Ever since I was a young girl, I loved to read.  My parents used to say that I carried a book  everywhere.

This hasn’t changed but rather than carry a book, I carry a library.

Having all your books on one device is both a blessing and a nightmare.  Confronted with so many choices to read, I’ve now had to stop the habit of downloading willy nilly off Amazon and instead, make sure that I read one (ok, two) books at the same time.

Although not entire list of books read this year, I have linked the ones that I found valuable and interesting for my own learning and development.

You may like them too:

• The Elephant and the Flea (thanks to Joyce Seitzinger @catspyjamasnz for this suggestion, it was fantastic)
• Drive: The Surprising Truth that Motivates Us
• Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation
• eLearning Provocateur: Volume 3
• Cntrl Alt Delete: Reboot Your Life
• The Shift: Future of Work
• Open
• Net Smart
• Organisations Don’t Tweet, People Do
• Radical Openness: Unexpected Principles for Success
• Flat Army: Creating a Connected and Engaged Organisation
• How to Get People to Do Stuff
• MOOC Yourself
• The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything
• The 2020 Workplace
• The New Learning Architect
• The New Social Learning: A Guide To Transforming Organisations through Social Media

Some of the fiction I enjoyed this year are:

• The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window (brilliant – hope they make this into a movie, it will be hilarious)
• Gone Girl
• The Book Thief
• The Rosie Project
• Secret Life of Bees
• Machine Man
• The Paris Wife
• One Day
• The Help
• Red Dog
• The Happiest Refuge
• The Sense of an Ending
• Before I Go To Sleep
• When God Was a Rabbit
• Room
• Jasper Jones

Reflections on Reading:

This was the first and only physical book I read this year and check out the post-it notes! Thanks to Ryan Tracey for this great gift. @RyanTracey

One of the things I’ve noticed nowadays is that I tend to forget what I’ve read on the Kindle over the hard cover book.   The key messages don’t seem to stay with me long enough.  Also,  gone are the days when someone asks you for something and you say, “ah, I have just the book for you” and walk over to your bookshelves to run your finger along the spines to locate it.  Somehow the romance is lost when you say, “I’ll send you a link to my Evernotes”.

I don’t know about you but this doesn’t exactly appeal to me.

Sure, I annotate and make notes on the Kindle but it’s not the same as the tactile nature of a book with post-it notes.  Something I can just pick up, open to the relevant page, scribble a note on a post it and most of all, share it with someone else.

So I have to change my behaviour in 2014 and actually hand-write my notes and key points – or sketch note – each book just so I can remember the main themes and refer to them with my work.

Before you ask, “but Helen, you can review the book!”  – yes, I can but sometimes, you just need to make notes for yourself that don’t need to be shared with the world.

So it’s quite timely that I stumbled upon this article today, “How to Read a Book”

What do you think?