How to read a book

　　More than that– I never fell behind or stopped. I was always ahead of schedule for the entire year. So now, this coming year, guess what? I’d like you to do the same. Here’s how.
Why in God’s Name You Would Want To Do This
It feels awesome. It gives you an amazing amount of ideas. It helps you think more thoroughly. It’s better than TV and even the internet. It makes you understand the world more. It is a building block towards a habit of completion. Did I mention it feels awesome?… whatever, just do it already.

Why One a Week?
First of all, why so many, why not just “read more books?” I’d argue that setting a massive goal, something crazy like one a week, actually helps. To make a comparison, the body reacts strongly to large wounds, expending significant energy to heal them. Small wounds, it doesn’t think much of, which means they can sometimes take longer to heal. So setting a massive goal will make you take it seriously.
So, that’s first. Make your goal massive and unreasonable so that you freak out a little. :)
One Day at a Time
The average book I read was maybe 250-300 pages. Some were larger, some were smaller. I broke this down to 40 pages a day, which I read early on so I can get it over with. It’s an easy, manageable goal, which doesn’t seem nearly so daunting as 52 books in a year. This is critical to managing your emotional state, making it feel like it’s totally reasonable.
Make It a Routine and Stack It
I have a habit right now of getting up, showering, etc., and then going out for breakfast every morning, sitting at counter at the same restaurant, and drinking coffee until I’ve read my 40 pages.
Why do I do it like this? Because I know that I’m kind of weak-willed. I’m betting you can admit this about yourself too, and doing so will help you set everything into its proper place.
Oh, and a protip: Set it up early in the day, as early as possible. Like the Artist’s Way’s morning pages and Twyla Tharp’s exercise regimen (discussed here), it must occur early or we will put it off. This is the same with every habit– you must chain them together for them to work.
Use Every Moment
If you have a commute, use it. If you have a lunch break, use that. This is something I’m just figuring out, but the ability to whip out your book quickly and read 2 pages will help you out significantly, especially in getting ahead, which will be your biggest asset and give you a rewarding feeling. Further, getting ahead will help you take your time with the hard books that are really dense and worth taking time on.
It’s Ok To Give Up… Kind Of
If something sucks (or feels tough), it’s ok give up on it– for now. You can do this when you’re ahead of schedule and it won’t screw with you too badly, and then you can go back to that book every little while until you finish it.
I did this a number of times this year, which means the number of books I started was probably in the 60-65 range (I finished 54.)
It’s Ok To Cheat
Is your deadline closing on you, and you feel you may fall behind? Holy crap! Ok, it’s time to cheat. Choose a quick book and read it, something you may have read before, enjoy a lot, and can breeze through.
“This is cheating,” you may say. I would agree. But the short term cheating to help yourself succeed in the long run on this goal is more important than hard-headed idea that every book you read has to be frikkin War and Peace. It doesn’t. This is to enrich your life, not to make you feel like crap.
By the way, even small books can be incredible. This year, I read the following books that were small but awesome: The Dip, The Little Red Book of Selling, The Five Secrets You Must Discover Before You Die, Man’s Search For Meaning, Vagabonding, and Of the Dawn of Freedom.
Never Fall Behind
Never “owe yourself one” or deduct from the bank account, saying you’ll get back to it later. Your weekly deadline (the first is on January 7th) will help you stay on track, but falling behind may make you feel helpless and make you consider giving up. You have to control your emotional state from dropping to this level, where you feel it’s hopeless, etc., and you do that by always being ahead of schedule.
In Conclusion
Reading has made me a much better, more complete, and happier person. All the world’s wisdom is contained in books– most of it is not on the internet or known by people in your social group, so this can really help you expand, if you let it. So start today.

To write should choose a best time

　　I have been reading Claire Tomalin's bicentennial biography of Charles Dickens – the latest in a long line that begins with The Life of Charles Dickens by the novelist's friend and adviser John Forster, and includes important studies by Peter Ackroyd, Michael Slater and, most recently, Becoming Dickens by Robert Douglas Fairhurst.

