September 18: 4 Books

62. New Ways to Learn a Foreign Language by Robert A, Hall

At the advice of my good friend Asim Khan, previously mentioned in this blog, I will be incorporating many re-reads of important language learning books into the rest of my reading challenge. This is the first such re-read from my selection of books that made an impact on me over the past few years of my personal explorations into the art and science of foreign language learning.

This book is a bit dated, focusing entirely on European languages commonly taught in the US as of 1966. With a few interesting suggestions about generic, positive language learning habits, the main points that I was able to take away from my reading came from chapters 17, 18 and 19, dealing with real-life language learning resources and experiences (as opposed to textbooks and grammar guides), and regarding a "gestalt" type approach, incorporating many of the prevalent concepts of language teaching and learning as of the 1960s.


63. Authentic: How to Make a Living By Being Yourself by Neil Crofts

What a great, inspiring book!

Though this is not a language-learning book as many of the others that I am about to review will be, this is nevertheless also a re-read, which I came across on my shelf while gathering my language books for this challenge.

This book is a manifesto for authentic living and for creating an authentic career path which adds positive energy and gives back to the community instead of polluting people's lives with media garbage, disposable pop culture and literal disposable plastic and other non-recyclable trash items. After writing at length about many of the social ills, especially pertaining to the educational system (in Britain) today, the author then suggests a 12-step plan involving 4 "preparations" and 8 "actions," the result of which will serve to eliminate the nonsense from an individual's life, allowing more meaningful work and life pursuits to fill the space once the junk is gotten rid of from any one person's work and personal life:

1. Preparation 1: Telling the truth
2. Preparation 2: Perception and reality
3. Preparation 3: Finding your "natural language"
4. Preparation 4: What is my point in life?
5. Action 1: Eating your energy
6. Action 2: Exercise your mind
7. Action 3: Taking control of your life
8. Action 4: Avoiding distraction and inspiring change
9. Action 5: Editing your address book
10. Action 6: Changing habits
11. Action 7: Making your plan
12. Action 8: Coming out and being yourself

Preparation 3 is Crofts's version of the same crux of Kenneth Robinson's book, reviewed earlier in this blog. It, as well as preparation 4 and actions 4, 6, and 7, were most inspiring to me during my reading. I will DEFINITELY come back to this book next month, when I will be intensively journalling on my life's direction and purging all unnecessary emotional and physical garbage from my life.

64. Speak Like a Native: Professional Secrets for Mastering Foreign Languages by Michael D. Janich

Though this is a super short book at around 115 pages, it is actually one of the most practical and valuable of all of my "real life" language learning guides.

Written from a self-directed study point of view, though firmly grounded in the academic world of language learning (the author is an award-winning 2-time graduate of the US Military's prestigious Defense Language Institute, with top marks in both Mandarin Chinese and Vietnamese, the latter of which led to him serving as one of the main US Government / Military representatives in Vietnam after the end of the war during the search for remaining MIA soldiers as well as unaccounted-for remains of dead soldiers in need of repatriation and US burial.

Impressive, yet simple and to the point, this book is a top pick for anyone seeking practical language learning results that do not necessary involve taking classes or "formal" language study. Most inspiring to me were descriptions of the progressive incorporation of background noise and poor quality audio recordings into the listening comprehension part of language learning. I have actually incorporated this exact strategy, to a lesser degree, into my own studies of spoken Cantonese Chinese with excellent results.

Also important were suggestions about foreign language radio and television resources, creative ways to use dubbed and native language foreign language DVDs to use visual cues and body language as aids in the language learning process; the importance of eventually practicing speaking the new language on the phone (something I have not yet incorporated into my language learning process for my own languages that I am studying); and a multi-pronged approach of language "bombardment" (my choice of word), which I will explore in more depth either later in this blog or in my own language learning blog, www.speakmanylanguages.com.

65. The Way of the Linguist: A Language Learning Odyssey by Steve Kaufmann

I find Steve Kaufmann's various Youtube vlog entries very inspiring, and when I heard about his book that he had published on his own language learning life story, of course I ordered it from Amazon immediately.

