Books

I added a page on this blog: Books. It consists of a list of most memorable books I have read so far. If books are windows to the world, they have been my windows. Truly.

Since I have created this list purely out of my memory, they are not necessarily listed in the chronological order of my reading. Besides, there are quite a few books that did not find themselves into this list. However, I was able to add some kind of time-line into the list. They are separated according to blocks of a few years in which I read them. These intervals of years signify different times in my life: 1996 to 1999 during which I enrolled myself into our village-library with the help of my friend, during which I was able to develop a penchant for reading, and during which I believed almost everything that appeared in books! Then 1999 to 2003 during which I was an undergraduate at Thrissur, during which I started speculating the truth of what I read in books, during which I developed a firm foundation for my reading and ideas, during which, with the help of my good friends, I was introduced into great writers and thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and so on, and during which I started understanding that there are no absolute truths, but everything is a perspective. Then 2003 to 2005 during which I was job-less mostly and then became a teacher, during which I struggled to develop my own perspectives and ideas and miserably failed. Next 2005 to 2007 during which I was a post-graduate student, during which I fully recognized and accepted my failure to develop my own perspective, during which I disowned many of my own ideas and perspectives, during which I disowned a lot of other things, during which I fully understood Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence and affirmation of ones fate and life ("amor fati"), and during which I became a complete nihilist and extreme atheist. Then came 2007 to 2012, my lonely Ph.D. days, during which I became what I am today, during which I read not just books but also a lot from the internet and watched a lot of movies, during which I learned to affirm my fate, and during which I don't still understand what all happened to me. 2013 was a stable year with a lot of developments in my life, during which I started getting regular salary and was able to buy any book I wanted, during which I pledged that I will not sacrifice reading for anything else and became so determined. My life, academic development, and other things revolve around all these years and the books I read.

So, that was my narration of my own story, which, indeed, is a lie from a pure psycho-analytic perspective!

Sandeep

Trivandrum

Dec 24, 2013.