The Midnight Sun

Category: Books

  • How audiobooks rekindled my love for reading

    How audiobooks rekindled my love for reading

    After listening to a lot of grandma stories when I was very young, I started reading story books, in English and Tamil, during my school days. I always looked forward to long train journeys because I could request my father to buy me some books and Tinkle comics from Higginbothams to read during the travel. In a few years, I moved on to reading books from authors like J. K. Rowling, Dan Brown, Stieg Larsson etc. and enjoyed that a lot. This continued through my college days and then somehow after I got my first job, I lost that habit. ☹️

    Perhaps, my love for computers, gadgets, and gaming distracted me, or I spent all my spare time wooing the love of my life, I do not know. While I have read a book or two once in a while, mostly non-fiction ones that interested me, I couldn’t get back into my habit of reading books regularly.

    A few years ago, I had read good reviews about Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn saga and started reading the first book a couple of times but lost interest very quickly. This wasn’t because of the book’s content, but more due to getting distracted by other, “more interesting” things.

    Around 2015, I started listening to podcasts during my long commute to and from work and loved that experience so much that I have continued to do so till now even though I don’t have any daily commutes anymore. So I decided to channel that into listening to audiobooks to see if that sticks as a habit.

    I started listening to the Mistborn saga audiobooks and surprisingly, it stuck! I kept coming back to it regularly enough to be able to finish listening to the trilogy in 2 months or so. Listening to podcasts during dinner time was often replaced with long audiobook sessions during the same time. Even when there were some gaps, I came back to it within the next day or two. On a few days, I even ended up listening for long hours because I was interested in seeing the stories progress. I have to thank Michael Kramer, who narrated all the books, for keeping things lively throughout.

    Cover images of the Mistborn trilogy books
    Cover images of the Mistborn trilogy books

    As for the Mistborn trilogy itself, it had a decent plot and the execution was decent, considering that these were some of Brandon Sanderson’s earliest books. While there were enough plot points that kept the listener hooked through parts of the books, I couldn’t help noticing how most of what happened in each book barely mattered at the book’s/trilogy’s ending.

    Even though I noticed and realized that audiobooks are a very inefficient way to consume content at a glacial pace (relative to reading), it was still better than not reading books at all.

    Here’s to reading and listening to more books in the coming years! 🤞

  • A shallow review of ‘Revolution 2020 – Love, Corruption, Ambition’

    Chetan Bhagat has tried to create his style of love story with a strong message relevant to the present and has botched up both. The novel proceeds through a fairly linear plot. While that can be good at times, it provides very little scope for the reader to get a better view from other perspectives and hence the plot is as shallow as it could be. Incidents between the protagonist and his love interest is so clichéd and would be predictable even for those who haven’t read Chetan Bhagat’s previous better books. Focus on the message part of the plot is too little and I doubt if the intensity will make the readers to feel attached to it.

    Revolution 2020 - Love, Corruption, Ambition

    There isn’t much of the wit and light-hearted humour that were a key ingredient to the success of Chetan Bhagat’s books. The author has already proved that he can successfully touch the hearts of so many people and that is why a lot of people will still end up liking this book.

  • Three days of Chetan Bhagat

    I have been spending all my time by doing wrong things at the wrong time, hence I missed out on a lot of things that I like to do and reading books is one of them. My ‘to-read’ book queue had been building up into a monstrous one and as I too was fed up with the routine life, I decided to read some books for a change. I got my hands on Chetan Bhagat’s famous three – Five point someone, One night @ the call center and Three mistakes of my life.

    I started with One night @ the call center the day before yesterday. One thing which I immediately felt after reading a few pages was Chetan Bhagat’s style was so similar to the of R.K. Narayanan’s (whose immortal Swami and Friends is one of the best books I have ever read). Very simple and easy to understand language and the plot always goes in a way that we are able to relate something with it. R.K. Narayanan was a genius at that and Chetan Bhagat is a really good one at the same.

    Even though the story wasn’t a path-breaking or a mind-boggling one, I still enjoyed reading it because of being able to relate to a lot happening in the story. Five-point someone was slightly better than One night @ the call center coz the plot was over a longer period and the protagonists were students fighting their ways through their college lives like me. :-).

    I was tempted to start reading Three mistakes of my life straightaway, but when I was a few pages into it, I realized that I having an overdose of Chetan Bhagat and hence was unable to get myself into the story or enjoy it. So I decided to push it to some time in the near future when I am cured of this very enjoyable Chetan Bhagat overdose. 🙂

    Status update: March 6, 2009 – I finished reading “Three mistakes of my life” today and I could conclude that it was the best of the three novels in most ways, but still I couldn’t help feeling cliched about the way Chetan Bhagat has portrayed the female lead characters in all his three novels whereas the male protagonist is shown in an entirely contrasting light.