This is a great book, which I initially discovered and read maybe 3 years ago. A former Canadian diplomat and international forestry businessman, Steve speaks over 10 languages to varying degrees and, unlike many of the other Youtube language community folks, Steve actually learned and uses or has used most of his functional languages for international government and business purposes. THIS I found very inspiring, and because of this PURPOSE behind Steve's language acquisition efforts, I found myself resonating with his life story on every page of this book.

My personal favorite aspect of this book is Steve's exploration of the limitations of traditional US and Canadian higher education's ideas of "teaching" language. Rather, Steve proposes completely taking away the emphasis from TEACHERS who somehow have a responsibility to put knowledge into the heads of their students and instead shifting almost all responsibility to the STUDENTS, who must instead take charge of their own language learning efforts. At ALESN, the school where I study and teach Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese, we have always told our students that none of the teachers can make the students learn the language. Each student must think deeply and make a decision to put in the effort necessary to take the information we provide them with and in turn teach themselves Chinese.

[* I was feeling guilty about calling the last 2 entries separate  "books," due to the 110-125 page length of each, but my friend Amanda, who owns Roots Cafe in South Park Slope, Brooklyn, where I am typing this entry, insisted that I call these separate books for my challenge, particularly since there is one book coming up in the next couple of entries which is 543 pages long. So ok, 2 separate books. That helps my count so far...]

September 17: 1 Book

61. Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne

What a fun book -- a nice change from my typical non-fiction focus of this Reading Challenge!

I spent yesterday morning on the subway going to pick up a Hampton Bay cubbyhole cabinet contraption that will make storage much more pleasant in my bedroom during and after my PURGE that I am doing (see previous blog entries). I read the first half of this 300 page novel on the subway to and from picking up my new piece of furniture, and the second half I read while enjoying a cup of coffee at my favorite South Park Slope, Brooklyn neighborhood coffee hangout, Roots Cafe.

Not much to say about this book except for this: great story, and I could not help but be inspired by the urgency of Fogg's journey to win his bet and my own urgency now to finish 100 books in the next 9 or 10 days. Could Fogg travel around the world via ship, train, horse, and land sail? Can I read 39 more books in the next 10 days?

He could.

I think I can!

Let's just see.

Though I did not read any additional full-length books today, I read bits of several others as I continue to move towards my goal. I also spent I lot of time going through 15 years' worth of personal belongings as part of my home organization purge.

60 Books So Far as of September 16

This means I need to average 4 books per day for the next 10-11 days in order to accomplish my goal.

Can I do it?!?!?!?!?!

September 16: 2 Books

59. Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Transcendentalism.

"To be awake is to be alive."

I read this book in high school, and I remember wondering if Thoreau might not have frozen his brain while living off the land at the pond for the time that he wrote Walden. In retrospect, this is actually a very well-conceived rumination on the individual's place in society and manifested by Thoreau's own basket weaving, house building, and farming efforts -- as expressed via the medium of journalling...something I have personally experienced at a very deep level (journalling -- not basket weaving, house building, and farming).

I dogeared 7 pages in my copy; it seems I will want to reread this book at a later date. If nothing else, Walden is the source of quote that my musician friend George Wurzbach paraphrased to start one of his songs: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."

60. Chicken Soup for the Entrepreneur's Soul: Advice & Inspiration on Fulfilling Dreams by Jack Canfield et. al.

I had to take my cat Stinkie to the vet this morning to learn how to give him vitamin B12 shots once a week from now on. They really kept me waiting a long time. So long that I literally read this entire 300 page book of short essays of entrepreneurial wisdom and inspiration during my bus rides to and from the vet combined with my wait time of an hour and a half or so. Very fast reading. Very inspirational stuff.

