In August 2015, my friend Rajib Aditya embarked on a unique journey called Contrapunkt. It was a massive undertaking in which he posted an excerpt from a book every day for a whole year, never repeating a book.

Rajib would scan entire chapters of a book using his Epson scanner, clean and convert them to text before posting them. The chapters were chosen such that they were representative of the entire book, or they were interesting to the reader. Rajib soon got a small but dedicated readership.

After a year, the sheer effort of posting everyday bore down heavily on Rajib, and he halted the effort.

Rajib’s interests are varied, and a lot of his reading is academic in nature. Contrapunkt introduced me to new ideas and authors. This website is a homage to Contrapunkt; the goals, however, are not the same.

The books I read are generally easy reads, and that is likely to manifest itself in the psots. Individual extracts will not be entire chapters or representative of the whole book, but I hope they will still be interesting and insightful. I will also not be as prolific as Rajib in posting, but I hope it will be a sustained effort. I hope readers will find it worth their time to drop by or subscribe via RSS feed.

In a way, it is also an effort to support the publishing industry, and it is my hope that extracts from curated books will provide a reason for some of the readers to buy and read the entire book.

Lastly, I would like it if this grows into a collaborative effort where I’m not the only one posting. This website is hosted as a project on Github. Please feel free to submit a pull request for a post, or email me excerpts from books that you think will be a good addition to this this motley collection.

This website is created using Jekyll and hosted free on Github. A special thanks to the developers of Jekyll, and github. Without them, this effort would never have taken off.

Rajib and I grew up in the same town, a decade or so apart, but we first met on facebook. I dedicate this effort to the Shillong that was once the Scotland of the East.

Rajbir, Cork IE, 4/27/2019