages of what happens when to whom but it actually depends on the structure of the book.The structure of the book is essential to handle the complexity, if there are going to be a 1000 pages, there is going to be some complexity and not just words pen down in abstract manner. The structure of the book must cope with its characters regardless of the writing style of a writer. 

This is what Infinite Jest made me understand.

Which David Foster Wallace book have you read recently/last?

What do you think about massive books?

Check out this link: Five David Foster Wallace Essays You Should Read

The post Understanding Infinite Jest appeared first on Confessions of a Readaholic.

The evolution and popularity of the genre increased in late nineteenth century in UK and USA, offering cheap paperbacks and mass producing them. Author like Arthur Conan Doyle made a huge contribution in the development of this literary genre for the famous detective Sherlock Holmes.

If we have to categorise crime fiction genre, we must do it in two parts as follows:

• Whodunit
• Locked room mystery

Now, the subgenre whodunit is the most common form of the this fictional category. It features a plot driven story in which a reader is supplied with clues to identify the executioner or the commuter of crime before the solution is revealed in the end. The best examples are Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, Umberto Eco The Name of the Rose and Gillian Flynn’s Dark Places. The whodunit is vast and is written in many ways. Spy novels, legal thrillers, police procedurals, and psychological suspenses are some ways.

The Locked Room Mysteries is another kind of whodunit but with a special condition in between that is the crime is committed under an impossible circumstance which happens to be that no intruder could have tempered as in entered or left what is now called the crime scene. Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four.

Crime Fiction is a huge category in itself under the fiction and is a widely read genre. We all might not be having thrilling jobs as those detectives do, most of us don’t get to carry flashy badges and nor we carry those Beretta’s and Glocks but we do like to be thrilled in our beds, practice our own deducing abilities and feel a bit accomplished if we solve the written mystery that we are holding in our hands before it is supposed to be.

The post The World of Crime Fiction appeared first on Confessions of a Readaholic.

The other day I was just hovering around the internet researching a bit on David Foster Wallace. After reading The Pale King, I was impressed by his versatile writing style of taking ordinary topics and characters and blending them together and turning them in an extraordinary experience for the reader. I cam across some of his essays which I think you should take a look.

• The Capital T Truth
• What Words Really Mean (An excerpt from Twenty Four Word Notes)
• Laughing With Kafka
• The String Theory
• Grammar Lessons

The post Five David Foster Wallace Essays You Should Read appeared first on Confessions of a Readaholic.

I usually read 90 to 110 books a year as I have only been recording  my reading habit through a widget on Goodreads.com called Yearly Reading Challenge from past four years. It’s fun thing to do, you get to know exact statistics like how many number of pages one has read in total or a graph showing books read by you in the year they were published. It can also go otherwise for some of us, like having no time to read, and your ‘yearly reading challenge’ displaying that you are 3 books behind your schedule. Then some of us might force our way to do so.

You are forgetting the whole point of reading. I do not read books for these mere statistics, I read books because of the benefits it offers. If you develop a habit of reading books, at least 5 to 10 pages a day, you will become smarter over the years, this self improvement thing is extremely important aspect for being an adult. A book doesn’t have to be a self-help rather a fiction, science or philosophical work which is full of ideas that you cannot gather by skimming articles reading online. 

There is a difference in reading a book and reading an article online. When reading a book, you spent a good amount of time but on reading online most of us are in a hurry. It’s not totally our fault. It is part habit and part brain simulation. After spending a good amount of time with a book, the text of the book is tend to remain in our memory longer than the those articles. I come across more than fifty different articles everyday regarding, technology, web development, books, reviews, news but by the end of the day, only a few of them, hardly one or two of them I am able to recall. The most important articles I read, I either bookmark the link or save it somewhere on a sticky note on my desktop.

Reading more books also help you gain knowledge. Let’s say of you want to do a research on a specific topic, reading 100 to 200 articles won’t help rather reading 40 to 60 books will do. The numbers in the context are of course, arbitrary. Ignorance is not a bliss, you can’t o something about you don’t know. Learning about yourself, the surroundings around you is essential and reading books can help better since the mental effort put by you in reading each and every single book is totally worth. Reading is an active activity and not a passive one such as watching television.

So boys and girls, get your books/ e-readers out, and start reading.

The post Why Bother Reading More? appeared first on Confessions of a Readaholic.

There are a lot of free ebooks available on websites like Project Gutenberg. Then there is an option for NetGalley lovers, to send the books they have been approved of, directly to their Kindle(s). Having multiple dictionaries on the go is a good option. Battery life is good, haven’t really tested it. The testing part is still in progress but I have read five books on it since the day I have bought it and got it fully charged before doing any reading and the battery bar is still there, hanging around 20 to 25 percent.

Another feature that fascinate me is the “Reading Time”. The device calculates the reading speed, taking into account, how many words you read in a minute which may vary depending on the complexity of the text, (like reading Milton’s Lost Paradise or Dante’s The Divine Comedy) but there is an average that it will continue to do so. If the book is in Kindle Format, that is azw/azw3 or DRM free like mobi, it will show the time remaining in completing the chapter and the book separately along with amount of book you have read in percentage. 