My favorite chapter was the one written by Jack Canfield in which he discusses his 10 step process for achieving success:

1. Decide what you want. Be clear. this is something I am really, REALLY struggling with right now in my own life. What do I really want to accomplish in the next year, 3 years, 5 years, my life?
2. Unleash the power of goal setting. Written goal setting with accountability.
3. Visualize accomplishing these goals. See what you want, get what you see.
4. Take action. On a daily basis.
5. Use feedback to adjust goals and outcomes.
6. Commit to constant, never-ending improvement. This one I have down.
7. Exceed expectations. Oh, how I would love to exceed my own expectations!
8. Stay motivated by reading, listening to, and speaking with masters, mentors, authors who have traveled this road before you.
9. Hire a personal coach.
10. Create a Napoleon Hill-style Mastermind (something that, thanks to my good friend Asim Khan, I am about to become a part of on my own road to self-improvement and success).

Great book if, like me, you are looking to inspire yourself regarding some entrepreneurial pursuit or life change. My overall experience of reading this book was very positive, and it was truly a page-turner. This one flew by!

September 15: ZERO BOOKS (no real time to read today)

I procrastinated most of the day in a haze of trying to motivate myself to go through 15 years' worth of personal belongings and initiate my personal PURGE, which I have written about earlier in this blog.

September 14: 4 Books

55. CPR for the Professional Rescuer by The American Red Cross

No, I did not take a CPR or EMT course...

Like most of the books that I plow through these days, I picked this one up at The Strand in Manhattan's Union Square. Published in 1993, this book did a good job of presenting an overview of EMS as a profession; the human body and how its workings pertain to mouth to mouth and CPR; and breathing and cardiac emergencies.

This book makes me want to take a CPR course. In the meantime, I hope I never have to use the techniques that I read about, and if God forbid I do, I hope I can remember what to do while under the extreme pressure and stress of an emergency situation.







56. The Mucusless Diet Healing System: Scientific Method of Eating Your Way to Health by Arnold Ehret

This is actually the book by Ehret that I wanted to reread the other day when I came across my copy of his other main work, Rational Fasting.

Ok, I know, I know -- it might seem to my readers like I am preoccupied with my bodily fluids. Indeed I am -- at least as they apply to my current state of health and how I can improve that state. I have lost 18 pounds since the beginning of the summer, and my intention is to lose another 15. In addition to eating a mostly vegan diet with meat every other day or so (this works best for my due to some ongoing food allergies that I won't go into here), I have been exercising a lot.

I noticed earlier in the summer that first thing in the morning, either my coffee or possibly the oatmeal that I was eating for breakfast 4 times a week was making me cough and occasionally giving me familiar food allergy-like slight asthma symptoms. Since then, I have wanted to get another copy of this book and reread about Ehret's diet consisting mainly of non-mucous-producing fruits and leafy green (non-carby) vegetables. I am sold now that this is something I want to incorporate into my own diet more and more going forward. To that extent, I have been snacking on apples with fresh almond butter and eating a lot of broccoli and other non-carby green veggies. I feel pretty amazing when I do...


57. Throw Out Fifty Things: Clear the Clutter, Find Your Life by Gail Blanke

This is a GREAT book on purging extra personal belongings from one's life. I cannot speak highly enough about this book, because it goes much further than the other one, It's All Too Much, also reviewed in this blog.

Unlike the other book previously reviewed, which focuses only on clearing physical clutter, extra personal belongings, things that haven't been used in over a year, etc., Throw Out Fifty Things goes further to suggest 9 other categories of emotional blockages and garbage that can be cleared / thrown away as well. This second section is the real treasure of this book.

Because a cluttered home can lead to a cluttered mind, and because a cluttered mind can in turn create a cluttered home, this book, in creating a system to eliminate all of that clutter, really resonates with my life right now. Alas, though I just read this book 4 days ago as I am typing this, I am FAR FAR FAR from really implementing this knowledge, very far from changing my own life as quickly or as positively as I would hope. However, I am definitely making progress...


58. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I was having dinner with my good friend Alan earlier tonight and we got to talking about some of the great works of literature. A huge Dickens fan, Alan was saying that compared to A Tale of Two Cities or the like, he could never understand all of the hubbub over a book like The Great Gatsby.

