Beard Between the Lines

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Beard Between the Lines

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Hey. Last week, I read THE NEWS: A USER’S MANUAL, by Alain de Botton, and the effect of the news on our brains. Good, but it didn’t meet my expectations. Then I read a book on copywriting that made me wanna write a book on copywriting to also get easy money without much effort. And then I read an amazing collection of crônicas by Antonio Prata: TRINTA E POUCOS (THIRTY SOMETHING). The best read of the week, for sure. ⁣ So, crônica is a popular writing style in Brazil. We usually read them in newspaper columns and collections like that book. It’s sort of a short story that may or may not be real, but always feels true and reads like an interesting conversation. It’s usually funny, compelling, well written, concise, and very relatable. It’s usually written in first person and it deals with daily life, ordinary stuff, the news, personal stuff, or pretty much anything, to be honest. ⁣ Whenever I lose my little Mongrel Complex and start writing in Portuguese, I wanna write crônicas. I love them. Especially when I read Antonio Prata and other great cronistas. ⁣ “Mongrel Complex” is an expression coined by Nelson Rodrigues, one of our greatest cronistas, and it refers to the fact that Brazilians put themselves voluntarily in an inferior position in comparison to the rest of the world because of our culture and history. And I think it’s not because of the lack of that (we do have a lot of culture and history) but because we take them for granted, we talk a lot more about the bad stuff, and we tend to idolize what’s shipped to Brazil from other countries in cans. ⁣ I’m totally guilty of that, and I’d have to lose it because a good crônica plays exactly with culture, language, and history. That’s what makes it relatable and why it doesn’t always work universally. So you either lose good similes, jokes, examples, and (well) freedom to write it to a global audience, or you dissect the frog like I did with “Mongrel Complex” and didn’t with “cans”. ⁣ But if you know Portuguese, read crônicas. You’ll love them even if you don’t understand a few parts. ⁣ #now, tell me: what’s in your culture that not everybody in the world would relate to? ⁣ 👊🏻 Beard
⁣When the week starts it always feels like the beginning of a chapter, you know? And if you think about it, every year then could be seen as a book of 52 chapters with experiences, actions, thoughts, habits, dialogues, work, etc. ⁣ I was thinking about that this weekend when our chapter 50 was about to begin, and it kinda made me think about the way I wanna live from now on. Or how I wanna read and write this whole series of books. We’ll get back to that at some point later. I just wanted to plant this analogy seed for now and see what grows from it. ⁣ But yeah, the first thought already blooming in my mind is that, if the week is a chapter and I’m reading it, I want it to start with a compelling introduction or a killing hook right in the first paragraph and I want to keep interested and never put “the book” down. And yes, we’re still talking about the year, the week, and habits, and living. Bear with me. ⁣ Now, if I’m going to write something in that chapter,—and I guess it’s fair to also want to be the author of the book—, I want to write a solid outline for it first. Hence, my plans and all that stuff we talked about last weekend. ⁣ This post is the first one of a new experiment. It’s 5 pm for me now, I’m out of my “engagement window” but I don’t care much about it. Experimenting is the purpose of this and all the “second posts of the day” that I wanna share this week are going to be part of that too. ⁣ Experimenting, by the way, is also one of the keys to building an interesting social media account, if nobody told you that yet. We should never cease to try new things all the time and see how it goes. ⁣ So, yea. That’s what I wanted to share. Let’s try new things, build new habits, learn something new, try other ways to improve, try different ways to do the same thing. And, I don’t know, let’s try to see our weeks as chapters in our lives and see what happens.
I was wondering if I could just treat my Monday mornings as a time to browse my shelves and pick up the books I’m gonna read. Just like we usually do at a grocery store, you know what I mean? I’m gonna say, these books are what I want to “eat” this week or put on my reading meals this week. ⁣ So, I’m gonna try to turn it into a habit and this Monday morning post will be like the checkout. And you can either be the other person in the line, and engage in small talk with me after peeking my cart, OR you can also be the chatty checkout person and say, Oh, Beard, no book on writing this week? Are you on a diet? Or whatever you wanna say. And I’ll shrug and probably reply with something back or engage in an endless conversation. We never know. ⁣ But yea, this week, I’m gonna have… ⁣ • A CHRISTMAS CAROL, by Charles Dickens. Reading it with the amazing #BeardyRead book club family. ⁣ • YOU GET SO ALONE AT TIMES THAT IT JUST MAKES SENSE, by Charles Bukowski. Which I realized I started a couple of months ago but never finished. ⁣ • S. BERNARDO and CAETÉS, by Graciliano Ramos. These two in the same book but in a very curious kind of print, cuz the first title reads until a little bit past half the book, and then, for you to read the other title, you have to turn the book upside down and start reading it from the back cover. Pretty cool. ⁣ And, finally… • LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER, by D.H. Lawerence. Thanks to @companhiadasletras, by the way. I’ve been meaning to read this one for a while and since I’m at a good pace this month, I’m gonna enjoy my flow and go for its 500 pages. ⁣ I think that’s it, and of course, we always end up eating other stuff too. Like when we know we should eat a bowl of salad with some salmon, but we end up eating a hamburger. Or when we’re not in the mood for cooking, and we order something to eat. We’ll talk about that later. ⁣ Now, FOR THE COMMENTS… What do you think about these choices? Have you read those books? What do you think about the analogy of picking up books like you’re getting ingredients for your weekly meals from a grocery store on a Monday morning? And what do you have in your cart for the week? ⁣ 👊🏻 Beard
