Author: edwinsetiadi

You want to know about anybody? See what books they read, and how they’ve been read – Keri Hulme

The following is a summary of many reading techniques that I’ve read and implemented, including my own personal trial and errors that suited my temperament.

An average book takes 5 to 7 hours to read, at a normal speed. Break it down into 1 hour a day (or about 15% of the book each day), and we’ll read 1 book a week or 52 books at the end of the year.

Now 1 hour a day might sounds like a lot, but you can break it down further to 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes at night, or 3x of 20 minutes, etc. And if you miss your daily 15%, you can always catch up over the weekend. You can also read more than 15% to compensate the low days when you can only read little or nothing at all.

Just like we need to train our muscle before we can lift heavy weights, reading a book needs a mental muscle, which is also trainable. Stop using it, and you’ll lose it. So discipline and consistency to reach that 15% each day are the key. Remember that famous saying, we don’t have time but we make time.

But before you do any of that, start small first. From 1 book a month (around 15 minutes/3.5% reading per day that culminates with a total of 12 books a year), then 1 book every 2 weeks (30 minutes/7% reading per day, which totaled 26 books per year), then 3 books every month (45 minutes/10% reading per day, that’s 36 books per year), and eventually 4 books every month.

As we speak I started to throw in a 5th book for each month, with the 5th one usually a long book that needs a month to read (hence my magic number 60+ books read over a year).

In addition, to reach 1 book a week you can read 1 book at a time for a week, or 2 books at the same time for 2 weeks, or 3 books for 3 weeks, etc. I personally read different types of books in the mix of 2 or 3, so that I can switch between 2 or 3 different topics to avoid boredom. In this way I keep on reading forward, instead of taking a break altogether from reading.

Reading techniques

Now, after the logistics, let’s talk about the techniques. A toddler starts reading by learning to identify one letter. A slightly bigger child learns how to read a word. An older elementary school student learns how to read a sentence, which a majority of us stays in this level for the rest of our lives. But professionals go further, they learn how to read a paragraph in one go.

The speed in which we read should also varies. Just like driving a car, we should speed up in a dull highway, but drive slower in a place with the nice views. In other words, when reading a paragraph that is just full of gibberish space-filling words, you can go ahead and skim read it or skip it. But whenever there’s an impactful sentence, slow down, take notes, and re-read it if you must. That’s why the best books I’ve ever read are also the books that I read the slowest.

Moreover, there are some books that deserve to be read word by word, from cover to cover. There are some that only useful as a reference book and we read them to specifically find some findings or sentences. While there are others that only amount to be skim-read. And be careful with sunk-cost fallacy, where just because we have invested our time and money into this book, doesn’t mean we must finish the book when it’s no longer serve any purpose for us.

So, learn to read one paragraph at a time, skim read it, slow down when you hit upon good sentences, take a lot of notes, but you don’t need to read it word by word if you don’t need to. After all, do you remember the last paragraph that you read? It’s more about understanding the concept or the story, and not the word count.

Comprehension and retention

Jim Kwik says the best way to learn from a book is by teaching it. Because what’s the point of reading a book if you don’t understand it enough to explain it.

Now, teaching what we know from a book can either be direct, or indirect through mediums such as a book review. I tend to choose the latter, using the notes that I gathered as I read the book and turn them into a summary review. Hence, my ever growing book reviews (100+ reviews in just two years alone).

This is where we get our maximized Return On Investment (ROI) from the books, when we understand it enough to explain it to others, find gaps in our explanation, read the book back to find the answers to our knowledge gaps, and then refine our summary (this step is also known as the Feynman Technique).

And the best part of writing a review is when we forgot what’s the book is about, we can just read our summary review to refresh our memory.

How to buy a book

Physical book is the best form of books, where we can touch it, smell it, and use them to decorate our little home library. But they might not be the most practical form. At first I too was a fundamentalist book reader, but then I downloaded the Kindle app in my phone and bought the same book that I already have the physical form, to compare them.

And it’s not hard to see the many advantages with using Kindle. I can spread my reading further throughout the day, such as while waiting for the lift, queuing at the supermarket cashier, and most importantly, when meeting with my friends and I’m the first to arrive (I’m always the first to come, in many different groups).

