 Hello everyone, it's time for another video and time for another book haul. July book haul, I guess, because it's in July right now. And so let's get started right away. Actually, let's not. Before we get started, I do have one thing to announce. This isn't a sales video by any means, but look what book is out. Actually, I only want to bring this up because there is a physical book, but I noticed when I ordered it that the paging is a bit wrong, as in it doesn't coincide with the table of contents. It's two pages off for some reason. Now, I don't have control over this. Amazon does all of this. So basically, when you use Amazon to make a book, you put your book up there and, you know, you put all the information, you put the cover and everything, but then Amazon kind of takes control from that point. And it's okay with the Kindle version and the ebook because there I can download it right away and look, see what it looks like. And I can make tweaks as needed right away. However, for the physical book, I need to order it. So I need to pay for it, order it, wait for it to come and then check it out and see what happens. And that's the only way I can make corrections because everything looked fine when I put it up there, but suddenly it changed when I ordered it. So now I've made other changes to it, ordered it again. But if it doesn't come correctly this time, then I think I'm just going to take the physical book off the market and only have the ebook. And so basically, I've just mentioned this because just get the ebook. It's a lot cheaper and it was, and you can read it on your iPad, on your iPhone, on your Android device. I mean, I checked mine on my Android device or in your Kindle or whatever. And it's probably better just to consume the media that way. And again, if the physical book, if the next thing I order seems to look okay, then I'll keep it up there. But regardless, I still recommend getting the ebook if you're planning on getting that book. Anyway, enough about that. Let's start with the book haul. Actually, I won't start with that. I will start with the language book or the book that deals with languages. And this is this book, the four literatures of Switzerland. And as most of, so I grew up in Switzerland, actually. And so Switzerland is something that I know quite a bit about. I know they have four main languages, German, French, Italian and Romance. And so this is essentially the story of literature in all four of those languages. And as someone who grew up in Switzerland and knows quite a bit about Switzerland, I found this really interesting. So I think I found out as much in the brief introduction for each language that they had at the beginning of each language section, as I did in the main parts, you know, that talks about the authors of each language. For example, why the Swiss French part doesn't speak any French dialect, but speaks more normal French, or why Swiss German isn't written and never really has been written. Like there's a reason for that. Also how the majority of Italian speakers in Switzerland aren't even from the Italian part of Switzerland. And how Romance, Romance is the fourth language of Switzerland, the one that most people don't know about. And it's no one's first language. So it's interesting to see how literature can evolve when it's a second language to begin with. It might be difficult to find. I found it in a used bookstore. But if you can get your hands on it, and if you're somewhat interested in the literature of Switzerland, definitely check it out. I do wish there were an update because this was written a while back, I think it was written in 1995. But still, they could use an update so they could include contemporary authors. But I definitely give it five stars out of five. I mean, that's what I gave it on, good reads. So another point along the lines of being more discerning with what I read, I have this. I think many of you, especially many Americans, probably remember Archie and you remember, you know, you remember the comic books from when you were young. So this all came from the fact that I was never really into comic books growing up. But I know that they're a huge part of our culture right now. I mean, so many of the movies coming out are from superheroes and they're all from comics. But then even from The Matrix to like The Walking Dead, you know, and, and all these other things, all these movies and TV shows and everything came from comics originally. So I thought I should give comics a chance. And when looking around, this seemed the closest I could get to anything. When I was a kid, as I mentioned, I didn't grow up in the States. But when we would come to the States to visit, I remember seeing Archie comics, my friends would have them and they'd be around. So that was the closest I got to actually reading comic books. And so I decided when looking around comics that apparently they've redone it. And it's it's the same Archie and and Betty Veronica and let's say I'm Jughead. But they, you know, everything is drawn anew. And there's kind of a new storyline. I mean, I think it just gives a bit more background, but it's basically the same storyline. Anyway, I thought the drawing was great. It was really interesting to read up about these characters in a more almost mature way. But I mean, halfway through the book, I probably realized I'm just not the target market for this. And so I finished it. But if you if you're a bit younger, then you might be into this and it'll be really cool to read it. But otherwise, I don't know, you can definitely check it out. But I don't, you know, for me, I'm not going to be buying volume two or anything like that. Although I did enjoy reading this one. So that's about it for comic books. And now let's move on to another book I read recently. And that is Haruki Murakami. This is the second book I read by Haruki Murakami. And I love it. The first book I read was Dance Dance Dance and then South of the Border West of the Sun. I know he has a lot more famous books out. So I should probably read those as well. But in the meantime, again, I just found this in a bookstore and I decided to read it. And it was excellent. If you've read Dance Dance Dance, that was quite surreal. This was a bit less surreal, so more like real life. But the interesting thing is he really and he's a lot like Banana Yoshimoto in this sense, to me at least. Maybe that's just contemporary Japanese authors how they are, maybe I should be reading more of them. Anyway, he drags me into this world, which is kind of melancholic nostalgic and, you know, sort of sad, but he really drags you in and you're kind of part of that world. And you get pulled so far, at least for me, I was pulled so far into this weird world of his that I didn't notice all the symbolism that was all over the book. I mean, there's, well, first of all, you know, stuff about South of the Border and West of the Sun is all over the place. The contrast between the rain and desert and stuff like, anyway, there are a whole lot of things going on. I could probably read it a second time