Tea & Dark Chocolate

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...

  In 2021, I read a total of  80 books against a goal of 60 books . This includes the  26 books  written by non-native-English-speaking-authors, a goal I carried into 2021. Here are some of the best books I read in 2021, in the order of my reading them in the year -  1.       On Tyranny : Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century  - This tiny book gave me much required validation about my stand for constant vigilance against misinformation on regular & social media, especially the kind that can change governments and people's stances about important issues like public health policy, immigration, human rights etc. With multiple examples per lesson, this book was a great, informative read.  2.       The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides  - This is a potboiler book in the thriller/murder mystery genre - not my chosen genre. This book made this list purely because of how gripping it was, so much t...