Blue Chi’s

I started going to the gym last month for the first time ever in my life, I thought it would be the only way for me to gain weight. I’ve never been to the gym before so I thought I’ll read a book about it and use an iPhone application to make my gym experience more fun!

The book I read is the one you see above, it is Muscle – The World’s Most Complete Guide to Building your Body – by Ian King and Lou Schuler. The book is mainly written for those who want to get seriously into body building and weight lifting, unlike traditional workout books, Muscle takes a scientific approach by explaining how muscles work and goes into great detail into the function and nature of every single muscle you can think of. I thought that the book was helpful because it explains a lot of about how muscles grow, how to have a proper diet, and explains in a great detail many exercises for working the various muscles in the body. However, at many circumstances I thought that the book was an overkill for someone who merely wants to gain weight to look more normal than trying to be a big buff or a professional weight lifter (which the book seems to be directed at). The book also seems to focus on working with free weights more than using any machines (literally, I think only four machines were mentioned in the book).

However, in my regular trips to the gym I do not actually follow the workouts in the book, and instead I follow the routines specified in the iPhone application iFitness. This is an awesome iPhone application that has detailed routines for all training levels. In addition to the explanation on how to do the workouts and show you videos on how to do then, the application also enables you to log your training sessions for each exercise you do and lets you plot graphs to show your performance.

I really love iFitness probably because I am a sucker for statistics! Apparently I can also back up all my data online and send it by email as well. I haven’t tried these two features yet, but they should be interesting.

I’ve been going to the gym for a whole month now and I feel like I can have as a permanent item in my routine, but I’m away from Muscat for nine days for Eid and there isn’t a branch of my gym here in Sohar, I still got my shoes with me, so I might try going to any gym here. What’s even worse is that I’ll be traveling abroad for about two weeks after Eid, so again, I’m not sure what’s going to happen to my gym schedule.

So does anybody else go the gym around here? Have you read a helpful book on the topic or used a good iPhone application to help you with it?

Just finished reading The Secret a couple of weeks ago. For the very few of you who have not heard of this book before, it is a book that got published in 2006 after a DVD on the same topic was released. The Secret is a spiritual/self-help book on how to use the law of attraction to achieve everything you want in life. The book got super famous after appearing on Oprah.

Though the book is a massive international hit, many people criticise it, mufti’s in some Arab Muslim countries held that the teachings of the book are haram for some reason, which I thought is very weird, because the majority of the principles of The Secret are compatible with most religions, for example, praying to have what you desire, being grateful everyday for what you have, thinking positively, giving those who need some of what you have, and that each person is responsible for his own fate.

I thought that the Secret is a fun and energizing book to read, it is not meant to be taken as a scientific book of authority, but a little book to make you feel good about the future and that you can do anything you want in life if you put your mind to it.

Finished reading this book a couple of days ago, it is a 200-page translated story by Japanese author Murakami. I don’t recall ever reading an English translated novel before, I thought that this sounded very natural at most times, except at some rare extreme situations like calling an LCD a “liquid crystal monitor” multiple times.

The book tells the story of a single night in which a teenage girl spends the ‘after dark’ hours in the city and the incidents and people she meet there. The story slowly turns into a story about two sisters who lived all their lives together, yet somehow have completely different lives.

I really liked the book, the author has a very unique way for story telling, the narrator in the book is almost like an unknown being who is trying to understand what is happening as it tells the story, but the narrator is not actually a character, so I don’t know how to explain it.

The book sort of reminded me of the Persona games in terms of atmosphere, even though this book had nothing to do with supernatural powers really.

I thought this was a refreshing read, I might read something else by Murakami in the future, I like his books cause they are short and nice!

3.5/5

Just finished reading “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy, I picked it solely on Amazon recommendations based on my previous book purchases.

The bok tells the story of a father and son as they travel across American in a post-apocalypse world. This book is so not my type, it is a bit too descriptive of the scenary, but I supposed it is necessary for this book because it is tells  the story of a world different from what we live in.

There is something weird about the way McCarthy writes, he doesn’t seem to believe in the invention of quotation marks, and misses way too many apostrophes.

The book barely has any events other than a description of the random incidents that happen to the father and son on the road. I felt at many times that I can skip 10 or 20 pages without missing anything of the ‘story’ because there wasn’t really much of it except the ‘experience’ of living in this destroyed world. (but I didn’t skip any pages even though I was tempted to do so a lot through the first half of the book).