Furthermore, note taking becomes so much easier, all I do is to highlight the particular sentence that I want to note down, and it will appear in the notes section of the app. I can then copy them into the note-taking app. Using a kindle device also function the same way, where any reading that I left in Kindle for mobile I can immediately pick up where I left off in the Kindle device.

The kindle price of books also fluctuates like stock prices. So put all your targeted books into a wish list, and monitor that list closely. For me, when the price drops below $4.99 I might start to consider buying. Unless, of course, those books that I just must read now, I’ll buy it at the normal price.

With this strategy, around 2/3rd of the books that I own now is in the Kindle format, where in average I bought them at $2.99 – $4.99.

In conclusion

Reading is a form of habit. It requires a mental muscle and discipline, one that can be developed gradually like physical muscles. Once you stop using it, you’ll eventually lose it. But if you stick with the habit, an abundant range of knowledge come pouring in. All the dots suddenly become connected, all the orders appear between the chaos, and the world just makes a little bit more sense.

“Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy” by John Julius Norwich

Once upon a time, being a pope was the most politically powerful position in Europe. Back then, Vatican was a turbulent place with power struggles, territorial disputes, greed, coups, and betrayals. And scattered throughout the papacy’s history exist a role called antipope that functioned like an opposition leader, but with some antipopes eventually became more powerful than their respective reigning popes.

Back in those days the popes did not practice celibacy like today, some have mistresses, others were suspected to be gay, while one had a son whom later also became a pope. Indeed, controversies are in abundance in Vatican’s history, from one pope that was strongly suspected to be a woman, to the monetisation of sins (which ignited the protestant movement by Martin Luther), their complicated relationship with science (and its scientists such as Galileo), to the many volatile problems caused by the Knights Templar.

Moreover, although the Vatican and their 227 popes and 39 antipopes represent the leadership structure of the Catholic religion, their long history is more of a political history rather than a religious one, as they operate like any other monarchies across Europe. And more often than not, they played the central role in the continent’s geopolitics, such as approving the appointment of kings, getting kidnapped by Napoleon, exercising careful diplomacy with Hitler, and granting Spain the permission to colonise the Americas and Portugal to colonise Africa.

A line in the first paragraph of the first chapter in the book captures the essence of it all: “After nearly two thousand years of existence, the Papacy is the oldest continuing absolute monarchy in the world. To countless millions, the pope is the Vicar of Christ on Earth, the infallible interpreter of divine revelation. To millions more, he is the fulfillment of the biblical prophecies of Antichrist. What cannot be denied is that the Roman Catholic Church, of which he is the head, is as old as Christianity itself; all other Christian religions—and there are more than 22,000 of them—are offshoots or deviants from it.”

Love the institution or hate them as you may, but one thing is certain: the story of this long-reigning monarchy is so complex and interesting. Their survivorship puts the other monarchies into shame, they still keeps their darkest secrets unspilled even today (which in turn inspired so many conspiracy theories), and their wealth and power over one of the largest religions in the world are subject to awe and envy. And this 626 pages book covers their history so meticulously.

“Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World” by Adam Grant

This is a well-researched book, written by a highly intelligent person. It challenges the common misconceptions of what it takes to be successful person in many different fields – from business, to social movement, politics, filmmaking, sports, even parenting – or as Adam Grant refers to as the originals.

So, what are the common misconceptions of originals?

Firstly, originals do not take a giant leap of faith or a high-risk-high-return strategy, where they risk everything they own into one basket. Phil Knight still works as an accountant when he first started to sell shoes out of the trunk of his car. Steve Wozniak still kept his job 1 year after he co-founded Apple. Larry Page and Sergey Brin didn’t drop out right away from their PhD program when they founded Google. Pierre Omidyar built eBay as a hobby, and he only left his job after his online marketplace was generating more money than his job. While Henry Ford still kept his job as a chief engineer for Thomas Edison, when he started his automotive empire.

Even Bill Gates, who is famous for dropping out of Harvard to start Microsoft, waited an entire year after selling his new software program as a sophomore before leaving school. Even then he didn’t “drop out” but instead applied for a leave of absence (which was formally approved by Harvard) and supported financially by his parents.

