i wonder if 2021 even happened. it passed in a flash while i just stayed stationery. life was dull and uneventful. i don't know how people could keep creating in such uninspiring time, i could barely pick up a pen and cook myself dinner. this is the first time since is started this blog around 14 years ago that i hadn't written anything here. i guess it was in order to prevent myself to completely turn into a potato who consumed to much tv series junks, i read and i read a lot. at least reading is an act of consuming while also at the same time educating ourselves in a way.
i finished a total of about 44ish books and read some parts of another 12ish, i think. it's the most i have ever read in a year, in my entire life. on usual year reading 10ish was considered good enough for me. i guess part of it is because i discovered the joy of using an e-reader. i'm a random reader, i rarely can hold just one book at a time and finish it. i read things based on my mood and it changes all the time. so e-reader accomodate that style of reading for me cause i always carry all my books with me.
i was also reading a lot of new genre that i've never read before like sci-fi, thriller, young adult fantasy, politics. i read a lot of different things this year and i surprised myself when i actually enjoyed most of them.
some of my highlight are:
* The Stranger - Albert Camus. i don't know how nobody has ever recommended Camus to me before. i can relate to this book in a lot of level. and the moment where Mersault grabbed the collar of the priest and yelled at him telling him to shut the fuck up is probably my favorite moment i've read in a book.
* Talking to My Daughter About the Economy - Yanis Varoufakis. i wish this kind of book exists when i was younger instead of rich dad poor dad, which is still popular to this day although the author has clearly declared bankruptcy.
* Animal Farm - George Orwell. i think Animal Farm is somehow overshadowed by 1984. a lot of people i think see this book primarily about stalinism or authoritarianism. but when i read it i can see how much it is relevant to our world this day. how we mostly are all the sheeps which are have no idea about our past histories and have been going along with the status quo for too long.
* The Jakarta Method - Vincent Bevins. this book opened up a lot of things i have never realized before about how the world works. i can only say that everyone should probably read this and then went on your own further research.
* How Do You Live? - Genzaburo Yoshino. it's a very simple book about humanity. it actually hit me the most when i got to the translator note about the author. it made me respect him and the book even more. i just don't know why every book about the equality of being human needs to be labelled as "marxist". even Sally Rooney's book is described as a story about two "marxist" girls. neither books mention marx even once. they of course carries socialist ideology but i've never heard of other normal books described as "capitalistic".
* other than those, i read a lot of books about Russia and the Soviet Union to the point that i learned how to read cyrillic alphabets. i read a lot of life in communist (totalitarian, to be exact) countries, not about communism itself, and it actually fascinates me but i'll write a lot more about this later. also i read a lot of psychedelics and the ongoing research about it which has been fascinated me for quite a while now.
let's see if i'd be able to keep up the next year.
