self-help books

To combat excessive and persistent anxiety, I bought myself:

How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
by Dale Carnegie.

To my mortification, about three other people, whose opinions I do care about, joined me on the trip to the bookstore. I explained that this is the first time I am getting a self-help book because I've gotten desperate about my anxiety. Thankfully, my friends were nonjudgmental. However, Arthur pointed out that I need the How to Win Friends and Influence People badly. This is not the first time someone told me about that book. Mel confirmed my suspicion that it's not a good thing when multiple people recommend that book to me.

But the point is, I realized I had inadvertently lied to my friends for it was NOT my first time buying a self-help book. In fact, looking at my reading history, I consult a self-help book quite often. The book, It's all too much: an easy plan for living a richer life with less stuff, really helped me with decluttering and organizing my things. And my last entry in this blog was kind of a review of a self help book about graduate school.

So am I one of those people now who head for the prominent self help section at Barnes and Noble? Please tell me I am not one of them... When I was there with Shee a couple of weeks ago, I saw a waste of good shelf space devoted to cheesy and colorful books for illiterate and lonely people. There were way too many chicken soup books for distinctly afflicted souls. When a salesperson came up to ask if I needed help, I wanted to ask if there was a section on anxiety self-help books. I chickened out and asked instead if the self help books were organized by subject or author.

Okay, so it seems I am the judgmental one. I admit it. Ironically though I am kind of sold on self-help books. The "Stop worrying and Start living book" was amazing and it not only helped me to feel less anxious, but made me a better, happier person. I thought the book was going to teach me how to stop worrying, but it somehow hit at all my issues from interpersonal relationships to insomnia. Now I am actually starting to accumulate a list of self-help books to read.

It can be the recession of course. I read in the paper that people focus more on self-improvement during bad economic times. It can't be that these books contain novel jems. In fact the worry book told me things I already knew or things my parents, teachers, and friends have already told me. The book, though captivating and somewhat well-written, was not literary. So what is it about (good) self help books that actually allows me to help the self?

I came up with two things:

1. It's much easier to hear things (sometimes) from a total stranger who will never see you than from earnest friends and a loving family.

2. Reading these books delude me into feeling that I am making progress towards helping the self when in reality I am further procrastinating doing something about my flaws by reading.

Okay, those two things are rather cynical. I guess I don't want to accept that I am destined to watch Dr. Phil in two years. But I have to admit that some of them actually help. The worry book is awesome. Try it. Reading self-help books is probably a better way to cope than reading depressing poetry anyway.

grad school experience

I knew there's a book, a good book, about everything, but I have been having trouble finding one about grad school. But I did find one a couple of weeks back. If you are considering grad school (academic), check out:

Getting what you came for
by Robert Peters

It's more of a breadth than a depth book and despite what the author claims (multiple times!) I think the book isn't of value to current grad students (except maybe for comic relief). The book is best suited, in my opinion, for people contemplating grad school to get some basic info on admissions and the experience so that they can better decide for themselves if grad school is right for them. Of course there's no substitute to actually talking to grad students and professors, but I find that grad students are in general rather bitter and professors too positive about their chosen profession.

The book also has great advice, though nothing earth shattering, on grad school admissions and how to plan your years in grad school so that you are focused, efficient, and most importantly, graduate. But the chapter on getting an academic job is weak and dated. In fact, I was disappointed there wasn't a lot of info on how academic hiring process works and how best a young PhD can get that elusive assistant professorship.

Even the revised edition was published in 1997 so the info on technology is quaint. But all in all, the writing is good and there's great value in unveiling academia for anyone considering grad school.

Now if you are considering riding out the recession by going to grad school, please don't. Other than it being a really bad idea, you will make it difficult for me to get in. If you are, however, considering going to law school (not that that's such a good idea either), check out:

Law School Confidential
by Robert H. Miller

That's a fantastic book for a prospective (or even current) law student.

book anxiety

When I feel anxious, I feel there must be a reason why I feel anxious. My mind is particularly good at finding something to ruminate about. The mind searches and sticks on to some minor thing like Velcro and no matter how mismatched the magnitude of my anxiety and the tiny thing I am obsessing over, it's virtually impossible to get unstuck. Well, my anxiety over books is a bit different. It's more of an ongoing anxiety. It's always there to some extent: sometimes I feel it acutely, sometimes dully. Anyway, I feel anxious that I will run out of things to read.

