Category: Books

Kafka could have written it as a man with a stroke or a chronic disease. No speech, or movement. Most probably with a feeding tube. Instead, he wrote a man who turns into an gigantic ugly insect. That feels like an odd choice, if he wanted to slap us with the truth.

The book metaphor helps us get close to hard things or even perceive the hard things in life. An insect is strange, scary and could be unreelable at times. The reader can feel disgust without facing what that disgust means about real people. Or maybe metaphor does the opposite. Who knows? But, it does gives us the distance. It lets us write about cruelty without admitting it. It does happens to real bodies, in real homes. I am not sure whether fiction tells the truth. Maybe it just helps us avoid it or sugar coats in a better way.

Either way, something exits in layers. Gregor stops earning money. His family’s love starts to change. Not all at once. First there is worry, then duty and then tiredness. Then his sister calls him it. No one chooses to stop loving him. It wasn’t their choice. But it just turns out their love needed his usefulness to keep going. Once that stopped, they also did.

I used to think that being useful was the most beautiful reason or even a purpose to live. My old blogs scream the same. Something solid to hold onto when nothing else made sense. But these days, with a personal event having happened, there is this particular kind of question that lingers.

Which kind of usefulness did I mean? Is there usefulness I create for myself (a sense of moving forward without any external validation), or is usefulness the price of being kept?

The kind Gregor’s family ran on. I thought I meant the first kind. Now I am not so sure. Maybe confused?

If usefulness is the real foundation and everything stands on it, what happens when it is gone or broken? Not as an idea. But as something a body can no longer do.

That is the real problem with calling usefulness a purpose or a duty. It works until it does not. There is nothing in the idea that tells you what is supposed to hold you up once it is taken away. Is there anything like that? I doubt.

Perhaps that is the most useful thing the insect ever did. Just making us question once you stop reading it as fiction.

Cheers

Check out the previous post: A Room of One’s Own

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Women couldn’t write before, because they had no money and space of their own. Not because the talent wasn’t there. But the conditions weren’t available to them. This was clearly pointed by Virginia Woolf in 1929 in her book. This is one of the most precise argument made in the book.

She tries and brings it out carefully across the literature and books published. For centuries, women were the protected gender. Mostly kept away from hard labor, war, physical danger. On the surface, it looks like care or even protection. But this comes with a price she says.

No access to libraries, no legal right to own property until few decades ago, no institutional recognition. The fragility that followed was biological or intentional? I don’t know. Maybe it was produced by the confinement, then used to justify continuing it.

Think like this. If someone is only ever given desk jobs, never allowed near physical work, and then someone points and says, See, she has no muscle. Right now, most of us don’t have unless we hit the gym or do strength training. That’s not an observation. That’s a setup or system is for generations. Woolf argues that womanhood was a protected occupation. The protection looked like shelter. It was a prison with a nicer name. She also brings out that it would be better to have money than voting power. Seems valid isn’t it? even now?

She builds this argument carefully, almost strategically. And then something I felt strange happens at the end. Maybe after effect of reading Nawal El Saadawi? I am not sure tho.

After documenting every obstacle, generations of women who died without writing a word. Woolf concludes that the greatest creative mind is androgynous. To write without gender. This was quite contradicting to me. Transcending the whole thing entirely. This raised an obvious question.

How do you transcend conditions that were never neutral to begin with? Possible? The androgynous ideal assumes a level of inner freedom (maybe, Zen mode) that only becomes possible after the material conditions (money, time and space for oneself) are already secured. Shakespeare could write without ego about his gender because no one was using his gender against him. Nor he was denied of things.

And then there’s Judith Shakespeare. Woolf’s imaginary sister example. Equally talented, born into the wrong body in the wrong century. Maybe, I need to read again to understand the reference point quoted. We don’t actually know what Shakespeare thought about women and his state of mind while writing. We just know he became the default measure of genius. She could have spoken more of Jane Austen, I believe.

So why that as ending?

