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Boklesings målenheter: antall ord er et bedre mål enn antall bøker?

februar 24, 2024

En kuriositet som stikker ut i nåtidens sosialmedialandskapet er presset på målbarhet og sammenligningsgrunnlaget til helt alminnelig daglige aktiviteter. Dette sees i eksempler som antall steg man tar i løpet av en dag, søvnkvalitet målt på antall vekslende syklus av dyp og lett søvn, eller antall kalorier man spiser seg gjennom over en tidsperiode. Alt kan loggføres, måles, kvantifiseres. Og vises, publiseres, markedsføres. Selvfølgelig. Sånn er det digitale kutyme i den 21. århundre. Men en av de daglige aktiviteter som jeg har et nært og lidenskapelig forhold til er lesing. Det er også blitt en veldig fasjonabeltaktivitet blant Gen Z (eller Generasjon Prestasjon, hevder noen), skrives det i de siste tider. Kanskje som konsekvens av en verdensomfattende pandemi, Boktoks gryende popularitet, eller kanskje som en form for eskapisme fra et aggressiv og inntrengende informasjons- og kommunikasjonsteknologi som krever stadig mer av oss. Kanskje folk vil bare ha noen minutter av ro.

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How to read more books

januar 16, 2024

Recently I started posting on social media the books that made a strong impression as I read them, and a friend of mine wrote me asking how do I manage to read so fast, especially taking into consideration how busy people are with their jobs, family and social life. I get asked this question quite often, so this post is an attempt to answer this question. I want to start by writing that I do not include the easy tricks that can be used to get the reading frequency up (there are plenty of blogs and vlogs about that issue already), since I do not see reading as a competitive sport or a way to self promote oneself. Some of these tricks include switching to shorter reads (thinner books), switch to audio books, divide longer books into their equivalent partial chunks (like some people could divide Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings into three books and count each one of them separately, for example), include work or study literature on your reading lists, etc. In some cases it can be just

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Bookworms January 2024 list: why do we read fiction?

januar 09, 2024

When I was 17 years old, I met a friend at highschool that was a bookworm like myself, so we naturally gravitated towards each other and started discussing literature. After a while, he surprises me with the revelation that he never read fiction, because he meant that only non-fiction teaches something, while fiction is just for entertainment and time-passing. This month's list is a late reply to this claim. For one of my present book club meetings, I chose five titles that, in my eyes, are five absolute masterpieces of fiction literature, because of their originality and thought provoking content, mastery and artistic use of the written language, and width in geographical and historical context. They both entertain, teach you and make you wonder. So, here is the list: 1. Das Parfum: Die Geschichte eines Mörders [Perfume - The Story of a Murderer] ( Patrick Süskind , Germany, 1985) - This is, until now, the best debut novel from an author I have ever read. Superbly well wr

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15 memorable books from my last 7 years of reading

mai 29, 2023

I have joined the website Goodreads in the beginning of 2015. Some weeks ago I suddenly realized that I have passed my 400th registered read title in the website, and I have been going through the lists to try to distill the books that have left the strongest impression. I found out many books that would fall into that category, but when forced to shorten the list I came up with the somewhat arbitrary number of 15 works. So here it is, my list of 15 memorable, interesting, captivating, and somewhat unusual titles that I have read in the last 7 years. They comprise both fiction and non-fiction, a bit of biography, science and history. There is an overweight of technical/historical books on these list. The books are ordered by chronological order of reading (from 2015 to the present). So here it is. 1. The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Richard Rhodes, 1986) : This list starts with a bang! This is an impressive book, combining both the history behind the Manhattan project, short biograph

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Why emmigrate?

januar 05, 2022

I have recently travelled to my birthtown and had the chance to meet old friends and relatives that I have not seen in a long time. Most of them have stayed in Portugal most of their lives, while some emmigrated to other countries- They have moved mostly to other countries in Europe, due to the dire socioeconomical situation that Portugal has passed through the last decade. We met for a couple of social events and the reasons for emmigrating came up often as a conversation topic. I knew beforehand that there is a big fraction of portuguese emmigrants (emmigrants, yes, I do not understand why some people prefer to classify themselves as ex-pats, as if the word immigrant is some sort of insult) to whom the main reason for migrating has to do with the improvement of work conditions or economical situation. With the real danger of sounding pedantic or pretentious, I would say that probably one of my biggest personal motivations to emmigrate is the chance of being challenged and to

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Hernán (2019)

juni 29, 2021

Hi everybody! It has been a while since my last entry in this blog, so here is a little update. My future plan is to give ample exercise to my writing skills in this virtual arena, since my line of work does not require much more than a couple of more or less formal or technical emails per day. To start with, I would like to recommend some online available TV series that impressed me positively in the last weeks. The first was Hernán , a joint mexican-spanish production produced in 2019, that follows the early stages of the conquest of the Aztec Empire by Hernán Cortez in the beginning of the 16th century. In this first season, we follow the first taking and fall of Tenochtitlan (future Mexico city) in the period 1519-1520. Some of the aspects that I find particularly interesting in this TV series is the use of the original languages by the actors (it is obvious that the production team went great lengths to restore and drill minority languages, namely nahuatl and maya ), the hist

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