The thing I always take away from reading about the Inimitable, as he styled himself (half-joking), is his prodigious energy and his Victorian capacity for sheer hard work. Reviews, letters, petitions, journalism, stories, plays, scraps of poetry, more letters on myriad topics (from interior decor to prison reform), and finally of course the 14 great novels themselves.
But then, as you go deeper into Tomalin, you discover that Dickens, in his prime, used to compress his literary energies into five hours, roughly 9am to 2pm, after which he would walk incessantly, and put his mind into neutral. He might return to what he'd written in the morning later in the evening, but those five hours held the key to his output. Which raises the question: what's the best time of day to write? and its corollary: how many hours are necessary?
Some writers (Dickens among them) are larks. Others – more nocturnal – are owls. Robert Frost, whose remote Vermont cabin I visited recently in company with his biographer Jay Parini, never started work till the afternoon, and often stayed up till two or three in the morning, not rising until midday, or even later. Proust, famously, worked night and day in a cork-lined room. I remember reading somewhere that Raymond Chandler observed that it was impossible to write well for more than four hours a day. What do you do in the afternoon?
There's also the question of how long it might take to complete a novel. Here, you encounter literary legends. Faulkner claimed to have completed As I Lay Dying in six weeks. In the mid-1930s, PG Wodehouse, who wrote fast once he had the mechanics of his plots straight, polished off the last 10,000 words of Very Good, Jeeves! in a single day. In his autobiography, A Sort of Life, Graham Greene describes writing Stamboul Train on benzedrine, to pay the bills, working against the clock. Further back, Samuel Johnson wrote Rasselas, which is short, in a fortnight to defray the expenses of his mother's funeral. Or so it's said.
More usually, a 60-70,000 word novel seems to take at least a year to complete, allowing for two or three drafts, although often the first, rough outline can get written in a matter of weeks. The strange truth about a lot of fiction is that the dominant moments that animate an entire novel can occur to the writer in a matter of minutes. After that, in the words of one New Zealand writer I recall with affection, "it's just typing".
Dickens, of course, lived in the golden age of the typesetter. His strong, decisive manuscripts (he boasted a very clear hand) were swiftly transformed into galley proofs, for endless re-writing, the really time-consuming part of the process. The revision is the bit that many writers really enjoy, once the heavy lifting of the first draft is done.

The Landmark Books of Haruki Murakami

　　We simply haven’t showcased enough of Japan’s writing talent so let’s start with Haruki Murakami. He writes novels, he writes short stories, he writes non-fiction, he has a shelf filled with literary awards and he’s sold a lot of books.
Murakami is one of the most important figures in modern literature and is always prepared to challenge readers and critics with books that don’t conform to traditional narrative structures. Acclaimed as his fiction is, one of Murakami’s most engaging titles is about running – his 2008 book, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, shows another side of his character.

He started writing at the end of his twenties and his debut novel was called Hear the Wind Sing. He followed that book with a sequel called Pinball, 1973. A Wild Sheep Chase completed his ‘Rat’ trilogy.
In the mid-1980s, Murakami penned a fantasy called Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and then wrote Norwegian Wood – a two-volume bestseller about nostalgia, loss and sexuality that really put him on the map.
The 1990s saw The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (a novel about an unemployed man that shows an apparently mundane life is actually very complicated) and Sputnik Sweetheart (a novel about loneliness and conforming to society’s expectations).
This century he was been acclaimed for Kafka on the Shore (an unconventional narrative with two plots running side by side) and also published an anthology called Birthday Stories, which is just that, and includes work from Raymond Carver, David Foster Wallace and Paul Theroux.
Haruki Murakami has climbed two distinct literary mountains – first making the grade in Japan and then having his English translations acclaimed by literary critics in North America and Europe. His team of translators deserves a nod of appreciation.
Murakami latest novel is 1Q84, published in Japan in 2009 but the English translation did not appear until 2011.

Is reading on the loo bad for you?

　　From the moment Ron Shaoul took it upon himself to investigate the practice of reading on the toilet, scouring medical literature and turning up nothing of note as to its public health consequences, the situation became clear that here, on his hands, was a big job.

