Honest reviews from a guy who hates chemistry: one anime, one fat novel, one series, zero spoilers

Let me begin with a confession: I have the attention span of a squirrel on espresso, and in the last two months I still finished one anime, one 600-page novel and one crime-comedy series. How? Because I stopped treating "fun" as a crime I had to hide from my parents. Instead I made a deal with myself. One episode or twenty pages a night, no more, as a reward for finishing that day's chemistry. Chemistry has never been so productive.

I rate things in moles, not stars. 1 mole = "6.022 x 10^23 of my brain cells enjoyed this". Anything under 0.3 moles is a waste of electricity. Anything above 0.8 I will annoy you about for weeks.

No spoilers. I'll tell you how it felt, not what happens.

1. The volleyball anime (everyone in my class already watched it, I was late, shut up)

Rating: 0.9 moles.

It's about a short, loud kid who really wants to play volleyball and discovers that his height is "a problem". That's it. That's the premise. And somehow it made me cry on a Wednesday afternoon over a serve.

What I loved: nobody in it is a genius for free. Everyone is bad at something, and the show is mostly about the awkward, boring, repetitive practice that makes them slightly less bad. Practice, practice, one tiny improvement, practice again. As a person who thinks I'm "just not a chemistry person", watching a character fail a hundred times at the same receive, and then, in some quiet episode, not fail it, rewired something in my head.

What annoyed me: it is long, and at some point I could predict where the music would swell. Also there's a lot of shouting. I like the shouting but my neighbour doesn't.

Time cost: roughly 25 episodes a season, 24 minutes each, so around 10 hours a season. I did it at one episode per night. That's the whole plan.

2. The big novel (my nani forced it on me)

Rating: 0.7 moles.

It's one of those thick family sagas with a lot of characters whose names all sound a bit similar, spread over three generations in Bengal. I didn't want to read it. I thought it'd be "homework with a hard cover". I read thirty pages the first night out of pure spite and then ended up reading it in four weeks.

What I loved: the way the book describes ordinary stuff. Heat, mango pickles, a dying uncle who refuses to say he's dying, a house that gets smaller every year. It doesn't teach you anything but somehow you feel like you've lived somewhere else for a few weeks.

What annoyed me: the middle 120 pages drag like a Sunday afternoon in a government office. I skimmed. No shame. Also I needed a family tree on a sticky note by page 80, which I drew in the back of my Physics notebook and is now the most useful diagram in that notebook.

My nani asked me what I thought and I said "it was fine". She said "fine?" and I said "okay, I cried at the end, stop looking at me like that".

3. The crime-comedy series (my guilty pleasure)

Rating: 0.5 moles.

A bunch of clueless people accidentally solve a case. Think "a detective show where nobody is a good detective and everyone's bickering in a kitchen". It's silly. It's very, very silly. And I loved how it didn't take itself seriously, at all.

What I loved: the banter. The first three episodes made my brain shut off and relax, which for someone who spends the day staring at the periodic table is a gift.

What annoyed me: by episode 6 the same joke is being told in a different outfit. And the final episode ended on a cliffhanger that felt like it was written by someone who ran out of patience. I did not recover emotionally. I did, however, recover enough to do the next day's Organic.

A quick table, for the people who just scrolled down

Thing	Moles	Best for	Skip if
Volleyball anime	0.9	Feeling like effort matters	You're allergic to shouting
Fat Bengal novel	0.7	Weekends, slow weeks	You want fast plot
Crime-comedy series	0.5	Switching your brain off	You get annoyed by repeating jokes

What I actually learned about studying, which is not the point but also kind of the point

1. Fun with a limit is fun. Fun without a limit is a trap. One episode a night works because it ends. A whole season in one night is how I lost Sunday in class 10.
2. Rewarding yourself after the boring task works better than rewarding yourself instead of it. Chemistry first, then the show. It's the only reason I did Hydrocarbons properly.
3. Stories fix your mood in ways that more study doesn't. Don't tell my parents I said this.
4. You need to talk about the thing afterwards. Half the joy was arguing with Rohan about whether the best character was the setter or the libero (it's the libero, he's wrong).

And honestly? I'm still bad at chemistry. I got 14/30 in the last unit test and my teacher wrote "improving" in red ink, which I'm choosing to read as a hug. But I am slightly less afraid of the subject now, in the same way that the kid in the anime is slightly less afraid of the net.

Drop your own moles ratings below. If you have a good thin book (under 200 pages), I need it. My neck can't take another 600-pager.