If one is not satisfied with the device’s calculation and want to reset the reading time, one should type the following, without quotes:

“;ReadingTimeReset”

in the search bar and thus, the reading time will reset itself. On opening a book now you will notice in the bottom left corner, it is saying ‘Learning Reading Time’. You cannot put off this thing permanently by default. Even if you choose to display only the location, it will continue to calculate the reading time.

There is an also an option of what is called the “Experimental Browser” and is an ‘okay’ utility for times when you have WiFi connection and in need of urgency. Maybe your boss is angry-calling you since you have forgotten to email him but you promised him the previous day that you are going take a leave as you are not feeling well but will do emailing from home, and all you took the day off for reading a book written by your favourite author recently published. But I would suggest against using or accessing websites with heavy graphics.

Overall, I think my reading is back on track since I have been struggling with distraction and eye strain with my previous reading device. I can store the words that I am interested in on the same device as I am storing the books to be read or currently reading. One can read in dark, at night, without light. I think having an E-Reader is a good utility, both for technophiles and bibliophiles or both. It is handy, you can carry anywhere around, just have to take care that it does not come in contact with water. Having an e-reader doesn’t mean you can completely forget about buying physical books, instead it is an asset.

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Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some instructions on writing and life

Lamott starts on considering writing as a sense making mechanism:

One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around.

Lamott, throughout the book take into consideration that who ever reading this book is a part of her class or a workshop and pursue this type of narrative throughout the book, till she has dismissed the class. She begins her class by advising her students on where to focus when starting to write:

‘I don’t even know where to start,’ one will wail.

Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can.

[…]

Start by writing down every single thing you can remember from your first few years in school. Start with kindergarten. Try to get the words and memories down as they occur to you. Don’t worry if what you write is no good, because no one is going to see it. move on first grade, to second, to third.

[…]

Write down everything you can remember about every birthday or Christmas or Seder, or Easter or whatever, every relative who was there. Write down all the stuff you swore you’d never tell another soul.

[…]

Scratch around for details: what people ate, listened to, wore—

But the question arises here is that, how to do it? Well, Lamott has an answer for that:

You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively.

According to her, writing is as an important task, as reading books and she also emphasis on how an author grabs reader’s attention:

For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die. They are full of all the things that you don’t get in real life—wonderful, lyrical language, for instance, right off the bat. And quality of attention: we may notice amazing details during the course of a day but we rarely let ourselves stop and really pay attention. An author makes you notice, makes you pay attention, and this is a great gift.

She urges a writer to focus only on writing for the first time and says there are always second and third drafts that take care of the fix-ups and the amendments:

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something— anything—down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft—you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft—you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.

Following that, she dismisses the idea of perfectionism. In this bird-by-bird approach to writing, there is no room for perfectionism:

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.

[…]

Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend. What people somehow forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here—and, by extension, what we’re supposed to be writing.

She describes the correlation among the developing the plot according to the character’s needs:

Plot grows out of character. If you focus on who the people in your story are, if you sit and write about two people you know and are getting to know better day by day, something is bound to happen.

She then reveals why a set of good dialogue between two characters and how to master the art of shaping a set of dialogue:

Good dialogue is such a pleasure to come across while reading, a complete change of pace from description and exposition and all that writing. Suddenly people are talking, and we find ourselves clipping along. And we have all the pleasures of voyeurism because the characters don’t know we are listening. We get to feel privy to their inner workings without having to spend too much time listening to them think.

[…]

There are a number of things that help when you sit down to write dialogue. First of all, sound your words—read them out loud. If you can’t bring yourself to do this, mouth your dialogue. This is something you have to practice, doing it over and over and over. Then when you’re out in the world—that is, not at your desk—and you hear people talking, you’ll find yourself editing their dialogue, playing with it, seeing in your mind’s eye what it would look like on the page. You listen to how people really talk, and then learn little by little to take someone’s five-minute speech and make it one sentence, without losing anything. If you are a writer, or want to be a writer, this is how you spend your days—listening, observing, storing things away, making your isolation pay off. 

Most importantly, she tells us to stay strong, and believe in ourselves and developing self-confidence within us:

You get your confidence and intuition back by trusting yourself, by being militantly on your own side. You need to trust yourself, especially on a first draft, where amid the anxiety and self-doubt, there should be a real sense of your imagination and your memories walking and woolgathering, tramping the hills, romping all over the place.

[…]

You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind. The rational mind doesn’t nourish you. You assume that it gives you the truth, because the rational mind is the golden calf that this culture worships, but this is not true. Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating.