Okay, I need to explain this. I am not worried that I will read everything ever written or everything ever written that is worthy of reading. It's more like I am worried that I will find myself on the train without anything to read because I finished the book I was reading. Then I will have to actually bring myself into the real world and possibly interact with other human beings. So I always have something to read with me: books, newspapers, magazines. I worry about this before leaving the house: do I have enough pages on me? And I worry about things like: are my reading material the right size, are the pretty, do i feel comfortable with it today and does it go with my outfit?

Another one of my constant worries involves the ratio of read and unread books on my bookshelves. Having too many unread books makes me feel guilty. I start having thoughts like: why aren't I reading more? Am I lazy and unproductive? But when there are too few unread books, I worry that I will read all the books I own and then what will I read? What will I look forward to reading? And when all the possibilities in unread books, some of which will be wonderful and some undoubtedly disappointing, are gone, will I die?

Of course the optimal ratio or read to unread books is subjective and highly dependent on my mood. When I feel tired, there seem to be too many unread books on my shelves and ohmygod I have so many other books I want to read and there are just too many books to be read. But when I feel unusually productive and hopeful, I feel as if I will run out of things to read in a week.

So I worry on and on about the ratio. I can alleviate my anxiety in many ways but the best one for now is to get more books. That may result in higher percentage of unread books, but I'd rather own books and play with them and anticipate when to read the books than to worry about running out of the pages to read. Much better to be lazy and unproductive than to lose the possibilities, I think.

Thanks to Natalie for helping me out: the Russian lit books you sent me are fabulously beautiful to look at. I look forward to reading them and I enjoy fretting over just when I will read them.

remedy

I had no choice but to start another book when I was already actively reading 3. Here's the thing: two of them are long and one I read only on the bus. So... it seems like I won't actually finish a book in awhile and that means I can't enter a book in my list of books read. And even though I did the calculations and decided that if I read 100 pages a day, I will read 100 books this year, I am nonetheless feeling anxious. It's a phase I know but the paranoia is definitely making me not enjoy Middlemarch as much. So the solution: Read Freud's "The Ego and the Id," a 56 page book that I intended on reading anyway.

The problem with short books, however, is that they tend to be dense. I remember in college that the 50 page reading assignments were always tougher than 250 pg reading assignments. And so it turns out the Freud book is actually quite involved. But still, I will definitely take less time to read that than Middlemarch.

So I will finish the short book, enter it in my list, confirm that I will in fact see the end of books this year, and all is well once again. It is challenging living a neurotic life.

how many books should a person read in a year?

I wonder...

How many books should a person read in a year?

I think the (reasonable) upper limit is 365 books. That's if you read a book a day and I can tell you that's really hard to do. The minimum is obviously 0 books. So I'd say somewhere between 0 and 365 books. I think a reasonable goal is to read 100 books a year. Here's why:

An average book is between 300 to 500 pages. So I'll say on average 400 pages. 400 pages/book times 100 books equals 40,000 pages. 40,000 pages divided by 350 days (let's say you don't read at all for 15 days of the year) is about 114 pages/day.

I think it's reasonable to read 114 pages in a day. Some days you'll read less, some days more of course, but I think it's reasonable to read 114 pages per day. So if you read about 100 pages everyday, you can read 100 books this year!

conciseness is overrated.

Good writing should be concise and clear. Arguments should have a logical flow and a writer should weed out all unnecessary words.

Yes, I really believe that... but when I read Montaign's essays or Burton's "The Anatomy of Melancholy," I do find the rambling on and on style of writing charming. I wish I can just go on and on about my topic as well as tangential issues. Readers are not patient, I know, but reading Montaign or Burton makes me feel like I am sitting in a room with some really old dude and listening to him talk about everything. You can listen intermittently and still come away feeling wiser.

Ah... the good old old old days.

...

Finally finished the Einstein biography I have been reading forever. It's a fantastic book and I loved it thoroughly but for some reason, I have been having a hard time finishing a book. And this trouble is related to my general inability these days to get a lot of reading done. Even though I am constantly thinking about reading, pleasure reading seems to be the one thing that gets left out of my day. I guess I feel I should get more nagging tasks done before I settle down to read. But perhaps I should change strategy. Instead of fitting reading into my life, I should try fitting life around my reading:

We are such stuff as books are made on,
and our little readings are rounded with a life.

Happy 2009: I hope everyone has a good reading year!