The mind blowing books project

This year I set myself a challenge. At midnight on the first of January - as the clock rung in the new year - my eyes narrowed and my jaw clenched. A New Year's resolution had crystallized in my head, and it was the first one I ever made. In 2013, I will read 50 books.

I've always wanted to spend more time reading - as most people do - so this year I gave myself a mission to do just that. Reading 50 books in a year is roughly one book a week. Clearly, how difficult that is depends on the length and complexity of the books I pick.

The thing is, I don’t want to read just any book...

Otherwise I could spend the year reading, say, the complete works of John Grisham  and Stephen King. I think that would be a damn good time, but I want a little bit more out of this.

When I'm done, I want to come away with something amazing. I want to be challenged. I want my world to be expanded. I want to have new ideas roaming around my head looking for a fight. And I want my mind to be rinsed out liked a sponge, and then filled back up with lovely new stuff.

So I decided the books I would read this year had to meet two simple criteria. I want to read them, and I want to have read them.

For me, the books that meet these two rules can be summed up in three words. The best ones! The way I see it, if I’m going to spend a chunk of my life reading, why wouldn't I simply work backwards down the list starting with the very best?

Of course, ‘the best books’ are not that easy to define. Everyone has their own views. So I’m picking books that don’t just appeal to me, but cry out my name. Books that I think will change my life, will blow my mind, and also that are 'stamped with the mark of permanence'. Books that I would argue are among the best ever written. 

I have a good list in my head - probably a thousand long - of books that I think must be read. But to guide me, I’ve also made liberal use of lists, like this and this.

So, why am I doing it?

I think there are four key reasons.

• One - I feel almost a rushing, giddy excitement about breathing-in the world’s greatest literature. The very best of the world - amazing ideas, the vibrancy and crush of real life, and the poignancy dreams -  is squeezed like juice into these tiny little books. And I can pour all that wonderful stuff straight into my brain.

• Two - How could I go my whole life without having read Bleak House? Or War and Peace? To me, that’s inconceivable. I've always wanted to see everything, to do everything. So how could I neglect a book that someone says is the best?

• Three - Great books are a way to improve your experience of life. They teach you to make better sense of - and express better - the constant, surging stream of reality. I  can't imagine anything much more worthwhile. Living is all we have, so why not learn how to do it better?

• Four - Finally, I feel like a man on a threshold about to plug himself into a machine. Who knows where this will take me, and what these earth-shattering, mind-changing ideas will do to my brain. I can't wait to find out...

My thoughts

So far, I’m loving it! Reading is taking up more of my life. But I don't feel that it has displaced anything significant. Rather, reading is filling up the cracks in my life. 

I don’t really watch TV or mope around much anymore. Downtime is now reading time. And that's great. I also find a couple of times a week I have to sit down and have a serious reading session. Maybe after work I’ll go to a pub, have a craft beer and read for a few hours. Or spend Saturday mornings reading before going out.

The time I spend reading probably adds up to an average of 11 hours a week. I think that's very doable. My job takes up lots of hours too. I work typically eleven/twelve hour days in the week and go out most evenings. Before I started, I seriously didn't know how I would find the time to do this. Now I don't know how on earth I used to spend those hours.

So far...

Here's the books I've read so far this year.

1)   Our Man in Havanah

2)   Poor Economics (I took a non-fiction turn)

3)   Heart of Darkness

4)   War and Peace (part 1, part 2, part 3 )

5)   Moby Dick
6)   Of Mice and Men

7)   Madam Bovary
8)   Labyrinths

9)   Hamlet (coming)
10) Hound of the Baskervilles (coming)

11) Lolita (coming)

12) In Search of Lost Time - volume 1 (currently reading)

Wish me luck!

Adam

Three things Moby Dick will teach you about life

Moby Dick is a must read. But it doesn’t belong on a top-shelf of stuffy classics coated in dust. It lives, and breathes, and everyone needs to read this book. 

‘Call me Ishmael’, the book begins, and from there it’s a headlong descent into an obsession-fuelled madness. And, because the levels of meaning run deeper than a whale’s dive, it will challenge your mind and take you places - weird, strange places - that you otherwise wouldn’t go. And that doesn’t just mean a whale-ship off the Cape Horn; it’ll take you on a journey down into your own mind too.

If you want to see everything, do everything -  and who wouldn’t -  reading Moby Dick shouldn’t just be on your bucket list, it should be on tomorrow’s to-do.

Here’s the top three things that Moby Dick will teach you.

1) Walk the line

There’s a fine balance between being passionate and obsessed. Reading Moby Dick will teach you exactly what it takes to find that balance.

You cannot necessarily trust the people around you to tell you when you’ve crossed the line into obsession. The captain, Abraham, manages to convince the crew to go on his crazy whale hunt. He is convincing and evangelical and unwilling to listen to reason. 

