1.What is Goodreads?

Favourite topic

I wanted to say by far my favourite topic, but that’s a bit too much. So, my favourite topic was What on Earth is Remote Sensing?. After two years in a completely different field of work, I was 3 months or so working in my original field of Remote Sensing. That, in combination with the format, made the post really enjoyable to write.

The reason I withdrew myself from saying by far …, is that I also deeply enjoyed creating the clips for Kaizen versus Good Enough. That post might even be the start for a new category of posts I will do together with my wife on her blog.

Favourite post (Arjen)

This one is easy. That has to be my first attempt in this series: Planning your Career or the Boundary between Private and Professional life. At the time I just changed jobs so I gave this topic a lot of thought. It must also be my most spontaneous and emotional post.

Do nice things with nice people. Where, how and what you do is of minor, if of any, importance.

Favourite post (Hans)

Easy for me again: the six books that had the most influence on who I am today. Favourite, partly because Hans and I started with an almost identical disclaimer. Partly because I love reading and immediately ordered all the books from Hans’ list which I didn’t have. But I mostly liked this post  because I feel it has the most Hans in it. I like personality shining through in writing (is this English?) and this is Hans’ best example in my opninion.

Formats

Coming up with a new format every two months was part of the fun as well as seeing what Hans’ would come up with every other month. I still remember being full in moving from one house to another when Hans sent me this notice: ‘Order this book, the new parallax topic will be about the book’. I read the book in my sleeping bag in my new, unfinished house. The reason we introduced constraining formats was to induce the creative process. And that for sure worked out. Especially when you are limited to, say, 500 worrds, you are forced to be concise and say exactly what you want. It also induced the creative process in a more indirect way: you first have to be creative in coming up with a new format, then you have to be creative again to comply to format and come up with something decent. One format I would like to explore more is the one with guest authors. Maybe something with a dialog or, even better, polemy. Another thought is to include more alternative channels, like twitter, facebook or a post composed of only creative commons content from flickr. Well, shouldn’t spill all my ideas yet.

Hope the coming year of parallax posts will be as fruitful as the last and I will try to improve my English writing style. I enjoyed writing, I hope my 10 readers enjoyed reading (10, that is including the Googlebot. Hi there again, thanks for not giving me a Page Rank).

I had a tough time reading this book. I do basically agree with all the things stated in the one page chapters. Most of my ‘career’ is even based on the spirit advocated by the book. But the writing style and the way of arguing were driving me crazy. The pattern is as follows: “Lot’s of people say you can’t do X. But look at us! We did X, so it is possible”. For me that reads as: “Lot’s of people say you shouldn’t base your life’s path on winning the lottery. But look at me! I won the lottery, so it is possible”. Yes it indeed is but don’t underestimate Lady Luck. She’s a bitch called hope. And hope is for the weak.

Here are my three lists:

Done

Go to sleep: this could be my life’s motto. You will never be creative or productive when your tired. That goes for physical as well as mental tiredness.

Embrace constraints: this Parallax series is based on this principle. Constraints boost creativity. Constraints are freedom.

Sound like you: I don not possess many qualities but you can be sure that I never ever write or produce anything which is not me. I say and do as I think and try to do that in the best way I can.

TODO

Your estimates  suck: I often tend to plan too much and too far ahead. I should really limit my planning to 1 to 3 weeks ahead and for the rest depend on vision and strategy.

Don’t confuse enthusiasm with priority: I sometimes let myself be carried away by my enthusiasm about new stuff whereas it would have been better to first finish other things up or focus on useful quick wins.

Sell your by-products: interesting thought. I never really thought about focusing on 1 product / service and see the rest as by-products. So maybe for me it should be: focus on your main products, the rest are by-products.

The hand that feeds you

Hire managers of 1: I’ll be so arrogant to state I myself am a manager of 1. I hope that my bosses realise that those are the persons that will make our company stronger.

Build an audience / Out teach your competition: our company is still only famous in it’s own parish. We should get out to the world and blog, microblog and organise workshops and seminars, go to conferences more.

Resumes are ridiculous / Years of irrelevance: anyone can write an impressive resume and everyone can suck at a job for a very long time. But that doesn’t make them good people for your company. Always rely on solid interviews and make sure you test drive newly hired staff.