Let’s cut the beard short. No books, no writing, just tweet-sized thoughts between the lines of a Saturday morning. Trying something new here. ⁣ # trimmed I’ve been working on my life goals for next year. This is something I do every end of the year. I list achievable goals, atomic habits, and action plans. I love to have a map and follow an itinerary in my journeys. That’s what it means for me. ⁣ There are three benefits in writing your goals for the year: (1) you eliminate the time wasted on deciding what to do every day or month, (2) you’re always motivated and working on a project, and (3) it’s satisfying to see how much you’ve accomplished at the end of the year. ⁣ Tip: always keep your goals realistic and achievable, and always allow yourself to review your list when you feel bored, restrained, if you need to change something, or if you want to create new things. ⁣ # content I plan my content every month just like goals in an editorial calendar style. A topic every day, picked from content buckets, and a simple outline for each caption I’ll write. ⁣ This month the weeks in the Beard will be like this: we start with the books we’re reading, then we go to the books we’ve read. I talk about thoughts on writing. Then back to reading but now in Portuguese. The week ends with thoughts on reading and a Saturday morning trimmed cut. ⁣ 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 Some ideas: What’s in your mind today? What are you doing and planning? If you only had 280 characters to share something valuable today, what would it be? ⁣ 👊🏻 Beard
I’m gonna give you a weird tip about reading better and reading more. ⁣ Create a Bookgram. 🤯 ⁣ Here’s what happens when you come here and create a new niche account other than your personal one that’s full of random photos for your friends and family. You join a community. And when your account is about books, you enter the #bookcommunity and the #bookstagram niche. The one that’s confused with lifestyle and travel sometimes, or maybe food blogging, because of all the coffee and pastry in the photos (?) But what many people don’t understand is that we talk about books and we’re here for the captions. And books are the center of our photos, too. Even when they’re photobombed by our lattes. ⁣ You see, we’re not here to talk about sunny weather or the mojito we had while drooling at a perfect sunset. We’re not here for the reels with Owen’s wows or the autumn leaves under trendy songs. Though we do that sometimes, yea. But no. We’re here on a way more interesting trip. We’re readers and writers and book bloggers promoting and reviewing books, sharing what we know about reading and writing, discussing those topics with passion, making friends who like the same books we do, and other friends that show us books we’d never read if it wasn’t for them. ⁣ No doubt. We change the way we read and talk about it. We become real book bloggers and critics, we can’t just read a book passively anymore, cuz we’re gonna talk about it in a caption and discuss it in DMs. We’re gonna share our thoughts and they have to be honest and interesting. So our brain shifts to an active and better-reading mode. We often find ourselves thinking what to say about the book while we’re reading it. How do we feel about it? Do we agree with what it says? Would we do the same as the characters? What’s the meaning behind this story? So, yea, we read better. ⁣ After more than 5 years of doing this every day, I know I’ve read A LOT MORE than I would if I didn’t have this account and I honed my reading AND my writing thanks to it and this community. That’s the truth. ⁣ 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 So, tell me, what have you learned about reading thanks to Bookstagram? ⁣ 👊🏻 Beard
Não vou mentir pra você. Às vezes, eu sinto falta de escrever em português aqui. Não parece, mas eu amo a última flor do Lácio tanto quanto a gringa louca anglo-saxônica. Na verdade, eu sofro de um incurável amor eterno pelas línguas, quero todas elas em mim. Insaciavelmente. Mas, juro, eu amo o português. Tenho orgulho da nossa literatura e das palavras e expressões que não se traduzem em outros idiomas. ⁣ Então o que acontece? Muita gente me pergunta porque eu não escrevo em português aqui. É porque ninguém lê no Brasil? Um pouco. ⁣ É verdade, nossos leitores aqui no país são escassos e um pouco fechados para o mundo. Culpo várias coisas. Não há como negar e não tente me convencer. Eu vejo. Se você chegou nesse parágrafo, você é uma exceção. Muitos parariam no primeiro depois de lerem "flor do Lácio” e “anglo-saxônicas”. Se você continuou, é porque você gosta de ler. Mas isso é raro. Sem falar das pesquisas que mostram que muita gente não lê porque não quer. ⁣ Aproveitando o gancho… Como você quer que eu me sinta como escritor assim? Essa conta e a minha cabeça de escritor estão voltadas para o mundo. Quero que meus textos atinjam qualquer lugar, não um lugar específico. Sem depender de tradutores. E quero ser lido. Escrever em inglês então é a chave. ⁣ Mas eu sinto falta de escrever em português. Por amor à língua e em respeito à singela parcela de transeuntes dessa pracinha virtual que a gente acessa e rola pra baixo todo dia. Amantes da literatura que querem ouvir um pouco da nossa língua soar num texto. Também acho que deveria incentivar a leitura um pouco mais no Brasil. Tipo um dever. Dar um pouco de murro em ponta de faca. Por isso, atendendo a pedidos, vou começar a falar português aqui. Uma vez por semana tá bom? ⁣ Aliás, nessa semana, eu tô lendo VIDAS SECAS do Graciliano Ramos. Faz parte de um projeto gigante de ler e reler obras da literatura brasileira. É uma lista imensa que depois compartilho com vocês. Mas vale a pena. Você já leu? Quais são suas ideais sobre o livro? ⁣ 𝗽𝗮𝗿𝗮 𝗼𝘀 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗼𝘀 O que você está lendo? Como é sua relação com a leitura? E como você encara outras línguas? ⁣ 👊🏻 Barba (?)