Somehow though, the book grew on me eventually and I started to ‘care’ about what will happens at the end to these two people. There are a couple of images which I got from the book that I thought were memorable.

I felt for some reason that this would be the perfect book to read in highschool for an English class, not sure exactly why I think so, it could be the extreme level of detail which might be fun to discuss in a class, or just the utopian and dystopian themes of the book.

The book apparently got loads of awards and positive feedback from all sorts of people, but I thought it was just very average.

2.5/5

I just learnt that they actually made a movie for this book and it is expected to come out late this summer! The movie looks very nice. You can check the HD trailer at YouTube here.

I just finished reading Watchmen, the graphic novel on which the recent Watchmen movie was based. I did not watch the movie when it was out in the cinema a short while ago, but I’ve been wanting to read a comic or a manga book which was a self-contained novel and not something episodical which I would have to carry on reading for months and months. Watchmen was exactly what I wanted because it is a 12-issue collection of the entire story.

Watchmen tells the story about costumed vigilantes who were once active in fighting crime before the government passed a law prohibiting their activity. The story starts with the sudden murder or one of the Watchmen which led to fear of a conspiracy to eliminate all costumed crime fighters. 

I don’t think I ever read a graphic novel since I was a child, and I really liked this one. It was really artistic and smart, especially the way two scenes would be told simultaneously to indicate irony (part where the kid is reading the novel on the street and other events happening). 

I usually read in bed at night before going to sleep, but I found it hard to do that because, unlike pure text novels, you have to focus on each picture and analyse all the contents of the frame, which is mentally exhausting.

Now that I missed the movie in the cinema, I will make sure I get the DVD when it comes out.

My next book is The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

Blogger Ahmed Al Mueini published a news article stating that the Cultural Club announced a national program to support the publication of new books in the country in hope of publishing a 100 new books a year. The program will be funded by the Cultural Club and other private and public bodies. It will be headed by a committee made up of representatives from the Cultural Club, SQU, Scientific Research Council, the Authors Association, and others.

The initiative is a result of one of the recommendations made during the period national discussion meeting of the Cultural Club. Other recommendations include:

• Requesting the Ministry of Information to update the Publication Law, which is according to the news report, a barrier for the proliferation of book publication in the country.
• Requesting the authorities to establish and support  more public libraries.
• Requesting the authorities to support publications houses by assigning more publication works to them (How else was the government publishing its books? Duh.)
• Preparing a nation report on “book problems”.  The preparation of this report will be carried over three phases is aimed to conclude with solutions for short and long term goals.

The meeting concluded that Omani authors are faced with many obstacles such as the lack of financing, the strictness of the old Publications Law, the lack of decent publication houses, and distributions and marketing difficulties.

A more “interesting obstacle” stated by the Club is the lack of “appreciation, criticism and reward” for authors in Oman. 

The press release made mentions in what is almost a footnote, the ‘emergence’ of a problem in ‘readership’  - as reading is not a daily activity for people in the Arab world and has become sort of an “activity for the affluent”.

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I guess it is nice that Omani authors will have some support to write and publish their books. Not sure if this will have any impact on readership though, publishing books (which have no contraversial content) is a relatively easy process in Oman, it is relatively very cheap to independently publish small books and novels, but distributing them is very difficult.

Making money from your book is even much much more harder, especially due to the low price at which Arabic books sell.You can buy an Arabic novel for something as low as 700 baisa (About $2) with expensive novels going for Ro1.5 (Less than $4). 

Due to the very small demand for books, the dominating publishers in the local market are stationers who sell books as a secondary product to their “papers and pens”. A book author who manages to convince this sort of  ”publisher” to publish his work will provide the script and the publisher takes care of printing and distributing on a share of profit basis – which usually goes on at 50-50. Usually 500 prints are made in each release, this number could go up to a 1000 copies in certain circumstances. The most oft hese copies are sold at the annual book exhibition.

This means if an author manages to sell every single copy (1000) of his book that costs RO 1.5, he would make: RO 750. This number is subject to reduction relating to printing costs, design costs, registrations costs, and just everything else that has to be done through the process, from writing and typing, to driving up and down to get your book out.