In a wonderful case of serendipity, after I walked Alan to the Union Square 6 train, I bopped back to The Strand and found, among other things, a used copy of that very book outside for $1.

I read the first half to 2/3 of this book on the train ride home (it's a short book) and finished the remainder after a nice phone conversation with my good friend Twyla, who loves this book. I have to say, for the first 2/3 of the book, I was completely in agreement with Alan. And then , once I got to the car accident and all of the shit hitting the fan after that, I have to say that I can see why people think so highly of this book. The writing is solid, and the story is engaging, most importantly with deep character development. I wouldn't mind discussing this book at some point with someone who has studied it in a literature course, so I can learn a bit more about what other people think of this work.

September 13: 7 Books

48. Cantonese for Everyone (Daai6 Gaa1 Ge3 Gwong2 Dung1 Waa2, Jyutping Version) by Chow Bun Ching

Ok, so just like with the Mandarin textbook from yesterday's post, I did not really read this entire Cantonese textbook today. Rather, I finished reading the last of 15 lessons this morning, in an effort to review this excellent beginner Cantonese Chinese textbook, from which I will be teaching this fall (see previous posting for ALESN website information; as always, all classes are FREE FREE FREE)...

I love this book. In my mind, it is SOOO much better for beginning (and especially non-ethnically Chinese beginning) adult students learning to speak Cantonese, the official language of Hong Kong, parts of southern China, and many/most of the expat Chinese populations throughout the world (though immigration patterns are changing with the current influx of Mandarin and especially Fukienese / Fuzhouese speakers to New York City and elsewhere in the West).

Unlike Chow's other beginning Cantonese textbook, Spoken Cantonese for International Students, which I taught from for the past 3 years, this book is geared towards adults interested in learning to speak the language for travel and basic business purposes. Very useful stuff. Definitely looking forward to teaching from this book. If any of my readers are interested in free Cantonese or Mandarin Chinese classes in New York City's Chinatown during the 2014-2015 academic year, please feel free to contact me for more information.

49. The Possible Human: A Course in Enhancing Your Physical, Mental, and Creative Abilities by Jean Houston

This relic of the 80s is a pretty decent, hands on cookbook filled with recipes for enhancing creativity and exploring one's ultimate, mostly sensory, potential. Like The Artist's Way, which I am about to review,  this is a book to be DONE rather than READ. However, given my shortness of time left for my Reading Challenge, and my belief that I might still absorb some of the wisdom inherent in this book without actually DOING any of the exercises, I decided to plow ahead anyway. I am glad that I did.

The same dimensions as The Artist's Way, this book surely must have influenced the publishers of the latter 10 years later. Highlights for me were the development of the concept of the NEBISH (Yiddish) in the chapter entitled, "the Art of High Practice;" an in-depth discussion of inner space and time, and how the passing of time is relative to the person experiencing the passing of that time; learning modalities vs. standard IQ test measurements in children (at least as of the 80s); a story of one tribe in Africa demonstrating an extreme example of how preconceived notions can determine our experience of the world, regardless of what actually exists or is happening in the world when we are experiencing it; the definition of a miracle on pages 197-198; and the activity of humming (singing) at the deepest level to bring forth our core being.


50. The Artist's Way: A spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron

As cheesy as the mystique has become that has grown around this book and its followers, I consider myself lucky to have been introduced to this classic work of self-actualization literature just 6 years after its publication.

16 years ago this fall/winter, I was given this book as a present by then girlfriend and now one of my best friends, Twyla Heaney. We both lived in Hoboken, NJ, and met each other while waiting tables at the local Johnny Rockets diner. Twyla is great, and she was very supportive of me and my quest for my own musical creativity while she and I dated.

As mentioned above, this is a book that you DO -- not one that you read. I have "done" the book twice -- once in 1998-1999 and again a second time 8-9 years ago when I first moved to Brooklyn, to my current apartment. Because of this book, I have written over 15,000 pages in my journal since 1998 (not a typo). The Morning Pages exercise alone is worth the price of this book, which incidentally you can get very inexpensively on Amazon and, if you are lucky, occasionally from the $1 bin at The Strand in Union Square.