Shaoul's curiosity was driven by his work as a doctor specialising in paediatric gastroenterology. He mustered some colleagues, drew up a questionnaire and had hundreds of people of all shapes and sizes complete it. What resulted was perhaps the most scientific attempt yet to shine light on a habit that rustles unseen behind closed doors.
Shaoul, who published his study in 2009, lamented that toilet reading was woefully neglected by scientists, considering the habit probably dated back to the emergence of printed books. Writers, on the other hand, have shown no such aversion. For some, their authority on the matter has bordered on the connoisseur.
The anonymous author of The Life of St Gregory couldn't help but notice that the toilet of the middle ages, high up in a castle turret, offered the perfect solitude for "uninterrupted reading"; Lord Chesterfield too saluted the benefits, recounting the tale of a man who used his time wisely in the "necessary house" to work his way through Horace. This was but the beginning.
No writer owned the arena of toilet reading more than Henry Miller. He read truly great books on the lavatory, and maintained that some, Ulysses for instance, could not be fully appreciated elsewhere. The environment was one that enriched substantial works – extracted their flavour, as he put it – while lesser books and magazines suffered. He singled out Atlantic Monthly.
Miller went so far as to recommend toilets for individual authors. To enjoy Rabelais, he advised a plain country toilet, "a little outhouse in the corn patch, with a crescent sliver of light coming through the door". Better still, he said, take a friend along, to sit with you for half an hour of minor bliss.
From a medical standpoint, there are plenty of questions to ask of toilet reading. Most can be worded in vague, euphemistic terms that convey the gist without delving into coprological detail. Does reading material become irreversibly infused with nasty contaminants when carried into the toilet? How long can unpleasant microbes live on glossy magazine covers or, for that matter, the pages of a newspaper? And what does the straightforward act of reading on the toilet do for bowel movements?
Val Curtis, director of the Hygiene Centre at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, is a self-confessed toilet reader. There is, she says, a theoretical risk. To be blunt, bugs in your poo can get on your hands, be transferred to your reading material, and on to the hands of some other unfortunate. That risk is quite slim though. As Curtis says, "we don't need to get anal about it".
"The important thing is to wash your hands with soap after using the loo to get the bugs off," Curtis says. This way, even if you flicked through a shit-smeared copy of the Metro left on the toilet floor at Reading station, washing your hands before leaving should keep you quite safe. Of course, if you ran your hands over the most soiled pages, picked your nose and rubbed your fingers in your eyes, you might well get an infection. For the determined, there is always a way.
Microbes don't fare too well on absorbent surfaces, and might survive only minutes on newspaper. But plastic book covers and those shiny, smooth surfaces of Kindles, iPhones and iPads are more accommodating, and it's likely bugs can live on those for hours. A recent study by Curtis suggests that in Britain one in six mobile phones is contaminated with faecal matter, largely because people fail to wash their hands after going to the toilet.
Curtis, who is writing a book on disgust, says evolution has honed our sense of infectious risk. Hence our revulsion of bodily fluids and all things excremental, particularly when they are other people's. But a squeamishness of reading in the toilet is probably our primitive selves making us over-sensitive. "Disgust helps us avoid the bugs that make us sick," she says, "but it evolved in ancient times. We now have this psychological tendency to over-detect contagion."
Shaoul, who works at the Bnai Zion Medical Centre in Haifa, Israel, agrees that there is little to fear from unpleasant bugs when reading in the toilet. Most people who indulge in the habit – and his questionnaire pointed to more men and more educated, white-collar workers – do so at home or at work with their own material, rather than in random excrement-spattered lavatories.
More interesting to Shaoul is whether the simple act of reading on the toilet has an impact on bowel movements. "We thought sitting and reading while you were on the toilet might be relaxing and make things go better," Shaoul says. "We thought we might cure the world of constipation with our research."
Shaoul cast his net wide. He received completed questionnaires from 499 men and women, aged 18 to over 65 – some unemployed or students, others builders and academics; some from rural villages, others from the city. More than half of the men (64%) and 41% of the women confessed to being regular toilet readers. More often than not, they described their reading material as "whatever is around". In practice, this usually meant newspapers.
It transpires that toilet readers spend more time on the loo and consider themselves less constipated than non-toilet readers, but other measures of their defecation habits show the two groups hardly differ. Shaoul's work hints that toilet readers suffer more haemorrhoids – something that made for cautionary news stories around the world – but the effect is neglible.
Finally, Shaoul concluded that reading on the toilet is widespread, alleviates boredom, and is ultimately harmless. This rings true to Curtis. "I always have New Scientist by the toilet. I use it as distraction therapy. I don't particularly want to think about crapping."

