I finished reading Quiet by Susan Cain. The book is so aptly subtitled “The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking”. It is an engaging book, that talks about what it means to be an introvert in a world that obviously highly values extroverts. We want our leaders to be bold, brave, gregarious and fearless. We want managers and CEOs who can boldly (and loudly) go where no one else has gone before. We assume that people who can easily communicate their ideas (regardless of how good those ideas are) are better than people who are quieter. Ironically, research shows that some of the best leaders are introverts and with one in three people being an introvert that should not surprise us.
It is commonly thought that introverts are shy, timid or anti social people and that is untrue, introverts like to be stimulated differently that extroverts. Also not all introverts are the same, just the same way that extroverts can not all be lumped into one big group.
Cain herself is an introvert who pretended to be an extrovert, and became a Wall Street Lawyer. It took her a while to realize she just wanted to do and be something else.
Cain explores a plethora of topics. Is introversion built in your DNA or is it nurtured? How do different cultures deal with introversion/extroversion? Can you be yourself in a world that wants you to be something else? Can you be an introvert and still act like an extrovert sometimes?
Finally her last chapter was perhaps the one that struck with me the most on how to parent an introverted child. My daughter is an introvert. I have always know that. I know that half of it is from her DNA and half of it from how we live our lives. She is perfectly content to sit and [pretend] read her books. She shies away from situations where things are too loud or crowded. I once left her at IKEA’s play area after she begged to stay but 30 minutes later they called me and said she wanted to be picked up. When I did, I asked her why she wanted to leave, she said “it was getting very crowded for me”. She will cover her ears when sounds are too loud and has only recently been able to watch movies (and I only let her watch things that are age appropriate) because the overly sad or emotional music is too much for her. I understand because I have been there and I know what it is like. My husband says I should push her to experience more things and I am adamant about it. I will give her the tools and teach her the skills she needs to deal with all of this but I think every child must be given the chance to be who they really are.
It is an interesting read. Chock full of information not just about introverts, how to deal with them and how to be one but also about why we are what we are. This should be required reading for parents, teachers and generally just about everyone.
I leave you with Susan Cain’s March 2012 TEDTalk about the subject.
My daughter loves her books. She drags them around like kids would drag their favorite toy around. She also drags other random stuff around too, yesterday it was an umbrella.
I like getting her Arabic books as well as English books. For her birthday my sister picked out a bunch for her and sent them over. Some of them were total keepers but one made me want to fling it from the window. YES IT WAS THAT BAD. And that coming from a person who loves all books.
It was this book.
I didn’t like the illustrations, but I am a big girl so I let it pass. But the story is depressing. A fisherman talks to a fish and tells her that his children are hungry and he needs to feed them to which she replies that she too has children and can not be his dinner. Her son tries to eat the bait off the hook so she pushes him aside to save him and ends up being lunch.
I hated it because it was a sad, depressing idea. I hated it because it built on the idea that mothers always need to be self sacrificing. I hated it because he was moping and the fish was moping and by the end of this book I was moping too.
This one has the same level of bad illustration but the story isn’t so bad, actually it does have an interesting moral. Long story short, lemon tree was sad that no one liked its sour lemons and everyone loved the sweet grapes until family got sick and needed the lemons. Lemon tree learns that everyone is different and has a purpose. Lemon tree is happy.
Can you see the sad depressed suicidal Lemon tree? This is a children’s book.
Now that I have happily bashed the bad books can I tell you about the books I LOVE.
It is called the Pretty City and it is by Adly Rizq Allah. It is a whimsically illustrated story about an artist who doesn’t like the noisy polluted city and starts drawing a happier version of a city. He eventually goes to a place which he likes better and everyone follows him and doesn’t pollute or make noise.
My daughter loves it as much as I do.
But my favorite book is Hanooma and her grandmother Soona.
