Tea & Dark Chocolate

Time for some Resolutions to follow in the New Year, right? TBH, IMO, you don’t have to set any resolution - we all must grow every day. But if you want to, might I offer one suggestion? Just one. Do not set a big bang resolution. For example, don’t say you’ll lose x kgs this year. Say what you’ll do to lose those? Start small. Maybe say, you’ll eat two healthier meals in a day. Give yourself some room to fail and get back up quickly. Don’t say, I’ll go to the gym regularly. Maybe say,  I’ll increase my average active time by X mins every week. This is my fitness story - I woke up on Jan 1, 2019 and felt immediately down coz I HAD a make a resolution and I knew the one I was averting - that I must get to the gym. Maybe it was the general interest in outdoors that started as part of exploring the parks in HK back in 2010. Or the series of hikes we went on, in Greece in 2013, for which I had to get fitter - but I’d been working out off & on for years.  Snap to 2016-...

I love this time of the year. It is the holiday season, so people are chilling. I love the slight nip in the air, albeit with lowered AQI here in Hyderabad. I love seeing everyone’s holiday pictures. Most of all, I really like recapping my year – Have I had fun this year? Did I meet enough interesting people? What have I learnt this year? What should I change in the next year to be more productive – not just at work, but in life in general? That brings me to this post - I love doing a book recap. Books take up a significant portion of my day and reading is no more just an interest - it is something I just do or have to do, like eating food, something I have time in my day no matter what my schedule has been like. I’ve read  108 books in 2024 . Out of these,  47 were written by exophonic authors  and are hence mostly translations – my hope is to learn more about the author’s native land and their culture. Here’s a list of some best reads from this year, listed in the order...

Time for me to sit down and review my books from 2023 - like many others, I also read for pleasure and leisure. But I spend at least an hour every day reading, so I'd rather this activity gives me some exposure to the real world, which means I gotta be conscious about it. At the beginning of every year, I set a goal for the no. of books I want to read - I set my goal to a modest number (modest, to me 😊) coz I love to see that I've exceeded the goal - some small pleasure I derive from this 😊. I also take stock of all my unread physical books, the books on hold from the library and those that are languishing in my Kindles - the idea is to bring logical closure to all these books - either read them or move on to the next read. This also helps me assess if am being smart about the book choices, ensuring that I read those from my chosen genres or am I picking too many easy reads - easy reads are always good to break the monotony, but I don't want to read too many easy ones in ...