Tomorrow I am going to start a new challenge. Growing up, I was an avid reader. Somewhere along the way, I stopped being one. I’m not sure if it was due to dry textbooks, carpal tunnel syndrome, chronic back pain, or just pure disinterest, but I lost the thrill of reading.

For this month’s challenge, I am going to take a reading dive that to many might seem dull, but which I find captivating: philosophy texts. More specifically, I find the study of philosophy to be fascinating; books may or may not be.

Here are the parameters for the challenge:

1. Sign-up for a 30-day free trial of Kindle Unlimited. All of the books I will be reading from are available for free or under $1 with this subscription. What this means is that I will be reading mostly from a screen, which isn’t optimum for eye health or skimming, but is incredibly cheap and accessible.

2. Each day, select a book from the following list:

• The Upaniṣhads (8th to 1st century BCE)
• Bhagavad-Gītā (5th to 3rd century BCE)
• Confucius, Analects (c. 500 BCE)
• Plato, Last Days of Socrates (399 BCE)
• Plato, Republic (380 BCE)
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (350 BCE)
• The Daodejing: A short book on Daoist philosophy (c. 300 BCE)
• Epictetus, Discourses (108 CE)
• Lucretius, On the Nature of Things (50 BCE)
• Cicero, On Ends (1st century BCE)
• Seneca, Letters from a Stoic (c. 65 CE)
• Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (161-180 CE)
• Augustine, The City of God (426)
• Huineng, The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch (8th century CE)
• Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (1641)
• Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1677)
• Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)
• Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1690)
• Hume, Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)
• Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748)
• Rousseau, Émile, or On Education (1762)
• Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781)
• Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)
• Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov (1880)
• William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890)
• Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921)
• Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)
• Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949)
• Bertrand Russell, The problem of philsophy (1956)
• Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)

3. Spend at least 1hr/day skimming the book. My goal is not to consume, but to nibble. I am not at all interested in reading for reading’s sake. I want to taste the thoughts from thinkers of ages past and expand the way I view myself. The hour of skimming can be spread out as much as needed during the day.

4. Publish a blog post each week of the challenge. The content will be whatever I have gleaned that week from my readings and musings thereupon. What I write about doesn’t have to be super insightful – just my feelings and thoughts about the books or the excerpts I read from them.

5. Choose 2-3 of the books to put on my purchase list. If I want to read a physical copy of a book, it is more economical for me to borrow it from a library, assuming it is available. However, I do want to develop my own library of books I find especially interesting, meaningful, or that I might want to reread in the future.

6. Restart high-intensity exercise for at least 10 minutes a day. In order for me to glean the most out of my reading this month, my body needs to be in shape. Since my accident, I have become extremely sedentary. This needs to change and this challenge is the motivation I need to do so.

“The mind is just like a muscle – the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets and the more it can expand.”
~ Idowu Koyenikan

Namaste.