Books of the month — January 2020
“Think before you speak. Read before you think.”
It’s been a great start to my year, reading wise, everything else is as crappy as it was last year. I read around 26 books last year and decided that I will try and grow my love for reading even more this year.
I completed 6 books this month and thought I will do a collective review of these books. So here are my top 6 (also the only 6) reads of January 2020.
1. When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
“You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”
This book is not just the best book I read this month but also one of the best books I have ever read. I simply don’t have words to describe how much I liked this book. You know it’s gonna be a sad book when you know that the author died because of lung cancer while working on the book. But you don’t read this book for that, you read this book because that dying man had a lot of important things to say.
We live our whole life planning for the future, what we wanna achieve in 10 years, how you would you wanna shape yourself in the forthcoming years. But a disease like cancer strips you of dreaming and planning. Your life becomes an uncertainty. In one of the chapters Paul says “if you say I have ten years to live I would continue to practice neurosurgery, if you say I had one I would write a book”. With his own experiences he teaches us that death is imminent. And when you know how certain it is, that’s when you start thinking about what you have been and what you wanted to achieve.
In the epilogue of the book his wife wrote, “what happened to Paul was tragic but he was not a tragedy” and that is a lesson in it’s own. Paul didn’t let the disease define him, and though I hope neither of us face something as tragic as cancer, but I do hope that all of us don’t let our tragedies define us.When breath becomes air is a book about life and learning and I think one should definitely read it.
2. Lady, You’re the Boss by Apurva Purohit
The book is about the struggles of being a modern working woman. The book is divided into two parts. The first covers incidents from her early professional life. She tries to point out the common behavior women somehow develop based on the stereotypical corporate environments. I did relate to some of these incidents.
In the second part of this book, the writer talks about strong leadership practices and the womanly qualities one can use to be a better leader. This part of the book contained some interesting advice. I didn’t like a few parts of this book. I don’t like feminist books which portray all men as the “bad guys”. This book unintentionally does so in a few places.
Also some of the characteristics of men the author talks about such as being dominant or outspoken are more of a personality trait than a gender trait. So labeling all men as “narcissistic and self centered” doesn’t make sense to me.
Either way, it was a good one time read.
3. The Moment of Lift by Melinda Gates
I wanted to read this book because Melinda Gates is a famous feminist and philanthropist. The book turned out to be pretty average though. Some of the experiences Melinda talks about are heartbreaking. But for the most part of the book all I got was statistics, about how many women don’t have access to contraceptives, the number of child marriages or how many kids are dying in Africa.
I am glad there are rich people out there who are trying to solve real world problems. However, the book didn’t cover anything I wasn’t aware of before and I think I didn’t gain anything by reading it. The Moment of Lift didn’t make me feel uplifted at all.
4. 21 Lessons for the 21st century by Yuval Noah Harrari
This book is quite difficult to review. I enjoyed Part 1 about the technological challenges humans will be faced with and how we can adapt. The rest of the book was more political, religious and philosophical than I usually go for. The title misrepresented the content of the book as there are 21 chapters, not 21 lessons. These chapters do not qualify as lessons. Another thing I didn’t like about the book that each of the chapters is a big enough topic to be a book on it’s own and all of these topics seem way to be cramped to be in a single book. Either way, I did learn a lot from this book about how our inventions and culture might effect us in the future.
5. Ring For Jeeves by P. G Wodehouse
It’s a genre I don’t usually read, nevertheless I enjoyed it I chuckled throughout the book. It was a hilarious journey with Bill, the impoverished Lord of the Abbey, his fiancee Jill, a veterinarian, Jeeves, who has taken residence as his butler as Bertie is out at a school which teaches self-sufficiency. Monica aka Moke, Bill’s sister, and Rory her bumbling husband, are also in residence. Enters, Rosie aka Mrs. Pottsworth, the rich lady who amassed wealth of her dead husbands, and Captain Bigger, the hunter of large wild animals, who is secretly in love with her. I think I did not understand a few references and scenes because of my lack of familiarity with the series.
6. Digital Minimalism: On Living Better with Less Technology by Cal Newport
This book is about having the minimal presence of technology in our lives. However, most of the book is about social media addiction and not other forms of technology people get addicted to. I appreciate the thesis that by choosing to minimize technology in our day-to-day lives, we’re choosing to be more deliberate with how we spend our time. I liked some of the advice to consolidate texting, hold conversation office hours, and in general, choose to be more purposeful with what energy we give to reacting to others. I think this book would have been stronger if he provided research to this points rather than random anecdotes about people who decide to step away from technology. A few pieces throughout the middle also felt like fluff to fill up the book (i.e. the rock-paper-scissors championship, the fantasy board game groups, and anecdotes about old white dudes like Henry David Thoreau). The book was also redundant at times. I thought I would take away a lot from this book but somehow I just didn’t.
I feel the books I picked up this month weren’t really optimistic. I hope you guys made better choices this month. Tell me what you guys read in the comments below!
