Vivek Kaul: A LinkedIn lesson on the opportunity cost of life

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Ian Rankin is my favourite writer. He writes crime fiction set in the city of Edinburgh in Scotland, featuring a now-retired police detective called John Rebus.

Rankin’s latest book featuring Rebus, Midnight and Blue, the twenty-fifth in the series, released on 10 October. I finished reading it at around 12.30am on 13 October. I really enjoyed reading it.

Other than the fact that I always enjoying reading Rankin’s Rebus books, there were three reasons that made the activity even more pleasurable this time around. One, this was the first time I had managed to get hold of a physical Rebus book a day before its release. In the past I have always read new Rebus books on Kindle.

But in the last few years, I have found that reading physical books gives me more pleasure. It also helps me retain more information (while reading non-fiction). This might be an impact of too much screen time with one too many screens being a part of my daily life.

Or as the economists would have put it, the law of diminishing marginal utility seems to have kicked in. Or as us lesser mortals put it, excess of anything is bad. Or in pure business terms, my reading on Kindle days are more or less over.

Long live Amazon: There is still a lot of shopping to do. Two, having visited Edinburgh for three days in late July, I could put a visual to Rankin’s words and relate to the physical spaces in the book in a much better way. Three, unlike the previous two Rebus books, which were written during and after the pandemic, and had a pessimistic undertone running through them, Midnight and Blue has hope at its heart, and even a dyed-in-the-wool old school hack like me who is normally oozing with cynicism enjoyed this slightly