I choose this particular format because I wanted to think about what was really important to me given two obviously ubiquitous dominant technologies. Polarising them as the ends of a spectrum forces you think about (1.) the nature of the spectrum and (2.) possible hierarchies or gradients within that spectrum. I decided to start at ‘Internet’ and then see how that would trickle down to ‘microprocessor’. For each item I reflected on why I think it is important. The ‘cannot live without‘ from the title is highly overrated (i.e. for me) and is only there to satisfy search engines.

1. The Internet

The Internet for me equals connectivity and exchange. Connectivity and the open exchange of data and ideas allows and enables innovation at an hitherto unseen speed. Moreover, it democratizes the means of production by putting (access to) generative tools in the hands of everyone willing to create or share products and ideas. I realise there’s a cultural bias here as not everyone in the world has an equal opportunity to access the internet. Let’s be positive and assume that will only be a matter of time.

2. The Commandline Interface: CLI

This was the hardest item to pick and at first sight it might seem like the stranger in the midst of these 5. But choosing one particular, ‘most important‘, tool to access the internet left me hopelessly undecided. The closest would be the web browser, in particular Chromium, but the problem with a browser is that it does not have any direct link to my local computing device. That’s why I choose for the cli, for me the glue of any OS and the bridge between the Internet and you(r computer’s files, databases, programs, tools, whatever).

3. Linux

I use Linux as a placeholder for FOSS. Together with open standards, FOSS is such a powerful combo that it’s a mystery to me why governments don’t invest more money in it or develop more legislation around it. Of course, for me Linux is also synonym to all my favourite (cli) tools like vi, grep, bash, wget, rsync, R, find, sed, awk, php, apache, python, [endless list of tools I myself never even heard about]. It’s your workstation and server in one. It can do everything you want. If you can’t do it, you probably don’t want it.

4. My Laptop

A laptop is still my computing device of choice. For me, being mobile is a number 1 requirement. Of course there’s a boom in mobile devices nowadays (smartphones, tablets, netbooks) but I still feel these all fill in a niche whereas my laptop is really more like a Swiss army tool of productivity: I can create and edit documents, images, audio, video, browse the web and do programming. There was a hard fight with the netbook for this position. Still, the powerfull processor and the slightly bigger screen give me that extra edge that makes me opt for a laptop.

5. The Microprocessor

The microprocessor is the driving engine of most of the technological developments of the last 30-40 years. Together with it’s older brother, the microchip, it’s becoming to dominate actually everything. Think about the rise of the internet of things, Sensor Webs or just your bank’s debit card. The microprocessor is already at the stage of just being there. I think The Internet will also reach that status some day soon.

Looking at points 1 through 5, the eerie feeling comes over me that it seems to be a gradient of less and less choice. You can choose to live and function normally in society without the Internet for example. But I doubt if you could live in a Western society without microprocessors or microchips. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, as long as the choice within those levels stays open and free.

Hans de Zwart and I write a monthly series titled: Parallax. We both agree on a title for the post and on some other arbitrary restrictions to induce our creative process. For this post we agreed to write about DrupalJam 6 by commenting on 7 tweets that have a #drupaljam hashtag. You can read Hans’ post with the same title here.

1. bertboerland @arjenvrielink you can still do a BoF at the#drupaljam

I submitted a proposal for a presentation which was refused. But one of the organisers informed about the possibility of a BoF via twitter, which is very cool (considered but didn’t do a BoF after all). Furthermore, I learned  something since I didn’t know what a BoF is. Luckily wikipedia did.

2. arjenvrielink Would be cool if solr could build spatial indexes from shapefiles and geotiffs to allow semantic spatial search #drupaljam

Tweeted when watching a presentation by Robert Douglas on the excellent Apache Solr, which integrates beautifully in Drupal. Two slides later, Robert announced integration of of geospatial indexing in Solr. Supercool!

3. ijansch #drupaljam not sure I get it. If drupal and solr are free, what’s the added value of the commercial aquia search wrapper?

Common misunderstanding of the freemium model. I think Acquia is a great example of how freemium can be successful: release your software as open source and offer paid services around it.