and get quite a bit out of it in that sense. But I enjoyed it just because of the story and then thinking back over it about all the symbolism. I really liked it and I really want to read more of Morakami. I kind of feel like reading all of his books right now. And so I highly recommend this one. Again, I gave this five stars as well on Goodreads. And last but definitely not least, I have a book that deals with business. So for those of you for all of you, I guess, who are setting up your business freelance translators or anything along those lines, this should help out. Every time I make these videos, I try to have at least one that's business oriented and one that's language oriented. And so that's why I had the four literatures of Switzerland. I'm also reading, by the way, the Stuff of Thought by Stephen Pinker. But that is a very long book. I'm in the middle of it right now. And so that's why I'm not including it in this video. Also, I read the language instinct relatively recently. And a lot of the information is regurgitated from that is recycled. It's not really recycled. Actually, he has all new examples and it's more up to date. So you should probably read the Stuff of Thought rather than the language instinct. I mean, we'll see. I'll see. But by the time I get to the end of it, if actually if it does cover everything from the language instinct or not. Anyway, that aside, this book is Gary Kasparov Kasparov Kasparov. Anyway, how life imitates chess. For those of you who don't know, Gary Kasparov is a world famous chess master. He's probably the best chess player alive today, even though he's retired from chess. He was the one who in 97, 98 competed against Deep Blue against the IBM computer, won several times, lost the last time after which IBM guys refused to play again, you know, because that's what they wanted to do. And but in the meantime, he's been he's extremely smart and again, probably the most famous chess player who's alive today, as well as the best one. More recently, he's gotten into politics. He's been in opposition party to Putin, which as you can imagine, didn't go too well. But he is definitely a smart guy. This book is equating chess with business. So it says how life imitates chess, but the continuation title is make the right moves from the board to the boardroom. So, you know, it deals with business and it tries to show you how chess relates to business. I don't know why I keep repeating that. Anyway, being someone who's read a lot of, in fact, quite a few crummy business books lately, and feels like everyone's kind of recycling the same information there. This was not the case with this book at all. This was brand new fresh information for me. And I found I found myself just making notes and underlining a whole bunch of things. I'm going to share a couple of these with you. A couple of the main points that I took from this. One, he's talking about Cockrope here, one of his main rivals, and talking about how his personal style was in conflict with a game strategy that was required in order to win. And he veered off course. And he basically equates this one game to, you know, to other lessons in life and in business about how many times, because many business books will tell you, follow this strategy, do this, do that. And the fact is they could all be right, even if they give conflicting advice, because you need many times the situation dictates what you need to use and what you need to do. And many times, as they say, what got you here won't get you there. And so when you have attained success, you want to keep doing what you're doing, but they might be the wrong thing to do. Along those lines, he also has another line, success is the enemy of future success, which once again, shows that once you are successful, then you kind of fall into the pattern when that might not be what you want to do to continue going on in the future. And here are a couple more. Here, here, quates it also with war, and then with the war, he equates it with business. How time is always a factor, but is it really the essence of the case? Are you just being impatient about when to be impatient, when to jump to market and when not to, even if other people are, and how you need to be able to discern one from the other. Here's another one, a company that is in financial trouble should never gamble on a risky venture. You say like that, it might sound obvious, but actually this was what happens quite a bit. As soon as you start losing money or seeing what you're doing doesn't work, you try to gamble on something else that could provide really high returns and is risky, and that's exactly the wrong time to do it. You want to be doing those risky things when you're doing well and flush, but that's usually that's when people once again, just fall into their pattern and don't follow that. He has other lines, intuition is very good after experience. Once you have a lot of experience and you're an expert, then your intuition tends to be on point, but not before. And so it's something to keep in mind. Anyway, I won't bore you any more with these quotes and you can find your own. I found it extremely original. I found it extremely refreshing. I haven't read any of his other books. I heard that some of theories are repeated from the other books. I wouldn't know anything about that, but I did find this interesting. My one wish is that someone from the business world had joined him either edited or co-authored it so they could relate what he says more to business. Sometimes he gets a bit carried away just talking about chess, which is very interesting, but doesn't necessarily tie into business. And especially towards the end, he ties it a lot into his political movement and struggles, which again is very interesting, but doesn't necessarily tie into business. So I do wish someone had edited it to bring it back to that, but that aside, I thought it was a great book. And that's about it. Again, I want to keep it short, so I'm just going to keep it at those for now, and I didn't keep it short at all, so I apologize for that. But I won't talk about the mystery novels I've been reading, because I've been continuing with those, but in fact, those are all audiobooks anyway. I've just been listening to them. And that's about it for the book haul this time. And if you do have any recommendations for future books, definitely let me know, because I'm always looking for good books. As I said, I'm trying to be more discerning, be more discriminating about the books I read, because I only, you know, have so many minutes and hours to read books. And so I want to read good books. That's it for now. If you did enjoy this, please leave a thumbs up. Those always help. And let me know if you want more book hauls or fewer of them that kind of different from the videos I usually do. The videos I usually have are tips for freelancers out there, for freelance translators, and tricks for getting ahead in this profession. But every now and then I like sharing what I read as well. So that's about it. I'll talk to you next time. Thanks. Bye.