November 2022 Reading List

I had no idea what Pachinko was when I started reading this book, but I soon learnt – it’s a game like pin ball that is used for gambling.

It’s a beautiful multi-generational family story that starts in Korea and then moves onto Japan. It discusses a lot about how the Japanese see and treat the Koreans so poorly, but from all their struggles the Korean characters keep putting one step in front of the other and doing the best they can in the situation.

A great eye-opening read.

While writing up this review I stumbled upon a TV series that was released earlier this year, also called Pachinko that I will try to watch.

The Seamstress of Sardinia was a book that was recommended in one of the newsletters by the Australian Sewing Guild. I borrowed it from Overdrive earlier in the year and I did make a start on it, but I couldn’t quite get into it. When it was mentioned again as a good book to read I gave it another go, and I’m glad I did.

It follows the story of a young girl in Sardinia, Italy in the early 1900s, who is taught to sew by her Grandmother and helps make a living for them both. After her Grandmother dies she continues to sew for the wealthy who have their own secrets.

This a great insight into how seamstresses made their living and how they were treated. Things have since changed quite significantly, thankfully.

This was a randomly selected book from my library that I listened to on the Libby App. I had no idea until I was about 8 hours in how long it was. Over 19 hours! I did wonder what else would happen and it didn’t feel like a drag. Just be warned it’s a long one.

The story of two longtime friends who spend part of their year at Fellowship Point in Maine. We go back and forth in time on the lives of children’s book author Agnes Lee and well-off Polly Wister. They both have had very different lives, Agnes as an author who has released some of her work anonymously and Polly, wife, mother and grandmother. But there are secrets, and when a book editor wants to get a memoir from Agnes those secrets are revealed and the lives of many are changed for the better.

Narrated by Cassandra Campbell, it runs for 19 hours and 32 minutes.

Written in 2012, I can’t remember if I’ve read it before or just seen it at the library or bookshop. It was one that I found when googling for books on starting a business selling your craft.

The information within it is still relevant some ten years later, and there is a lot of information. It covers dreaming up your ideal business, running your business, looking after yourself, goals and intentions, asking for help, business planning, time management, market research, marketing plan, financials, and getting professional support.

It has lots of exercises for the business owner to complete, as well as lots of advice from other creative business owners. If you are feeling a bit lost, or alone setting up a creative business I highly recommend this book!

As I read through Wayne Dyer’s list of books chronologically this was the next one on the list, and it was a disappointment.

It’s a very short book. It doesn’t offer any new insights that haven’t been in his other books.

Its focus is on how to do Japa meditation. So if that’s of interest to you, then this is a good resource. But for me, I prefer to listen to a meditation on Insight Timer, on the occasions I do actually meditate (something I do on and off).

Etsy is something I tried using ago many years ago to sell kid’s clothes but I didn’t really treat it seriously. I have started using Etsy again to sell bags and I wanted to read a book on the topic rather than go down the rabbit hole of blog posts and videos. This was one of the few books that I could find on Etsy.

Like many Dummies books there are a lot of screenshots of how to do specific actions, but of course, as it was written in 2017, and with the speed of technology most of them are out of date. But don’t let this bother you as it has some useful content amongst all those screenshots. To find out how to do a particular task a quick Google will enable you to find more up-to-date instructions.

Good to Great is one of those books that comes up a lot in business book recommendations. And I agree, it’s worth a read.

Collins and his team wanted to discover what qualities make a great company. They looked closely at eleven American companies that they deemed had made the leap from a good company to a great company. Then compared them to those companies that were in similar fields at the some point in history and why the good-to-great companies were successful and their competitors were not.

The results were:

1. Level 5 leadership: Usually introverted and not led by their ego
2. Have the right people
3. Confront the facts but don’t lose faith
4. Hedgehog concept – do one thing really well
5. Culture of discipline
6. Use technology to set them apart from others, but not as the primary need for change
7. Flywheel and the doom loop: move in a single direction over a long period
8. Core values and purpose that are not just about making money.

As an aside, I wouldn’t recommend reading this on a Kobo as some of the diagrams and tables of data were unreadable and couldn’t be magnified.