4. kanariezwart @shderuiter Die views overtuigen mij niet zo. MySQL views zijn toch sneller? part 2 tippeldip? #drupaljam

rough translation (ed.): Those views are not really convincing to me. Aren’t MySQL views faster? part 2 tippeldip.

Two issues: 1. I think he completely misses the point of Drupal Views. Drupal Views are so powerful because it basically puts the tools of a DBA in the hands of a non-techie (the Drupal admin).  2. tippeldip  = tippelphip = tippelvip = drupal lingo for template files which end in .tpl.php. Nice to see that all communities have their own idiom and language.

5. shderuiter Loving the changes to theming in Drupal 7, but upgrading’s gonna be a bitch. So basically nothing new… :-)#drupaljam

Drupal is not backward compatible and upgrade paths are not always clean and smooth. I think this fundamental design decision is one of the forces that drives Drupal’s success. The developers are free to create the best thing that the current state of technology allows for. Moodle for example suffers from the opposite decision. Lot’s of ‘bad’ design choices in Moodle can be traced back to the quirks and limitations of early MySQL and PHP versions.

6. regnard RT @arjenvrielink: Design for the mental model, not for the implementation model. Drupal7 UX #drupaljam

Another reason why I love twitter: twitter is a mental note taker; tweet was about that often techies tend to design from the perspective of all the cool stuff they’ve build where they should be designing for the people using it.

7. hansdezwart What is the reason @mortendk has chewing gum in his mouth while presenting? To make sure we can’t hear what he is saying?#drupaljam

This was tweeted by several other people and the presenter apologised afterwards. The best presentation of the day severely wounded by chewing gum sounds. Bummer man.

All in all it was good to be at the Drupaljam. Met some cool people, got some fresh ideas and had fun hanging out with Hans.

Recently, Wired magazine wrote about the Good Enough Revolution (GE-Rev). In short it comes down to that where in the past people wanted bigger, faster and better products with more features, nowadays Good Enough products seem to conquer the market. Iconic examples are the good enough computer (the netbook), the good enough video camera (The Flip, Kodak Zi8) and good enough sound (mp3, Skype). I personally love the GE-Rev and it’s products for it lowers the threshold to create content for the social web (eg flickr, youtube, wordpress, facebook).

However, sometimes I get the feeling that some people apply the Good Enough principle in a wrong way. For example, lot’s of scientist’s programming skills seem to be ‘Good Enough’: it works so it’s done. Well, let me disagree. As Edsger Dijkstra said (he is talking about programming code):

Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a quality that decides between success and failure.

Or some manufacturers think that by making crap expensive, it stops being crap (Microsoft Sharepoint). Another itch is the seemingly complete random moment utensil manufacturers in the Occident stop in their development cycle. Take, for example, the simple case of saran wrap. How difficult is it to make an easy to use, functional casing for that?

Apparently very difficult.

Kaizen on the other hand is the philosophy of continuous improvement. It’s origin lies in the Japanese work culture and is best known for it’s biggest success story Toyota with it’s Total Quality Management system (allthough the latest callback didn’t really seem to advocate the use of Kaizen). What would Kaizen do to saran wrap?

Well, how remarkable, it is possible to make an easy to use, functional casing for saran wrap. Those Japanese nailed it again. You gotta love the Japanese utensil market. Every product is designed and improved to the best it can be. It really makes you wonder why Western stuff is that bad.

Now, I am a great fan of DIY (GE-Rev) and I’m also a great fan of Kaizen. How is that possible? Have I lost my mind?

No I did not loose my mind (at least, that’s what I force myself to believe). The point being is: where lies the value adding quality of the product or service? In the case of saran wrap the difference between Kaizen and Good Enough lies in the hugely improved usability.  In the case of e.g. netbooks Good Enough is a result of Kaizen. An analogy of the latter case is that of guitar playing skills. Johnny Rotten plays guitar Good Enough to play punk music. His goal is not to entertain listeners with his amazing guitar skills but to entertain listeners with the raw and direct energy of punk rock music. On the other hand, I wouldn’t buy the ‘Johnny plays Rachmaninov’ record if I’m looking for a skilled performance of classical music. Similarly the goal of the netbook is not to provide users the most powerful, highest resolution computing experience but to be small, cheap and process simple tasks (e-mail, browsing, text editing).