Probably because 1929 had limits on how much anger/opinions were allowed to express. The androgyny conclusion was the part that made the rest of the book listenable to people who needed to hear it. Maybe, It was the compromise or maybe not.

Maybe we don’t know Woolf’s full inner state either. Maybe she didn’t pull the punch out of strategy. Maybe she genuinely arrived at gender neutrality not as a compromise, but as someone who had processed the anger so completely that she wrote from the other side of it.

Is the androgynous conclusion a ending she hit, or a place she actually reached genuinely. We can’t know and never know.

But that’s almost the point. She pushed through conditions that were designed to stop her before she started. And somehow, at the end of it, she’s still asking us to go further. To write better, to think freer, to not stop where she stopped.

Cheers

PS: Might read other books of hers.

Check out the previous post: Obsession (2026)

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I’m simply connecting dots from the books I’ve been reading lately and they all seem to arrive at the same point.

Once we know ourselves, truly know ourselves, the question changes from Who is influencing us? to Who are we choosing to become?

Nietzsche wrote, He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

Frankl saw this in the harshest reality in the concentration camps. The prisoners who held onto a why (a family waiting, a mission unfinished, a person they wanted to remain) survived longer than those who lost meaning. A few stayed true to themselves despite the cruelty around them; they didn’t let the environment turn them into something they were not. Their purpose kept them alive when everything else was stripped away.

Stephen Covey says that it Begins with the end in mind. Imagine our eulogy. What do we want people to remember? Integrity? Courage? Kindness? Wisdom? Then we build our lives backward from that vision.

But here’s the uncomfortable part!

The reason most people never do this work isn’t lack of information. Maybe it’s fear. When we define our own “why,” we lose our excuses. We can’t blame our parents, our past, or our circumstances. We become responsible. We must stand alone with our choices. Quite scary to own up for everything in life right?

That’s why the five-people principle is so seductive. It lets us off the hook. I’m just a product of my environment. But once we know ourselves and choose our direction, we’re admitting that this is on me now.

All these thinkers are pointing to a shared idea

• Know our why (the inner anchor)
• Define who we want to be and not what we want to have
• Let that vision guide our choices

This is how we escape unconscious conditioning. Most of us inherit our why from society and never question it. But when we choose it consciously, everything shifts.

We select the five people around us based on who supports our becoming. We see suffering as a test and proof of our commitment to our values. We stop drifting because there’s a North Star in sight.

Everything external can fall away. Who we choose to be is what remains.

Cheers

Check out the previous post: Child Labor, Chocolate & the Creator Economy!

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It’s been a long time since I picked up a big, heavy fiction book. Honestly, I didn’t plan to read this one. I found it at a book fair, on sale. Something about the cover pulled me in. That’s how it started.

This book is not for everyone. I won’t recommend it widely. It’s not an easy read. It’s raw. It’s intense.

The story follows Hannah, an alcoholic. It explores her inner world, her family, and her partner. As you read, it feels like you’re inside an intoxicated body. Things are hazy. Reality slips in and out. The writing mirrors the confusion and chaos of addiction.

I’ve often wondered, can a book hold all the messy thoughts in our heads? This one does. It throws everything in. The pain. The longing. The blurriness of being lost.

Some parts are clear, some are foggy. Just like Hannah’s mind.

I’ve met a few people who struggle with alcohol. This book helped me see their world differently. Not with judgment, but with a bit more understanding.

Cheers!

Check out the previous post: Tourist Family

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Here are my key takeaways from Don’t Believe Everything You Think by Joseph Nguyen. It’s a quick and easy read, not a heavy one! Trust me!

The book highlights the difference between thoughts and thinking. This helps us to see and understand why we experience anxiety, nervousness, and negativity. It also explains how the rational mind works in justifying it.

I trust my inner instincts, and this book added a layer to that belief as well.

The quotes in it were inspiring. One that stood out to me was from Albert Einstein.

No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.

Cheers

PS: Re-reading might bring something else!

