It may not look so from my writing but I turned 40 this month. It was just another day and just another year as always. But, the day reminded me that I am getting wiser (ahem!) and made me question my purpose and existence and what not? Not a great way to start the day but it is better to think about these than the mindless infinite scroll. One thought led to another and my monkey-mind landed on Goodreads.
Goodreads is one of the two social media sites I am on. The other being LinkedIn. Goodreads is a nice tool. It doesn’t try too much to grab my attention. It helped me develop my reading habit. The reading challenges really helped me in reading at least a few books a year. It helped me to check the reviews of other readers before I bought a book. It helped me in feeling good about myself as many of my friends are not on goodreads and those who are, they read even less than me. It helped me to find some great quotes which I would not have come across otherwise.
But then, I realized these are just shallow reasons. Ultimately, the truth is that I wanted to show off that I read and that I am more intelligent than many. I did not use the tool to review any book. If anything, I wrote about the books I liked on this blog. I will keep it that way going forward too. There is no need for anyone or even myself to know the number of books that I read in a year. It is pointless to say I read 1000 useless books. I would rather like to recommend the books that I liked reading, even if it is just one.
The question is whether I am intelligent. Not whether others think I am intelligent.
Your’s truly
Lord Ram is also called AnasUya – which means one without envy. It can be interpreted as Ram does not envy anyone as well as no one envies Ram. Ram was so great in all aspects that humans put him on a pedestal and said we are never going to reach his greatness and so there is no reason to envy. He was way out of league. All the number games are like that. There is always someone better than you. When you check a few people’s stats, they have read over 12000+ books. So, there is no comparison and the number game does not make any sense. In the end, what matters is whether I’m getting better as time progresses.
With this sudden philosophical thought surging through my veins, I decided to get rid of my Goodreads account. And I did it. Maybe I will regret it in the future, I don’t know. But, it is just another site without which thousands of readers lived, thousands of readers live and thousands of readers will live. So shall I. I want to read to know more than to show. So, Goodbye Goodreads! You were great. It’s not you, it’s just me.
Pointless & Prosaic 
No, you certainly don’t sound 40. Though 40 sounds like a kid to me from my lofty 64 😃
Goodreads… You don’t seem to appreciate best thing about it, which is to look up books, read reviews and get recommendations. I rarely update my reading and post reviews equally rarely, but I visit the site almost every day. And get more than the (zero) paisa vasool in the form of book talk.
I will take that as a compliment 😀 Kids these days are preaching everywhere how to become a millionaire. Someone has to remind them to stay kiddish. 😀
Yes I never used that feature. I used to manually look for books that I got interested.