The book is written by Samira Shafiq and illustrated by Ihab Shaker and published by Nahdet Masr. It is for slightly older kids, probably kids who can read on their own and it is not really a story book either. Oh and it doesn’t have enough pictures for little non reading kids. But, this book is just AWESOME. Hanooma and her grandmother talk about Egyptian places, people and customs.
Soona tells Hanooma about Khan El Khalili, Nagib Mahfouz, Siwa and lots of other things. Every Egyptian kid needs to read this book.
Ooooh I haven’t really done a book review in ages and it is probably because I haven’t actually haven’t been reading like I used to. Life keeps getting in my way. Anyhooo.
This was a funny and interesting book. It is about the curious and quirky things we do all tested out by scientific (as scientifically as they could at least) experiments. Things like how good people are at detecting liars and how. Or why we believe in horoscopes. Or how they tried to find the world’s funniest joke. And my personal favorite chapter was on lucky and if there are actually lucky people or not.
It is funny and interesting, oh I already said that. But that is exactly why I loved reading this book. It didn’t feel dry at all and it was chock full of really strange tidbits that might come in handy some time in the future when I think people are lying to me and I am trying to decide whether I believe them or not.
I have always found humans really interesting, we are very different and diverse but we are all basically very very similar. Some of our quirks are really hard to prove or even spot, but Wiseman is a scientist who does just that, or knows other scientists who do that too. You can also go off on tangents and delve deeper and read more about other research that has been done on the topics that he touches in the book. I love books that are starting points for the pursuit of other books and things to read and find out. I usually like to think about what I have read versus just putting down the book and completely forgetting about it totally.
You really should check this book out and the website. It has some interesting videos like the one below and some experiments and their results.
Oh and have you noticed the site redesign? I just decluttered a bit here and there. I am on a pseudo minimalist kick.
The books and I have a long history together. When I was a child, I had friends and I was an upbeat outgoing kid. But something was always missing so I usually ended up in the library and ended up reading a ton of books. Books were my friends, my safe haven and my outlet from the world. They still are, but there aren’t enough hours in the day to read all the books I want to read.
Today I took my daughter to Better Books for story time. And if you are in Kuwait, you really ought to pay them a visit. They have lots of amazing activities for all ages. But basically they are a used book store, with an eclectic selection and good prices.
I spent the hour reading, knitting and then I got up and visited the books. I stood in front of books that I had read as a child. Every book held a different memory of a place. The Dr Seuss books reminded me of my childhood in Kuwait, of reading them in the school library. The Roald Dahl section transported me to a little city in Fife, Scotland called Kircaldy. My memories of these books are vivid and real, maybe even more vivid than the actual stories that are in them. And then I moved along and saw the Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys and Sweet Valley High books on a bottom shelf. I started reading Nancy Drew in Scotland and kept reading them in Egypt and added SVH to them too. I remember my teen years, they were awkward. But not these books, they were an escape. An alternate reality.
Harry Potter, mostly read in Egypt before I was married and the last one read here in Kuwait while I was expecting my daughter. And then my mind wandered off to all of the different strange books that have been my friend for the duration I was reading them. Books on magic tricks because for some time when I was 9 I wanted to be magician and a juggler. I even had a set of juggling balls. Books on yoyoing, origami and garden growing. There was also that book about hypnosis that I borrowed from the adult section in the library when I was 10 and the librarian told me that I was too young to be able to understand it. I remember how I thought that since I could read and use a dictionary then reading any book was not a problem. I read that book and didn’t understand much, but I learned that you can always do things that people you can’t possibly do. I still love books on the secrets of the mind, which I can thankfully understand now.
I went through a period of reading NLP books when I was in college because I thought I could change the world if only I could control what other people thought which was probably a result of reading The Evil Headmaster series when I was a child. I learned that I could only change my mind and no one elses.
There is an old copy of ‘Kalila we Demna’ in my library. It belonged to my father and he read the stories to us, or so I thought. He told us the stories in his own way. I tried reading from it a couple of time but it is very cumbersome, but I still cherish the book, because it is about the happy memory of my father.
