1st quarter - status check

In my last post I had talked about embarking on an effort to read at least 52 books over the course of a year. For a while, I thought this was going to end up the route of my other such ambitious proclamations. However, reading is something I genuinely enjoy.  Hence I was a little more optimistic.

It helped that my wife is a voracious reader and she has been bringing all sorts of books from the library. I started reading from her collection first and and slowly started accompanying her each time to get my own set of books that I had always wanted to read. In addition I also started listening to audiobooks on my way to work and back. This way I was able to peruse multiple books simultaneously.  Its been many years, since I read books with such a fervor. During my most addicted moments, especially with books that are absolutely riveting, one can find me glued to the book (or the kindle, of late) right from the time I come back from work, while waiting in lines, the restrooms (which has turned into a mini library) and even during lunch hour at work.

Its been a mix of books, right from classics to graphic novels to contemporary literature. My appetite has been insatiable. I feel like I need to catch up on all the lost years. My Netflix and Hulu plus usage has suffered as a consequence and I'm actually pondering whether I should just yank them off. Now I want to write about each of them. But my thoughts are all wandering about all over the place. I need to gather them and give purpose to each. Let me start with listing my progress so far. And of course before I forget, I want to highlight goodreads.com. Its an amazing website with a great app to boot. The reader community is huge and its a great way to keep track of all the books you've read and also create a wish-list for future reading. Here's what I've accomplished so far:

Read
The Great Gatsby
Shadow of the wind
South of the border, west of the sun
Animal Farm
Of Mice and Men
Such a long journey
Pride and prejudice
Freedom Song
Breakfast of Champions
Embroideries
Persepolis
Feynman
War is boring
The Communist Manifesto
The Sun also rises

Currently Reading:
The Rape of Nanking
Brave new world
The Yiddish policeman's union
Blind willow, sleeping woman
Great Expectations
The 4-hour workweek
The Beautiful and Damned

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52 Books In A Year

The other day on NPR there was an interview with an author. Unfortunately the name of the author slips my memory. But the interesting thing was his first book was based on his experiment during which he read the entire '5 foot shelf' in about an year and a half. It instantly sparked an idea, on whether one can pull something off like that in a year along with a day job. I figured something like a book a week would be doable. So one could with some effort pull off 52 books within the year.

Now keep in mind, the Harvard classics collection is much more than 52 books. A lot of those are collections. For e.g.. Plato's 3 books are clubbed as one. Its amazing that one can get an entire used collection for about $200-$300 bucks online. This works out to  about $4-$5 a book which I think is a steal. I would love to have something like this at my home just for the sake of posterity.

At this point, my 1 bedroom apartment cannot afford luxury of having the entire physical collection. So I found the next best thing. The Gutenburg project and the Internet Archive both have the entire collection in web format for free. Since the books are all over at least 100 years old, they are all out of copyright and can be downloaded for free. They also have the kindle versions for each. Giddy with excitement, I downloaded the entire collection to my kindle, armed to set forth on my expedition.

I started off with a couple and immediately realized my folly. I've been out of the habit of reading for such a long while, that starting off with century old classics was too daunting a task. And also going through the list, my initial enthusiasm watered down to tentative apprehension. I wondered whether I had signed up something too onerous. My wife suggested that I instead start with something easier and lighter. There have been lots of other great books which I had wanted to read but never got to. It helped that she is a voracious reader herself and had a bunch of books on her kindle. Also she's been going to the Mt. View library on a regular basis and bought me a bunch of books.

So long story short, I've been on a reading spree since the past month. I'm keeping my schedule of a book a week, so that means I'm on target for 52 for the year. Although I do want to get to the my original goal of reading the Harvard classics, I'm not complaining right now.

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Payday loan, Activehours, Lendup, Sociogrammics etc

I posted recently a post on Payday loans on my other blog. In that I also talked about startups which are trying to disrupt the industry like Activehours, Lendup and Sociogrammics. If anyone knows about other companies which are doing something in this or banking/finance in general please send me a note. I would like to cover each of these companies in detail. 

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Pennies for a dollar

For a long while now, I have been inspired by amazing bloggers who are living examples of the concept of 'New Rich' . And mind you, I'm talking about 20 something guys and gals who have transformed their lifestyles by various life-hacks. Just to give you an example of what I'm talking about, imagine living a life of a millionaire with only a few hours of work every week, or managing to fly around world for free, or becoming New York Times bestseller at 26 . All these blogs have amazing tips, practical ideas and best of all proven records of them working. Now, for a lot of people all of their advice or tips may not be appropriate. But lets pick what we can and work with that.

I've also been very interested in managing my money and maximizing it. I'm always on the lookout for deals, coupons and discounts. But then who isn't. The key is to be systematic and plan in advance to make the most of the all the deals and coupons. Same goes with investing, saving and money management in general. Inspired by Tim Ferris, I'm going to take a deep dive into cutting deals and trying out these ideas and distill them to find the ones that work the best and the ones that don't. My one peeve with a lot of these tips and blogs is that a lot of the things they suggest take too much time and people have waste a lot of effort on research. One of my biggest philosophies in life is the 80/20 principle. Nothing new but its amazing how every time you have to make a decision, all you need to do is think about the Big things and the rest will take care of itself. So I want to focus on only the stuff that gives the maximum bang for your buck/effort/time whatever you deem important.

And thus my blog, 'Pennies for a dollar'

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Dogtooth

Dogtooth is one of those weird foreign movies which had received a lot of praise in the media and especially in the blogosphere. Almost all the critics and bloggers I admire and respect had loved the movie. So basically as you can imagine, I went in with boatloads of expectation.

 

Of course it had to be good! I trust my taste in blogs and critics which in turn means I share the taste in movies with my Gurus of film-buffery. And if I didn't like a movie they LOVED, that would be a contradiction of sorts, wouldn't it? Actually no, because I respect their thoughts and views to understand where they would be coming from but can still have divergent opinions. See how I slipped in a snide comment on how it's ok to have different viewpoints and yet be ok with it.

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