Books Read January - June 2024

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These are the books I read so far this year.

Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier

Learn Like a Pro - I finally finished this.

The Priceless Gift of a Rich Cultural Education - An extremely inspiring book on how one man gave himself a wide-ranging education by reading good books. The book suggestions are out of date but that is irrelevant.

Learn Like a Polymath: How to Teach Yourself Anything, Develop Multidisciplinary Expertise, and Become Irreplaceable - Avoid.

Zen in the Art of Archery - Avoid. Why?

Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner - Reread this after ages. Not as inspiring towards the end as it seemed earlier.

Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

Siddhartha 

The Odyssey - Did not finish, dropped off at 70%

Steppenwolf - One of my best loved books of this year.

A Man Called Ove - My best loved book of this year so far. 

The Return of Vaman: A Science-Fiction Novel - I had to reread this for a paper I was writing for the IASFS's annual conference.

MAKE: Bootstrapper's Handbook - Good ideas throughout but bad editing, grammar, and spelling. 

I Too Had a Dream - Very inspiring.

Waiting for the Mahatma - Reread this after 20 years, I think.

The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea  when everyone is lying to you - Excellent advice if you can follow it.

Elon Musk

Stories from Indian Classics 

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos - This is not easy to read but has wisdom. Many people hate this book because they hate the author. I left this at 70%.

The Indians: Portrait of a People

Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy - I wasted a few hours to reach halfway and realized it was going nowhere.

Foundation - Always a joy to reread this classic.

Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

Dubliners - Reread. It tasted like good coffee.

 

 

I use Goodreads to track most of my reading - https://www.goodreads.com/challenges/11634-2024-reading-challenge



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