world book day Archives - DU Beat - Delhi University's Independent Student Newspaper

This world book day, DU Beat celebrates the art of reading and brings to you 10 ways to cultivate and preserve your reading habits:

No matter how much convenience a Kindle has to offer, you can never get over the smell of new books or the excitement of finding a rose in between the pages of your old high school favourites. The bookmarks, the coffee stains, the little notes in between the chapters, on every page, make reading a book so much more special. This world book day, we celebrate authors, editors, writers, illustrators, publishers, and libraries for preserving the essence of reading, over all these years. Always.

This celebration of books is marked in over 100 countries all over the world. In 1995, UNESCO decided that the World Book Day will be celebrated on 23rd April every year, to commemorate the death of William Shakespeare as well as the birth and death of several other prominent authors!
This World Book Day, DU Beat brings to you a list of ways through which you can preserve your reading habits and your love for stories;

1. Read a little every day

The first step to cultivating and sustaining your reading habits is to make sure that you take out at least 10-15 minutes from your daily schedule to sit and read. Be it during breakfast or before your bedtime, make sure you read. This will unconsciously create a habit of reading for you.

2. Carry a book along wherever you go

A book can prove to be the best company. It’s proven to be therapeutic and also the most productive use of your time. Be it a 10 minute ride or a 10 hour journey, make sure that you have an out to drown yourself in the world of words.

3. Make a list

Create a list of the books that you want to read. It could be in your personal diary, your journal or your phone’s notes folder, make sure that you constantly have at least 10 names on your to-read list. Keep adding recommendations and crossing out the ones that you’ve read. This will serve as a great source of inspiration to you to read more.

4. Fill your book rack

Keep filling your book shelves and racks with books that are close to your heart, books that feel like home. Buy classics, in an effort, to honour the stories that have shaped our history and always have a book on your bedside table.

5. Visit a library at least once a week

Issuing books from a library is a much cheaper alternative to buying them each time. It also keeps you on your toes about the return dates and the overdue fines.

6. Try out used book stores

You can donate boxes full of your old books and get discounts on the old books. There’s something so special about reading a book that’s already been read with all the footnotes and bookmark imprints and coffee stains.

7. Set a goal

Decide the number of books that you want to read in a year. It could be 10 or 50 or 100. Give yourself a target and actively work towards achieving, rather exceeding that target.

8. Create a log

Create a little diary where you write the starting date, the ending date, and approximately the number of hours you spent reading the book. It’ll serve as motivation for you to read the next book in lesser time.

9. Create a board of your favourite quotes

Write down your favourite quotes and lines on a board, without paying attention to the order. Mess it all up a little. Keep the conversation going and read those sentences every day to remind yourself why you read.

10. Don’t give up mid- book

We all have our phase of a reader’s block and of not being able to find the book interesting enough to be completed, but try your best not to give up mid-book and complete what you’ve started. If nothing else, it’ll give you a feeling of an accomplishment.

More than anything, remember that reading is an art in itself and it makes this world a much more beautiful place to live in! Be it the romances or the comedies, books give you a reason to not give up, to laugh, to love, and to live a little more. They take you to a world that is completely their own but also yours. Cheers to books and stories that make you who you are and make this world a lot more beautiful!

Feature Image Credits: Popular Science

Muskan Sethi
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For anyone who likes to read, immersing oneself into a story, a thought process, an idea, an opinion is so fascinating – our books become the little niches we make for ourselves; niches that may be happy or sad, full of optimism or rigidly cynical, but are all ours, and influence us in more ways than we are perhaps even conscious of. For any avid reader, choosing favourites out of these little niches is incomprehensibly hard. Which book made me think harder? Which book completely changed the way I think? Which book helped me get through a stressful time? Having struggled with these questions for a bit, I’ve finally come up with the four books that changed my life:

The Color Purple, Alice Walker – Alice Walker introduced me to what it was like to be a black woman in the most objectionably racist and sexist environments – a reality for many people even today. Written in the form of letters by a black woman (initially to ‘God’ and then to her sister), The Color Purple is tragic yet liberating. At sixteen, the book taught me that even the very construction of the figure of the Almighty (seen by most imaginations as a white man) is packed with patriarchy and racism. Everything about this book made me think differently, and I pick it up every now and then, just for some perspective.

Black Skins, White Masks, Frantz Fanon – I was introduced to this book in a classroom, where Fanon’s thought of internalized racism touched me deeply enough to be interested in a book that was part of the course curriculum – and it was possibly one of the most intelligent things I have done. Black Skins, White Masks makes you question the way you see yourself, the lens with which you look at yourself when you look into the mirror and makes you understand the numerous subconscious biases you hold against yourself. This devastatingly beautiful book changed my life in ways that are difficult to put into words.

Feminism is for Everybody, Bell Hooks – Short, comprehensive and incredible, Feminism is for Everybody was the first book I read on Feminism (possibly because it is most easily available on the internet – you could grab a PDF off Google – it will be worth it!), and it has only intrigued me to know more about the fascinating and courageous women’s movements across the globe and the political ideology.

The Palace of Illusions, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni – It’s hard to put this book down. The Palace of Illusions taught me how important perspective is in viewing every situation. Having read it in my first year of college, when I was constantly deconstructing all my ideas of black and white, right and wrong, Divakaruni’s book reaffirmed all that I was learning in class about the ‘lens’ with which we view life. Seen from the eyes of Draupadi, the epic Mahabharata becomes a completely different, and far more overwhelming story.

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