So much of this book resonates with my own personal life right now that I hardly know where to begin -- so I won't. In the interest of time, I will move on to the next review.


51. Organizing for the Creative Person: Right-Brain Styles for Conquering Clutter, Mastering Time, and Reaching Your Goals by Dorothy Lehmkuhl and Dolores Cotter Lamping

Lately, I have found myself disappointed with several of the books I have read in this genre. This book is ok, but it pretty much distills and then repeats the exact same information that I recently read from Stephen R Covey and other authors whose books are included in this blog.

Though ostensibly geared towards "right-brained" (creative) people, the book falls prey to the same criticism I had for another recent organization book which had obviously been written for "traditional" left-brained "business" people. And that is this: invention of book-specific jargon used to then create a system that really isn't and doesn't need to be that complicated.

As someone who struggles with the concept of organization, and specifically currently, with purging my life of all unnecessary CRAP, I was, again disappointingly, not really helped in any meaningful way by this particular book. It is not a bad book, but as with some of the others in this milieu that I have read over the past almost 3 weeks, this particular book didn't really provide me with the solution that I am seeking to my own life, work, and home organization issues.


52. Modern Man in Search of a Soul by Carl Jung

This is a very famous collection of essays by the Father of Jungian Psychology, Carl Jung. Imagine discovering a method of Psychology that already had your own name associated with it. How cool would that have been?

Ahem.

There are many good tidbits in this book, but 2 that stood out to me were:

1) The notion that we often presume that the psychological processes of other people function exactly the same as our own, and because of this, we tend to project onto other people all of our own shit, assuming that their motivations for anything and everything can be explained in terms of how we live our own lives. What a breathtaking falsehood this is, people.

2) We can only truly understand another person -- their life and motivations -- by really digging deeply into the meanings of that person's experiences and doing everything in our power to recognize ONLY the meanings of the experience(s) as they pertain to that other person -- completely separate from anything that we may think about our own lives and experiences. When one delve into this deeply enough and on a cultural level, it is known as A PARTICIPATION MYSTIQUE, in which the individual can for a moment forget about the specifics of his or her own life and at that moment proceed to a deeper alignment with a more human existence.

This is really good stuff!


53. Thinking and Language by Judith Greene

This slim volume begs the issue for me of whether I am cheating in some way on the present Reading Challenge. At 135 pages, I am not sure whether this book really qualifies in the same way as most of the others I have read so far. However, it was sitting on my shelf for at least a year or two, and though I really gleaned only one meaningful thing from my reading, I am glad that this one is out of the way. You never know until you read, whether a seemingly "important" book will live up to its promise...

I didn't realize until taking a photo of the cover just how sexual the cover image might be. Boy, that's fun.

In essay number 5, which is the title piece and which is located halfway through the book as a bridge between a series of essays on cognition and another series on language, the author does a nice job of summarizing, in 10 pages or so, the prevailing views (as of 1975) regarding how language develops from thought. This was pretty interested for me, an eventual intended linguistics grad student.


54. The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self bu Alice Miller

I suppose that I would be "just like" some psychologists to use case studies of crusty old white men to try to explain away everyone under the sun -- black, white, asian, hispanic, male, female, whatever. For me, this book falls under the umbrella of that unfortunate brand of "scholarship" which comes up with a Eurocentric premise and then attempts to extrapolate from the mental "workings" of a few white male case studies to show that these findings are somehow universal to all humankind, regardless of race, culture, language, or background.

I had first heard of this thin volume from one of my best friends in Hoboken, NJ 15 years ago. His shrink at the time had recommended this book, and I think that for my friend, this title may have actually resonated with his life and concerns at the time. Speaking only for myself, I was amazed that the author could not see the fundamental stretch of logic inherent in using only a small handful of case studies of powerful, famous white men in the last chapter to try to explain the conflicts that everyone goes through with their parents during childhood and adolescence.

Perhaps it is only because of 35 years of hindsight since this book's initial publication that I am even aware that this material might be explored in a more universal, less jargony fashion...?