As Grant remarks, “Originals do vary in their attitudes toward risk. Some are skydiving gamblers; others are penny-pinching germophobes. To become original, you have to try something new, which means accepting some measure of risk. But the most successful originals are not the daredevils who leap before they look. They are the ones who reluctantly tiptoe to the edge of a cliff, calculate the rate of descent, triple-check their parachutes, and set up a safety net at the bottom just in case.” In fact, “[e]ntrepreneurs who kept their day jobs had 33 percent lower odds of failure than those who quit.”

Secondly, originals are not always that alpha character with convictions, and not the flawless beings with no negative emotions. Instead, they are humans with hopes, fear, doubts and fallibility just like the rest of us, but they make do with what they have. Michelangelo was initially scared when commissioned by the Pope to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. George Washington and Martin Luther King Jr. were not interested on being a public face, let alone a leader of a movement, but their respective circumstance inspired them to rise up to the occasion. And it took Copernicus 26 years to publish his findings that the Sun does not revolve around Earth, in fear of being ridiculed.

Thirdly, child prodigies, as it turns out, rarely go on to change the world. In fact many of history’s most prominent and influential people were not unusually gifted as children. This is because child prodigies excelled in their chosen field as the best in an already codified rules of established games, instead of coming up with something original or something new. In order words, they are masters of playing Mozart and Beethoven but they can not compose their own original music.

Fourthly, the first mover advantage is a myth, and that originals are “strategic procrastinators.” They are quick to start but slow to finish, or in other words they are more willing to let their ideas zimmer in procrastination until they got it perfectly rather than rushing in to be the first mover but with half-baked implementation (in fact, the first movers have 47% chance of failure, while improvers only have 8% chance of failure). Leonardo da Vinci is a prime example for strategic procrastinator, where, for example, it took him 16 years to finally finish the Mona Lisa painting. Or in business world, Facebook created a much long lasting social network after MySpace and Friendster, while Google waited for years after AltaVista and Yahoo have created their search engines but now they’re the undisputed number 1.

Indeed, originals procrastinate, they are scared, they are risk averse, most of them are ordinary people, and the book clearly shows how they become successful because – and not despite – of these traits.

The book also provides a lot of thought-provoking data findings that offer more dimensions into originals, which are just fun to explore. Such as why Firefox and Chrome users are likely to become more successful than Explorer and Safari users, the warning against premature scaling, how to use defensive pessimism, the case for being a tempered radical (where we disguise our radical goal into a trojan horse of temperance), the psychology of a first middle or last child, a cheeky point made using the Sarick Effect, why it’s often wiser to partner with enemies than frenemies, and in chapter 2 the book compares between a much-hyped start up that turned out to be bonkers (Segways) with a much-criticised TV concept that would become a global hit (Seinfeld) and why people judged these two completely wrong.

Perhaps the best feature of the book for me is that Grant is using a huge goldmine of data and conceptual theories in almost every other paragraph, and he illustrates them all using spot-on real-life examples to make his points across.

Theories such as the difference between conceptual innovator vs. experimental innovator: “Conceptual innovators formulate a big idea and set out to execute it. Experimental innovators solve problems through trial and error, learning and evolving as they go along”, and which historical figures fall into those 2 categories, and how they made the most out of it.

Or one the most enlightening theories for me, especially in this age of extreme polarisations, the concept of horizontal hostility: why the minor differences in people who are otherwise alike can form the basis of the most hostility. Such as vegans towards vegetarians, a deaf woman who won the Miss American crown but was protested by deaf activists because she isn’t “deaf enough”, a radical eco group dismissed a more mainstream Greenpeace movement, or how extreme liberals are more harsh towards moderate liberals than conservatives. The message is clear, according to Grant, “if you were a true believer you’d be all in. The more strongly you identify with an extreme group, the harder you seek to differentiate yourself from more moderate groups that threaten your values.”

Adam Grant is an electrifying human being. Just listen to his many talks or interviews and you can hear his brightness, passion and confidence channeled through his words. This book is the culmination of all of that, the embodiment of his life’s work that teaches us to see things beyond the common perceptions, and understand that the incremental steps toward becoming an original is not reserved only for the gifted. It is an exhilarating read right from the start, one of the most enlightening books I’ve ever read.