I now own a Kindle Fire and I am in love with it. It is loaded with a bunch of books and I am finding that I have been reading more than I usually did. It lives in my handbag and I whip it out and read when I am waiting in the car for my daughter to finish school, I read while I am waiting for my turn at Aramex, I read in bed and I also read to my daughter (I got a bunch of Dr. Seuss books for her). When people tell me that they dislike the ereaders because they love real books I have to agree and disagree. I love books too, but I read them for their content and for the memories that are created by them. While the experience of reading from paper is one that I love, it is not one that will make me ditch the gadget.
Yet, I am teaching my daughter to love books. She has her own shelf in our modest bookshelf which has been filled with books (my mom buys her lots of books too, I guess my mom is the reason I love books too). She will pick out her books all by her self and she will even take them to bed and to school in her little lunch bag. She pretends to read them too making up the words as she looks at the pictures. But then there are books that we have read so many time at bed time that she almost knows all the words by heart.
She understands that books are marvelous and are to be taken care of, loved and enjoyed. But she also understands that the books are about the memories they leave behind, about story time at bed time, when she will turn on her little light, get into bed, plop up the pillow, pick out a book and ask me to read. She doesn’t follow the story line, she asks a million questions, she looks at the pictures, she makes up a different plot. One day she will stop asking me to read and she will sneak into bed and read under the bed cover like I did, and I will tell her to stop reading and to go to sleep and she will pretend to listen and will just keep on reading and I will pretend not to notice because I know how much fun she will be having.
Because after all, a reader will always be among friends when they are reading a book.
I can across this article about how what you read shapes you, especially women. Go ahead and read it then come back I can wait. I remember reading so many different things as a child but I never really like romantic novels, they were just too mushy wushy for my taste. I don’t remember being a tomboy or boyish, I was just different. I clearly remember reading all of the Asterix and TinTin books I could find at the public library when we lived in Scotland. Before that I remember going through the entire Ramona Quimby series. After that I got interested in Nancy Drew books and the Hardy Boys too. I read every single one I could find. Then somehow I stumbled across the Evil prime minister series. It is about an evil prime minister who hypnotizes the kids to do his bidding and has world domination plans. That lead to trying to sneak into the adult section to read more about hypnosis, the lovely librarian told me it was too complicated a book (I was 10 at the time), but I have always had no doubts about my abilities so I begged to borrow it and she let me. I didn’t understand a thing, but it did start a lifelong interest in all things related to the human brain. Then the crafts books always interested me, Origami, Friendship bracelets, Macrame, and things like that. Totally random things like how to solve a Rubik’s cube and how to learn YoYo tricks too made their way to my reading list. The older I got the wider my range of books became. I would sometimes read romantic novels but never with the fervor some women have towards them. To me they were just like movies, entertainment but not too much value of them to me. But I felt I should read them because everyone else was reading them and raved about them. I went through a phase where I would read the books people recommended because I felt that I should fit in even in my reading. I sometimes read poetry, which I love but can’t read too much of it. My favorite kind of books is still a non fiction book that has lots of information that I can store in my brain. Autobiographies and history books have also been added to my reading list.
So have these books shaped me, or was it the other way round? Was I born this way and chose the books because this is who I truly was? I think the book chooses you because you attract the book.
When I do enjoy a romantic novel it is usually because the heroine is a strong woman who is the hero of her own destiny. But if you really want to know what kind of fiction books I like, I still like things like Harry Potter where you can enter magical worlds where reality does not have to dictate the storyline. Mythical creatures, magic potions and spells. Things that make life less mundane and interesting. Things that you can not compare to your real life and wish you had them, just a good gripping book that makes you happy while you read it. I also love novels which are set in totally different places and eras than mine. I read My name is Red a while back by Orhan Pamuk and felt totally immersed in the different culture of a totally different era. I want to read a book that takes me into a new world and let me walk around and take it all in at my own pace.