If reading is like eating words… 𝗿𝗲𝘄𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗻 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗹𝗼𝗴 ⁣ If reading is like eating words and digesting ideas, writing must be like cooking. If you think that way, your piece of writing will turn into food you could make in a million different possible ways. Food for thought or food for the mere delight of savoring words. ⁣ So, say your words are a chicken fillet, a cut of boneless meat. You might just want to sear it on a pan and serve it with a pinch of salt or spices, a dash of olive oil, and a parsley leaf on top, and call it a dish. ⁣ And it’s gonna be good. I know it will. I like that sometimes. Simple, looking like the safest choice, but still good. ⁣ But I don’t know about you. I find a Schnitzel more interesting. Bread crumb coated, fried crisp and golden, crunching in my teeth, melting on my tongue, making me talk with my mouth full cause even though I want to savor the words in silence, at the same time I want to pronounce them out loud to have a full experience. Add some potato to it and mayonnaise to dip it in, make it smooth, and wow. The taste. ⁣ That’s how I think writing ceases to be just writing and gets seasoned to become literature. When you’ve got texture, flavor, memory, balance, taste, explosion. That’s how I like my words. Served on a literary dish you’ll remember and crave and ask for more because you had such an amazing sensorial experience with their words when they got into your mouth. Because the aftertaste of those words lingered longer in your brain’s papillae after you chewed them in your wild phonetic degustation. ⁣ Now, how do you do it? ⁣ 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 How do you add that texture and taste to your writing? How do you create that explosion of senses with your words and sentences? And if you don’t write, when was the last time you had such a meal from a book? And what book was it? ⁣ 👊🏻 Beard
It started with a real story in watercolor, captions and balloons. It was about an artist who changed the world of comic books and superheroes, a writer with a brilliant mind for super stories, and a battle of rights supported by the power of storytelling and a loyal readership. I still don’t know how the story ends, tho. The last page of the book was far from being the last chapter of the still ongoing war, unfortunately. ⁣ A few days later, I entered a wardrobe that was a portal to the amazing mind of a writer and his reading life. Heard his ideas about reading, stole some of them, learned new ways to travel through books. I highly recommend you do the same. Still walking in the same side of road, I heard a best-selling author’s meditations about his personal library, while he’s moving, and I listened carefully to his advocation for the vital role of libraries. ⁣ Totally unexpectedly, I swerved and fell into an America with gods and magic and choices and disturbing scenes and ironing fates, all that rolling down a hill of storytelling geniality. Meanwhile, I visited the past of Greek philosophers, bored to death with some of them, learned to hate Socrates but understand him, and loved Aristotles, still not knowing exactly why. ⁣ The last part of that trip led me to a quest for writing with a theme or finding themes to write, something I’m recently obsessed with, and the exact reason for a turning point in my writing journey. And then, convinced by the author of a profanity-riddled self help book, I’m closing the month with trying to calm the f down. ⁣ That was my reading month. Here are the books I’ve read: ⁣ • Superman: The Unauthorized Biography, by Glen Weldon • Reading Life, by C. S. Lewis • Packing my Library, by Alfredo Manguel • American Gods, by Neil Gaiman • Ancient Greek Philosophy, Canterbury Classics • Writing Your Story’s Theme, by K.M. Weiland • Calm The F Down, by Sarah Knight ⁣ 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 How was your month in books? Can you find patterns and connections in your reading choices? Can you link what you’ve read and give us a summary of how this month felt in your reading life and mind? If not, why? ⁣ 👊🏻 Beard
Sometimes restarting the system is what it takes to fix it. ⁣ I have over five hundred unread books on my Kindle and shelves. It’s got completely out of control and I’m FREAKING OUT! No, I’m not. I’m kidding. But I do wanna do something about it. I can’t just stay cool and live by that talk about Taleb and Eco and the antilibrary. ⁣ I mean, yes, knowing I still have a lot to read is keeping me “intellectually curious and humble”, for sure, but at the same time, f— it. I don’t want a big antilibrary in my life. You know? ⁣ And the cherry on top is this crazy urge to reread some books too. Knowing I’ll have different ideas and conclusions and knowing I’ll read them better now that my writing mind has evolved. And also because I want to read them better. ⁣ So, here’s the thing: those books are standing there, waiting for me to read them. Each one looking at me like a pet frozen in a pleading face crying for my hands to pick them up to read them. I’ll defrost them from this whole frozen state and free their ink and words back to life to finally let them rest in peace again as soon as I close their back cover with ideas boiling in my mind and a burial speech written on an Instagram caption. ⁣ Let’s begin our works then. Or should I say, restart them? Yea, more like it. ⁣ 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 So... how would you start your reading life if you had just realized you can read anything you want in a better way? ⁣ 👊🏻 Beard
