Reading Challenge in 2021 (21/21)

 December 28, 2021

Today I completed the target of reading 21 books this year. Books always amaze me. The first thing I did in January 2021 after shifting to Mumbai was to get to Colaba and buy some fantastic books. I remember my conversation with the book vendor whenever I was asking him about any book, he was telling me the name of the author and names of some other books from the same author, you can expect this thing from the guy who is working at the Crossword but listening to these recommendations from the street vendor and that too without mispronouncing or mistaking a single name indeed amazed me or rather impressed me. When I shop books at Nagpur, this never happens, and even I always struggle to find books of my choice. I remember I talked over many books with the guy as it was early morning and couldn't see any customers nearby. It was a great discussion, from talking on Inferno to heading to Benjamin Franklin's and Einstein's biography and finally ending up with 6 books in my bag XD.

I started my year with "The Shoe Dog", one of the best reads of this year. I started loving books more than ever when in December 2020, I read "Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption" and "The Pursuit of Happyness". When I was truly hopeless and frustrated, somehow, by reading those books, I felt alive, I was able to see the hope inside, I kept myself calm in the challenging atmosphere, and these books are the ones that truly deserve the credits. They just didn't motivate me but actually brought many changes in my psychology, which ultimately led me to do much more than I would have.

A book does not change you, a paragraph does, and sometimes a sentence does. Maybe that's why I love books. You always love someone who doesn't judge you irrespective of your flaws and keep showering love on you. They say books are the source of knowledge, but for me, they are also the source of love and friendship. They know the way through my heart.

A book can take you on different adventures while not leaving your own space. You meet new people, experience life as a completely other person and most importantly for most of the time, you can create the people out of your imagination. I generally avoid TV series or the movies of the books I have read. It distorts my imagination, dreamland, and all my fictional characters whom I love.

Though I set this target of completing 21 books, it was just another dream, dreamt to break. I had no proper plans or even the list of books I had wanted to read, I went with the flow, and when at the end of December I overlooked my list, I was able to see most of the books were unfinished, and I was still 5 books away from the target;  then I paced up and completed 4 books in 5 days and the last one quite slowly. Such relief was there. I was overwhelmed with just the idea of achieving my target. 

This year, I read different genres and tried reading from new authors. I even got so much influenced by Haruki Murakami that I started running daily for almost 4-5KM (Big thing for someone who tires after just 800m). My view about the building startups literally changed after reading Shoe Dog and Bad Blood helped me remove my false perspective, which I had about Silicon Valley, the glamorous isn't the good always. 

Setting the target of books isn't only about completing the books. It's always about living a new life, living some amazing experiences, and opening your mind, filtering your so-called perspective, having some new crushes in life, dating a fictional character, and then getting lost in your new world. To date, I can proudly say my best crush is Andy Dufresne( from Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption). I tried to imitate his calm nature, the wall he built around him, how he foresaw the situations and prepared for them (A big applause).

This year I got to meet some more good people, little Liesel and Rudy (from The Book Thief), Miss Sienna (from Inferno), Nakata (from Kafka on the Shore) and the list goes on. I was exposed to some unknown Psychology, and it really helped me break old visions and form new ones and maybe the right ones for me.

Here's the list of the books I read in 2021(placing in random order):

1. The Shoe Dog
2. The Book Thief
3. Everything's Eventual
4. On writing
5. Bad Blood
6. Inferno
7. Man's Search for Meaning
8. The Hound of Baskervilles
9. The Lean Startup
10. My Boyhood Days
11. The Courage to Be Disliked
12. Lord Edgware Dies
13. Kafka on the Shore
14. What I talk about when I talk about running
15. Ayurveda Encyclopaedia
16. ISRO: A Personal History
17. Shyamchi Aai (Reread)
18. Bokya Satbande (Reread 1, 2, 3)
19. Think and Grow Rich
20. The $100 Startup
21. Eat That Frog

Looking forward to reading more books in 2022.

Till then 👋