And like the author of the article mentioned, the authors of these books usually deal with their own issues thru the characters in their books. Sometimes it is healthy to relate to protagonists and sometimes it is just healthier to look for it elsewhere. After all these characters live only in the confines of the pages of a single book or series of books, but we don’t.
Now that I am older and have less free time to read all the books I want to read I am even pickier. If the book won’t make me happy or help me learn something new I just won’t read it. When I was younger even if I hated a book I would still force myself to read it, now I guiltlessly put a book down and start a new one if I don’t feel I am getting what I want or expect from it.
Growing up I never had many friends so I made friends with my books. It is sometimes thought that the nerdy kids don’t have friends because they lack in social skills, I would like to disagree. Sometimes they just find that the books are more interesting and more accommodating and fulfilling to their needs. Moving a couple of times through childhood it was hard to keep friends, but a book fits into your bag.
I have come full circle my favorite books are the same as when I was 10, I read for my own personal pleasure and my own personal growth. I read because it satisfies a hunger and fills a need. I read because at the end of the day I still haven’t settled down in a single place long enough to make life long friends but I can fit a friend in my bag.
I am still selecting books, but now I am picking out books for my little girl and perhaps my own character will lead me to specific book. Books where girls are strong and can do anything. Books with magnificent creatures and stories. Books with values and morals I would like her to learn for a lifetime. But I still accept the fact that eventually she will make her own choices and perhaps totally different books will choose her, but that’s ok, because I know that the right books will want to be her friend.
A while back Juka sent me a copy of her book To Each Her Own, which is now published and on the shelves of bookstores in Egypt and will soon be available from Amazon too.
All this goes back to November 2008, or at least for me it does when she posted her bucket list of things she would like to do and one of them was publishing a book.
The story or should I say the story line because it is not like a conventional story with a beginning and an end but more like looking into the lives of a group of young Egyptian women on a timeline in their lives. It leaves you with the feeling that the girls are now your friends and that you will pick up the phone and check on them.
A book by a young woman for young women, well men can read it, but I think it touches women more. Six young women who are ambitious and live purposeful lives are always a great example for other women. The characters are so real and that is not a surprise since they are based on real people.
A lovely read, yet it might leave you inspired to find yourself, embrace it and move full speed ahead in your own life of purpose. It should also make you reach for the phone and call your friends because the feeling of friendship and camaraderie in the book is quite high and heart warming.
Juka, I wish you all the best and hope that this debut book is just the beginning of a long list of bestsellers and I want a signed copy of this one too.
“Five Truths about Fear Truth 1. The fear will never go away as long as I continue to grow. Truth 2. The only way to get rid of the fear of doing something is to go out and do it. Truth 3. The only way to feel better about myself is to go out… and do it. Truth 4. Not only am I going to experience fear whenever I’m on unfamiliar territory, but so is everyone else. Truth 5. Pushing through fear is less frightening than living with the underlying fear that comes from a feeling of helplessness.”
~ Susan Jeffers quotes from Feel The Fear… And Do it Anyway
You would think that a book titled “Feel the Fear and do it anyway” would only be about dealing with your fears, but it is not. It is about opening yourself. living a fuller more fulfilling life and finding happiness, peace and balance. Many of these self help style books are not cross culture friendly, meaning that they might not apply to you if you don’t live in the USA or Europe but not this book, it is written for a very wide audience. You can read this book and benefit from it no matter how old you are or what your gender is.
We all have our fears and things that hold us back. This book is not about fixing these fears or trying to find out why we have them, it is about overcoming them, accepting that we will always be afraid of things and how to use that fear as a stepping stone to get to where we want to go.
