Year 2020’s Completed Readings:
Killing Joke by Alan Moore
Steins;Gate
Steins;Gate 0
Letters to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens
The Missionary Position by Christopher Hitchens
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
Mastermind: How to think like Sherlock Holmes by Maria Konnikova
Why I am Not a Hindu by Dr. Ramendra
A Dracula Handbook by Elizabeth Miller
18 Volumes of Nana to Kaoru (Nana to Kino)
Unfinished:
7 Chapters of Manusmriti (Boring Beyond Belief, unlike Mahabharata and Bhagavad Gita which had some clever ancient philosophy)
63 Percent of “The Importance of Racial Integrity” by Charlatan and Racist lunatic, Anthony M. Ludovici (DO NOT RECOMMEND)
Several chapters of Attack on Titan
Several chapters of One Piece
Never Split the Difference (2 Chapters)
I decided to make this topic early, because I doubt that I’ll be reading anything more for the year. I just feel a huge wave of exhaustion at the prospect of doing anything more this year at the moment. I probably shouldn’t feel this way, but I can’t seem to help it. Erratic sleeping patterns, trying to constantly push myself into the motivation of writing or researching or working on the next project, or working on aforementioned fantasy novel ideas and coming up with concepts for those have just taken their toll. This is on top of failing health and my desperate attempts to avoid feelings of helplessness. I try to muster the strength to write, but I just feel waves of exhaustion. Even writing this much took all day. I really just cannot bring myself to be in the right mood for it all anymore. This whole year has been a disappointment insofar as social activism and my eye-opening meetings with people I clearly misunderstood. Everything just feels like an uphill battle and all my strength feels fleeting. I’ve just been binging on Netflix for the past few days. I marathoned Alice in Borderland and I’m mostly finished with Sweet Home. My brother paid for my new Hulu account and a Netflix gift card, so I plan to just marathon more shows for the rest of the year.
On the plus side, one of the benefits of this global pandemic was that I could put more time in to read lengthy books. As I consider visual novels to be interactive books, I spent time reading all the content of Steins;Gate and Steins;Gate 0 visual novels this year. I heartily enjoyed and reviewed them all; even adding a thematic analysis. I finally finished two books I had put on pause to finish for far too many years; Niccolo Machiavelli’s “The Prince” and Maria Konnikova’s Sherlock Holmes styled “Mastermind” book. I enjoyed the former more than the latter. Konnikova’s book was really just a less interesting and – in some places – much weaker rehash of Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. I was very disappointed since her book “The Confidence Game” on the behavior patterns of charlatans was a masterful read. I read Elizabeth Miller’s Dracula Handbook far too quickly and misconstrued key details and historic facts unfortunately; I’d still rate the book as just average though. My only regret of the unfinished category is not having finished “Never Split the Difference” by Chris Voss. Manusmriti is only good for laughing at and any of my fellow Hindus who think it is a good book to live by in modern times is lying to themselves unless instructions on how to angle your body to correctly piss based on where the wind blows is supposed to be something deep and meaningful. Smriti texts aren’t Shruti and hold far less significance – mostly as cultural relics for us Hindus. I still wish I could bleach my brains out from having read Anthony Ludovici’s insane ravings, but on the plus side, I’ve used the ideas behind is “thought models” to construct an idea for an alienish genealogy for the fantasy novel I’m writing. Dr. Ramendra’s book I decided to read through once after putting it off so long because I wanted to get a different perspective from a native, educated Indian source and I found his views to be thoroughly unconvincing. Finally, Nana to Kaoru is something I stumbled upon in the middle of this year from discussions with avid manga fans and which I decided to try to read because of my interest in the mature subject matter. I was wary of trying to finish an 18 volume series of what consists of its main story, but I’m proud of myself and happy to say that I managed to do it. Fortunately, the characters are established to be 17 – 18 throughout the story and I’m thinking of reserving the sequel Black Label as something to read for next year. It got more difficult to find online sources for reading due to the nonsensical anti-Japanese bigotry that far too many Western Barbarian websites are normalizing nowadays. Japan is definitely superior to the West insofar as Free Speech if they can have serialized and licensed mature stories about safely practiced sadomasochism / BDSM while the US still acts like an infantilized barbarian foolishly arguing Japan is somehow the one being immature about sex because they take a mature, sex-positive, safe, and healthy stance on the subject matter. Meanwhile, we Western Barbarians are having so many hidden cases of Churches raping little kids which is something Japan managed to avoid by not having so many converts to the over-glorified pedophile cults known as Christianity.
For next year, I’ll try to finish the backlog of Dracula books I’ve acquired, Chris Voss’s book, and I’m hoping I can start reading more deeply into Vedanta Philosophy by finding appropriate starting material for it in English. I’d like to read all the different theological underpinnings within Hinduism for future writing purposes, but I can’t really say much more unless I manage to finish and self-publish more fantasy stories than just a novel mocking Neo-Nazis. Given the expectations that situations won’t return to normal until mid-summer next year with regards to the COVID-19 pandemic in the US, I suppose that the early 6 months will be a prime opportunity to get more reading done for long books or a long series like Nana to Kaoru more generally. The pandemic was certainly a boon in at least this regard despite all of its negative consequences with everything else. Goodbye and good riddance to 2020.