I am pretty bad at reading books. Since high school, I have always struggled with finding inspiration in fictional stories and dedicating time to reading. I could not place it among my habits and preferred other activities, even when I enjoyed some authors from Latinoamerica. Up to now, reading requires a significant effort.
Then during my college years, I started learning English as some design topics I wanted to grasp were not in Spanish and ended up seeking useful and updated translations. Once I reached a worthy fluency level, I jumped into design books and articles confidently but never achieved steadiness. I was fully driven by needs.
When a friend gifted me “A thousand splendid suns“, some curiosity woke up in me. The book dives into political and cultural boundaries through the story of two Afghan women during war years. The story is heartbreaking and outlines complexities not familiar to me. Since then, I have been slightly shifting toward novels while leaving design books behind.
In parallel, I became a recurrent visitor of Rest of World, a magazine covering societal issues driven by tech in non-Western countries. They post a list of books curated by the editors every end of the year, and thanks to that, I discovered “Americanah“. A marvelous book about a Nigerian woman dealing with race and identity once she migrates to the U.S. to study.
All this led me to keep embracing reading novels. Books written by women, authors from non-Western countries, and buy them from the author’s website. Unfortunately, not all of them sell their own books, and fewer as ebooks.
So far, I have the following in my next reading list: “After The Inquiry“, by Jolene Tan; and “10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World“, by Elif Shafak. Hopefully I will read both and more during the year.
This is not a 2023 goal. It is an approach I took and aim to strengthen in the coming years.