I read 44 books in 2025

I'd like to believe I'm a bookworm. But these days, I think I'm just a worm. It's quite an irony because at some point, I wrote a post about How To Read More.

I had a small realisation as to how our lives are always assessed in numbers as I reflected on the number of books I read in 2025. How many guests at our wedding, the amount of money we earn, the sizes of our homes, the number of kids we have, the number of followers, the price of our homes, the number of trips we've taken or countries we've visited. All these numbers could showcase a perception of our lives.

There has to be more than just these numbers. Our lives become like games, with each area of our lives becoming a metric: to be scored, totalled and judged. We often think of these like a Black Mirror episode, that it can't happen in real life.

Unfortunately, it can. It has. Anything and everything can be "wrapped" in the Spotify sense and be made into a data-story for the world to judge, for us to signal our social class, for us to beat our chest and ask, "Am I better than everyone?" (in the words of Rama Lauw, of course).

This year, I want to be a bit more mindful in everything I do. I do not want to read just to fulfil an arbitrary number of books to read. I do not want to rack up screen time for nothing. I don't want to visit an exhibition just to say "I've been there, it's nice." I want to have more in-depth understanding of whatever I lay my hands, ears and eyes upon, and not just for the sake of updating this space but to be more appreciative of the work that is thrusted into my hands, ears and eyes.

In other words, I want to be able to world and berbual world.