This week, I started George RR Martin’s A Clash of Kings. I made it through 605 pages (out of about 1000) in six days, so I made a pretty good pace, but I’m not likely to finish this book toady. I wouldn’t want to either – I enjoy this book and I wouldn’t want to feel rushed.
So this morning, I opened up my copy of The Underachiever’s Manifesto by Ray Bennett. I picked it because it was a gift that I hadn’t read yet and it’s incredibly short (I would expect nothing less from a self-styled underachiever). Coming in at something like 85 pages ( there are about a dozen blank pages at the end, helpfully labelled “Some Blank Pages”), it was a quick and funny read, but also surprisingly insightful.
Bennett’s underachieving philosophy has a a lot of common sense going for it and a lot of funny one liners (“Think globally, underachieve locally”), and at times it feels like a kind of layman’s Buddhism. Indeed, Bennett’s “Ten Principles of Underachievement” reads less like the self-help lists he’s parodying and more like a rephrasing of Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths (with the possible exception of #4: “Great expectation leads to great misery. This may seem self-evident, but without it, there would have been only nine principles.”).
All told, I think The Underachiever’s Manifesto is a great book, and an easy way for me to hit my goal and still read a nice long book like Kings. My only worry is that, since I plan to finish the Song of Ice and Fire books, I’ll have to find a bunch of other short, entertaining books to keep me on schedule. But that’s a problem,I’m sure Bennett would counsel me, for another day.
See the full list of books that I’ve read for this project here.
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