The Booker's narrative arc must change if its cultural dominance is to continue

A week is a long time in Grub Street. It seems only yesterday that the Man Booker was in the grip of an apparently terminal crisis provoked by the announcement of a rival, the Literature prize, and compounded by the worst shortlist in living memory.

Now, with Julian Barnes declared the 2011 winner for The Sense of an Ending, and the annual Guildhall dinner safely negotiated, the air of panic and atmosphere of annus horribilis has dissipated. Strangely, even Dame Stella Rimington's bizarre and defensive speech from the chair (aptly described by Sam Jordison) now seems like the buzz of interference you get on a radio before tuning into the right station. So how did the Booker get out of the locked room of "readability" into which it had incarcerated itself?
By a whisker, is the answer. On the night itself, it seemed as if former chairman of Booker plc Jonathan Taylor would continue his impersonation of those post-revolution Bourbons who had "learned nothing, and forgotten nothing". He insisted on telling the Booker's diners the sales figures for last year's winner, The Finkler Question, and providing details of its foreign rights deals. You could see people shaking their heads in dismay at remarks that were barely appropriate for the works outing of a book warehouse union. What about contemporary fiction? Whither the culture of the English-language novel?
Well, eventually, we were allowed to think about books – specifically, about this year's winner. As is often the case in the book world, it's the quality of the work that provides a reality check, and prevents a drama from becoming a crisis. Barnes's 11th novel is perhaps not his best, and nowhere near as original as Flaubert's Parrot, but it is a work of art, and conforms to the high standard set by previous winners.
This is not a negligible point. Say what you like about this prize – and most of the commentariat have done that pretty freely this year – Booker has a record of picking winners, from In a Free State (Naipaul) and Rites of Passage (Golding) to Oscar and Lucinda (Carey) and Disgrace (Coetzee). Among UK literary prizes, only the Orange comes close in providing an appealing mix of the literary and the commercial – choosing titles that stand the test of time, at least in the short term. A lot of the credit there, I think, goes to Kate Mosse, who is as spirited and youthful as she is tough and brand-conscious. The Booker could do worse than find itself a Mosse to enunciate its vision for the future.
And that brings up another thing: compared with all the other great literary prizes, even the Orange, the Booker is impressively global. This is why its choice matters, why so many readers around the world are exercised by it. Indeed, part of the trouble it has got into lately derives from the disjunction between its 21st-century appeal to a global English-language audience and its 20th-century, literary London origins and organisation. The one is contemporary, the other in danger of becoming hopelessly outmoded.
I wrote last week: "The forthcoming prize dinner at the Guildhall next Tuesday will be fraught with interest." That proved true. In the end, however, there was a palpable sense of relief that good sense had prevailed, and that justice had been done to the best book on the shortlist.
In preparation for 2012, let's hope the placemen and women of the Man Booker don't sit back with a sigh of relief, and refuse to address the issues raised by their critics. The prize is in need of some urgent reforms. Many close to the heart of the organisation are privately anxious to address the way to ensure another 25 years of prize patronage. The Booker's dominant place in the cultural landscape is neither guaranteed, nor automatic; it has to be earned. Otherwise others, such as the Literature prize, will step in and take its place. The Guildhall evening speaks of grandeur, security and a certain cultural arrogance. But it's completely out of sync with the reality of the creative society whose activity it adjudicates.
For instance, it's notable that, with the exception of the winner and his publishers, everyone associated with the shortlist – writers, agents, publishers and so on – was under 45. Contemporary fiction is, generally, not about the old. Yet the Booker persists in handing the judging process to pensioners and retirees such as Rimington, who will go down in the Booker annals as the woman who compared London's literati with the KGB.