Saturday morning. I’ll finish American Gods. Reading it gave me a different perspective of Gaiman’s work. It’s interesting to see how good he is with his narrative and use of vivid language. He’s a great storyteller, and I like his diction, even on the parts where he brings a strong unease with his choice of words. I’m still trying to get over a scene at the beginning of the book that I called “the invagination scene”. If you read it, you know what I mean. If not, it’s nothing related to cells or developmental biology, of course. But the premise of the book is very good, gods trying to live in America brought by immigrants who believe in them, walking around disguised as ordinary people. Gaiman can balance magic and mundane well enough to bring wittiness and criticism in this book while we keep hooked to know whatever will happen to Shadow and his job as an emissary of a Norse god after a shitty series of episodes that bring him to this point. ⁣ ■ Have you read American Gods? What do you think of Neil Gaiman’s work? ⁣ – João
A few days ago, I asked you what makes a good reader. I’ve got many responses for that but I wanted to start with three of them. (1) The adjective does not apply to readers, cause one is either a reader or is not, (2) There’s no such thing as a good reader, and (3) “A reader is a reader is a reader. No competition and no good or bad”. That was not Gertrude Stein, by the way, but it was still an interesting answer. ⁣ Although I like those responses and kinda see what they meant, I have to say that there IS such thing as a good or bad reader, unfortunately. And it’s not about competition, it’s about competENCE. The ability to do something efficiently. And it’s also not about reading a lot of books, but reading a lot FROM books. ⁣ Here’s what makes you a good reader in our opinion: ⁣ • You read with all your senses, your attention, and mindfulness, and you reflect on the words you eat from your fovea to digest them in your brain. Then you absorb the nutrients of what you’ve read to build muscles of thinking and enjoyment. ⁣ • You grasp the idea of a book with your best reflexes and abilities just like Mr. Miyagi catches a fly with his chopsticks. Or maybe not that fast, which makes you hungry for more knowledge and mind growth so you can do that as a natural skill and not a trick. ⁣ • You read and think critically, which means you discover information and ideas within a text and you’re able to evaluate them for deciding what to accept and believe. ⁣ • You love reading and you enjoy it so much that you see reading as a good habit in your life and a natural part of your daily routine. You understand its benefits and you allow yourself a daily intake of it as a daily elixir. ⁣ • You immerse yourself in what you read and the words are not words anymore, they’re doors to worlds and characters and ideas and knowledge. You swim in a pool of intellectual opportunities. ⁣ • You share your passion with the world and everyone around you and you try to encourage other people to read more and better, just because it’s GOOD. ⁣ Or so I think… ⁣ ■ Well, would add something else? And tell me about what you’re reading right now, how is it affecting you? ⁣ – João
I noticed an interesting thing about my idea of writing after all this time. Something that is changing the way I’m sharpening my tools or conjuring my muses. Whenever I ask people why they write, the most common answer is either because they want to tell a story they wanted to read or because they have these stories inside their heads. That’s good, but not enough for me. I love storytelling, too, but I don’t have a story that I want to tell just for the sake of it, if that makes any sense. I think storytelling is just the means for an end. ⁣ Writing for me is not about “l’art pour l’art”, art for the sake of art. Maybe poetry is, but even poems shouldn’t be like “a worm chewing its own tail” in my opinion. There has to be a reason, a consequence, a meaning, maybe a moral. Something to think about, you know. And, for me, also something out of the common box-checking themes in vogue. I’m not here for that. Not in the world for that. ⁣ I want to write things like the story of a madman who thinks he’s a knight and makes you question which is better between living a life you create or accepting reality as it is, without thinking that’s crazy. I wanna write something like an interesting psychological monologue of an overwhelmed woman who kills a cockroach and starts thinking about her existence. Or the story of the cockroach itself and how transitioning from a man to a grotesque bug nullifies his whole existence. I wanna write the story of a guy who dies without achieving anything and then invites you to an amazing posthumous discussion about his life, making you think about how you wanna live YOUR life after what you learn from his misery. I wanna write about a hundred years of generations and episodes that make you think about changes and the inevitable growth of the world for better or for worse. ⁣ Things like that, you know? ⁣ ■ What about you? Why do you write? Don’t say it’s because you love it or because you have stories you want to tell. Tell me the real WHY you’re writing a story. ⁣ And if you’re not a writer, just a reader, still important, tell me this, When you read, what kind of theme makes you love an author for? ⁣ – João

