Takeaways from Reading

From time I could recall, it has been my habit to note down points while reading a book. It could be quotes that inspire me , activities worthy of emulation, good points that could be reused for the benefit of readers- but one common thread is these are points that definitely impressed me. My scrapbook of collections date back to 1976, when I was involved in aggressive reading and when I look at the dog-eared notebook, I am very nostalgic of those days !

I could vividly recall pulling out my scrap book while I was reading "The writing of a Novel" By Irwing Wallace. There, Wallace describes the 20 years of effort that went into the making of his famous book "Prize", which is a lexicon of all acts related to Nobel Prize, gently tied around a storyline. I was very impressed by the struggles he underwent to get into the writing groove, as to how a writer locked himself in a room, how many hours each of the authors spent and it was so very impressive, I felt that these needs to be captured and thus my idea of the scrapbook was formalized.

From then on, it became a habit and I automatically started looking at extracting points that appeal to me. This gave birth to a collection of such gems like " The cemeteries of the world are full of indispensable people" (From the "Roses in December" - Biography of M.C.Chagla).  The habit continued resulting in accumulations from " Experiments with Truth" by Mahathma Gandhi, Freedom at Midnight, "Consolations" by Swami Ramakrishnanda,  Krishna Menon's biography, "Power of Positive Thinking" by Norman Vincent Peale, books by Kuldip Nayyar, M.O. Mathai, Kaifi Azmi and the list trails on... My 100 odd pages of scrap book is full of reminiscent diamonds about which I can rightfully be proud of . When I am able to enjoy such collection after 30 years, I felt the compulsive need to share the benefit of this habit with others and so decided to post this in my blog.

Recently, I felt the need to look for this scrap book when I was reading Robin Sharma's "Who will cry, when you die"- the book was so full of collectibles that I cannot live without sharing it, I felt.

I recommend this as an affordable habit and elsewhere in this blog, I will also attempt to provide glimpses of the collections. Such thoughts, I feel is the takeaway one can have from readings.