“Bird by Bird” by Anne Lamott

This is a brutally honest account of someone who lives and breathes writing. It is part autobiography and part lessons on how to become a writer, by an established writer who actually teaches a writing class. “One of the things that happens when you give yourself permission to start writing is that you start thinking like a writer”, Anne Lamott says. “You start seeing everything as material.”

And how to process that material is the absolute gem of this book, gem that has helped numerous writers along the years, gem that has made this book a go-to reference for writing even 25th anniversary edition later.

The first advice from her to the students is to write on, write everything from scratch, let it all out without worrying about structure, grammar, or even plot (that’s for phase 2, the editing part). The first draft of everything is shitty, as they say, and according to Lamott that’s part of the important process where ideas sporadically appear in our mind, and we write them all down in a messy first draft. This is why she puts notebooks in every room in her house, she even brings with her a notepad and a pen when walking the dog, so that any thoughts and ideas that spring up in her mind can be quickly jotted down and will not disappear.

Lamott then elaborates that we should not worry about perfection, because being a perfectionist prevents us for writing the first shitty draft in the first place, it puts so much pressure on us to produce them perfectly right from the start, which is impossible.

Which brings us to the next lesson. “Writing a first draft is very much like watching a Polaroid develop”, Lamott says. “You can’t – and, in fact, you’re not supposed to – know exactly what the picture is going to look like until it has finished developing. First you just point at what has your attention and take the picture.” Indeed, we could not have had any clue of what the story would look like when we first started, we just knew that there was something about this particular material that compelled us, and we stayed with it and focus on it long enough for it to show us what it was about.

And when the story has started to flow, nothing holds a story together better than a likeable narrator. As Lamott remarks, “If your narrator is someone whose take on things fascinates you, it isn’t really going to matter if nothing much happens for a long time. I could watch John Cleese or Anthony Hopkins do dishes for about an hour without needing much else to happen. Having a likable narrator is like having a great friend whose company you love, whose mind you love to pick, whose running commentary totally holds your attention, who makes you laugh out loud, whose lines you always want to steal.”

Lamott then spends the majority of the book providing beautifully written stories from her own life and her students’ life to illustrate what happens with the writing process in the real world. How mistakes were made and corrected, how forming a writing partnership can works wonder, and how the odds of our materials getting published is not really favourable, but why it does not really that matter.

Because one thing that I noticed about her writing class is that all the habits, tools, mentality, and attitude on writing are also good tools for approaching life in general. And in this sense, writing is almost therapeutical or can serve as a good habit for life, regardless of the result of the craft.

Perhaps the best analogy of her approach on writing and how to live our lives comes in the story of the origin of the title of this book: “Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.””

“Warrior of the Light” by Paulo Coelho

This is Sun Tzu’s Art of War meets Marcus Aurelius’ Meditation. It is a short book filled with one liners of what constitute a perfect person – with all their demeanour, mentality, and flaws – in the eyes of Paulo Coelho. It serves as a manual on how to act and behave in many different situations, and it also provides us with plenty of strategies to best deal with anything that life throws at us.

Weirdly, or perhaps unsurprisingly, the universal messages in the book really resonate with what I’m going through in general. All the aspirations that I want to achieve, all the struggles that I’m facing, and the ultimate person whom I want to become, all perfectly portrayed by Coelho in the book. I guess this is why he’s one of the best writers in the world. This book is simply unmissable, definitely worth re-reading in years to come.

“The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Soccer is Wrong” by Chris Anderson and David Sally

You know that moneyball approach in baseball that has since copied elsewhere after the success story of Oakland A? This book is the story about its implementation in football (soccer).

The book highlights the fascinating world of data-analytics that are already rampant in baseball, basketball, and American football, but often previously overlooked in football. Using heavy sets of data, the book provides some interesting statistical angles that we will definitely miss if not pointed out, angles that could change the way we sees football and perhaps more importantly could change the way managers and players approach the game.

Now, this is an old(ish) book, published in 2013 during a time when data-analytics was still new in football, with the arguments made in the book are already a little outdated today. But the good news is, in hindsight we can immediately see which prediction came true or which arguments render to nothing.

