golden eggs

That question of 'what book or book(s) changed your life?' is one that a lot of people have very clear ideas about, and they can identify particular books that changed their lives or their views, but it's never been a question that I relate to. There is literature that I love, but even the best of it didn't change my life. I don't think that's what literature is for. 

To my mind, only you can change your life. But anyway, just as a matter of fact, all the literature I have loved the most - Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, The Portrait of a Lady, Frankenstein, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Emma, The Idiot, The Possessed, A House for Mr Biswas, A Fine Balance, The Story of am African Farm, Such is Life, Jane Eyre, Daniel Deronda, Convenience Store Woman, A Passage to India, A Room with a View, Let the Right One In, Howards End, The Power of One, The World according to Garp, Setting free the Bears, Invisible Man, Brave New World, Dracula, The Secret Garden, To Kill a Mockingbird, Oscar and Lucinda, Leviathan - none of it changed my life or made me think in a dramatically different way about the world. 

It's kind of the same with the really good non-fiction books I've read, and even self-help books. 

Maybe it's just because I have a different definition of 'life-changing' to other people. If I got creative, I could probably think of ways that each of the books that I have cherished changed my life. You can tell by my book collection - both physical and e-books - that I deeply believe that books enrich one's life. 

Self-help books are a special category. The main point of them is to change our lives. We sometimes read them with a sense that they will impart some kind of secret knowledge that will make all the difference. But the reality is that their best use - and some of them are quite good at this - is to give us some knowledge and ideas that we can use to change our own life. There is no 'cheat code' that you're going to discover and then success, well-being, happiness, money - whatever it is that you want or need - will come easily. Geese don't lay golden eggs in real life. 

स्वातंत्र्य

there are so many things to read and so many things to write about. There are so many books I want to read and yet there's nothing I really want to read. I have freedom to write about anything and yet nothing to write

I've been learning about a lot of technical things lately...cybersecurity, data analysis, data management, digital workplace solutions. and, in a job I was doing in 2019, I started to learn a lot about IT networking

learning experiences are peculiar things. You never really feel the learning. Like, for example, when you're younger, a degree seems like a really substantial thing - after doing a degree you would have expertise, and if you do a masters or a PhD, you would really be a master of that subject area. 

but the reality is less tangible /// a degree - even a masters, if it's by coursework - is just a series of separate units that you do. It's true that the units generally become a bit more involved as you progress, but it's still a series of separate units, and once you finish a unit, you're done with that subject. A degree is not like one big unit that you work through and steadily grow in expertise and then you do some kind of grand exam/ assessment at the end that examines the whole course. 

I suppose you can bring that sense of progress to it yourself depending on how you use what you learn. In a way I did that by doing honours at the end of my degree and writing a thesis, and, because I did it part-time, I was able to spend two years writing my thesis, which was really great. If I had done it full-time, I would have had to spend 1 semester (just 14 weeks) doing course work, and then 14 weeks to write my thesis. That's kind of how academics work. I've known academics, for example, who were on the panel to judge literary awards and had to read something like 60 (maybe slightly less, but a lot) novels in a few weeks, on top of their everyday work. but, for me, writing a thesis in 14 weeks is just not something I would want to do. Maybe I could do it, but spending two years thinking, reading, making notes, writing was so much better. 

It was weird how it came together. I was getting worried because the due date was rapidly approaching and I'd written a lot, read a lot, made a lot of notes, but none of it was really a draft. I'd had a lot of meetings with my supervisor and she had kept me on track, but I still didn't really have a draft. But then, when the time came to write my thesis, all the reading, thinking and writing I had done came into play and I wrote the thesis pretty quickly. It wasn't that quickly. A 15,000 word thesis that needs to cite 50 - 200 references is not something you can write the night before. But it came together in a matter of weeks. And there wasn't really any drafts. I suppose the drafts were all the writing I had done in preparation. When I wrote the actual thesis, my first draft, maybe with a few minor changes, was it - it was the thesis. 

I did well. I went on to start a PhD, which I didn't end up finishing. Then, more recently, I started another PhD, and worked on it for a couple of years and then discontinued. There's always something about the system - any system - that I'm averse to - that I can't function in even if I want to. I think that's why I've succeeded more as an English tutor than as an English teacher, because, as a tutor - yes, you're teaching students, but there's also a sense in which you're working against the system - you're teaching the student how to beat the system/ play the game, and get a good result. I love doing both. I love literature and literary theory and sharing that joy and interest with students, but I also love the process of coaching students in how to do well in their assessments. The two are different things and I like that. I like interdisciplinarity.