It’s no secret that 2020 has been a terrible year for all of us. I’ve had a particularly rough time myself. My mom died unexpectedly on April 10, and then a close friend two days later. The pandemic disallowed us from being able to celebrate her death the way we have wanted to, and my brother and I have been managing her estate (with, luckily, the guidance of well-educated and well-meaning family friends, many of whom double as accountants, lawyers, financial advisors et. al) while working full time from home together. My grandmother had a heart attack a few days after that, almost died, and we were unable to visit her in the hospital before she had emergency open-heart surgery to heal its cause. During this time, I also had to re-write my entire MBA thesis in under a month because my first one was rejected, and then present it on Skype in July and have been dealing with a few health issues. Under normal circumstances, maybe a vacation or prolonged break would help heal the pain. Yet I haven’t felt comfortable doing so, as travel has been heavily discouraged by the CDC these past few months due to the second and now-third waves for COVID-19.
So I have done what a lot of my friends have told me they, too, are doing: taken a ton of baths, (finally!) binge-watched Netflix/Hulu (after years of not having the time to do this, I am grateful to have been able to do so), and read a million books. Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration. Not a million books. Maybe 10–15 because my other time spent has been on, well, all of the above. After reading a ton of articles about how reading is good for you (Bill Gates reportedly reads upwards of 50 books a year), I decided that one way to ensure I can read MORE in a year is to document the books I have been reading on a Medium channel, like the one I’m about to create.
If you don’t care that I read books, cool. I don’t care that you don’t care. These “reviews” will be varied: some will probably be a few hundred words about books that I didn’t feel impacted my life that much, some may be extremely in-depth critiques, others may be recommendations…my goal is to finish fifty (50!) of these reviews in the next twelve months. Since I decided to go easy on myself, I started the year on December 16th so that next year I can have two extra weeks to take a vacation without reading and so that I have something to post on the channel now.
Buckle up, losers! You’re about to read the most rote, staid, critical book reviews of your life. But in this pandemic we’ve gotten nothing but time…
Signing off,
DOH