Some of my favorite concepts from the book:
Taking responsibility of our lives without blaming anyone else or beating ourselves up. I used to go back and forth to these two extremes and always felt stressed and unhappy. Now I can easily tell myself that other people’s happiness is not my responsibility without feeling guilty. My happiness is my responsibility and no one else’s. It is not fair or healthy to blame other people for what goes on in our lives if we have decided to give up control of our lives.
Saying “Yes” to the universe. Accept what the universe has given you and say yes to it and everything will change. This concept is very different that normal positive thinking. It stops at acceptance and then the rest is where you have to work for change. Just thinking positively does not change your situation, it is only the very first but very important step.
“Act as if you were important” There was one really interesting story about a woman who hated her job and thought it was only temporary until she found something better and was instructed by the author to act as if she were really important and mattered at her job even if she felt otherwise. A week later she returned and told the author how things had changed dramatically at her job. She took a plant and pictures to make her cubicle better, she went to work earlier and had more energy, even her co workers noticed the change and commented on it. She was told that whatever she was on, to keep taking it. Sometimes we trick ourselves into thinking that we don’t matter, that our contribution is too small or irrelevant but that is so untrue. If you start to believe that your contribution is very important you will act accordingly.
The best thing about this book is that it is not preachy and is full of tools that can help you on your journey and little stories about people who either felt the fear and did it or those who buckled under the strain of their fear. It is like a friend talking you out of a mess, slowly but surely.
It also couldn’t have come at a better timing for me. I got over my own fears and started my crochet business and failed at selling finished items, which turned out to be a huge blessing. I realized I was more talented at creating and selling designs instead. At first I was afraid no one would be interested or buy anything, but I felt the fear and did it anyway and found out that I had been wrong. I felt that there were these amazing designers out there who much be so much more talented than I am so why would anyone buy from me, until I cam across something Doris Chan had written who is a prolific designer with hundreds of very successful designs and how she became a designer totally by chance, an opportunity presented itself and she took it. I had to ask myself why was I afraid of taking the opportunity that is sitting right in front of me. I am still anxious whenever I publish a new pattern but it is not the crippling kind of anxiousness, it is a liberating kind. The ability to step out of my comfort zone is amazing.
I was planning to give the book away to someone else to read but I have decided against it, I definitely want to keep this book and read it again later.
Really, I did. Did anyone else want to be Ms. Drew? I thought she was awesome. The sharp young red head was my super hero. She didn’t have any super powers except her brain so I thought I could eventually be like her.
I was at Jarir this morning and came accross these books and felt really happy. Happier than a 10 year old nerd in a library.
I read all the copies that were available at our public library when we lived in Scotland. Then my parents got me some more. Unfortunately my mom gave them away to a second cousin or cousin a couple of years back. I thought of buying one, but I am not buying any books until I finish the ones I already have so boo hoo. I turned around and saw a shelf full of TinTin and Asterix books. Other favorites but not as dear as Nancy Drew.
Oh well, maybe when Lulu is older I can introduce her to Nancy Drew.
Who was your favorite fictional character as a kid?
{Note this was in my drafts folder dated February 10th, but totally forgot about it}
I was tidying up the bookshelves and saw the copy of The Alchemist which I gave to my husband when we were engaged. I asked my friends what book would they give to their significant other. I got some interesting answers (The Alchemist, What Life Taught me – Galal Amin, War and Peace and Have a Little Faith).
{Until this morning when I saw Ola’s post on Cinnamon Zone}
I love the idea.
So why don’t you give a friend a book that might be useful.
Who would you give a book to and what would it be?
I finished reading Quiet by Susan Cain. The book is so aptly subtitled “The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking”. It is an engaging book, that talks about what it means to be an introvert in a world that obviously highly values extroverts. We want our leaders to be bold, brave, gregarious and fearless. We want managers and CEOs who can boldly (and loudly) go where no one else has gone before. We assume that people who can easily communicate their ideas (regardless of how good those ideas are) are better than people who are quieter. Ironically, research shows that some of the best leaders are introverts and with one in three people being an introvert that should not surprise us.
A while back 
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