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  • reader

    reading life and the joy of worlds within it

    November 8, 2021 /

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    June 22, 2021 /

    Imagine you’re cleaning a room, and you kill a cockroach with the door of a wardrobe… What would you do next? (A) keep cleaning the room?, or (B) think about your reason to exist? Or do both things belong to the same process readingthisweek ⁣Back to my Brazilian Literature project, I just started reading A PAIXÃO SEGUNDO G.H. (“The Passion According to G.H.”), by Clarice Lispector. Written in a very difficult moment for Clarice, the book is the monologue of a woman simply identified by G.H. drawn in an existential crisis after a random episode in her life. It all starts when G.H. decides to clean her maid’s room in…

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    June 8, 2021 /

    Have you ever seen words being used as a form of power to influence people or common words being used in a way that scared you? CULTISHby Amanda Montell First off, let me say. Amanda is not just an incredibly talented writer and language scholar, she gives me hope and evidence that the future of language and young brains are not as doomed as I thought they were. Every time we chat, I leave the conversation with new ideas, a smile on my brain, and something new to study. She has a gift I rarely see these days. Thanks to Amanda I dived into a thousand articles on the internet…

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    June 1, 2021 /

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    May 25, 2021 /

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    on to Jane Austen’s most flawless work

    May 13, 2021 /

    Dear reader, She’s handsome. She’s clever and rich. She has a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence (whatever that means), and she had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her. I know what you’re thinking, but I’m not talking about Cher (or Alicia Silverstone in that coming-of-age teen film). She comes from another time (definitely not the 90s). She’s the kind of girl who likes trying to make people happy, you know? But in the following pages, I think she will realize that it’s not the lives of others she wants to transform…

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    What We See When We Read

    April 20, 2021 /

    Dear reader, You know, it’s like the pictures were projected on the pages, and the scenes and characters and worlds suddenly become clear in my head. Everything around me just disappears, and before I realize, I’m flying over the story. The words, I mean the ink and lines, they just fade out, and I hear the narrative and dialogues, I see through the paper, and it’s like I’m over a hill, or I’m a fly on a scene, I’m inside a mirror, I’m a lamp, or the button of a shirt. You know what I mean? There’s this book called What We See When We Read, by Peter Mendelsund. You…

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    How to read and why

    April 13, 2021 /

    “It matters, if individuals are to retain any capacity to form their own judgements and opinions, that they continue to read for themselves. How they read, well or badly, and what they read, cannot depend wholly upon themselves, but why they read must be for and in their own interest.” Harold Bloom The book is How To Read and Why. Harold Bloom starts by advocating for deep reading. Reading classics or reading great works that enrich our culture and mind is basically the reason we should read. Then Bloom goes through the works and authors he believes to be the best for this quest, this adventure and journey of reading…

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    crime and punishment – the end

    March 29, 2021 /

     “But here a new story begins: the story of a man’s gradual renewal and gradual rebirth, of his gradual crossing from one world to another, of his acquaintance with a new, as yet unknown reality…” Dostoyevsky, in “Crime and Punishment” That could be a subject for another tale — our present one has ended. And we finished reading CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. SPOILER ALERT. The burden of his crimes without a proper punishment became unbearable. A sudden realization that humanity wasn’t so bad and that he wanted to live a common life with common people led to his isolation in Siberia. But now he’s there to redeem himself, to learn about…

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  • Archives,  book review

    The whole world is an enigma

    March 27, 2021 /

    “I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.” Umberto Eco, in Foucault’s Pendulum It all starts with a man hiding in a museum, a friend in need, and files of a word processor in a computer. A few pages later, we’ve already embarked on a perfectly crafted page-turner thriller that has semiotics, secret societies, religious and historical mysteries of mankind, and nonsensical conspiracy theories as the main characters. This book is for readers who can laugh at philosophical jokes, chuckle when Templars are compared…

