Making time, staying positive, and finding your mojo — books that let you do just that

In this digital age, we often find ourselves swimming in an overwhelming sea of information. Books provide a welcome escape from that world.

Books provide us with an opportunity to lose ourselves in their pages and partake of new experiences and perspectives so we can enhance our own. They are the means of self-discovery.

YourStory reached out to women to ask them what they read this year. Here is a list of books that we discovered.

Overwhelmed — Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time by Brigid Schulte

Parimala Hariprasad, Senior UX Architect at Amadeus Software Labs, says, “As we are nearing the end of this year, I felt overwhelmed about how the year passed and what is left of it. Just then, this super cool book came to my notice. It is just the book that all of us need to read. John Robinson, a well-known time-use researcher claims that women have at least thirty hours of leisure every week and men have much more than that. If you feel like you are clanged on the head with a frying pan, it is a must-read book for you.”

Stop the Excuses by Dr Wayne Dyer

“This book is custom made for the Indian woman,” says Vidushi Daga, Co-founder of CloneFutura. She says, “Many of us spend a large chunk of our initial years on this planet playing second fiddle. And these formative years leave lasting thinking patterns that are detrimental to the older us. Dr Dyer has expounded on how to get rid of those dangerous patterns and become an achiever, a go-getter; the book is thus especially redeeming for women in our cultural context.”

Learned Optimism by Martin Selgman

Deepa Subramanian, Founder and Creative Head, Galerie De’Arts, says, “This book by the father of positive psychology was suggested repeatedly by a close friend. The book has a path-breaking approach to fighting negativity. Women have enough reason to add negative thoughts about themselves to their heads because of the pressures they face from people, peers and self. Although the book is not specifically addressed to women, I feel the far-reaching benefits are more for a woman.”

 Neverisms by Dr Mardy Grothe

Deepa highly recommends this one too. She says, “More than a book to read, it has become a handbook for me that can be read and re-read several times. The book has a fantastic light-heartedness about serious issues that can completely change your outlook on life.”

Why We Love The Way We Do by Preeti Shenoy

CEO of Pink Lemonade Tina Garg says, “This book has had a personal impact on me.” This is a collection of essays, each of which focuses on relationships and their different aspects.

My Gita by Devdutt Patnaik

Nidhi Agarwal, Founder of Kaaryah, has been reading this book. She says, “I think this book simplifies critical concepts from the Bhagavad Gita such that they become easy not just to understand, but also to remember and execute. We all know the famous ‘Work hard and don’t bother about the result because you have done all you can; you have given it your best shot’. Incidentally, The Gita has volumes on the ability to stay objective and a criticality in empathising with people, which in turn helps you help them towards success.”

Tina Garg recommends books by Sudha Murthy. She says, “I love how she captures the essence of women in smaller towns and villages — a milieu I’m generally not familiar with.”

Standup comedian Sumukhi Suresh shares two well known and interesting reads. “They are well known, but I got the time to read these two books only this year — The Palace of Illusions and, yes please, Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” she shares.

As we step into a new year, perhaps it is a good time to pick up a few of these books as we reflect upon our journey and all that we did in the past twelve months. Let us think about our life, our goals and relationships, and how we want to make things different in the New Year. Happy reading!