Someone asked me yesterday "how do you find the time to read so much?". This post is an attempted answer. It always starts with books. I read around 2/3 of them per month on average. I started posting lists of all of them for a given year. Here are the books I've read in 2022 typically. There is no secret. I make time for reading on an everyday basis. It's usually the last thing I do before going to bed. I don't read in bed though. I read in our living room - often with a hot tea - until I feel my body just wants to go to sleep. I usually read for an hour. Sometimes way less, sometimes more. I don't put any pressure on myself. The goal here is just to relax, and read. Across the day, I look forward to that moment.
I've no idea if this is due to my age or the average age of the people surrounding me - mostly in their 30s - or my parents and grand-ma getting older - the former in their 60s, the latter in her 80s - but I hear more and more 'complaints' about how hard nowadays are, how doomed we are, and how better it was in the past. I know how inevitable it is to think such things when you grow up. This is genetically speaking how we work, how our brain is operating. Which is why we can find some exact same complaints by 'older people' about their youth and current state of affairs from centuries and millennium ago. Still, I find it challenging to watch myself and my closest people fall into this trap.
First time I heard about Costco was in 2014. I just landed in Los Angeles and settled on Venice Blvd and Walgrove Ave. A few blocks away on Washington Ave is Costco - I also discovered and became a regular at the In-N-Out on that block. I didn't fully grasp the power of Costco at first. As a european, it reminded me Metro. Metro is a food wholesaler. We go there to buy high quantity of things we know, at the best price. We needed a 'professional' card to enter the store though. We had one thanks to our society activity [organizing events and weekends]. I remember at school, it was well perceived to hold a Metro card. You could definitely leverage this.
I read a wonderful - sometimes disturbing - article about history; more precisely about how storytellers (and their biases) crafted our history. I highly recommend it. It also made me realise there is 'story' in the word 'history'. Never really paid attention. By the way, in french, these are the same word: 'histoire' [pronounced his-too-ar]. So we could say 'raconte moi une histoire' [which would translate into 'tell me a story'] and when we're talking about history add something like 'l'histoire avec un grand 'H'' [history with a big H]. I realise now - deeply rooted in our language - how history is only a story of the past we collectively agreed upon.
My kids are still young, respectively 4 and 2 years-old. The more I observe them, the more I tend to think they already hold all the right keys to live a good life. A few things here: it's not about 'my' kids, but kids in general. Since mine are the ones I observe the most, on a daily basis, of course they're the ones I might refer to the most. Then, when I say 'holding the keys to a good life' I mean: they already possess, play and use all the right ingredients to live life at its fullest but of course, everything is still raw. Hence childhood by the way, as a time to mature, learn, develop and we - adults - have such an important role to play here.
I spent last week on the French Riviera, in the south of France. We were constantly contemplating the Massif de l'Esterel, and its quite special red color. Saying that the whole place could look like one of the most beautiful on Earth would be an understatement. And yet, while it could truly be a paradise, we ruined it. We let cars ruin it entirely.
To stay on that urbanism theme and following yeserday's post Urban planning and the war on cars let's look briefly at Tallinn's example [Estonia's capital city - more about the city itself here - population being around half a million people].
I settled in Lyon, France 2 years ago. I came from Lisbon, Portugal where I spent 3 years in total and both my kids are born. People are usually surprised when they ask us why did we leave such a nice place [Lisbon is outstandingly beautiful] and I tell them: urban planning might be the worst I've seen since I walked around Jakarta, Indonesia.
I promised the list of books I've read in 2022 so here we are. If you'd want to dig into them, I've made such a list for 2021, 2020 and 2019. Interestingly, and while I stand behind a '2 books a month pace is kinda perfect for me' I kept reading slightly more books year after year: 21 in 2019, 26 in 2020, 28 in 2021 and 30 in 2022. We'll see what'll happen this year, I've read 25 books so far.
'Why is it so hard for really smart people to write well? One of the reason is: they have 20 years of bad habits.' That whole clip from Larry McEnerney is really worth a watch. Every time I watch it, I instantly get the urge to jump here, write and publish. And yet, while I contemplate the idea of writing and publishing every damn day for so long, I still never succeed to implement it in my life.