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Hey. Last week, I read THE NEWS: A USER’S MANUAL, by Alain de Botton, and the effect of the news on our brains. Good, but it didn’t meet my expectations. Then I read a book on copywriting that made me wanna write a book on copywriting to also get easy money without much effort. And then I read an amazing collection of crônicas by Antonio Prata: TRINTA E POUCOS (THIRTY SOMETHING). The best read of the week, for sure. ⁣ So, crônica is a popular writing style in Brazil. We usually read them in newspaper columns and collections like that book. It’s sort of a short story that may or may not be real, but always feels true and reads like an interesting conversation. It’s usually funny, compelling, well written, concise, and very relatable. It’s usually written in first person and it deals with daily life, ordinary stuff, the news, personal stuff, or pretty much anything, to be honest. ⁣ Whenever I lose my little Mongrel Complex and start writing in Portuguese, I wanna write crônicas. I love them. Especially when I read Antonio Prata and other great cronistas. ⁣ “Mongrel Complex” is an expression coined by Nelson Rodrigues, one of our greatest cronistas, and it refers to the fact that Brazilians put themselves voluntarily in an inferior position in comparison to the rest of the world because of our culture and history. And I think it’s not because of the lack of that (we do have a lot of culture and history) but because we take them for granted, we talk a lot more about the bad stuff, and we tend to idolize what’s shipped to Brazil from other countries in cans. ⁣ I’m totally guilty of that, and I’d have to lose it because a good crônica plays exactly with culture, language, and history. That’s what makes it relatable and why it doesn’t always work universally. So you either lose good similes, jokes, examples, and (well) freedom to write it to a global audience, or you dissect the frog like I did with “Mongrel Complex” and didn’t with “cans”. ⁣ But if you know Portuguese, read crônicas. You’ll love them even if you don’t understand a few parts. ⁣ #now, tell me: what’s in your culture that not everybody in the world would relate to? ⁣ 👊🏻 Beard
⁣When the week starts it always feels like the beginning of a chapter, you know? And if you think about it, every year then could be seen as a book of 52 chapters with experiences, actions, thoughts, habits, dialogues, work, etc. ⁣ I was thinking about that this weekend when our chapter 50 was about to begin, and it kinda made me think about the way I wanna live from now on. Or how I wanna read and write this whole series of books. We’ll get back to that at some point later. I just wanted to plant this analogy seed for now and see what grows from it. ⁣ But yeah, the first thought already blooming in my mind is that, if the week is a chapter and I’m reading it, I want it to start with a compelling introduction or a killing hook right in the first paragraph and I want to keep interested and never put “the book” down. And yes, we’re still talking about the year, the week, and habits, and living. Bear with me. ⁣ Now, if I’m going to write something in that chapter,—and I guess it’s fair to also want to be the author of the book—, I want to write a solid outline for it first. Hence, my plans and all that stuff we talked about last weekend. ⁣ This post is the first one of a new experiment. It’s 5 pm for me now, I’m out of my “engagement window” but I don’t care much about it. Experimenting is the purpose of this and all the “second posts of the day” that I wanna share this week are going to be part of that too. ⁣ Experimenting, by the way, is also one of the keys to building an interesting social media account, if nobody told you that yet. We should never cease to try new things all the time and see how it goes. ⁣ So, yea. That’s what I wanted to share. Let’s try new things, build new habits, learn something new, try other ways to improve, try different ways to do the same thing. And, I don’t know, let’s try to see our weeks as chapters in our lives and see what happens.
I was wondering if I could just treat my Monday mornings as a time to browse my shelves and pick up the books I’m gonna read. Just like we usually do at a grocery store, you know what I mean? I’m gonna say, these books are what I want to “eat” this week or put on my reading meals this week. ⁣ So, I’m gonna try to turn it into a habit and this Monday morning post will be like the checkout. And you can either be the other person in the line, and engage in small talk with me after peeking my cart, OR you can also be the chatty checkout person and say, Oh, Beard, no book on writing this week? Are you on a diet? Or whatever you wanna say. And I’ll shrug and probably reply with something back or engage in an endless conversation. We never know. ⁣ But yea, this week, I’m gonna have… ⁣ • A CHRISTMAS CAROL, by Charles Dickens. Reading it with the amazing #BeardyRead book club family. ⁣ • YOU GET SO ALONE AT TIMES THAT IT JUST MAKES SENSE, by Charles Bukowski. Which I realized I started a couple of months ago but never finished. ⁣ • S. BERNARDO and CAETÉS, by Graciliano Ramos. These two in the same book but in a very curious kind of print, cuz the first title reads until a little bit past half the book, and then, for you to read the other title, you have to turn the book upside down and start reading it from the back cover. Pretty cool. ⁣ And, finally… • LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER, by D.H. Lawerence. Thanks to @companhiadasletras, by the way. I’ve been meaning to read this one for a while and since I’m at a good pace this month, I’m gonna enjoy my flow and go for its 500 pages. ⁣ I think that’s it, and of course, we always end up eating other stuff too. Like when we know we should eat a bowl of salad with some salmon, but we end up eating a hamburger. Or when we’re not in the mood for cooking, and we order something to eat. We’ll talk about that later. ⁣ Now, FOR THE COMMENTS… What do you think about these choices? Have you read those books? What do you think about the analogy of picking up books like you’re getting ingredients for your weekly meals from a grocery store on a Monday morning? And what do you have in your cart for the week? ⁣ 👊🏻 Beard
