Best 5 Books I Read in 2021
Hey friends,
It was the last year 2021 that I first read English books, and I loved it. As far as I remember, I was down to try reading, and after some books, it became a routine. I started off with Young Adults, and some fictional series including Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, but now I significantly tend towards non-fiction.
Soon, I implemented it into a daily routine, and I have to agree with what others say – reading has been awesome. I highly encourage you to just give it a try as well.
From April to mid-December, if I kept track correctly, I finished 50 books. I think it was not bad at all – reading an average of 5-6 books a month, but truthfully, only a small portion of those had a certain impact on me.
Here are the 5 best books that I enjoyed the most, or had the most impact on my life for good.
Educated
Somehow I will always remember this book. A great friend of mine gave me a paperback of this book, and it was the headstart of my reading habit.
The book is a memoir, which basically is the life story of the author, narrated by the author.
The author Tara grew up in a Mormon family, and her father was paranoid about hospitals, the public school systems, and their government, so they didn’t have any formal education, they didn’t go to hospitals when they are ill, and they are preparing for the end of their world.
As she grew up, her father became intensely violent, while a brother of hers, on his own will, chose to go to college against the family. She noticed how her brother was different from every other person she has met in the world (who were the rest of her family members), she admired and respected him, and she ends up going to college despite difficulties.
She described all the hard difficulties and how she managed to overcome them, and most importantly, how education has been an incredible thing that could change a person for good.
The book was incredibly inspiring, heartwarming, and just incredible. I loved it.
It’s hard to get one practical takeaway from the book, but if there had to be one, it’d be that education can change a person in the most profound ways.
Atomic Habits
Atomic Habits, the International Bestseller.
The book explains how habits work and why tiny changes are important in the most outstanding way and continue to explain how we can change our lives by building good habits.
Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations. If we want one percent better each day for a year, we’ll end up 37% better by the end of the year – and that’s the power of the daily habits.
If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.
If we achieve our goals, we only change our life for the moment. We get these temporary results. Instead, what we really need to change is the systems that cause those results in the first place.
The book also covers 4 steps of building a habit, and to help build them, 4 Laws of Behaviour Change are also mentioned. You can read those online or in the book haha.
It is safe to say that this book singlehandedly changed my days, and how I view things. This book has been incredibly valuable, and I am about to read it for the second time. I am convinced that every person (literally) should read this book. It is just so amazing.
Deep Work
Deep Work is another book on productivity, and it focuses mainly on Deep Work – how we can work productively.
According to the author Cal Newport, Deep Work is Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”
The author explains how deep work has become increasingly rare, and meaningful in this economy that increasingly rewards depth.
It also covers how we can implement deep work ourselves – where I believe I prefer the Rhythmic routine, where I take 3-4 hours every day to perform deep work on my projects.
This book changed my understanding and my approach to work. This book has been incredible for me, and I believe it could benefit most of us out there as well.
You can read the full summary for Deep Work here.
Good Vibes, Good Life
Good Vibes, Good Life is a bestselling self-help book, focusing on how we can feel great ourselves.
The Law of Vibration: The Universe responds to your vibration. It will return whatever energy you put out. Change the way that we think, feel, speak, and act, and you begin to change your world.
The book also goes through how we can implement positive and healthy lifestyle habits, including how we should surround ourselves with positive people, to stay clear of gossip and drama, to sort out our nutrition and water, to be aware of the present, and not surprisingly, to meditate.
The author also explains how to make ourselves a priority, i.e, to have intrinsic security, and it has been absolutely fantastic for me. This part of the book has been extremely valuable for me, and I have reread it a number of times. Super nice.
Generally, the book explains how we can choose to feel good, and how we can implement self-love in our lives.
How to Win Friends and Influence People
Again, doesn’t need to introduce; the international bestseller that made history. Another book that I am convinced everyone should read.
The core idea is that you can achieve more favorable outcomes in communications with people by understanding people better, becoming a more amiable person, improving your language, and learning leadership skills.
The book lists a series of how we can be better at communications, basically. Among them, the most striking ones for me have been “Any fool can criticize, complain, and condemn — and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving,” and to talk in terms of other person’s interests.
I am convinced I should read it again, and so should you. Just give it a try and see how it goes.
For the past month, my life has been pretty hectic with new things and life and trying to adapt to it, and basically, that’s my excuse that I haven’t read much in the past month.
But I am implementing a daily reading routine back again, and as soon as I get my school timetable, I will be making a weekly schedule, with reading as a priority.
At the moment as I write this, I am reading Me Before You, and it has so far been pretty nice. I intend to give so much more time to reading and to read many more books this year. (Keeping in mind that quality > quantity.)
If you are, for any reason at all, reading this post until this point, you absolutely should try reading. Try reading for just as little as 15 minutes every day for a month, and see how it goes. (For comparison, we spend 8-12 hours on our mobile phones every day, and this is just a tiny 15 minutes, which is a teeny 1% that is 0.01 of our huge 24 hours.)
Thanks so much for reading.
I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope that you’ll try one of these books mentioned if they are new to you.
Kaung x