Every achievement requires some kind of single-minded focus. And being blinkered to criticism can be necessary for success. However, if you are obsessed with something - especially if it’s the wrong thing - it is unlikely that you will be able to accept good feedback. And that means people won’t want to give you it. 

It’s a tough balancing act. If you are put off by every negative comment, you won’t be able to do anything significant. But if you don’t listen to criticism, you might spend years doing the wrong thing, wasting your resources.

Moby Dick shows us how to find that midpoint. Listen to specific people you trust. But most importantly, be the judge of your own actions. The best way to tell if you are obsessed with the wrong thing is seeing its effect in the world. Do you have to say or do crazy things to justify your beliefs. Are you circumventing the globe chasing your very own white whale?

2) Meet your shadow

Abraham, the captain, becomes obsessed with killing a white-whale that ‘reaped’ his leg. This famous obsession is infinitely interpretable. The ferocious, unbending anger that Abe feels towards the Sperm-Whale, ultimately, is symbolic of the anger that is inside us all. Abraham’s fury, pointless and driven, has lived in all of us at some point: with a boss, parent, friend, or partner. We’ve all felt that flash of white rage when you just want to put your fists up and fight. 

Moby Dick forces you to confront your inner demons - and experience the futility of them. By letting you live, vividly, the nightmarish, logical conclusion of this blinding anger, it will let you see - feel - how utterly foolish it is. It shows you that you’ll end up bent on ripping up the world with hate, chasing around the world something that only exists inside your mind.

3) Do your dues

Decks need scrubbing, food needs making and whales need catching. In the life of an adult there is a certain amount of life-admin that just needs to be done. You’ll always need to wash up and polish your shoes. Work needs to get done.

Moby Dick teaches you that however tumultuous life is, there is nobility in keeping your life in order. A ships deck gets dirty constantly, it always needs cleaning. How much easier to let it stay dirty. But being able to create a home is one thing that separates us from animals. And a well-run ship is the one thing that keeps the tempestuous ocean at bay.

Moby Dick is a foundational piece of literature, and reading it is an experience to be treasured. Like all great novels, when you’ve made the journey and look back - you'll be able to enjoy more than just the view. It will change you too.



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Moby Dick is available on Amazon - only two pounds!

Moby Dick (Herman Melville)

Moby Dick is a classic in the same way as a Rolls Royce. Everyone knows what it’s about. But few people these days have been in it and enjoyed the ride. And that’s a shame. Everyone knows that Moby Dick is about a white whale and a ship’s captain - Ahab - who is obsessed with killing it to wreak his terrible revenge. But as soon as you delve inside, it becomes clear that it’s about a whole lot more.

‘They might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory’. 

As so, Herman Melville warns his readers off considering his whale as an analogy. But he must have been playing for laughs. Almost every sentence, every chapter and the theme of the whole book is big scaffold of analogous meaning. Each page folds like Russian dolls into a wider web of meaning. It’s like... I’d say peeling an onion, but I don’t need to. Melville gave us a better metaphor to use; his chapters go through - often literally - every single layer of the whale until we get to the dark, vacuous, core of human obsession. 

And so it’s not so strange, that on reading it, I started to see my life in terms of whales. Because Melville finds he can describe all of life’s activities there. For example, describing how blubber coats whales to keep them warm in the icy waters of the arctic, Moby Dick pithily probes the protective armour that coats all of us, and keeps us apart.

For a book with ‘no plot’, Moby Dick has everything. From a touching treatment of homesexual love, to the basis for all moral law - Melville finds it all in the whaling industry. And then there is the book’s ‘mighty theme’ itself, the tale of one man’s destruction at the hands of his own fiendish obsession with killing a white whale - which suitably, sublimely could be a symbol for almost anything. As DH Lawrence said ‘I doubt if even Melville knew what’. 

This infinite interpretability, and symbolic richness often makes chapters seem to swoosh up to the heavens. It’s quite a mind-opening experience - one moment you are reading about the physical specifications of a whale skeleton and then suddenly your mind is tumbling and reeling, as Melville has laid bare some essential moment of the human condition in language that is now, all at once, abstract, biblical, symbolic and emphatic

I also enjoyed reading this book straight too. It’s an adventure story, with a twist on a car chase from before there were cars. And why whales? Perhaps Melville believe this was an undervalued occupation. And so his book is a ‘hymn to the art and practice of whaling’. This books stamps in the ground. Hell,  if big game hunting can have books written about it, why can’t whaling? A profession that used to light the world, that daily engages in brutal, dangerous struggle with the biggest beasts on earth. There might be no glamour in it, but can’t there be just a little romance?

And there’s so much more here too. The madness, the horror of it all - the utter brutality of killing these intelligent, noble mammals; could there be a better advocate for vegetarianism?

Moby Dick should be read slowly, and sipped. Each chapter does something - why not read one a day?

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Moby Dick is available on Amazon - only £2!