[…]

If you stop trying to control your mind so much, you’ll have intuitive hunches about what this or that character is all about. It is hard to stop controlling, but you can do it. If your character suddenly pulls a half-eaten carrot out of her pocket, let her. Later you can ask yourself if this rings true. Train yourself to hear that small inner voice. Most people’s intuitions are drowned out by folk sayings. We have a moment of real feeling or insight, and then we come up with a folk saying that captures the insight in a kind of wash. The intuition may be real and ripe, fresh with possibilities, but the folk saying is guaranteed to be a cliché, stale and self-contained. 

At last, she tells the importance of being a writer and why this world will never run out of writers:

The society to which we belong seems to be dying to is already dead. I don’t mean to sound dramatic, but clearly the dark side is rising. Things could not have been more odd and frightening in the Middle Ages. But the tradition of artists will continue no matter what form society takes. And this is another reason to write: people need us, to mirror for them and for each other without distortion- not to look around and say “Look at yourselves, you idiots!,” but to say, “This is who we are.”

Bird by Bird is must read and absolutely recommended!

The post Anne Lamott On Writing appeared first on Confessions of a Readaholic.

I must say I enjoy blogging. I enjoy writing posts, I enjoy keeping a word limit for every post and trying not to exceed it, I enjoy sharing my views and opinions, and I enjoy when people give their feedback. I am glad to made some friends here.

I think there were times when I used to think that I will soon burn out and stop blogging but I guess if you take your time in doing the thing, you never burn out and run off the ideas. Another thing this blog drives me to do is to read books. Books and books and more books. I can say because of the blog I have read a vast variety of books. I get to know about a new book which I have never heard or read, almost every week. It feels good and becomes interesting when people share their views on different titles written by different writers or mutually share an opinion with me over a single title. When I started this blog I had an idea just to read and review a hundred books. I think I have surpassed the number and I really don’t care about the number here, not anymore.

Along the way I have learnt much about blogging. It’s a great experience to experience and will only be known to you if you experience it. Things I have learned here after spending the amount of time is that you have to be honest about your opinions or views over a thing no matter what. Especially when writing about books, I cannot know everything about books. At times, I cannot write everything in a review, that metaphor, those subplots, no. I try to be as honest in the reviews as I can, it is important for me to share my views on the subject.

Consistency is another matter and another lesson you learn when blogging, or not. When I started this blog I was not consistent at all. For the past few months, I have been trying to be consistent in publishing blog posts and I don’t know how much I can hold to that but it is fun. It is fun to be consistent and it is fun not to be. It can be a good thing, if you write more you get more ideas to write about, and it can go the other way around. ‘To be or not to be’ consistent is not the major question here. I think as long as I am reading there is going to be some blog material to write about. The other consistency I am developing is the consistency in my writing.

That’s all I got for now.

If you are a blogger, what piece of advice will you pass on?

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Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft is a part memoir, part writing manual, and part master class by one of the bestselling authors of all time, this superb volume is a revealing and practical view of the writer’s craft, comprising the basic tools of the trade every writer must have. This book is essential for both who love to write or who love Stephen King.

This book binds together three very different parts: an autobiography, the part teaching the art of writing according to Stephen King, and a description of the author’s current (circa 2000’s) life and work. I haven’t read much of the King’s fiction book, but On Writing:A Memoir of the Craft displays what a great talent he is in the world of written words.

King offers advice in between the text for aspiring writers along with his own story of becoming a writer and continuing to live life as one. His advice on being a writer:

I don’t believe writers can be made, either by circumstances or self-will (although, I did believe those things at once). The equipment comes with the original package. Yet it is by no means unusual equipment; I believe large number of people have at least some talent as writer and storytellers, and that those tales can be strengthened and sharpened.

On realising the fact that hard work is essential and why continue to write even ‘when you don’t feel like’:

Realisation that stopping a piece of work just because it’s hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like.

On why alcoholism is martyr to creativity and his sufferings due to addiction:

What you got was energy and a kind of superficial intelligence. What you gave up in exchange was your soul. It was the best metaphor for drugs and alcohol my tired, overstressed mind could come up with.

[…] At the worst of it I no longer wanter to drink and no longer wanter to be sober, either. I felt evicted from life.

Vocabulary is essential for every writer. It is the most important tool and the most common one too:

Common tools go on top. The commonest of all, the bread of writing, is vocabulary.

Put your vocabulary on the top shelf of your toolbox, and don’t make any conscious effort to improve it.

On writing with clarity:

One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you’re may be a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed. Make yourself a solemn promise right now that you’ll never use ’emolument’ when you mean ‘tip’. Talk only plain and direct.

On why use of grammar is essential:

You’ll also want grammar on the top shelf of your toolbox. […] Grammar is not just a pain in the ass; it’s a pole you grab to get your thoughts up on their feet and walking. If you start to freak out at the sight of such unmapped territory just remind yourself that rocks explode, Jane transmits and mountains float.

I think his following words is a universal advice for any writer who wants to improve his skill of writing:

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.

On why reading with diversity is essential:

Every book you pick has its own lesson or lessons and quite often bad books have more to teach than the good ones.

Ultimately, King explains on what writing is all about:

Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives if those who will read your work and enriching your life as well.

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