The Definitive Guide to Books

Books play a pivotal role in the life of any aspiring and existing intellectual. I began reading diversely and seriously when I was 19 and immediately regretted not starting sooner.

Reading sets you up for an involved existence. If you read vastly, you’ll be a force to be reckoned with.

Over the span of 3 years (2019 - 2022), I read around a 100 books ranging from the classics, biographies, auto-biographies, physics, computer science, anthropology, data science, etymology, theology, game theory, mathematics, history, how-to-books, nutrition, physiology , fitness, health, psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, business (okay, don’t judge - we all do this), economics, writing, self help (guilty as charged), spirituality, humor (guides to being funny and similar stuff), young adult (only 1 - please don’t chastise me - I could not handle the cringe), philosophy (a lot - please don’t chastise me) and meta books (speed reading, how to consume books, taking notes, etc).

I probably did miss out on some very eccentric oddity that could put me up there in the league of undiagnosed sociopaths - I recited that list based on what I could recall. (I’ve deleted my old goodreads (the one linked is a new index that I’m still building) that had these indexed, for a fresh start -> too many shelves and tags and I’m more of a destroyer than I’m a cleaner).

The habit of reading may have granted me access to the ocean of abstractions and intellectual entities but writing is the guru that teaches you how to swim and dive and evaporate seas and make it rain on deserts and communicate with marine life and unlock secrets from the deepest trenches and generate tsunamis and … well …, yeah …, you get the point..

I have blogged regularly for the majority of my last 4 years of existence and then felt like writing a book after a point. I felt so for the first time a year and a half ago but circumstances (code for excuses and procrastination) did not align the stars for me to get that off my check list.

Yesterday, while cooking my morning post workout feast, in this podcast, Derek (Sivers) discussed the idea of writing a book by building a series of blog posts.

Writing a blog post seems easier than writing down a chapter of similar complexity. It also encourages intermittent feedback rather than a final review of your ideas. I liked the concept and have finally decided to begin writing my book about “The definitive guide to books”.

It should serve as a good entry point for any lexically starved individual (as I was when I began) on how to go about reading diversely, efficiently and consolidating all that you consume in a dense and mentally index-able manner.

The final piece of the puzzle for any bibliophile to graduate into a telepath of abstractions is writing a book. That shall be the final section of my first book and I’ll be collating the experiences of writing these book-oriented blog posts into that final section.

Discussing my plans is a habit that keeps me accountable and pushes me harder on actually sticking to the promise made to no specific individual but to the edges of the internet that won’t be read so easily by those who actually care - that is something I would do: pseudo-accountability taken to the extreme.

“Do let me know what you think of this confession and commitment in the comments below” is a very generic call-to-action I could use, but that doesn’t matter if I actually don’t write the book now.