The Importance of the Books We Read
Last year while catching up on some of my favorite blogs from the US, I stumbled across the site Wait But Why. While reading over this new blog, I came across a post called The Tail End. This post opened my eyes to the briefness of many things we take for granted in life. Among them, the two most significant were books and relationships. This post will focus mainly on what I learned about the books we all choose to read.
The premise of the post was to use cartoons to represent how little we have of something left. For books, the author (aged about 30) estimated he had only 300 books to read for the rest of his life! Although this seems like a lot, when you stop and think about how many books are out there it is shockingly few.
Now that you realize you only have a few books left to read, choosing the remaining books becomes very important. Although this might seem like a daunting task, I'd like to make a suggestion. A few weeks after coming across this post, it just so happens I found a TED Talk on a similar subject. The talk is titled: My Year Reading a Book from Every Country in the World. The notion of the talk is that upon discovering her book shelf contained authors all from a small handful of the world's nations, Ann Morgan set out to read a book or memoir from every country in the world (using the UN list plus Taiwan).
After watching this TED Talk I immediately knew where I would find most of those remaining books. Luckily enough, I was able to bring this idea to my school's Global Relations Club and convince them what a great idea it would be to find a book from every country and make it a part of our school's library collection. Now, we are working towards accomplishing this in the next few years.
I think the most important part of both the talk and the comics is that each and every aspect of our life is fleeting: whether the time we have left in high school, the books we have left to read, or even the slices of pizza left to eat. So whenever you choose to do anything in life, stop and consider if it is something you genuinely care about and to use however much time you have left enjoying the things you love.
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Photo is of the main library in Hamburg. I took my C1 Goethe Test on the fourth floor of the building. Hope your all enjoying the last few weeks of winter!
