Journey of Reading 100 Books

Date: 11 December, 2021

A quest that started on March 2019 has reached its first milestone: “reading 100 books”. It started with a simple goal: “Do I know little bit more than what I knew yesterday?” This journey introduced me to topics that were missing from my traditional school education. First thing I learnt was the plethora of categories of books available and it seemed quite daunting to pick a starting book/point. So, I stuck with the broad categories: fiction and non-fiction. I found that my propensity towards fiction has decayed with growing age as my childhood was dominated by classic fictions like Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes, Tintin and not so classic fictions like Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Eragon etc. Though certain classic fictions are worth mentioning which I encountered during my quest: “1984”, “Animal Farm”.

By far, the genre that I enjoyed the most seemed to be the non-fiction: this genre introduced me to the weirdness of quantum mechanics, the flow of time, the implications of constant speed of light, the dangers and possibilities of artificial intelligence, the science of chaos, the meaning in life, the complexity of our brain, the cruelty of human nature, the ticking time bomb of climate change, the vastness of our universe, the magic of money and the intricacies of religion. Following are some non-fiction and fiction books (in no particular order) that have impacted my thought process:

Non-Fiction Fiction
  • Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind Book by Yuval Noah Harari
  • The Gulag Archipelago Book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
  • In Order to Live Book by Maryanne Vollers and Park Yeon-mi
  • An Autobiography: The story of My Experiments with Truth Book by Mahatma Gandhi
  • Astrophysics for People in a Hurry Book by Neil deGrasse Tyson
  • Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World and Why Things Are Better Than You Think Book by Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Hans Rosling, and Ola Rosling
  • Rich Dad Poor Dad Book by Robert Kiyosaki and Sharon Lechter
  • Start With Why Book by Simon Sinek
  • Outliers Book by Malcolm Gladwell (Frankly, any book by Mr. Gladwell is a treat)
  • Nineteen Eighty-Four Novel by George Orwell
  • Animal Farm Book by George Orwell
  • Contact Novel by Carl Sagan
  • The Trial Novel by Franz Kafka
  • Foundation Novel by Isaac Asimov
  • I Am Legend Novel by Richard Matheson

This quest has changed me mentally, as now I am more concerned with a particular form of currency that we all possess, i.e. the currency of time. On average, we are given the similar amount with no one being too rich or too poor. Unlike money, we cannot print time or exchange it. This is a once in a lifetime realization which sorted out my priorities. I learned a lot from these 100 books. Through these books, I have destroyed my world views multiple times, rebuild it multiple times, renovated it sometimes and I hope to go through this process again in the next 100 books as well.

If you have made it to this part, then congrats!!! You still have your inner child patience, a virtue that has been forgotten in this fast pace smartphone era. This is the trait that we are all born with and use it to learn to speak, write, walk and think, yet it has become the dinosaur of our generation. Surprisingly, the process of finishing 100 books never started as a goal but is a by-product of my predisposition to creating habits. The most important thing that I learned is that like other animals, we humans also like to spend less energy by creating habits out of everything possible. This makes it hard for us to change with time as change means spending energy. So, I hope to make a habit of not making a habit of constant knowledge.

Following are the list of all 100 books read during this quest:

Book Names Genres