read at will !!

I have often heard this from a lot of people, that they don't read books that much anymore like they used to do in their younger days, or bachelor/spinster days. I have gone through that stage after my year of solitary reading , where my reading speed reduced after my marriage. After marriage things were not the same as my bachelor days. I couldn't just come back home and pick up the book to read anymore. There would be something or the other waiting for me after I reach from office. It could be a dine out, a help with the domestic work, or a visit to family friend or just the i-am-waiting-here-for-you-and-you-are-reading look from your spouse. So this post is about how I got around it, and improved my reading speed even if that is not as good as my bachelor years, but better than my initial few months of marriage.

All my books stacked up during our house shift last year

Here are some of things I thought will help others:

• In office:
• Carry one or two books in your office bag. You can read them while you are on the bus/metro to office. You can also read them while you have lunch at your desk.
• If you work in a start-up, and there are only few people who have the office keys,  and the office is not yet opened by the time you reach, then you can read till the colleague with the key comes and opens it. You can also read it when there is a power outage and the UPS is drained, or when you do not have any other work in office :)
• If you are taking your car/bike for a water service, chances are that you will have to wait for more than an hour for your turn. Take a book every time you go for a water service. Read it when you are waiting in the car/bike and while they are washing, read it standing outside on the road. People may look at you as if you are a nut case, but do you really care?
• If you don't have the habit of reading while going to toilet, then inculcate that habit. Take a book with you and read, but please mind that too much sitting in the toilet is also not good ;)
• If you are going to a barber shop to cut your hair on a Sunday, you might end up waiting for atleast 15 minutes until you are called. Read a book during that time. Ignore the old film magazines lying there. When you are called to the chair, keep your book in a safe place, make sure you don't lose the sight of it.
• Carry them on your long train journeys. It might increase your baggage weight and your spouse might dislike it. But offer to carry that bag yourselves.
• Reach station early on the pretext of getting delayed in the traffic, if you start late. Find a nice cozy place and just read till the train arrives. Don't forget to listen to the announcements once in a while or else you may miss your train.
• Once you board the train and have settled in your seat/berth get on with the reading. Don't bother about what others think, just read until they say they want to sleep. If you are traveling with your spouse or friends, then chances are that it may not happen.
• If some passenger wants to exchange their seats, in the first or last cabins of a sleeper class Indian Railways train, with you, please don't hesitate. There will be always light there in the entries of a train bogies and that light may be enough to read a book, depending on your eye power. If your berth is somewhere in the middle, but the book is interesting go to the entrances/lavatory area of the trains and read from there. If you are lucky you may get a seat, but do carry your ticket along with you. It helps when police or TTE comes.
• Take books to all public sector offices you have to visit. Your job there might take a long time, and chances are there that you get lot of free time. Like you have gone to SBI for withdrawing some money (assuming your ATM card is not working) and your token number is 50 more than the current one, it might easily take half an hour for you to be called by the cashier. In that time read :)
• If you are a person who travels to office by car, and it takes an hour to reach your office, chances are that you will be spending 15 minutes of that time on traffic signals. Don't waste that time. Read a paragraph in junctions like Silk Board or Vallara junction in Bangalore
• Stack your bed-side table with variety of books, and make sure you read at least one or two pages from them every night before you go to sleep.
• The variety of books can be a novel, a short story, a screenplay, a non-fiction, a biography, a movie/sport related book. This helps in context switching. You might be able to finish a story or a few scenes from a screenplay in 15 minutes. Mostly your partner will take more than that time to settle his/her work and get to sleep.
• Keep a count of the books you have in your personal library. This is just for motivation, so that you feel you are doing a good job. If you are techie, think that is equivalent to your StackOverflow points. If you are a Facebook or Twitter addict, think that it is equivalent to the number of likes for your post or the number tweets you make.
• The count can be made for 'read' books and 'un-read' books. Whenever you read a book reduce the count of 'un-read' books and increase the count of 'read' books. If you are more interested you can separate the count in different genres(10 novels, 5 stories) and time periods (monthly, quarterly). A bit of analytics is good.
• Reading variety of books helps in improving your reading count. For e.g. If you start a novel, story and a screenplay on the same day, at different times, your 'read' books count increases by 3 in one single day.
• Watch the TV only if you really want to. Don't waste your time sitting there just surfing channels. Instead you can finish a short story in that time.
• Spend time on the internet or computer only if you need to. Divert that time for reading.

The most important aspect here is that you need to have books around and with you. You need to have that urge to finish a book, even if you are on with it for 2 months. This means that there are books on your bed-side table, in your office bag, in your travel bag, on your teapoy, in your car and even in your bathroom. If it is not conducive to stock books (like in bathrooms and car/bike), then its better you carry them with you. In short always keep it in your vicinity so that it is easily accessible. Always use a bookmark because you never know when your reading will be interrupted.

Happy Reading !!

PS: This post is mostly based on my experience after marriage. In this period I have also become the father of a baby boy, and I am not sure if these ideas I shared with you will work in future. :)
PPS: In future if I find new ideas for improving your reading while raising kids, I will be coming up with another post for that.
PPPS: Follow these suggestions at your own discretion. I am not responsible for the wrath from your spouse :)

what have you read - a revisit

This blog has been in a dormant state for a long time now. Between my last post and this one, I had changed jobs, wrote two posts which are still in draft, traveled less and read more, put on few kilos(Thanks to my wife's cooking) and got bored to death. It was during one such boredom that  I started reading my own old posts for some self motivation. I came across this blog which was a tag, and thought about re-posting it, with updates.

It is a book list and we have to say what we have read out of it. I have done this in August 2nd 2009 and thought about re-doing it just to see how many more books I have read from that list. I have also added a mark IS in addition to the X mark, which indicates that the book is In Store but I have not read.

So here is the Tag:

So how many books on this list have you read?

The BBC says most people will only read 6 of these 100 Books.Instructions:Cut and Copy the list into your notes... then...
1) Look at the list and put an 'X' after those you have read. (remove other persons X's)
2) Tally your total at the bottom.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - IS

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - X

6 Any religious book

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell – IS

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier - X

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - X

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - X

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - IS

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - X

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck - X

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - X

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma - Jane Austen 35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - X

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell - X

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - X

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - X

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - X

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - X

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - X

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - X

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac - X

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville – IS

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - X

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker - IS

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - (Read a few of them)

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole - X

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo - IS


That's a total of 18 read and 6 in store books. Last time it was 12 & 5. I would consider it a disappointment since the In Store books remained in store, and I could get hold of only 6 more books in this list in 2 and a half years. Sure this list is not the epitome of best books and for sure I have read many more good books during this period, which unfortunately doesn't fall in this list. But still, given a chance I would love to read them all. Considering that, it is a disappointment :)

Anybody up for this tag ?

20 years of my FIFA Football World Cup

1990 - World cup on DD National. Dad and Uncles for company.
1994 - World cup still on DD National. Dad and Uncles still for company.
1998 - World cup still on DD National. GEC Trichur For company
2002 - World cup on Cable TV and Internet. Dad, Friends and Uncles for company.
2006 - World cup on Cable TV and Internet. Bangalore Boyz for company.
2010 - World cup on DTH, Internet Live Streaming. Wife and Tweeples for company.

Vakka Vakka. Every Time for Argentina :)

thank god..

Thank God I was there to see it. And Thank GOD for providing it.
200* - Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar. Thank You, a thousand times over. You know how I am feeling. A rare feeling of ecstasy, happiness, overjoy, adrenaline rush - all clubbed together and I am yet to catch my breath.

Phew!! What a Man? What an Innings?

Thank God. I am alive to witness it.