Tea & Dark Chocolate

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 ...

2022 has been a great year for reading - 80 books . 😃 2022 was also a busier year as compared to 2021. I started making and selling pots by Jan and sometime in April-May, we launched our brand, Vemu Ceramics . Apart from selling pots on per-order basis, I was also putting in time to develop my craft and create prototypes for new designs. It was both exciting and time-consuming, to be having a full-time job and investing ~20+ hrs per week on this hobby, both of which I loved doing. I had fun with all of it, so I guess it was okay that I put hiking, my other PNW interest, on a slight back burner in 2022 😊. Also, in late 2022, we moved back to India. As expected, an international move takes away quite some bandwidth for planning and executing, and that took some toll on our non-work lives. Maybe prompted by this upcoming move, I felt separation pangs that I wouldn't be able to checkout physical books from my local library (which is also one of my favorite places, ever 😊), I read in...