Internette gördüğüm kadarıyla Orhan Pamuk’un “Kırmızı Saçlı Kadın"ını okuyanların görüşlerini iki grupta toplayabilirim:

1. Orhan Pamuk’un Nobel ödülünü aldıktan sonra en güzel eserlerini yazdığına inanan ve yeni eserlerini kolay okunabildiği ve sade dili için seven kitle
2. Orhan Pamuk’un “Beyaz Kale”, “Kara Kitap” ya da “Benim Adım Kırmızı"daki derinliği bulamayıp hayal kırıklığına uğrayanlar, kitabın aceleye geldiğini düşünenler

Ben ikinci kesime dahilim. Orhan Pamuk’un 14 ay yerine 5-10 yıl emek harcayarak yazdığı, tarihi altyapısı zengin, daha karmaşık ve derin kitapları daha çok hoşuma gidiyor.

The highlight of the book has been this insight:

Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is Haruki Murakami’s memoir on running. You get to peek into his life and learn about how he used to run a bar, smoked 60 cigarettes a day, started running at age 33, runs 6 days a week and completed 26 marathons and an ultramarathon. A few tidbits from the book that I’d like to remember are:

• The point is whether or not I improved over yesterday. In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.
• Raymond Chandler once confessed that even if he didn’t write anything, he made sure he sad down at his desk every single day and concentrated.

Overall, I didn’t learn that much about Murakami, writing or running by reading this book. I would only recommend reading it if you’re a hardcore Murakami fan and interested in his running memoir.

Philip Su is the site lead for Facebook London and is known as an awesome, inspiring individual. His book “Wipeables” is a collection of his posts from Quora and his blog. It’s a quick read and parts about work and career are very high signal. Here are the parts I found useful:

From his goodbye post when leaving Microsoft:

• I don’t listen too carefully when a poor performer tells me how awful their previous manager was. My ears perk up when a star performer constructively criticizes their management.
• For feedback to be useful, you must at least occasionally consider implementing feedback that you don’t initially agree with.
• Look towards the person you admire most at your level. What can you learn from them?
• Do you practice specific skills with repetition and intent? Athletes do drills. Musicians hone difficult passages. What do you do?
• How much soda can a personal steal? Our most interesting profits will come from capitalizing on huge opportunities, not from micromanaging costs.

On  personal goals and metrics:

Yıl sonu yaklaşırken, kendime karşı dürüst olmak adına geriye dönüp baktığımda bu yıl öğrendiğim birkaç fikri paylaşmak istiyorum:

1. İşe başlamayı kolaylaştırarak ertelemenin önüne geçebilirim.
Geçen yıl 735 km koşmuştum. Bu yıl kendime bir hedef koymadım. Bir yarışta koşmak için de hazırlanmadım. Buna rağmen 900 km koşmuşum. Yaşayacağım yere karar verirken, sık yaptığım aktivitelere uygun bir semtte olmasına dikkat ettim. Şehrin en batısında, nehre yakın bir yerde yaşayarak, evden çıkınca bir sokak yürüyerek koşmaya başlayabiliyorum. Koşu yapmak için sarfetmem gereken eforu azaltarak, daha fazla koşmayı başardım.

My growing interest in Japan and its culture lead me to Haruki Murakami. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was my introduction to Murakami’s work - I was surprised to learn that he was running a jazz club before he wrote his first novel at age 29. When I read non-fiction, I usually read to learn or be inspired. When I read fiction, I read to feel and dream. This book was extraordinary in conveying feelings and setting the mood for the reader. It starts as a metaphysical detective story, and continues like a fairy tale or a dream. It hovers so close around the edges of reality, and gradually, gets stranger and stranger as you read. The book doesn’t follow a traditional plot, but the journey is still worthwhile and the whole experience feels like watching a movie.

Talent is Overrated is a book arguing that world class performance is a result of deliberate practice instead of innate talent. The book starts by arguing that talent is less important than we usually think and debunks popular examples like Mozart or Tiger Woods by explaining how much their success is a result of their lengthy training in their field and having parents that were good teachers: Mozart’s father Leopold Mozart was a famous composer or Tiger Woods was born into the home of an expert golfer.

Work Rules! is written by Google’s head of human resources. The book talks about company culture and how to empower employees, performance management systems used at Google and how to hire best talent and reward high performing employees. There are many similarities between Facebook and Google, I wanted to understand the thinking behind some of our internal processes by learning more about Google’s HR. Here are some bits I found interesting:

Marie Kondo is a Japanese organizing consultant, a job that I didn’t know existed. She teaches people how to organize their houses and cabinets in Japan. Initially, I questioned why I purchased a book on tidying your house. It seemed like a waste of time to read 200 pages on something so simple, thinking a book on such a simple subject wouldn’t teach me much. However, I was wrong. It turned out to be a great exercise in letting go and diving deeper in why we want to keep things.

How to be Parisian Wherever You Are is a fun, playful book written by four Parisian women. The content is pretty spontaneous and full of random things: food recipes, movie suggestions, place recommendations, Paris cutouts, common words between English and French etc. The content is pretty lightweight, but what I really enjoyed about was the mood conveyed and how it made me feel. Through imagery and the feminine touch in the language, I felt like I was understanding what being a Parisian woman was like.