If people don’t know you just read a book, did it even happen? Here’s my attempt to spread my reputation as a pseudo-intellectual. I list the books I read this year, things I remember about them, and few quotes from the books. Apparently, I don’t claim that these are the messages of the books, rather it’s the messages I received.

``the same qualities that build a better person also build a better athlete.’’

``Try, I realized, was a soft word. I needed to execute.’’

``distinction between success and excellence. Success was “having”: money, awards, status. Excellence was “being”: living your values, having them guide your daily life. Pursue excellence, Coach would say, and success will follow.’’

``We must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.’’

  • Toward a Psychology of Being: No it’s not all about the pyramid. Examining the psychology of healthy people helps us understand the psychology of being as much as unhealthy people.

``self-actualizing people enjoy life in general and in practically all its aspects, while most other people enjoy only stray moments of triumph, of achievement or of climax or peak experience.’’

``the self-actualizing person a self-accepting and insightful neurotic, for this phrase may be defined in such a way as to be almost synonymous with “understanding and accepting the intrinsic human situation,”i.e., facing and accepting courageously, and even enjoying, being amused by the ”shortcomings” of human nature instead of trying to deny them.’’

``The B-lover is able to perceive realities in the beloved to which others are blind, i.e., he/she can be more acutely and penetratingly perceptive.’’

and of course my favorite.

  • On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft: It’s like a cozy conversation with your old relative. His wife is the one supporting him to push forward with Carrie, the heroine behind the scene. Find that hero(ine) of yours folks.

  • The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety: Ideas and words are static. Thus, our ideas about the future and the past do not capture the ever-changing nature of the reality of now.

  • Utopia: 15th century’s view of ideal state and society in a mocking way. No it’s not about communism.

  • Homage to Catalonia: How left lost the civil war – or was destined to lose. Surprisingly, it’s also about the early emergence of fake news.

  • The Glass Castle: Homelessness can be a choice and how people are responsible for their fate – when Jeannette and her siblings are old enough they took the responsibility of their life and got out of that mess.

  • A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age: Not all great scientists should have spectacular lives. Humble story of a humble yet overachieving scientist.

  • Man’s Search for Meaning: One can find the meaning of life in three things: i) the work we do. ii) the pain we have to deal with iii) loving relationship. More importantly, this is contextual. He uses the following analogy: The question of what’s the best chess move is stupid. For every game and at any point in the game the answer changes. Similarly, the meaning of life is contextual and changes people to people and the period of their life.

``Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his/her personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he/she loves him/her. By his/her love he/she is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he/she sees that which is potential in him/her, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his/her love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him/her aware of what he/she can be and of what he/she should become, he/she makes these potentialities come true.’’

``One always talks of the ideal as a goal towards which one strives but which one never reaches. For every one of us, Annapurna was an ideal that had been realized. In our youth we had not been misled by fantasies, nor by the bloody battles of modern warfare which feed the imagination of the young. For us the mountains had been a natural field of activity where, playing on the frontiers of life and death, we had found the freedom for which we were blindly groping and which was as necessary to us as bread. The mountains had bestowed on us their beauties, and we adored them with a child’s simplicity and revered them with a monk’s veneration of the divine. Annapurna, to which we had gone emptyhanded, was a treasure on which we should live the rest of our days. With this realization we turn the page: a new life begins. There are other Annapurnas in the lives of men.’’

  • The Course of Love: We love being loved but love should be more about giving rather than receiving. Our society’s perception of love is the early stages of love. The book focuses on the later, harder to navigate and inevitable stages.

  • Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): We do everything we can to protect our perception that we are good people. The book explains how and why we are always the victims in our stories. There’s no clear solution/shortcuts for admitting/owning/catching mistakes but the book gives tons of cases for us to notice our justifications.

  • The Tao Is Silent: On how to be more like water. I needed to re-read this one since I realized I lost my Zen long time ago – I’m more confused this time though. Everyone should read at least Is God a Taoist? section.

  • Aylak Adam: I claim that this is The Stranger of Turkish literature. This book made me realize how I am slowly losing my connection to the homeland.

  • Deep Work: I put this on my reading list after this twitter discussion dealing with the context switching. Core idea: use big chunks of times (90-120 minutes work for me) with ZERO distractions, i.e. someone should shake you to get off your work, not even a tab of email is OK, to get things done. If you skip a meal or lose track of time while working you are already on track.

  • Existential Psychotherapy: Any mortal sentient beings should read this. I wrote about it here but the core idea again: all our anxieties stem from 4 core immutable existential situation. Death: we all will die but no one wants to. Freedom: we are responsible for all the decisions we make (or can’t make). Isolation: life is a painfully lonely experience, no it’s not just being physically alone, but more like being separated from everything else and not even great relationships with partners, friends, and family can help this separation. Meaninglessness: we are meaning seaking creatures in a meaningless word, so how do we create meaning?

  • What should I do with my life?: This book has many memoirs in a very dense form. I love how the author himself also tells how he tackled the ultimate question while telling the stories of other people. No, it’s not just about to follow your inner voice kind of bullshit, it’s more real than that.

  • Watchmen: It gets pretty dark, much darker than you would expect. A good initiation to the world of graphic novels.