Reading Books

“Wear an old coat but buy the new book” was once quoted by great American Educator Austin Phelps. There are many quotes attributed to Books and reading books, glorifying the hobby. Many people boast about reading as a habit and also about having huge collection of books. Well..collecting books is one thing and reading them is altogether another thing. Everyone has one or the other hobby. For me reading is a sheer delight and also have a sizeable collection of books.

Like for people with hobbies, I was introduced to reading during my childhood. It started with comics and story books. I had huge collection of Tinkle, Chacha Chaudhary, Diamond Comics, Tintin etc. Gradually I started reading teen novels of Nancy Drew, Secret Seven and Hardy Boys series. Till college my reading was restricted mostly to Fiction. Medical thrillers of Robin Cook and Espionage/Military based novels of Frederick Forsyth were a pleasure to read. My typical weekends used to involve hours of reading. Post college I started venturing in non Fiction. Reading Non fiction became part of hobby during my preparation for MBA entrance exams. Argumentative Indians, India After Gandhi, Breaking India were few of the books that I enjoyed reading.

Slowly I started taking this hobby more seriously. Just as sprinters or sportsmen have goals and target, I started having my own. Targets worked out to be fun. Reading an page within a minute, completing novel in a day were typical targets that I used to set. Reading within time frame does not mean just reading. You need to read, understand and remember the ideas which were propounded in the read lines.

Later I moved on to reading Biographies and then politics. It is fun to learn about a particular event in 2 different books. Few years back I got interested in 2 events happened in Modern India. Emergency of 1975 and Accession of Jammu Kashmir to India. I read books by multiple authors on same topic. Many books have been written on the topic of Jammu Kashmir and Article 370 where authors build different narratives. Each event is described with totally different viewpoint by authors.  

In Non Fiction it is real challenge to read books of few authors like Nicholas Nassim Taleb. His books address very complex topics and are so verbose that it requires reading twice or thrice to actually understand what is written. I have completed reading his book Black Swan and now moved on to his second book, Fooled by randomness. Hope to blog these books soon.