In short, try the best you can be by continuous improvement but always within the context of your goals and environment.

There must be many people like me who are annoyed by voice-mail and vacation responders. I mean, for example, the vacation responder, if the system knows that you are on holiday I don not want the mail to be sent anyway. And I only want to call you when you are able and willing to pick up the phone. ‘Auto presence’ is a concept that could help increasing team and network communication efficiency. The concept is quite easy: the system knows your presence and only forwards communication efforts to you when it is relevant. The benefits are obvious: no more voice-mail, out of office responders.

Awareness Systems

Actually, modern collaboration platforms, like Google Wave, already include a lot of the auto presence concept. But what I do not like about systems like these is that they are a closed silo. If there is some relevant Wave activity for me, then I do not get an (email) notification. I first have to enter the Wave system and only then am I submerged in all the Google greatness. If I log out, I am back in the cold vast universe of the Internet. Similar things could be said about social networks like e.g. Elgg, Ning and Facebook. Inside the system there is a multitude of possibilities to communicate. Outside the system you are left with the traditional communication channels.
It would be cool to have some system where you would pick up your phone / skype, enter my number and see something like the footage below, combined with a message that I am ready for a real time, real life call:

If I’d not be available, you would see something like this (note the availability change at around 0:25):

That might sound obvious or ridiculous but the truth is that most office workers have mobile phones, which they bring anywhere, including meetings. Having a system that knows that you are in a ‘don’t disturb’ area (meeting room, client office, toilet) versus a ‘disturb area’ (your working place) would be a first step in increasing real time communication efficiency.

There are constant developments in communication efficiency so some of the annoyances / inefficiencies are already in the past. Some recent examples from Google:

• reply by chat
• forgotten attachments
• See which messages were sent right to you (vs messages where you are CC’ed)
• Send SMS text messages right from Gmail
• Sign out remotely (if you forget to sign out of a public computer: independence of space!)

The nature of communication

To really understand the problem of inefficient team and network communication, I think it is useful to take a closer look at the nature of that communication. First of all there is synchronous versus asynchronous communication.

synchronous:

• telephone
• skype
• instant messaging
• IRC (though you could argue it could be filed under asynchronous as well)
• …

asynchronous:

• email
• blog posts
• microblogging (twitter, identica, yammer)
• …

Second, in communication there are symmetric versus asymmetric relations. Until the advent of Twitter, the asynchronous relations in communication we knew of were traditional print (including books, magazines, news papers but also posters, bulletin boards etc) and web 1.0. Web 2.0 made asymmetric relations possible but not commonplace. In Facebook or LinkedIn, for example, you connect to people with mutual consent (I send you a request, you approve it). Twitter was one of the first asymmetric communication platforms. You can follow anyone you want without their approval (set aside the Cro-Magnons protecting their tweets).

Apart from the technological solutions from the first half of this post I think there is  a wealth of opportunities and possibilities in asynchronous, asymmetric communication. The real solution to inefficient communication is not in curing symptoms (like the technical solutions above) but in changing the way we think about communication. The problem is we are still approaching tools like Twitter from our traditional communication paradigm. I strongly believe there needs to be a paradigm shift in the way we think about communication. Such a shift would make the current problems in communication and network efficiency obsolete. Asynchronous, asymmetric tools like Twitter makes such a shift possible. Now we only have to do it!

I will write about that in another blog post: The Twitter iceberg; working towards a paradigm shift in online communication.

Note: it’s really strange recording and watching yourself writing a blog post

I concluded my post on the boundary between private and professional life with:

life is easy, just do the things you like with nice people

I will take that as a starting point for this post. Second, the title is a bit strange because everybody will acknowledge that if you work in a noisy room which is too hot, a shouting boss with an alcohol problem and a colleague keeping his beloved pet skunk in the office, will of course influence your performance negatively. So I rephrase the title slightly into: how to optimize a workspace for performance. Therefore we first have to define performance.

Performance

First let’s be clear about performance. In this post I will be talking about knowledge worker performance. Not how many bricks you can lay per hour or how many articles you can scan per minute at the cashier. I assume that knowledge worker’s performance is best when you do things you like with nice people.

