 Hi and welcome to my new-ish office. Today I want to talk once again about the books I've been reading. I've found out that apparently when you give updates about the books you've been reading they're called book hauls. Here's a book haul. So I did another one of these a few weeks or a month ago and so I wanted to give an update on that. First of all I want to start with Start With Why by Simon Sinek. This is a book that I started and did not finish. This is actually pretty rare. I hardly ever start books without finishing them. It wasn't necessarily a bad book. I did find that a lot of his advice and stuff you hear in many other places and I wasn't finding much new but I also feel like a lot of it had to do with motivating employees, motivating people who you work with or work for you. Since what I do is mostly by myself I didn't feel it was the right time for that. I do work with a lot of freelancers usually when I go to Asia or something like that. That's when I try to make it a point of meeting up with them and getting updated and whatnot. So I put that on hold. So far I didn't really think there was much new which was kind of surprising because I'd read articles. I think I mentioned by Simon Sinek before and I found him to be pretty smart and write stuff that was quite enlightening but in the book I honestly didn't find much that was new. So instead of that I decided to read another business book which turned out to be really bad. It was called You Are a Bad Ass and Making Money by Jensen Cheryl. It seemed like it had some good advice but for all the wrong reasons. She's definitely enthusiastic but when she starts getting into the law of attraction and how if you think of something long enough it'll happen to you and all that she started losing me. Her evidence is well not there. It's her personal anecdotal evidence or evidence of a friend who suddenly concentrated on the fact that they needed $75,000 and suddenly realized that they had some trust fund with $75,000 and didn't, you know, had forgotten about it. I don't know. You can skip that book. I really don't recommend it. I don't, that one I don't know why I finished it. Having said that, yeah, there were, I did like the enthusiasm which I feel like most people trying to, who are down or trying to set up their own thing, they aren't, you know, they start seeing everything in a negative light of everything that can go wrong. So it helps you get past that but I really can't get behind all the other stuff she was talking about. So I'll leave it at that. The next book is one of the ones I mentioned in the last video that I was looking forward to reading and that was The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker. The fact that I have it here with a bookmark in it shows that I haven't finished it yet. The reason for this is mainly is that it's a pretty heavy book but I really like it. What I usually do with a book like this is that I'll read it and once it starts getting too heavy I'll read a bit of something else and then I'll get back to it. Also it was written in the late 90s so a lot of it he starts talking about or speech recognition and recognizing phrase and grammar and whatnot. You can tell it's outdated because the stuff he talks about we've kind of gone past it now but still it really helps you appreciate, you know, what Siri and Google and Amazon Echo or whatever, you know, what they have to go through to understand our speech, what we're talking about and to understand our commands. Just as a quick example of that actually he gives the example of time flies like an arrow. When you say it to another English speaker they'll understand it right away. They don't have to go through any weird process but if you plug it into a computer they're actually, he says they're five different trees, he calls them trees, basically five different possibilities for this. The first one will be time proceeds as quickly as an arrow proceeds and that's the intended reading, right? Time flies like an arrow, boom. Another one is measure the speed of flies in the same way that you measure the speed of an arrow. Time flies the way you would time an arrow. The third one will be measure the speed of flies in the same way that an arrow measure the speed of flies. You should time flies the way an arrow would time flies. The fourth one is measure the speed of flies that resemble an arrow and the last one is flies of a particular kind time flies are fond of an arrow. So you have examples of this, things we take for granted. He also talks about how babies and how they learn languages and how it gets processed. I'm enjoying it quite a bit. I do wish he had more in other languages. He obviously talks about other languages here and there but I feel like a follow-up is needed for different languages except I feel like it would be a huge book because, you know, there are tons of different languages. But if you haven't read it yet, I do recommend it. I feel like it'll give you a great foundation for what's coming up and again I haven't finished it yet so we'll see what's to come. So another book is the biography of James Monroe. James