What’s On My Reading List : Intro

Here in this series, I will share with you 20 books that are on my reading list and why I choose them. When it comes to choosing the right books to read, I am much mindful now as compared to my past when I would recklessly purchase many self-help crappy books just because everyone was singing its glories and it was becoming a bestseller. Later I realized just because a book is a best-seller doesn’t make it a good one. If you can check out my GoodReads account here, you will realize that currently out of 69 read books, for 31 books I have given a 1-star rating!

Earlier in my Om Swami Archives series, I Swamiji shared a passage on books in his Booklish Website :

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.

(Barbara Tuchman. Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 34, No. 2)

Really a good book completely gives a different view of life to us. But at the same time, a crappy book makes a hell out of us. As the saying goes something like, “Always choose what you put inside your mind, because what goes there always stays there”. Swamiji also talks about it in his Hindi discourse titled “Bhojan” here.

Now when it comes to choosing the right books to read mostly, I don’t regret it as now I choose them after knowing a lot about them through googling.

Here the name of the 20 books :

1. The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa
2. The First and Last Freedom
3. Steal Like an Artist
4. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
5. Man’s Search for Meaning
6. The Children of Tomorrow: A Monk’s Guide to Mindful Parenting
7. Watchfulness, Awareness, Alertness
8. The Book of Secrets: 112 Meditations to Discover the Mystery Within
9. Life Is a Soap Bubble
10. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
11. 1984
12. Brave New World
13. Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow
14. A History of Western Philosophy
15. Jonathan Livingston Seagull
16. Glimpses of a Golden Childhood: The Rebellious Childhood of a Great Enlightened One
17. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
18. Meetings With Remarkable Men
19. The Psychology of Money
20. The Brothers Karamazov

In the coming next 20 posts, I will talk about them briefly.

#TheWriteChoice