20 book challenge 2019: 2nd quarter update
“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” — Ray Bradbury
Last year, I tasked myself with the challenge to read voraciously, with no target. And over a period of 12 months, I was able to read 16 books. So I set myself a target. My challenge for 2019: read 20 books and quarterly construct a brief overview of the content and my opinions.
The world is rapidly changing. Anyone willing to be kept abreast with these changes and informed on how to act must find means to be updated with new ideas on a variety of topics by experts who have dedicated their lives to these topics. Exposure to such synthesis will brew a topic of interest; one in which the reader can become an expert and thus a purveyor of insights updated for the next generation.
Between April and June 2019, I read a total of 8 books. The review of each of the books can be found in their respective links.
The topics explored were child psychology (in the book drama of the gifted child), African/Afghan cultures (Homegoing/Kite Runner), racism and the black man's experience (Americanah, Natives), Big History (in the Blindwatchmaker), the biography of the films and desire (in Sleeping with Strangers) to geopolitics and the question of China (in Destined for War).
I am eternally grateful to writers who take time to create things we can wonder. I am not sure the books I will review next (or if I would review book this summer), but I am currently reading Steven Pinker’s book “The Language Instinct” (of which I am almost done).
So thanks for reading this. Till next time, I leave you with a quote impressed on me recently:
Every life is an experiment on how to live. Every life is an experiment on how a unique combination of contextual decisions was able to preserve and propagate that life despite forces working to pull it all apart.
I think in the game of life, we play to understand the lessons in our unique experiment, and make them into a story..with the hope that our versions of events, will one day become what is normal.