Let’s cut the beard short. No books, no writing, just tweet-sized thoughts between the lines of a Saturday morning. Trying something new here. ⁣ # trimmed I’ve been working on my life goals for next year. This is something I do every end of the year. I list achievable goals, atomic habits, and action plans. I love to have a map and follow an itinerary in my journeys. That’s what it means for me. ⁣ There are three benefits in writing your goals for the year: (1) you eliminate the time wasted on deciding what to do every day or month, (2) you’re always motivated and working on a project, and (3) it’s satisfying to see how much you’ve accomplished at the end of the year. ⁣ Tip: always keep your goals realistic and achievable, and always allow yourself to review your list when you feel bored, restrained, if you need to change something, or if you want to create new things. ⁣ # content I plan my content every month just like goals in an editorial calendar style. A topic every day, picked from content buckets, and a simple outline for each caption I’ll write. ⁣ This month the weeks in the Beard will be like this: we start with the books we’re reading, then we go to the books we’ve read. I talk about thoughts on writing. Then back to reading but now in Portuguese. The week ends with thoughts on reading and a Saturday morning trimmed cut. ⁣ 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 Some ideas: What’s in your mind today? What are you doing and planning? If you only had 280 characters to share something valuable today, what would it be? ⁣ 👊🏻 Beard
I’m gonna give you a weird tip about reading better and reading more. ⁣ Create a Bookgram. 🤯 ⁣ Here’s what happens when you come here and create a new niche account other than your personal one that’s full of random photos for your friends and family. You join a community. And when your account is about books, you enter the #bookcommunity and the #bookstagram niche. The one that’s confused with lifestyle and travel sometimes, or maybe food blogging, because of all the coffee and pastry in the photos (?) But what many people don’t understand is that we talk about books and we’re here for the captions. And books are the center of our photos, too. Even when they’re photobombed by our lattes. ⁣ You see, we’re not here to talk about sunny weather or the mojito we had while drooling at a perfect sunset. We’re not here for the reels with Owen’s wows or the autumn leaves under trendy songs. Though we do that sometimes, yea. But no. We’re here on a way more interesting trip. We’re readers and writers and book bloggers promoting and reviewing books, sharing what we know about reading and writing, discussing those topics with passion, making friends who like the same books we do, and other friends that show us books we’d never read if it wasn’t for them. ⁣ No doubt. We change the way we read and talk about it. We become real book bloggers and critics, we can’t just read a book passively anymore, cuz we’re gonna talk about it in a caption and discuss it in DMs. We’re gonna share our thoughts and they have to be honest and interesting. So our brain shifts to an active and better-reading mode. We often find ourselves thinking what to say about the book while we’re reading it. How do we feel about it? Do we agree with what it says? Would we do the same as the characters? What’s the meaning behind this story? So, yea, we read better. ⁣ After more than 5 years of doing this every day, I know I’ve read A LOT MORE than I would if I didn’t have this account and I honed my reading AND my writing thanks to it and this community. That’s the truth. ⁣ 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 So, tell me, what have you learned about reading thanks to Bookstagram? ⁣ 👊🏻 Beard
Não vou mentir pra você. Às vezes, eu sinto falta de escrever em português aqui. Não parece, mas eu amo a última flor do Lácio tanto quanto a gringa louca anglo-saxônica. Na verdade, eu sofro de um incurável amor eterno pelas línguas, quero todas elas em mim. Insaciavelmente. Mas, juro, eu amo o português. Tenho orgulho da nossa literatura e das palavras e expressões que não se traduzem em outros idiomas. ⁣ Então o que acontece? Muita gente me pergunta porque eu não escrevo em português aqui. É porque ninguém lê no Brasil? Um pouco. ⁣ É verdade, nossos leitores aqui no país são escassos e um pouco fechados para o mundo. Culpo várias coisas. Não há como negar e não tente me convencer. Eu vejo. Se você chegou nesse parágrafo, você é uma exceção. Muitos parariam no primeiro depois de lerem "flor do Lácio” e “anglo-saxônicas”. Se você continuou, é porque você gosta de ler. Mas isso é raro. Sem falar das pesquisas que mostram que muita gente não lê porque não quer. ⁣ Aproveitando o gancho… Como você quer que eu me sinta como escritor assim? Essa conta e a minha cabeça de escritor estão voltadas para o mundo. Quero que meus textos atinjam qualquer lugar, não um lugar específico. Sem depender de tradutores. E quero ser lido. Escrever em inglês então é a chave. ⁣ Mas eu sinto falta de escrever em português. Por amor à língua e em respeito à singela parcela de transeuntes dessa pracinha virtual que a gente acessa e rola pra baixo todo dia. Amantes da literatura que querem ouvir um pouco da nossa língua soar num texto. Também acho que deveria incentivar a leitura um pouco mais no Brasil. Tipo um dever. Dar um pouco de murro em ponta de faca. Por isso, atendendo a pedidos, vou começar a falar português aqui. Uma vez por semana tá bom? ⁣ Aliás, nessa semana, eu tô lendo VIDAS SECAS do Graciliano Ramos. Faz parte de um projeto gigante de ler e reler obras da literatura brasileira. É uma lista imensa que depois compartilho com vocês. Mas vale a pena. Você já leu? Quais são suas ideais sobre o livro? ⁣ 𝗽𝗮𝗿𝗮 𝗼𝘀 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗼𝘀 O que você está lendo? Como é sua relação com a leitura? E como você encara outras línguas? ⁣ 👊🏻 Barba (?)