How then, can we optimize a workspace for performance taking into account we want to do nice things with nice people?

Workspace

Again I would like to stress that I will not be discussing the ergonomics of the workspace. There’s a science for that, figure it out yourself and make yourself physically comfortable.

First make your workspace independent of space and time. Being independent of space and time makes you free and puts you in control. Contemporary technologies make it trivial for knowledge workers to be independent of space. You don’t have to physically be in a corporate office anymore to execute your work. You just connect your laptop via VPN to the company network and you have all your companies IT facilities at hand. Cloud based applications like Google Docs or Mindmeister make real time collaboration over the internet a breeze. You just need a mobile, internet enabled device to plug into your virtual office workspace and of you go.

Being physically independent of space also allows you to take control over your own working hours. Your job shouldn’t dictate you to be at the office from 9 to 17, your job should dictate you to finish that document, deliver that code or visualise that new design. How and when you do that is (should be) irrelevant to your boss.

By not being forced to commute to that gray office through endless traffic jams with it’s terrible coffee (dear bosses of the world: coffee being free doesn’t make it taste better) you can decide when the perfect moment  there is to perform.

Second, optimize the relationship between you and your co-workers. As said, I passionately believe that by doing things with nice people, the actual things you do are really almost irrelevant. Motivation also becomes irrelevant. You will always be motivated to work with nice people, no matter what you do. I’d rather dig graves all day with my good friend then being the first man on Mars with Geert Wilders.

To find good people to work with might be one of the toughest challenges in your life. Intuitively most people know who they like. But there can always be hidden gems. As a rule of thumb I always look at the type and quality of connections between myself and others. That connection might be intellectual, humour, emotional, interests, motivational, political etcetra. So, for example, I find it very frustrating to work with someone who is intellectually on a totally different level. Also, I cannot imagine working with a (hidden) racist, even if she is super smart and very funny. Good people to work with are close to you on lots of levels.

Sometimes you are forced to work with not so nice people (clients, bosses). In that case, try to look for the connection that brings you closest and try to build from there. Also, please note that I do not advocate to try to collect and army of brainless worshippers around you. It is good to differ in opinion and have heated discussions to let fresh ideas emerge. Just make sure the heat is generated for the right reasons.

Freedom!

Well then, the recipe for happiness I proposed in my earlier post has just gotten elaborated with two new ingredients:

1. take control of your professional life by striving to make your workspace independent of space and time

2. try to minimize the distance between you and your beloved co-workers

Today’s technology makes these things quite easy (and cheap) to achieve. Fear, on the other hand, living in the heads of the decision makers, makes sure that for most of us freedom will be an utopia for long to come.

Creating a design concept for an e-learning platform like Moodle is not easy.  Whenever I find myself at a difficult task, the first thing I do is make it easier by defining and possibly narrowing the universe of discourse. Here we go.

Instructors and participants

The first condition I set is that the app is an addition to a normal Moodle install. Therefore I decided that administrative tasks like user management, installing blocks and modules, course design or quiz authoring are not the focus of the app. Those tasks should be done in the normal web interface. The mobile application focuses on two particular roles: participants (students) and instructors (teachers, facilitators).

Activities

Second, I think that Moodle is not a course based, user based or content based platform. Moodle is activity based. The heart of Moodle is a multitude of learning activities enabling users to interact with the system or each other. The focus of my design is on activities.

Mobile

Third, it is an application for mobile devices. Giving that some thought made me realise that there is an ambiguous relationship between Moodle and a mobile device. On the one hand a mobile device puts constraints on the design of the application (mainly screen size). On the other hand a mobile device provides new opportunities for Moodle as an e-learning platform. Being mobile makes learning becoming more independent of time and space. You don’t have to be physically behind a computer or in a class room anymore to learn (space). And you can decide to do learning activities whenever you feel like it or when it’s most comfortable for you to do so (time). Moreover, most smartphones being equipped with GPS, there is a whole new world of possibilities and opportunities for new location based activities.