You can add to this the lack of respect for copyright by people, including school teachers and university lecturers, which could mean that your book will be copied like hell without you being able to do anything about it. 

The business of writing in Arabic for a living is just not a viable business in Oman.

I’m super excited about the new upcoming novel by Douglas Coupland. The new novel is titled “Generation A” and it’s expected to be published in September 2009. The title indicates a connection with the first novel written by Coupland “Generation X”. Here is the book blurb from the official website:

In the near future bees are extinct—until one autumn when five unconnected individuals, in Iowa, New Zealand, Paris, Ontario, and Sri Lanka, are stung. Immediately snatched up by ominous figures in hazmat suits, interrogated separately in neutral Ikea-like chambers, and then released as 15-minute-celebrities into a world driven almost entirely by the internet, these five unforgettable people endure a barrage of unusual and highly 21st-century circumstances. A charismatic scientist with dubious motives eventually brings the quintet together on a remote Canadian island. But their shared experience unites them in a way they could never have imagined.

Generation A mirrors the structure of 1991’s Generation X as it champions the act of reading and storytelling as one of the few defenses we still have against the constant bombardment of the senses in a digital world.

I find it a little bit scary that Coupland has gone back to his first novel, I hope this has nothing to do with retirement or an intention to quit. 

It looks like this story will be a mix of Generation X and jPod. Can’t wait for September to come!

Girls of Riyadh (بنات الرياض) is an Arabic novel written by a young Saudi female author about four girls living in the capital of Saudi and their attempts to find love in there. I thought that the book was very real and I believe that there are people who live the lifestyle and stories told in this book. I loved the narration style, the use use classical Arabic for the narration and the use of Arabic accents and dialects for the characters dialogue. The book is so funny at times and so sad and depressing at other times. 

There is an English translated copy of the book, I’m not sure if it is as good as the Arabic one (which I read), especially as I personally liked the writing style more than anything else in the book.

I found it interesting how each chapter would start with a quote or a short poem to tell something. Some chapters had like a whole one page poem by Nizar Qabani, there were nice and they perfectly matched the story, but I really think that quoting a whole poem by someone like Nizar Qabani is copyright infringement cause he only recently died and copying the whole poem is not fair use. On the other hand, even though copyright captures this act, it is one of these instances where the law should probably be changed to allow other people to “remix” and create transformative works that create something interesting such as Girls of Riyadh.

This was the second Arabic book I read in probably the last seven years. I really loved it! If you are looking for a quick Arabic read make sure you check this book out.

Urgh, if only we had something as fun as this to read about Omani culture.

I recently finished reading Generation X by Douglas Coupland. The plot of the novel revolves around three characters who decided to depart away from their old lives, families and possessions to start a life away from the noise of the city. This is the very first book Douglas wrote and it was the novel that popularized the term “Generation X”. 

I enjoyed the book a lot, but I guess I’m biased because I am a sucker for everything Douglas has written. It’s just amazing how Douglas always had the same themes in all the books he wrote in the past 15 or so years.

I now have read every single “novel” Douglas has ever written in English. There is a short stories collection which I haven’t read yet though… and there is a book which he supposedly wrote in Japanese? 

Anyway, Douglas has written a new book called Generation A, which is is expected to be released in August/September 2009!

It’s been four months since I read my last Douglas Coupland novel. I finished Miss Wyoming a couple of days ago, this is a quirky love novel about an beauty pageant who survives an airplane crash and a film director who decides to decides to become a vagrant upon seeing a vision.  The storytelling runs back and forth as it starts by the meeting of the two main characters and then swings back and forth in parallel to tell the background story of each character and what happens next at the same time.  It was fun to read and had amazing characters. I was not crazy about the ending as much as I was about other Douglas Coupland novels. 

I am not sure if I should start reading my next Douglas Coupland novel Generation X. This is the first book he has ever written and will by reading it I would have read every single novel he has written in English (he has one written in Japanese, but I can’t read that). I’m afraid of what I would do in my life after completing all Douglas Coupland books .

I discovered recently that Coupland is going to publish a new book in August 2009! The book is called “Generation A”, it obviously has a link with his first book, but I’m praying that it’s not an indication that he’s gone full circle and would stop writing afterwards. That will not be cool at all!!