Rediscovering My Love for Books in 2020
As 2020 brought everything in life to a screeching halt, I was in strong need for a source of refuge. As somebody with an underlying health condition, my movement has been extremely limited to walking my dog and the bi-weekly trip to collect my groceries outside Target. With virtual activities few and far between, I spent a majority of time pursuing two activities: gaming and reading books. As the title of this suggests, I wanted to share some highlights from my favorite and most interesting reads in 2020 and what I learnt.
Through the year, I maintained and tracked my reading using Goodreads. You can check out my year in review here. Below are 5 books that proved the be my favorite reads for 2020, and then three special mentions that fell significantly outside my regular genres of reading that really pushed me out of my comfort zone
1. PLATO AND PLATYPUS WALK INTO A BAR
The pandemic gave me a lot more time to reflect and I found myself thinking a lot about philosophical questions. As a result, I picked up this book to understand philosophy through the medium of jokes. Some portions of the book had me in peels of laughter (existentialism and logic) and others had me scratching my head (metaphysics and meta-philosophy).
In today's world of never-ending competition, this metaphysics joke on the concept of teleology really had me splits:
Mrs. Goldstein was walking down the street with her two grandchildren. A friend stopped to ask her how old they were.
She replied "The doctor is five and the lawyer is seven."
Highly recommend if you're ready to challenge yourself to push the boundaries of how you perceive the world.
This book was technically the hardest one for me to read. It really delved into how our brain tricks us into feeling down and depressed and tactics to make you go into an "upward" spiral, rather than a downward one. The book focused both on emotional as well as physical exercises you can do when you're feeling down. Going back to being confined to my room and my couch for most of the last 10 months, this book was an important discovery for me and helped me make the most of an otherwise tough year. One of my takeaways:
"We have to constantly remind ourselves that our brains may be skewing the unknown toward the negative, so we don’t miss out on the potentially awesome rewards on the other side."
In the middle of 2020, as the pandemic raged, the Black Lives Matter protests took center stage across not just the United States, but many parts of the world. The Hate U Give (also a Netflix show) was an eye-opening read fictional read into what the average Black teenager has to go through in terms of their social dynamics and interactions. Without spoiling too much, Star, the protagonist's evolution into accepting her position in society as a Black individual on the back of traumatizing events faced on a daily basis by Black people is a satisfactory introduction to anyone unfamiliar with modern day racism in the United States (being from India my knowledge on this was limited but having worked in the US now for 4+ years, I've always been curious about this)
I highly recommend getting the audio book for this one, narrated by the author herself. At times, it is gut-wrenching but worth it for how educated you will come out of it.
4. IKIGAI
I picked this book up on Dec 30th 2020 as I sat on my couch with no major plans to do anything to end the year as the pandemic raged on through Santa Clara county. This book had me absolutely hooked.
Ikigai is simply your purpose or reason for living. By using examples from supercentenarians in Japan, the book tries to help readers understand how they can be more mindful and live in the present. This is what the book says is the best way to achieve "flow". A quote that stuck with me:
"The happiest people are not the ones who achieve the most. They are the ones who spend more time than others in a state of flow."
Sometimes books like this can be frustrating as they can be abstract in their delivery, but this book provided a lot of tactical examples on how to find flow, your Ikigai and as a result happiness in life.
It's a quick read and highly recommend to anyone looking to be more mindful in 2021.
This book was awfully hard to read - because of how heart-breaking it was to read about the history of the prison system in the US. The author carried out an undercover operation at a maximum-security prison to expose the conditions under which prisons are run. From the days of slavery in the 1800s to modern day privatization of prisons, they have become an example of how you can further deteriorate the human condition, instead of rehabilitating it.
The books gives a revealing insight into how prisoners and the conditions they live in are tied to improving the top and bottom lines of privatized companies made to run prisons, and the distressing impact it has on those individuals, their families as well as those in charge of these facilities. Needless to say, it also shines some light on how the average Black prisoner suffers more under such a system.
This book was on Barack Obama's list of books for 2019 and I couldn't recommend it enough.
And here are the special interesting mentions:
Viktor Frankl's experience in the Nazi camps of Auschwitz and his reflections on how to live life was a great gateway drug to some of the books above like Ikigai. At the heart of the book is his purported way of living known as logotherapy which encourages people to chase meaning instead of pleasure, a practice that helped him survive the absolutely inhumane and ghastly conditions of a concentration camp. Towards the end of the book, Frankl outlines some actionable exercises to be more "mindful".
I read this book as part of Book Club and was very hard to get through because of the style of writing. This book is supposed to be one of the scariest books to read but I didn't personally feel that way. This postmodern ergodic piece of literature had a very jarring style of writing, constantly shifting between times and stories that may or may not be related. To give an example, one page only had one letter on it (no spoilers why of course). It's hard to share a takeaway for my professional network except that every once in a while you shouldn't be afraid to try something unique, whether it be at work or in your personal life to see how far you are able to push yourself.
Seneca is supposed to be one of the fathers of Stoicism, the Hellenistic school of philosophy centered around virtue being the most important attribute to live a good life, devoid of focus on pain and pleasure. While like other Greek philosophers of his time Seneca did have a few misogynistic takes, he did have some very insightful letters to his followers that used practical examples to explain how to traverse the ups and downs of life. One of my favorite excerpts from one of his letters is an important reminder for all of us:
"What really ruins our character is the fact that none of us looks back over his life."
If you too took the Goodreads or any other book reading challenge in 2020 or are doing in 2021, feel free to leave a comment on what that is going to look like. Also, if you have read these books I would love to hear what you thought of them.
In my next post, I’ll talk about what I plan to read in 2021 and how 2020 taught me some important lessons on what works for me and what doesn’t – and how this has influenced my choices for 2021.
P.S. The opinions/views in this post are my own and do not reflect those of the company I work for.