What do you Read?

It is a question that I find very difficult to answer. I would blink for while trying to mentally categorize my reading preference and would come out blank. The best I could say is that I generally read more non-fiction than fiction.

When it comes to non-fiction, anything goes. I find almost any subject interesting. Looking at the last three books that I have read: Why are We at War? by Norman Mailer, The Forest for the Trees by Betsy Lerner and Smart Mobs by Horward Rheingold, they all fall under different categories.

At the same time I also buy books that I do not intend to read from cover to cover. I will dip into certain chapters or pages from these books in between my major reads. A lifetime is brief; I realise long ago that I cannot read all the books that I am interested in within a single lifetime--even if I do nothing but read for the rest of my life.

So I need to be very selective. And it is also better to sample a couple of chapters from a book than to not read it at all. Reading work-related papers or--God forbid--books also takes up my precious time, though I try to keep them to a minimum these days. The idiot box is another time trap, which I avoid whenever I could.

At the same time, there are current events that I have to keep track of: Time and Newsweek are my regular companions. And I have not mentioned the daily websites that I visit for news and other information.

One might ask: Is all this reading useful? How does it help in making us better persons? This is a very deep question and it demands a separate blog entry for me to answer. As this is a Sunday, I am not going to go into a philosophical exposition on the benefits of reading. I just want to spend a relaxing weekend doing--what else?--reading.