For instance, by the time the book was published, Liverpool – whose new owner is none other than John Henry whom successfully applied the moneyball approach on his baseball franchise the Boston Red Sox – had just started implementing the data-analytics approach. Liverpool began the approach through the trial and error era of Brendan Rogers, and carried forward into great heights by Jurgen Klopp in his throphy-laden and records breaking reign. A success story. But the unsuccessful side of the aproach also saw Roberto Martinez did not quite make it in implementing it in Everton, while another hero in the book, Stoke City, eventually got relegated to the Championship.

Moreover, the book provides a glimpse of what data analytics can do to assist decision makings: Why Chelsea should have bought Darren Bent instead of Fernando Torres in January 2011, why did Alex Ferguson really sold Jaap Stam to Lazio, how catenaccio was designed to protect the team’s weak links, why Andre Villas-Boas failed at Chelsea, why according to Xabi Alonso tackling happens when something goes wrong and not right (and sense of positioning is more important), and what Tony Pulis did with Stoke City and Sam Allardyce did with Bolton: to use long-ball style of play to help maximize their resources and compensate what they lack (they will never be the possession-controlling type with those sets of players).

The book also tells several never-been-told stories, such as English football’s true innovator: Jimmy Hill. He was the person whom in the 1950s campaigned to scrap the Football League’s maximum wage (20 pounds a week) that led to the slow inflation of salaries until today’s millions. He was also the one who commissioned England’s first all-seater stadium, and the 3-point rule (which would be followed by FIFA as late as 1995 where it commands for all its constituent leagues award 3 points for victory).

Furthermore, every now and then the book told few stories in a slight deviation away from football, such as the amazing story of Major League Baseball’s Tampa Bay Rays whose majority owner, president, and head of operations had all been Wall Street guys, and they run the club using sports analytics looking for “positive arbitrage” possibilities. With only 2% edge they could brought the team to the play-offs in 4 of the last 6 years even though their total wage bill was the 4th lowest in the league, way down on the sums paid out by New York Yankees or the Boston Red Sox. In football terms, it is as if Sunderland is reaching the Champions League knockout stages 3 times in 5 years.

And of course, the book provides us with plenty of tales from the footballing archive. Such as the story of Arrigo Sacchi in AC Milan, where in trying to prove his theory (that 5 organised players would beat 10 disorganised ones), in training he took 5 organised defensive players (Giovanni Galli in goal, Tassotti, Maldini, Costacurta and Baresi), and clash them against ten players (Gullit, van Basten, Rijkaard, Virdis, Evani, Ancelotti, Colombo, Donadoni, Lantignotti and Mannari). “They had fifteen minutes to score against my five players”, said Sacchi, “the only rule was that if we won possession or they lost the ball, they had to start over from ten meters inside their own half. I did this all the time and they never scored. Not once.”

And when it comes to longevity, statistically speaking, the greatest manager according to this book is not Jose Mourinho or Alex Ferguson, it’s not Marcello Lippi, Vincente del Bosque, Fabio Capello, Marcelo Bielsa, Arsene Wenger, or Pep Guardiola. But Jimmy Davies. Who? Exactly. That’s moneyball for you.

Football is passion, football is tactical prowness meets luck. It’s chaotic and often messy. It’s about those magical moments that were created time after time that does not make sense – Roberto Carlos’ goal for Brazil against France in Tournoi de France, the two goals by Man Utd in stoppage time 1999 that won them the Champions League, that Roberto Baggio penalty miss in 1994 World Cup final after brilliant previous performances, that Aguero goal at the very last minute of 2011-2012 season – moments that from statistical point of view should not happen. And then of course there’s the mother of all outliers, Leicester City who won the Premier League by beating a 5000/1 odds in 2014-2015 season.

But for everything else, football is measurable. It is a set of habits and repetitive moves that form a predictable pattern, pattern that can be analysed in great depths using statistics. It gives that extra edge in an increasingly tight matches, where even throw ins, or when to best introduce a substitute (minutes 58, 73, and 79), or where the goalkeeper should stand in a penalty shoot, or the choice between in-swinging or out-swinging corner kick can make a slim margin of difference on the outcome of the game.