Screen mockups

Here are three simple mockups I created with balsamiq. The first mockup shows the home screen displaying a scrollable list of recent and  / or upcoming activities. Like when someone replied to your forum post, a link to the post will show up high. Or when there is an assignment dead line coming, that assignment will get higher on the list when the dead line is nearing. Furthermore, there is a calendar button for planning and overview and a grade button. The second mockup shows an example forum activity. I modeled the forum to microblogging (Facebooks Wall, Twitter, Elgg’s Wire). On each activity page there are two additional buttons: calendar and resources. The resources button links to informational content like text documents, scorm packages, web pages, databases etc. The third mockup is a simple example of a location based quiz.

Note that the screens are course independent. You might want to show a small course indicator on the activity buttons.

Synopsis

My design concept for a mobile Moodle application can be summarised as follows: keep it simple. The app is activity centered and focuses on participant and instructor roles. Being a mobile app, the often heard adage ‘learning anyplace, adage,anywhere’ is getting one step closer.

Disclaimer

I realise that in this design I did not take into account accessibility. Knowing that the Moodle web application puts a lot of emphasis on accessibility I apologise for that shortcoming. Besides that I didn’t include any ‘helper’ navigational elements like a home button or help icons.

Please, if you ever read a book in your life, and you found this article interesting, sign up to goodreads.com, you can find me and Hans there as well

Reflecting on the title of this post, none of these books actually caused a radical change or severely disrupted the course of my life. Sure is that without these books my current me would have been different. Another certainty is that these books are changing with me. These books shaped me into who I am but at the same time they change themselves as I am the one who values them. I don’t exist without these books and these books don’t exist without me. That kind of symbiotic evolution is what I love about reading. Me and my books; we got each other in a loving stranglehold.

Please note that for the Dutch books I kept the original Dutch title. It feels very strange for me to translate the title to English. Moreover, I don’t believe there are English translations of these works.

1. The Sea Of Fertility - Yukio Mishima
Cheat number 1: The Sea Of Feritility is a tetralogy. The four novels include Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn and The Decay of the Angel. This is Mishima’s Magnum Opus. If I have to summarise this or all of Mishima’s work in one word it would be: decay. Throughout his work Mishima explores the themes of Buddhism, Shinto, nihilism, beauty, post WWII Japan, reincarnation, knowledge and action, truth and suicide. One of his famous quotes is “To know and not to act is no to know” There are so many layers and levels in these four novels that you can just keep reading and re-reading them. Worthy notice is that after the completion of the final work of The Sea Of Fertility, Mishima comitted seppuku, ritual suicide; history is a record of destruction.

First read:
I still clearly remember buying the first two novels of the tetralogy. I was in Jakarta in a mall looking for something to read in the air plane back home. (If you’ve ever been to Indonesia you probably noticed that you hardly see anyone reading a book. I always wondered if there was no one reading books because there are no book shops, or there are no book shops because no one reads.) So I finally found this department store which had a book section. Even an English book section! Well, English book shelf. I never heard of Mishima but judging the back cover it shouldn’t be too bad. After reading one page in the plane it bored the hell out of me. I stopped reading the book and instead watched a Harry Potter movie (Harry Potter movies and body wrecking air plane travels are inextricably connected in my life, having done Harry Potter nor air plane travel any favour). Anyway, the cursed Mishima’s stayed in my book shelf for about 2 years or so until I had absolutely nothing to read any more at home and thus finally gave them another chance. Blessed be that day.

2. Firefly – Haruki Murakami
Firefly is actually a short story and a not novel or a book. Murakami based his later novel Norwegian Wood on this story. Although I truly enjoyed reading Norwegian Wood, I never really liked it as much as Firefly. Firefly has everything that makes a short story really stand out. It’s crisp, it’s got lots of room for interpretation and it’s fragile. How many writers can write fragile stories? Remarkably, this story doesn’t have typical Murakami ingredients like magic-realism or pop-culture references. It’s very focussed on human relationships. For me, this story expresses Japan as Japan really is: the things not said, the things implied, distance, humbleness, to be retreated. Action and consequence.

