Why I read book and you should too.

6 min read

In 2025, I gave myself one challenge: read every day. A page, a line, a paragraph didn’t matter. The goal was just to read. Here’s the thing. I was never a reader.

tldr: To learn something? No. I read as an act of rebellion. Against short-form content, digital noise, screen time. I read because it’s becoming a lost art. I read because I can and I should. Learning, meeting people, making friends, all of that is secondary. I don’t care about genres. I don’t care about titles or authors. I just read. Some books leave me with thoughts I keep revisiting. Others are just meh. I’m not in a race to read X books in X days. I don’t want that dopamine. I read to just keep my mobile and laptop aside.

How it started

I picked up the habit in college, mostly to improve my English. Don’t judge me, but my first book was The Da Vinci Code. I couldn’t get through more than a page. My second was One Night at the Call Center. I finished it in one night (okay! you can judge me now)

That book opened a whole new world. I didn’t know anything back then, genres, authors, fiction vs non-fiction. I just picked up whatever looked interesting. But somewhere in there, reading became a part of me.

When I started working, I’d read during my cab rides. I made three or four friends purely because of books. We’d swap them, lend them, talk about them.

Breaking out of my comfort zone

After a few years, I looked at my shelf and realised I was only reading Indian rom-coms. So I decided to donate all of them. One of my friends was a collector. He collected every award-winning book. He handed me The White Tiger and The Shiva Trilogy. That cracked open a new genre for me. I stopped with the rom-coms and never looked back.

Losing the habit

Then life happened. Social media happened. My daily reading slowly disappeared. By 2025, I noticed my mental health slipping, and a lot of it was the phone. So I made one rule: start the day with a book, not with my phone. I also started a reading list. It was hard at first. Focus didn’t come easy. I began with The Daily Stoic and one other book in parallel, and started a page to track what I read. The Daily Stoic made it easy, one short passage a day. I posted about it. I even took a full month off social media, and the progress was incredible.

What reading gave back to me

That one habit did more than I expected:

  1. I finished DDIA (designing Data Intensive applications) book, the tech bible I’d been putting off for ages.

  2. It proved to me that I wasn’t in control of my phone. The books were.

  3. I could finally sit still and focus again.

  4. New genres, new areas, new stories kept opening up.

  5. I started recommending books to other people (win).

I also learned something about what I read. There was a phase where I devoured self-help books. Then it hit me, they all say the same thing. And no matter how many I read, nothing changes unless I actually change my routine. So I switched to autobiographies instead.

Books became my “me time.” Simple as that.

Why I read now

Now I read because I can. Reading is becoming a lost art. Kids today struggle to focus. When I moved to the UK, I saw people reading everywhere, on the commute, at cafés, walking, sitting in the park. That pushed me to read even more.

I read because I can, because I should, because I want to live inside stories other people wrote. I want to carry a piece of every book with me. And I don’t want it to become a lost art.

As a bonus because of books, I can now sit and read long docs at work without my mind wandering.

A few books that changed how I think

  1. Die With Zero: I started this after moving to the UK. Coming from India, I was wired to save for the future. This book flipped that: live in the moment, die with zero. But it also taught me something bigger, your lessons depend on where you are. In the UK I don’t need to save for healthcare or my kid’s schooling; the government covers it. Same book, different meaning depending on your country and background.
  2. The Last Lecture : This one found me at my lowest. It sent me down a rabbit hole, researching the author, watching his YouTube talks, and even questioning bigger things like reincarnation and past lives.
  3. Before the Coffee Gets Cold : A Japanese book translated into English. Wow. Astrology, food, and the way everything ties together at the end. Loved it.
  4. The Vegetarian: An award winner, and an odd one. Strange in the best way. I kept exploring even after I finished it, digging through Reddit threads, reading theories, watching the author’s interviews. That’s the pattern I love most now: a good book doesn’t end when you close it.
  5. Show your work : A pretty quick read about how to be creative in showing your work to the world. I love it because it is not a regular book from representation of the content, to the book size.

So no, I don’t have a reading goal for you. Just one small dare: tomorrow, before you touch your phone, read one line. See where it takes you

Skip if you want to (unpolished notes)

  1. I’ve started growing with books. For example, I’m a huge fan of Dan Brown’s writing. But with his 2025 release, secret of secrets, I could guess the pattern and the plot early on. That’s when it hit me how well I’ve come to understand his style.
  2. I also used to read Hindi books, since it’s my regional language. One author I loved was Durjoy Datta. Recently I read Byomkesh Bakshi (written back in the 1932), and it made me realise how weak the newer Hindi books feel. After that, I couldn’t pick up a single Durjoy Datta book, the writing just felt bad. But honestly, until I read Byomkesh Bakshi, he was my favourite author.
  3. My husband isn’t a reader. But he’s started taking interest in whatever I’m reading. Every day he asks, “So, what happened in the book? What’s going on with that character?”
  4. Books over movies ALWAYS
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