And while we already know that today the usage of data-analytics are spreading rapidly within football, this book shows us why and how. This is why this book is sublime.

“Just a Little Run Around the World: 5 Years, 3 Packs of Wolves and 53 Pairs of Shoes” by Rosie Swale Pope

In 2003, at the age of 57, Rosie Swale-Pope began a journey around the world that would cover 20,000 miles (32,187 KM) in 5 years. Not by car, not by motorcycle, not even by bicycle, but by running. Her quest was to raise awareness and fund for the early diagnosis of cancer, a disease that had just recently claimed the life of her beloved husband.

Carrying all of her belongings in a backpack (and later on in various different small carts), she embarked on the journey from her own front door in Tenby, Wales, to London and Harwich, crossed the English channel by ferry to the Netherlands, then ran the vast length of Western and Eastern Europe to Moscow and all the way to the far end of Siberia, before crossing the Bering Sea. She then continued running through the wilderness of the far north of Alaska, head across to North America towards Nova Scotia where she crossed to Greenland and then north of Iceland, before finally ran down the length of Great Britain back to the doorstep of her home.

While there were quite a few that have attempted a trip around the world by land before, and succeeded, she became the only person in the world that have completed this solo challenge with no support crew following her, while running. So, who is she and why can she get so “crazy”? (with the best possible intention of the word).

Rosie had an interesting childhood. Born in Davos, Switzerland, her mother was suffering from tubercolosis while her Irish father was away on duty serving for the British Army, so Rosie was raised by the wife of a local postman. She was 2 years old when her mother passed away, and little Rosie moved to Ireland to live with her paternal grandmother, and later with his father and his new French wife who loves Rosie. She grew up loving animals and took care of 4 orphaned donkeys, 7 goats, and a pet cow named Cleopatra. She also often go out exploring the countryside riding a black horse named Columbine.

To say that she’s an adventurer may be an understatement. She hitch-hiked her way to India, Nepal and Russia when she was a teenager with almost no money. Trekked 3000 miles (4800 KM) alone through Chile on a horseback. She walked around the entire coast of Wales, and ran a lot of exotic marathon races alongside the usual ones including one in Siberia, Romania, Albania, Cuba, Nepal, South Africa, ran 151 miles (243 KM) at the Sahara Desert, ran 1000 miles (1610 KM) from Arctic Circle to Iceland’s capital Reykjavik, and at one point ran 27 marathon races in 27 days.

Moreover, she once sailed single-handedly across the Atlantic ocean on a small boat. In fact, it was during sailing in 1982 when she met her husband Clive. Together, they had a happy, loving, and adventurous life, including living in a boat at one period of time and sailed around the world, even giving birth on the boat on Italian waters. That is, until Clive was diagnosed of prostate cancer a little too late and he passed away not long after. Rosie remarked of her last few moments with him, “[t]ime generously stopped its bitter headlong race; and stood still, just for a little while. It was time’s gift that meant everything. Things last for ever, not in years, but in the moments in which they happen.”

The run around the world was her way of grieving, and her way of battling against the very disease and awareness (or the lack thereof) that could have saved her husband’s life a little sooner. And what a touching journey. In that 5 years period, she didn’t run continuously but had plenty of stops and was welcomed by a lot of strangers and supporters of her cause. All the people she met, all the many weird and wonderful encounters, occurrences and even tragedies all made the run such a memorable adventure.

There was the 25 KM “Rosie’s Run” organised by her supporters in Netherlands to run alongside her, there was this one occasion where she entered a stranded place in the middle of the woods in Germany and proceeded to be served a delicious breakfast, when she’s serenaded in Poland, invited home by a Polish family during Christmas Eve, and by a Lithuanian family during New Year’s Eve, waking up with 6 other people in a random house, getting 2 Russian god-granddaughters, got ill several times including getting a double pneumonia and hospitalised in Irkutsk and suffered from broken ribs in Alaska, being protected by old men in a dangerous mountain, rescuing a dog that was about to be shot dead and took it with her for a while before giving it to a little girl in the next town, being proposed to get married, twice, almost losing a toe due to frostbite, making friends with the Amish, waking up surprised with a snake with her in bed, and appearing in the Martha Steward Show while in New York, among many others.

