Books and my thoughts

I wonder how people survive without reading books. For me it is no less essential than eating food and sleeping, you can postpone them for sometime but you cannot be fine without them.

I have just finished reading 2 States by Chetan Bhagat and it is worth the money. To extract the maximum value, I am planning to approach the 2nd hand book seller for an exchage. I have the Rick Riordan's final book lying with me and I am confident I can get two old books of my choice in exchange of these two new books. To be honest, I don't think it is necessary for every reader to buy a new book. I have survived because of lending libraries, and Hyderabad second hand book market. I can confidently say that there are few writers who start writing for their livelihood and I am also sure that they wouldn't mind if more than one person reads one copy of their book. I don't know why Delhi has no lending libraries. As a reader I am willing to pay 10% of book price to read it and will pay another 10% if I like it and if I want to read it again and again, I would go and buy that book. If the publishers take cognizance of this, they would save lot of paper without loosing much money. I am sure good authors wouldn't mind for this kind of arrangement.

Though I have been reading soft copies in pdf format, I don't like them much mainly because of lack of flexibility to carry and the lighting effect of LCD screen. I don't I'm ready yet for a Kindle or any other ebook reader.

I'm currently reading "Happiness" by Matthew Ricard and the second one is A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson and it is so interesting to see the connections between all these three books. As a human being, endowed with the ability to think, analyse, assimilate, theorize etc etc, we are obligated by nature, life and God (if present as a separate entity) to do something different than other living species, something better not detrimental. Instead of simply eating, sleeping, mating, dying and evolving (and adapting) like other animals, we should do more than simple physical evolution. We should evolve in certain other dimension, people keep talking about emotional and spiritual but I'm not yet sure about what they exactly mean.

This is what keeps me going and makes life interesting, not the money I make or the things I achieve(d) or the things I possess. This process, if you want to call search for meaning or continuous evolution or spiritual journey, is the only thing that keeps me engaged these days. Does it mean I'm satisfied with what I have, I don't think so, I keep thinking about so many things I want to do in future. This happens to be the most interesting phase of my life till now. Hope it will be so forever from now on