Reading for Fun & Profit - Small business advice
Until recently I was a hardcore how-to reader, spending time inhaling nonfiction. Why waste time on made-up stories when how-to do everything is indexed neatly in the library? How-to books make you smarter. They break things into steps even a monkey can do! They strip away narrative and serve up facts gathered from lifetimes of experience, research and perspective. Biographies, Leadership, Small Business Marketing, Entrepreneurship, Social Media tools and how-to be happy, fit and remodel a bathroom are all part of the endless possibilities.
Then by chance I picked up a used copy of the Human Stain and every rational argument I’d had on “How-to Hands Down” dissolved. Tidal waves of revelation, motivation, relationships and human experience swept me away into rapture. Tangles of deception, obligation and desire wafted from the book like smoke from a hookah.
After the The Human Stain I read American Pastoral, for which Roth won the Pulitzer and then decided to read the entire library starting with an author from every letter of the alphabet.
This lead me to my jumping-off point - H.
H lead me to rediscovering Hesse and his thinnest work, Demian, which I learned after devouring, was also among his heaviest, so there was NO WAY I was returning to H to kick myself in the head with Siddhartha.
Next off to B for Bill Bryson and a good laugh except my library doesn’t have any Bryson. I settled on Malcolm Bradbury’s seminal work, Eating People is Wrong. Ixnay on the ootsnay. Guard your brains for more useful purposes. They are bound to come in handy.
That’s when I discovered T.C. Boyle. Never heard of him. Well, the PEN/Faulkner Award people, the New York Times Bestselling people and the National Book Award people have. So far he’s written 10 novels and eight short story collections so I plunged into Talk Talk. I love it! I’m learning so much about perpetrating identity fraud, peppered with an angst-ridden love story AND how to program digital Demon Worlds that exist at 1000 degrees Fahrenheit. Now these are things that can really further a career! I’m going to hang in B for a while until I’m forced to return to Small Business Marketing, SEO Tools, Entrepreneurship and Leadership Principles.
You just never know when you’re going to be seated with the President of The Amalgam Bank and he wants to know which heat-retardant radar suit yields the best ROI.
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Thanks for taking me along on your fiction ride, Lennie. You’re the only person I know who would start @ H and then move to B.
I had fallen into a non fiction slump myself. I just picked up Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore to catapult me out.
Hi Jan,
Yeah! I have one reader!!!!! Is your book fun? You do remember YOU gave me American Pastoral. As far as the H thing - I was sitting on the floor of the library in a pink fur to boot! Demian is breathtaking - totally reco. The amazing thing - it was written before their world was burning and he felt it coming. There is nothing like it.