Last 2018, I opened 22 books and finished reading 14 of them.

(Twenty eBooks and two audiobooks; a variety of fiction and non-fiction — philosophy, psychology, art, business, self-improvement, and guides).

I’m still shuffling the other 7. Yes I would like to finish reading them hopefully. But I don’t feel the pressure anymore. If the book doesn’t excite me, I’ll proceed to the next. Writer Johnny deduced it well in his post, Everything I Knew About Reading Was Wrong.

This, of course, is a piece of cake compared to other readers who can read a hundred books a year. I wish I could do that. But I’m a very slow reader. Some books often take a month or more for me to finish reading and fully comprehend it.

Good thing there are blogs. I often turned to blogs when the book feels tedious.

Blogs are easy to read. And every time I finished one, it gives me a sense of fulfillment.

Last March 2018, I challenged myself that I will bookmark all the blogs I’d read in a year (and podcasts, too):

So yes. I did it. I read 350 blogs…

And listened to 37 podcasts (this doesn’t include the unfinished ones. I don’t bookmark them).

I also tracked the didactic videos (74)…

And music-related videos (23) I watched.

It may sound weird to you, but this is one way for me to measure or record my eagerness to learn and improve. Hopefully, it gets better and better over the years.

So what did I learn from all of these books, blogs, podcasts, and videos? That will do for another post.

By the way, I know you don’t have enough time to read all the books in the world. I don’t have either. But if you can spare a little bit of it, please do yourself a favor. Read these books if you haven’t:

• “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck” by Mark Manson
• “The Obstacle is the Way” by Ryan Holiday
• “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius

You’ll thank me for sure. These three are some of the most practical books I’ve read (and been reading) last 2018.

Of course there are more. So let’s find them.

Keep reading.

“One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.” — Carl Sagan