If reading is like eating words… 𝗿𝗲𝘄𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗻 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗹𝗼𝗴 ⁣ If reading is like eating words and digesting ideas, writing must be like cooking. If you think that way, your piece of writing will turn into food you could make in a million different possible ways. Food for thought or food for the mere delight of savoring words. ⁣ So, say your words are a chicken fillet, a cut of boneless meat. You might just want to sear it on a pan and serve it with a pinch of salt or spices, a dash of olive oil, and a parsley leaf on top, and call it a dish. ⁣ And it’s gonna be good. I know it will. I like that sometimes. Simple, looking like the safest choice, but still good. ⁣ But I don’t know about you. I find a Schnitzel more interesting. Bread crumb coated, fried crisp and golden, crunching in my teeth, melting on my tongue, making me talk with my mouth full cause even though I want to savor the words in silence, at the same time I want to pronounce them out loud to have a full experience. Add some potato to it and mayonnaise to dip it in, make it smooth, and wow. The taste. ⁣ That’s how I think writing ceases to be just writing and gets seasoned to become literature. When you’ve got texture, flavor, memory, balance, taste, explosion. That’s how I like my words. Served on a literary dish you’ll remember and crave and ask for more because you had such an amazing sensorial experience with their words when they got into your mouth. Because the aftertaste of those words lingered longer in your brain’s papillae after you chewed them in your wild phonetic degustation. ⁣ Now, how do you do it? ⁣ 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 How do you add that texture and taste to your writing? How do you create that explosion of senses with your words and sentences? And if you don’t write, when was the last time you had such a meal from a book? And what book was it? ⁣ 👊🏻 Beard
It started with a real story in watercolor, captions and balloons. It was about an artist who changed the world of comic books and superheroes, a writer with a brilliant mind for super stories, and a battle of rights supported by the power of storytelling and a loyal readership. I still don’t know how the story ends, tho. The last page of the book was far from being the last chapter of the still ongoing war, unfortunately. ⁣ A few days later, I entered a wardrobe that was a portal to the amazing mind of a writer and his reading life. Heard his ideas about reading, stole some of them, learned new ways to travel through books. I highly recommend you do the same. Still walking in the same side of road, I heard a best-selling author’s meditations about his personal library, while he’s moving, and I listened carefully to his advocation for the vital role of libraries. ⁣ Totally unexpectedly, I swerved and fell into an America with gods and magic and choices and disturbing scenes and ironing fates, all that rolling down a hill of storytelling geniality. Meanwhile, I visited the past of Greek philosophers, bored to death with some of them, learned to hate Socrates but understand him, and loved Aristotles, still not knowing exactly why. ⁣ The last part of that trip led me to a quest for writing with a theme or finding themes to write, something I’m recently obsessed with, and the exact reason for a turning point in my writing journey. And then, convinced by the author of a profanity-riddled self help book, I’m closing the month with trying to calm the f down. ⁣ That was my reading month. Here are the books I’ve read: ⁣ • Superman: The Unauthorized Biography, by Glen Weldon • Reading Life, by C. S. Lewis • Packing my Library, by Alfredo Manguel • American Gods, by Neil Gaiman • Ancient Greek Philosophy, Canterbury Classics • Writing Your Story’s Theme, by K.M. Weiland • Calm The F Down, by Sarah Knight ⁣ 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 How was your month in books? Can you find patterns and connections in your reading choices? Can you link what you’ve read and give us a summary of how this month felt in your reading life and mind? If not, why? ⁣ 👊🏻 Beard
Sometimes restarting the system is what it takes to fix it. ⁣ I have over five hundred unread books on my Kindle and shelves. It’s got completely out of control and I’m FREAKING OUT! No, I’m not. I’m kidding. But I do wanna do something about it. I can’t just stay cool and live by that talk about Taleb and Eco and the antilibrary. ⁣ I mean, yes, knowing I still have a lot to read is keeping me “intellectually curious and humble”, for sure, but at the same time, f— it. I don’t want a big antilibrary in my life. You know? ⁣ And the cherry on top is this crazy urge to reread some books too. Knowing I’ll have different ideas and conclusions and knowing I’ll read them better now that my writing mind has evolved. And also because I want to read them better. ⁣ So, here’s the thing: those books are standing there, waiting for me to read them. Each one looking at me like a pet frozen in a pleading face crying for my hands to pick them up to read them. I’ll defrost them from this whole frozen state and free their ink and words back to life to finally let them rest in peace again as soon as I close their back cover with ideas boiling in my mind and a burial speech written on an Instagram caption. ⁣ Let’s begin our works then. Or should I say, restart them? Yea, more like it. ⁣ 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 So... how would you start your reading life if you had just realized you can read anything you want in a better way? ⁣ 👊🏻 Beard

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