A Half Year In Books
Aug 11, 2015
20 books Read. Recommending my favorites.
I have been doing the Goodreads annual reading challenge since 2012. This year, I pledged to read 40 books. It is August now and so far I have read 20.
For some of these books I have already written some sort of review on Goodreads, but I wanted to put together a little “half-year” retrospective even though it is August 2015 but whatever.
My Favorite 3 Books of 1st Half 2015
This book was surprisingly chosen by Amazon as their book of their year and I only started it because it was featured as a deal of the day on their Audible platform. It’s the best buy of the year. The book drags. It goes on and on about people’s histories. The people in it are horrible. Maybe I like it so much because its characters are Asian and I am Asian too. I don’t want to put this book on a pedestal.
That being said, I felt something special about this one. It really hits its stride at the end. Amazing stories make you feel. I felt with this book. I felt so hard that it hurt. My reading history is nothing but pages in between truly special stories like this one.
I didn’t really expect anything about this book coming into it. It was a recommendation by Audible for those who liked the Martian, another great read (alas it was read in 2014). I didn’t quite understand the premise but picked it up quite quickly. This one is super fun on all levels. It is the Jurassic World of books. It moves quickly, has a great set of characters, and while the dialogue isn’t quite Aaron Sorkin, it is witty and snappy enough.
One thing I especially enjoyed is the most ridiculous history of its main character. The below quoted passage comes from a section that discusses the main character’s father.
I wrote about this before so I am not going to belabor myself but I found this an especially interesting re-read after watching the trailer for the Steve Jobs movie. It is hard to believe that it has been 4 years since the man died. The world has moved on from those times. So much is different.
One of the big resolutions that I have this year is to stop putting things, people, and ideas on a pedestal. Steve Jobs did awesome stuff, but he didn’t do it alone and he didn’t do it out of nowhere. This book helps get through the myth to the man and I appreciated its realistic view.
My Most Challenging Books of 1st Half 2015
Hands down this is the most challenging book I have read this year. In fact multiple years. It was recommended to me by my friend Jenny. She noted that it was an advanced level book - not for the types who are starting out in Buddhism.
I read it and she was right. This is nothing like, “Breath in and breath out and meditate” sort of stuff. Adyashanti discusses concepts like seeking Truth with a capital T, focusing on present goals, and seeming contradictions that I spent many times reading and re-reading. It is a short book but one you will be reading for a very long time. I recommend it.
This is a long, sprawling book that is shocking for two reasons: 1) It is fantastically creative in its choice of language. 2) It is constantly confusing. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which as far as I can tell is a bull way of choosing the books that you should be reading that year. (The four or five Pulitzer Prize winner books that I have read in the past 10 years have been full on disappointments.) As you are reading you cannot help but admire just how creative the language is, but then you are frustrated because it also feels like that the language is going towards something ultimately pointless.
I have to recommend the audiobook if you want to read this. The performer is really good, capable of multiple accents and different tones. There is a Russian-type character in the book and he just nails it.
The Weirdest Thing I Took From My Reading
This comes from a book that I read about the sport of ultra deep diving, called Deep.
From then on, I have made it a habit of mine to do these random breathing exercises to try to intake as much air as I can in one single breath.
The Most Majestic Passage of 1H2015
I restarted a special book that I put aside a few years ago, the Tiger. I truly utterly enjoyed this thrilling book and appreciated the reverence with which it treats its main protagonist - the Amur tiger. The below passage is so marble-y rich with imagery that it makes your stomach hurt.
Nobody who reads that will ever see tigers the same way again.
Most Eye-Rolling Passage of 1st Half 2015
In general I enjoyed China Rich Girlfriend for what it was - trashy fiction - but I will not deny that the writing got extremely painful at times. Check out this passage below describing a shopping foray in France.
Say what you will about the content of the Goldfinch - the style in which its non-events were written in never dipped below a most premium quality.
A Preview of 2nd Half 2015
Its summary reads like some sort of island adventure book but the reviews hint at something darker. I am reading this right now. Relative ethicism seems to be the theme of this one.
Said to be the most creative novel of the year, I am excited to start this one. It is also about Silicon Valley and I am from that world.
Oil and Gas Production in Nontechnical Language
There is not a lot of information out there about oil drilling - something that I want to know more about. I am excited to understand more about this mysterious but technologically advanced field.
If you come across anything that you found particularly rewarding to read, let me know. I would love to hear from you.
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