On Reading More, Wider, and Consciously
hello hello!
This is an honest attempt at starting my new year's resolution off somewhat early. So one of the things is to be a bit more regular with this newsletter. Here's hoping that I send this out at least every other week. And now onwards to the content.. :)
The theme (yes, we're doing themes now (let's see how long that lasts)), this time around is on reading. Primarily triggered by the reading wider challenge (which is the second thing).
On Reading More
By sheer chance I came across this newsletter of book recommendations, and the chap in his signup email has a bunch of interesting links. These two stood out to me, on reading more, and about selecting which books to stick with and which to quit.
On Reading Wider
Sometime last week I was invited to a page where Pooja, a friend's sister and a journalist, posted this challenge to read wider through the next year. This was timely, since 2016 was definitely a great year for reading more, but even I had felt at some point last year that I was reading books that were mostly by or about white males. Since then my reading did diversify some (1, 2, 3) but not a whole lot. This should definitely help. As with everything else in life, this project wouldn't be complete without me going full nerd and creating a google doc. The idea is that we track the books we are reading or have finished reading for the challenge publicly, so that you stick to the commitment and more importantly if enough of us do this, we'd be able to get some ideas of what to read. Let me know if you want in on this, and I'll make you a column.
On Reading Consciously
I've had my kindle for about four and a half years now, and it was somewhat frustrating that the 'highlights' and notes feature didn't have an API or a suite of apps and other products for it. But earlier this week I came across this beautiful idea of tracking quotes and ideas that resonate using a commonplace book on evernote. The idea is to not just highlight stuff, but type it out manually into themed notes, so that you can go back and refer to them and use them for writing, speaking or generally thinking through one crisis or the other.
That's it for this week. I'd really really like if you reply and/or let me know what you felt, thought etc. Until next time then.
Cheers,
Akshay Roongta
What I'm reading
Bonus gif