Books: Our best friends

I love reading books. Right now I am reading "The Magic of Thinking Big" by David Schwartz. Fiction, non-fiction, technical, any will do. It is true that books are our best friends. We laugh with them, learn from them, sometimes even shed a tear with them.

The best thing about books is that we can learn from the author's experience. What takes a person decades to learn has been put in an understandable way into books. It is thanks to such wonderful gifts of learning that we can enrich and improve our lives.

There are good books and bad ones. Picking out the good ones is an important task and only true book lovers master that skill. Also knowing the treasure troves of books is very useful especially in a city like Mumbai which discourages reading. I would love to know about the small book shops especially down town which offer some really good bargains on really good books. There are plenty of book chain stores in the city but they all keep the usual stuff: best sellers and all.

And first hand books are out of my budget as for many of the city's book lovers. So the few options that we have is either to purchase pirated books available at railway stations or the city streets (Just bought The Greatness Guide - Robin Sharma). Or go to some book store with second hand books. Or go to CST and try to find some goodies in the piles that are stacked on the footpaths. Another option if you cannot travel easily is to find a local raddi wala who stacks books (most are very impolite and don't be optimistic about bargains). One other option which I find is great for people who read books is to join a library. I think the good ones are all downtown. I hear the British Council Library is good. It has a vast range of books in many diverse subjects. Also it has an online library access provided with membership. So that is pretty cool.

Hoping we read lots and lots of good books this year.

Visit my book shelf at http://www.shelfari.com/rodrigueskevin/shelf