I would like to give you the back story of my life as a book worm. From a very early age, I’ve been reading books, from children books, teen books, to more adult books. Most of the books has been fiction, but some has been based on real events. In the end of the teens, I turned more into books with stories from the Wild West, especially the Morgan Kane series from the Norwegian author Louis Masterson (real name, Kjell Halbing).
Morgan Kane was born in 1855 on the Santa Fe Trail, where his parents were killed by Indians, and follows his life on the edge of the law. As a young adult he was hired as Texas Ranger and later as US Marshal to hunt down his own kind, gunslingers and other criminals. The series has 83 books and has been translated into more than 10 languages. Louis Masterson has written about 150 books in his career.
Another Norwegian author I’ve read a lot of books from, is Margit Sandemo. Although she wrote in Swedish, she was born in Norway. Her most famous series is the Legend of The Ice People. The story starts in the 16th century and goes over several generation, and is basically a fight between good and evil with a strong influence of super natural powers, symbols and amulets. The series has been translated into more than 8 languages and sold more than 40 million copies. Margit Sandemo has also other famous series and independent books, in total more than 185, making here the top bestselling author in Scandinavia since the 80’s.
It may feel a bit unfair to mention only those authors as I’ve read hundreds of other books growing up as well, circulating around more or less the same theme as above, but the two mentioned are definitely among those I liked best.
In the beginning of the digital photography era, I got into photography and at one point I was hoping to turn it into a career. As the book worm, I went through a big stack of photo related books and learned a lot about photography and some about its business. But after shooting a few weddings and some other assignments, teaming up with somebody that didn’t take it seriously enough, that my employer didn’t support me taking days off to do photography, the spark died and I haven’t accepted payed assignment for years now and the whole thing turned more into a half dormant hobby. But somewhere along the line, probably in some of the photography books, I came across a new category of books that I’ve never known existed, namely self-improvement and personal development.
At the same time I discovered self-improvement books, I became responsible for a group of people at work, and by that, I included some leadership books into equation as well. This changed my reading habits almost 180 degree again. From reading novels, to photography related, to self-improvement and leadership books. Often reading several books a week, my hunger for knowledge was unlimited, but with a new position at work came also an online basic leadership class with a pile of books we had to read and answer questions online for about half a year. During this time, I read “my books” and at the same time the books from the class, and somewhat a congestion happened and I got more or less a complete blockage towards reading any type of books. The leadership class went fine with a final score of B+, but my desire to read books disappeared. This happened close to ten years ago, and I’ve maybe read between five and ten books since then. This is what I normally would easily chew through in a month. I have no idea why this happened, the books from the course was interesting and the other book I was reading at the time was one of the most inspiring and interesting books I’ve (half)-read. The book was “Credibility” by James Kouzes and Barry Posner. Still not finished…
After several years, and as stated in my “2019 new year speech” post, I gradually feel like I’m being able to chip away on the blockage and hopefully will start slowly and steadily reading more books again. My bookshelf is still half full of unread books. And as written in the mentioned speech, this will not be reviews of books, but purely recommendations of literary works that speak to me on a deeper level. And this is what I want to share with all of you. Here is a photo I took of my pile of books about 10 years ago, I guess it has been added between 30 and 40 books since then.
Why this eagerness in sharing recommendations about self-improvement and leadership, you might ask? At school we are not thought about values, moral, ethics and consequences of our behavior in a way that we really understand what binds us all together as humans. And as one said, if you can’t lead yourself, how do you expect to lead others, being a family or at a workplace? Everything starts with ourselves, not everybody else!
This is mainly a photoblog, but this will be filed under a new category called “Bedtime Readings” to make it more casual.
Thanks for reading and comments are always welcome.
Neshaug Photography 