Some of the books I read in 2022

Jan 8, 2023 |

Every year, I promise myself that I will get this right and then the year comes and goes. Having been on Goodreads since 2012, I always set myself Reading Challenge for the year. In my first three years, I didn’t meet that challenge, for example, only reading 10 of the 50 I had set in 2012 and 24 of the targeted 30 in 2014. 2019, 2020 and 2021 were good years, having read 43/35 books, 59/50 and 55/55 respectively. For this reason, I was quite ambitious in 2022, with the intention of reading at least 60 books and, I must say, I started the year really well but faded quite a bit in the last...

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Book Extract: My heroes were on the walls

Nov 10, 2021 | ,

This is the second in a series of extracts from my book Listen To Your Footsteps, a collection of reflections and essays on fatherhood, identity, loss, creativity, etc WATCHING A documentary about Muhammad Ali, I was struck by how big an impact he had on me when I was a child. I was eight years old when he lost to Larry Holmes, and I have memories of watching the fight with my father. I has heartbroken because, even at that young age, I could see that Ali was at the end of his career. I read a copy of an early biography of his as a young teenager and, by then, had watched a lot of his...

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Reading To Write

Aug 25, 2017 |

Reading Zadie Smith’s essays on authors like Nabokov and Eliot and Kafka, I am plagued by a question that, as an aspiring writer, I am a bit embarrassed by. And yes, I do call myself an ‘aspiring writer’, not because I haven’t written or I have just started writing, but more because I haven’t written the things that I want to that would enable me, at least in my head, to consider myself an established writer. Like an actual book. Anyway, I distract easily. The question that that bothers me, when it makes its distant presence felt is: do I really want to read the books she references to get...

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Read For Ten Minutes a Day

Jun 14, 2015 |

The drive way is a 30 metre gentle incline that curves to the left. At the top, was the single-car garage, which, within a couple of months of moving into the house, he had converted into a study, with a carport just in front of it. On both sides of the length of the former garage, he put in shelves from ground to just below the ceiling with a couple of shelves on the wall office the entrance, beneath a small window that was put in to brighten the study. The shelves weren’t able to hold all the books he owned but it made a dent. This was the home we moved into when I was 11 years old. I grew...

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