2017 Final Year Resolutions

Another year has passed. Year 2017. It was a long and stressful year, with ups and downs.

Being the first article of this year and the first book related article, I will start by expressing my profound gratitude for the people who spent their entire life writing for letting us as a legacy some wonderful works, which get as out from the day to day routine and make us forget about problems.

2017 was for me the year of the learned lessons . I took many decisions more or less good and I set objectives more or less realistic.

From a number of 100 books which I had planned to read, I only managed to read 70. Amongst them were the following:

• “Brooklin girl” – Guillame Musso
• “Foam of the Days” – Boris Vian
• “Le petit prince” – Antoin de Saint-Exupery
• “The Alchemist” – Paulo Coehlio
• “The adventures of Tom Sawyer” – Mark Twain
• “The five love languages” – Gary Chapman
• “The disaster from Chernobyl” – Svetlana Aleksievici
• “Oscar and the Lady in Pink” – Eric-Emmanuel Schimtt
• “Pride and prejudice” – Jane Austen
• “The ultimate introduction to NLP” – Richard Bandler
• “The power of now” – Eckart Tolle
• “A tres metros sobre el cielo” – Federico Moccia

Beside these volumes, I also read a large number of personal development articles, which I learned I don’t like.

From the above volumes, I definitely can say that I liked the most the book called “The disaster from Chernobyl”. It is a sad story about the cruel reality from Chernobyl  which started on the 26^th of April 1986. It is about lost love and ruined destinies.

Also I enjoyed very much “Brooklyn girl”, a 400 pages novel which I devoured in 2 days. Detective novel action type, it captured my attention although I never thought I would read this kind of book and also like it. It is full of  numerous intrigues and surprises, complex characters full of emotions lived at maximum intensity.

The other volumes were also very interesting and capturing, but I had already met with some of them in the years that passed but, from some reason, I felt the need to read them again.

This year I have established the objective to focus more on quality and less on quantity. This means that I will no longer set a number of volumes I want to read, but some names I am interested in.

I started the year with “People of the book” by Geraldine Brooks.  An exceptional volume about a Jewish manuscript which leads our steps from the world of middle ages to the second world war and the modern ages. A book full of cruel realities, but also about touching love stories.

The following volumes I would like to read are “Frankenstein” and “The strange case of Dr. Jekill and Mr. Hyde”. Old stories, but which I haven’t had the chance yet to read when I was a child.

Also there are some other books on my list, less belletristic and more science:  “Psychogenic” and “Flowers for Algernon”.  They are not books that I necessarily wanted to read, but they are books that were recommended to me, so I will try to honor the recommendation, especially as it is an escape from the comfort zone. Who knows? Maybe I will enjoy them

Now I can only wait to see what 2018 has prepared for me.

Happy New Year!  🙂

© picnicontheshelf, January 9, 2018