Monroe, The Quest for National Identity and it's by Harry Ammon. This was also written a while ago in the 70s I think but as far as I know it's pretty much as good as you're gonna get. I found it in a library sale for a very cheap price. I've read a biography of James Madison a few years back and I'd read Thomas Jefferson or I read John Adams when he was in fashion. I figured you know a go in order of all the presidents and he's a fifth president so I read about it. If you're interested in that time period and what was going on then then yeah this is a great book. Obviously if you're interested in James Monroe it's also a great book. It's interesting to read about like the American Revolution from the point of view as a student because James Monroe was of the revolutionary generation but he was a student and you see him and his fellow students get excited about it. A lot like students nowadays get into protests or into movements. I feel like he always took a back seat because you know he was surrounded by giants in a way. He was able to accomplish quite a bit but you know we don't give him much credit for it. Everyone knows that he the Louisiana Purchase was Thomas Jefferson and it increased the area of the United States by so much but no one knows that James Monroe is the one who extended it all the way to the coast and he also was the one who got Spanish Florida from Spain. You might hear about the Monroe Doctrine. You might hear about Monrovia the capital of Liberia. It's named after him as well. He was a very interesting person with a very interesting presidency. Wasn't able to accomplish as much as he wanted to I guess but also it's pretty much thanks to him that the Federalists don't exist anymore. What's interesting there is to read about this in between time. Remember during this time the U.S. was the only democracy. For about 100 years it was the only democracy in the world. People were waiting for this experiment to go wrong so all these first presidents really had to make sure that democracy stayed a democracy. So James Monroe very interesting president. If you haven't read about any other presidents a U.S. president before then I would recommend either George Washington you know because he was the first one and so you get to hear about how it all started or Thomas Jefferson who to me is still you know one of the most interesting founding father. And just briefly other books that I've been reading say Marguerite Bourgeois. This is a just a short book about Marguerite Bourgeois. She came from France. She went to what was called New France basically Quebec and she helped set up Vidmarie like set up their first school. This place Vidmarie by the way is what we now call Montreal. If you know nothing about her it's interesting but it's pretty much a short you know like a children's book basically. On to mystery novels I'm always reading mystery books because my wife really likes them and so we tend to read the same book just so you know we can talk about it. Usually those ones I listen to and so they're audiobooks. One of the latest ones was Home by Harlan Coban. Harlan Coban to me is the best mystery writer out there. Home is his latest one and I really liked it. It's part of a series of Myron Bolotar who's this one detective. It could probably stand alone it might be a bit confusing with the characters and anything by Harlan Coban though it's going to be a great mystery novel something fast-paced and smart. Another one I'm listening to now it's called Hypothermia and it's by Ingrid Dasson Arnaldur completely butchered that. It takes place in Iceland and the author is Icelandic and in fact this one also is a series it's number eight. The series in fact is called Inspector Erlendur. The narrator is great actually I really like the narrator and I'm really enjoying it so I think I'm going to read other ones so if you like mystery novels that take place in Iceland yeah I recommend it and look it up. I'm going to have links to all these books by the way down in the description below. Another book it's a short book that I read recently it's called Ajax Penumbra 1969. This is I guess a prequel to Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour bookstore. Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour bookstore is an excellent book. Ajax Penumbra 1969 is sort of a prequel takes place in 1969. It's still good but compared to the original I don't think it stands up. It's 65 pages so yeah if you have access to it by all means read it. That's it for my book haul. As you can tell I like books and I like learning about new books so if you have any advice definitely let me know otherwise I hope you can pick up some of these books. If you do or if you've read them then definitely let me know because I love talking about these books. Once again this is kind of an anomaly. Most videos talk about freelance translation tips and tricks for freelancing or for freelance translation more specifically. So I'll see you in the next video. Don't forget to subscribe if you want more videos and click like if you like this video because that always helps and I'll see you next time. Thanks. Bye.