And perhaps the craziest ones for me, in between the run around the world she stopped at Omsk to run a marathon race, and halted the run once more to participate in the Chicago marathon (and finished 14th place in her age category). Remember, at this point she’s 60 years old!

While the journey was hers, the lessons were for everyone. And they are profound. Rosie is an incredibly kind soul with a positive outlook on life whom sees the best in people. Now this doesn’t mean that she’s naive and ignorant of the nasty sides of people and the violence occurring around the world (she even encountered violence few times herself in this journey, including getting chased by a murderer). But through her story she shows us and teaches us that even in the poorest and most desperate corners of the world people are naturally nice, and those who are desperate enough to become violent can be softened if we approach them with kindness and care. Even the murderer.

This is reflected in the so many people that she met along the way during those 5 years, who have so little but want to share or help her, all the doctors that helped her nurse back to health (for free), and the many people across many small towns that helped her with her broken equipments and so very often took her home and spoiled her with food and comfy bed. She might be running solo, but she got help from strangers almost in every step of the way. Rosie concluded, “I believe animals and people everywhere don’t just make the journey, they are the journey. It’s true in Siberia, Alaska, Canada, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and the beautiful mountains of Pennsylvania. You never know what will happen next. The most enchanting encounters can end up startling you.”

It’s been years since this journey began and ended safely, and since then the British progressive rock band Big Big Train had wrote a song about this journey in their song “the passing widow”, she has since embarked on another charity-awereness run from England to Nepal, and Rosie received an MBE honour from the Queen of England in 2008 for her charity work. She’s simply an amazing human being.

“The One-Minute Workout: Science Shows a Way to Get Fit That’s Smarter, Faster, Shorter” by Martin Gibala and Christopher Shulgan

This is a concise book about High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). What it is about, why it is beneficial for our body, the history of its discovery, the legends on the field, and most importantly the many different types of HIIT exercises and how to practice them. The lead author, Martin Gibala PhD, is obsessed with the scientific approach on physiology and it is clearly shown in the multiple experiments, the data-heavy findings, and the overall science-based narrative of the book.

Using running as the main focus, through multiple studies Gibala concludes that in a much shorter time frame sprint interval training is just as effective as long distance work (in a slow to moderate pace) for increasing the main predictor of aerobic fitness and longevity: VO2 Max. Gibala explains, “approximately ten minutes of hard exercise a week boosted overall fitness to the same extent as four and a half hours per week of traditional endurance training. It’s mind-blowing. A tiny bit of sprint training has the same effect on the human body as a whole lot of endurance training—despite a much lower training volume and time commitment.”

To illustrate this with a training term, using 3 x 20-second sprints over a 10-minute window (3 times a week) can generate the same impact to cardiorespiratory fitness, mitochondrial density, body fat percentage, and management of blood sugar as 3 x 50 minutes of moderate-intensity runs. That’s 30 minutes vs 150 minutes a week effort with the same benefits. Even interval walking (walking at a normal speed for 3 minutes, then at a faster speed for 3 minutes, then back to normal speed, etc) will generate “more improvements in cardiorespiratory fitness and much larger decreases in blood pressure for those who are out of shape” compared with a regular steady speed of walking.

Moreover, as with any other fitness books, Gibala also provides all the good nutritional checklist and methods that can perfectly supplement high intensity training. It has all the usual suspects, such as intermittent fasting, cutting sugar, the importance of eating more protein in every meal, while restricting our food intake using calorie counting, and drinking only water and not drinking our calories (not even sports drink).

The theory is not without a flaw, however, as the HIIT approach is not readily suitable for everyone. The book provides a careful analysis on many different types of body and capabilities, including people with heart disease, couch potato and people at the age of 50, 60, 70 and above, and provides the more suitable high intensity training for them. Gibala also took a great length for addressing, and solving the problems of, the so-called “noneresponse”, that is those people whose body do not respond to diet and exercise changes, where some even become less fit after exercising.