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I’ve always believed that it’s nearly impossible to express deep emotions with words. I tend to overexplain when I want to make sure others understand where I’m coming from. But sometimes, I just give up because no matter how much I explain, words can’t capture the feeling.

Dostoevsky proved me wrong. When I first picked up White Nights, I thought, How could he convey everything in few pages? I was skeptical. But when he describes his history to Nastenka, I was dead. Hell!

I never knew loneliness could be expressed so deeply. The way he describes emotions, even in third-person, pulls you into his world. The rollercoaster of emotions in just 76 pages still stays with me. N number of times, the name was mentioned.

Some of his lines, especially, struck me:

One could not help asking oneself whether ill humored and capricious people could live under such a sky.

Nothing else! Why, is not that enough for you, you insatiable person?

Because he is the artist of his own life, and creates it for himself every hour to suit his latest within.

One deceives oneself and unconsciously believes that real true passion is stirring one’s soul, one unconsciously believes that there is something living, tangible in one’s immaterial dreams! And is it delusion?

I do not blame you because I have no power over your heart, such is my fate!

Let them flow, let them flow, they don’t hurt anybody. They will dry.

Oh, if only he were you, echoed in my mind.

I saw myself just as I was now, fifteen years hence, older, in the same room, just as solitary

Is that too little for the whole of a man’s life?

Now, I understand, why people quote him rather than expressing themselves!

Cheers!

PS: Loved the name, Nastenka!

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The difference between reading a novel and a self-help book is quite interesting.

Novels are immersive and easy to remember. You can breeze/skim through them quickly. You can read them at your own pace and easily pick up the story whenever you return.

On the other hand, self-help books demand your full attention. You need to absorb, reflect, and sometimes reread to truly grasp the ideas.

They take longer to finish, requiring focused attention and energy, but in the end, they reward you with that satisfying “aha” moment.

Cheers!

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Finished reading Metamorphosis. At first, the book takes you to an imaginary world. So far, I’ve been reading non-fiction or self-help books, where the scenes are easier to imagine. This was different. I found myself trying to visualize the vermin as described in the book. I’m not sure how much it matches Kafka’s. No where near!

The first two chapters didn’t affect me much. It was interesting to see how people initially react when the breadwinner of the family turns into a vermin. But the third chapter hits you hard. It truly made me understand the meaning behind the title Metamorphosis.

Here’s what stood out to me:

• His struggles to accept the transformation: At first, he finds it hard to believe he has turned into a vermin. The physical appearance!
• Hiding from others: He avoids facing anyone and hides. By the end, he doesn’t even care. Swept off by the violin music.
• Losing his voice: He tries to speak at first but eventually loses even the thought of communicating.
• Family dynamics: Grete, his sister, cares for him. She tries feeding him different foods. But over time, even she gets tired of cleaning and feeding him.
• Adapting to darkness: He gets used to staying in the shadows.
• Pain changes: The pain is sharp at first but dulls over time.
• Family’s independence: The family, once dependent on Gregor, slowly learns to fend for themselves.
• Longing for connection: Despite everything, he craves human connection especially Grete.

While reading, I kept linking this book to The Courage to Be Disliked. I’m not entirely sure why. One is a novel, and the other is philosophical. Yet, both made me reflect on this: to feel alive and truly live, a person needs to feel useful to others

Now, if we consider Adlerian philosophy, it teaches us to find meaning by contributing to others without expecting recognition or validation. However, Gregor longed for connection. His value was lost, and complete isolation broke him. This shows how isolation can harm us psychologically.

While internal meaning is important, we are social beings at heart or by nature. The real challenge is finding balance. Feeling worthy on our own while staying meaningfully connected to others or to the community. Balance is one of the hardest things to do, extremes are always easier!

Books like Kafka’s Metamorphosis and The Courage to Be Disliked explore these intriguing ideas. They teach us that human value isn’t just about productivity or society’s expectations. It’s much deeper, multidimensional and complex. Hard to get a grasp of it!

That’s what I’m taking away from this book.

Cheers!

P.S. Nudge – Next reading!

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