My physical health is very important to me — I’ve done an Ironman, I’m addicted to the hardest spin class in Denver, and last month my goal was to eat more natural foods.
However, for February I tried to mix it up and focus on my mental health by reading one book a week…
I had borrowed the book Born to Run from a colleague of mine, and made that the first book. I had heard how this book changed lives, started a barefoot running revolution, and was really inspiring and interesting. I had wanted to read it for awhile, but often found myself distracted or busy or just lazy in front of the iPad or TV. This gave me a chance to refocus my efforts and give it another try. It was an enjoyable read, but wasn’t as into the “secret tribe” as I was the other athletes and how they got into running and racing.
The next book that I started (I’ll admit I didn’t finish it… yet) was Linchpin by Seth Godin. At my old company, the VP of Marketing and CEO were a little bit obsessed with Seth Godin’s approach to representing company strategy and telling business-based stories. Now, I believe that Seth Godin is a very smart man, and has a way with words, but I think primarily he is good to putting those common themes together in a neat package with a cool metaphor (Purple Cow, Free Prize Inside, etc.) as opposed to being the ‘be all and end all’ of how your company should work like those men made him. Linchpin was as I expected… it had good tidbits, some representative stories, and some thoughtful items for focus. However, I couldn’t really get into it enough to read all the way through! Part of the reason that I think I struggled was because I think I’m in a “Linchpin” like position at my current company and don’t need to eat up the ‘kick-in-the-pants’ prose to get myself to a different level. I have it on my table to pick it up again if I ever feel complacent, and I know that Mr. Godin has those anecdotes to look back on.
For my third book, I read one of those books “everyone” has been talking about — “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”. Now, obviously it took me a few years to catch onto this trend (hey, I’ve been in B-School for a couple years!) but I’m glad I did! It started a little slow, but once the murder-mystery part started, I was sucked in. Additionally, it was my first book using my Nook App on my iPad, and though I’ll admit I missed being able to really “understand” how far I was in the book by holding the pages in my fingers, I actually really appreciated having the book wherever I had my iPad (which was a lot of places — I heart that thing!).
My last book was supposed to be Freedom by Jonathon Franzen since it was my book club book. However, it’s an epic-ly long book and the person I was supposed to borrow it from was moving as slowly through it as I assumed I would. I’m definitely interested in reading it, but it didn’t make it during the February Challenge.
I did make it through a fair amount of my “Economist” magazines this month, which are more dense and all-inclusive than most non-fiction writing.
Next up… March: Food Diary! and April: Becoming a phone talker.