But for the rest of us, the 12 different HIIT training styles that are guided in the book are relatively simple and easy to follow, which is astonishing considering the complicated science behind them and the obvious benefits that look too good to be true at first, but almost instantly impactful when I tried it myself: It solved the mysterious stagnation in my running performance this year, which was baffling for me because I thought I did a good progress by keep increasing the mileage of the same 3x weekly runs.

But after reading this book (over twice the time I normally read books, so that I can practice them more accurately), I hit that “oh shit!” moment.

As it turns out my previous years’ improvement streak partly got to do with luck, as before the pandemic I used to play football and tennis every week alongside my weekly runs at moderate intensity, two sports that require burst of sprint – walk – sprint – walk (aka speed play). Last year when Covid hits I stopped playing them, but my physical improvement continued simply because I was following Jeff Galloway’s running method, that includes sprints / higher intensity pace. Meanwhile, starting from the beginning of this year I almost exclusively implement Matt Fitzgerald’s 80/20 run, 3x a week, with no other variation.

So, as you can probably see, for an autodidact running geek who loves to conduct my own trial and errors using many different theories, this book is definitely a game changer for me. One that explains the science behind the reason why the best of the best coaches in the world all put a great emphasis on the fartlek (or speed play) training and hill training among their weekly training schedule. One that inspires me to plan a more efficient training schedule and insert fartlek and interval walking in between my 80/20 runs.

And as a result, after a brief slump, my VO2 Max level is now back to before the pandemic level.

“The Beer Bible” by Jeff Alworth

It’s October, the unofficial month for beer, and I thought you know what will be cool to learn? How to make my own beer! And there’s arguably no better book to learn about this (and anything else about beer, for that matter) than one that is bold enough to claim to be its bible, with a whopping 657 pages of everything you need to know about beers, ales, wheat beers, lagers, tart and wild ales.

And when I said everything, I mean everything. The bible tells us all, from different brewing methods, different styles, and regions that create different taste. It list all the ingredients for making different types of taste, and for how long and at what temperature we should brew them, and which glassware or aluminum can to use to store them, and so on. It covers key activities such as lautering, boiling, chilling, fermentation, filtering and packaging. And it teaches us ways to taste beer like an expert brewer, which includes the intriguing explanation of retronasal smell and the difference between flavour and taste.

The book even trace back the history of beer to as far as 10,000 years ago. It’s really fascinating how many civilizations that presumably had no contact with each others can each separately develop techniques to create what later becomes beer. From Mesopotamia to Mayan to Egypt to China to Scotland and Scandinavia, where at one point after the birth of Jesus Christ and the rise of Christianity, monasteries once became centers of brewing activities.

Charmingly, the book also provides the explanation to many drinking games and how to say cheers in many different languages. It lists all the beer festivals happening around the world. And if we want to go for a “beer tourism”, aka visiting breweries, the book provides the proper route, explanations, and links to the recommended places.

Of course the book would not be complete if it doesn’t provide the names and labels that the author, Jeff Alworth, think as the best of the best beers. And the long list is mighty specific, spread across many different location in the world, covering many local breweries (none of those mass-produced brand names), which includes their ingredients, methods of brewing (what the hell is a stream beer?), and their backstories (such as why Indian beers ended up using more hops). And to be fair Alworth also tells the fascinating stories of the biggest brand names in the world and how they got so big and why they each taste the way they uniquely taste.

And just in case you somehow skip the early pages and only start reading from the middle, note that “Michael Jackson” is a respectful and legendary writer in the industry, and no you’re not drunk for thinking that THAT Michael Jackson is secretly a beer expert (it’s not he-he-em).

“Yoga: Your Home Practice Companion” by Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centre

As a complete novice on yoga, this is a perfect book for me to learn about the ancient practice. It provides the history of yoga, the philosophy behind the poses, and the scientific benefits of practicing them.

The book also teaches us about breathing, meditation, stress management, and proper diet according to yogic tradition (and how to cook or prepare for them). And every now and then the book inserts beautiful gems of wisdom, as a cherry on top of a wholesome philosophy of living.

All of this are wrapped up in digestible, bite size, chapters and sub-chapters that makes it easy to read and pause (so that I can mercifully – and comically – try to emulate the poses). I couldn’t ask for a more concise and straight forward introduction to yoga than this one.