First read:
On a cold, cold winter night at around 12 o’clock lying in my bed just about to sleep. Reading Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, a collection of short stories, I thought “One more paragraph of the next story and then I’ll sleep”. That next story was Firefly. I didn’t put the book down till I finished the story,

3. Een Uitzinnige Liefde – Bob den Uyl
Bob den Uyl is not really a well known writer in Holland. Too bad for the people who never heard of him because he is the funniest Dutch author in my opinion. If you can appreciate ironic, sarcastic observations of the meaninglessness of life, Bob den Uyl is the man. Well, I, for one, based my whole being on ironic, sarcastic observations of the meaninglessness of life. That’s why Bob and me go along pretty well. As a bonus, Bob is fond of biking, just like me. Life is without purpose so why not read one of den Uyl’s collection of short stories. If you’re finished with ‘Een uitzinnige liefde’ try ‘Gods wegen zijn duister en zelden aangenaam’, ‘Vreemde verschijnselen’ or ‘Een zwervend bestaan’ for equal reading pleasure.

First read:
Easy, I picked the oeuvre of Bob den Uyl as my reading list subject for my high school Dutch exams. So I read all his books in 1994/1995. I guess I was one of the few who actually enjoyed reading for his exams.

4. De Man Die Werk Vond -  Herman Brusselmans
Three words: boredom, fear and loneliness. Brusselmans’ best work in my opinion is this early novel of his alter ego Louis Tinner and his days as a librarian in a Brussels Ministry’s library. If you truly still believe life has a purpose, if you still believe there’s a deeper meaning in things, please read this novel and you’ll  be cured for the rest of your life. To top it all of, Brusselmans writes about his misery and pitiful life in a lovely ironic and sarcastic way. Plenty of laughs on the journey to the back cover as well then!

(Did I hear Gerard Reve? Anyone said Reve (‘De Vierde Man’)?)

First read:
Now, there’s a blank in my memory. It feels like I read this book 20 years ago but looking at the publishing date of the edition I got, it can’t be more than 3 or 4 years ago.

5. The Plague – Albert Camus
Of all the philosophers I read or read about until today, Albert Camus stands out as being the closest to my personal thought. The crucial point being that he acknowledges that life in itself is without meaning. Then, if that is true, knowing life is without meaning while still we greatly value it (the absurd paradox of life), why don’t we kill ourselves? That would be the rational consequence to take. However, Camus stated that meaning, though fragile and unstable, can be created through your own actions, interpretations and decisions. I myself love this absurdness of life where meaning is constantly challenged by death and decay. Let it be clear that I am an admirer of the complete works of Camus. In The Plague Camus covers the major themes of exile and separation, solidarity and community. Quoting the English wikipedia entry on Camus: “only by making the choice to fight an irreversible epidemic are people able to create the ever-lacking meaning to a life destined for execution the moment of its creation.”

First read:
Late spring 2006 in Hveragerdi, Iceland. I joined my wife on one of her fieldwork campaigns. Iceland, like Indonesia, is one of the countries which make you think different about life. Add to that a healthy dose of Camus, 160 km of biking through beautiful windy plains, plenty of free time, horrible food and no alcohol and you got your character defining experience.

6. A Feast in the Garden – György Konrád
Konrad is a Hungarian author which I got to know through a tv documentary by Wim Kayzer. Especially the interview with Konrad impressed me a lot so I started reading his novels. I especially like the dualism in Konrad’s work. Quoting (poorly translated by me): “(…) at this moment the duality of everything. Saint and hedonist at the same time. Spontaneity and the beauty of decadence; the attraction of the forbidden.”

First read:
Fall 2004 in Fuji, Japan. One of the enormous pile of books I always drag along on my foreign trips. Fall Japan = late summer Holland; around 20-25 degrees Celsius great food and the most mind twisting country you’ll ever visit. The country actually really suits Konrad’s style of writing. Write and wrong, black and white, plastic and authenticity live right alongside there.

Cheat number 2,3,4,5 and 6: of all the authors mentioned above (including Mishima) I actually love all their work. Reading more than one novel of an author provides new perspectives and insights on previously read work and on his genre as whole. Combine that with your personal growth as a reader and you get a self strenthening spiral.

Bukowski, Deelder, Dostoyevksi, Celine, Verhulst, Lanoye, Selby, Nooteboom,Sartre, Hermans, Mulisch, Pirandello, Kafka,Eco, Slauerhoff, Lucebert, Vlek, Hemmingway, Miller, Proust, Dazai and all the countless others: sorry, I could only pick six…

Poetry is greater than prose

The bums have won