2023

1. Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts (5/5)

Vive l’Empereur!!

2. Nothing Ventured by Jeffrey Archer (2/5)

not his best work…

still pretty good

3. Hidden in Plain Sight by Jeffrey Archer (2/5)

alright, but nowhere near his best. The ending was a solid 0/5.

4. Turn a Blind Eye by Jeffrey Archer (4.5/5)

Is this the book that gets the series back on track? I hope so…

Much better that the first two, an actual page turner, even though I wonder if Julian is just a bad lawyer for letting BW have so many chances. He’s just on the side of the angels.

No clue why the Rashidi thread was dealt with this badly, maybe Faulkner is the final boss for Warwick and that is Archer’s plan going forward.

5. The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell (3/5)

reads like a literature review of fairy tales. not all bad, although it’s brilliant that so many stories overlap in content (without a need for secondary interpretation)

6. The Iliad & The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Robert Fagles (4/5)

not the best translation, it gets so many things wrong. But the story stands tall, un-blemishable.

7. The Great Terror by Robert Conquest (0.5/5)

I was listening to the audiobook and it was way too infodense for me to follow anything. I’m going to read the Stalin biographies before I get back to this.

8. Circe by Madeline Miller (5/5)

I thought it was pronounced suhrsee, but the Greeks would have said kierke with a short eya sound.

9. Complications by Atul Gawande (5/5)

Incredibly well written. I will re-read this multiple times. Loved it. Best book I’ve read this year, beating Napoleon’s biography.

10. The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides (4.5/5)

11. Normal People by Sally Rooney (4/5)

12. The Innovators by Walter Isaacson (4/5)

13. A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman (5/5)

14. Carrie Soto is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid (3/5)

The ending is a betrayal. I loved this book so much and I hate it now.

15. Amazon Unbound by Brad Stone (4.25/5)

I’ve always had a soft spot about Jeff Bezos and the Amazon story. I mean, starting an internet book store and turning it into a global empire worth more than one and a half trillion dollars using leverage, and the power of technology, is extraordinary. I bought a physical copy of Amazon Unbound from a local bookstore, back in 2021, and decided to finally read it this summer.

It’s easy to read the book, partly because the story is captivating, but also because Brad Stone can spin a good yarn. So many times, I found myself stopping to think about how unreal what Amazon and Jeff Bezos were doing. Let us give the S-Team some credit too, so this means that the S-Team, and Jeff were working, more often than not, simultaneously, on the following things:

• Echo (Alexa)
• Go stores
• Fresh
• AWS
• Washington Post
• Expansion into India, China, Europe, and Mexico
• Fire Phone
• Kindle
• Primevideo
• Independent delivery system
• Advertisements
• Blue Origin
• HQ2
• Amazon PR
• COVID-19

While reading about Bezos’ idea to sell steak on a truck by going around neighbourhoods, I realized that so much of Amazon’s seemingly brilliant ideas would never have taken off if they didn’t have the capital. So now, the question is, if you gave a lot of people (a statistically significant number) a lot of money, would they reproduce Amazon’s results? Culture matters a lot, but are there other cultures that could achieve similar or greater levels of success?

Amazon opened up their store to sellers from China who flooded their market with low-quality ripoffs. So the question is, do you just give everything to the customer and let them make the choice or do you enforce a quality bar that all sellers have to cross? And on the next level, what does it mean for sellers that are making high quality originals if a Chinese clone will always take away their customer base?

Amazon Go and their “Just Walk Out Technology”. How do you create the best store in the world?

I don’t think Jeff was at his best with Blue Origin, maybe that was one step too much for the great man, maybe he was just unlucky. But Blue Origin should have done so much more.

What is the future of Amazon now? Can they afford to ignore structural and organizational inefficiencies and go innovating again? Or will Jassy have to iron out some kinks first?

These were questions I had, I will end with my favourite leadership principle from Jeff. Principle 8: Think Big. Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

16. Uncommon Type by Tom Hanks (2.5/5)

made me look at typewriters to buy, the writing is okay, some stories are better than the others. The foreword about typewriters is some nice writing, so are the chapters with Anna, MDash, and Steve Wong. The rest aren’t that great.

17. The Sittaford Mystery by Agatha Christie (2.5/5)

I can’t believe I never read all those Agatha Christie books lying around in my library. I actually enjoyed her writing, even though I skimmed through much of the book to find out what I’d been suspecting halfway through the book. I initially gave it 3.5 stars but now that I think of it, 3.5 stars is way too generous for this book, considering that finding out who the killer is didn’t need all the other revelations made in the book about all the characters. That was just used to add some spice and suspicion, and not actually used in the final analysis. Emily Trefusis is a brilliantly written character, very well done.

18. Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling (5/5)

I will never rate this series anything less than a complete 5 out of 5. Nothing has come close, and will anything ever come close? This time around, I listened to the audiobook versions of all the books except for the Deathly Hallows for which I just wasn’t patient enough to listen to the audiobook, and had to open my physical copy. Stephen Fry does very well, and I only realized after listening to him do the various accents of the UK about why Hagrid, Tonks, and Seamus’ dialogues were written that way. The last time I read the books, I was too young, and wasn’t aware of all the accents. So that was a new experience for me. The Jim Dale audiobooks are just as good, but I don’t know why he made Bellatrix sound slightly Eastern European.

19. Titan by Ron Chernow (4.25/5)

When you read a book of this magnitude, you always have a moment when something profound strikes you. For me, it was when I was nearing the midpoint of the book, and I read that John D. had retired, or more like, gave away most duties to Archbold. So that meant that more than half of the book was dedicated to his life after Standard Oil. I wasn’t expecting this, but now that I’ve finished reading the book, I realize how much more should have been there.

Titan, derived from the Greek $\text{Τιτάν}$, originally referring to the offspring of the sky and the earth, they were larger than life, primordial to the gods, all-encompassing, all-powerful beings. You tend to lose sight of Rockefeller’s status as you read episode after episode of him conducting history-making events. A few times in the book, when Chernow addresses him as the Titan, you pause to think about it and it hits you.

John D. Rockefeller evokes so many conflicting emotions in you, you alternate from admiration, to perplexion, to alarm, to wonder, and then back to admiration. I’m not sure you can tell what drove him, he made money for the sole purpose of making money, and then gave it away with pinpoint precision, aimed at the best causes of his times. He was adamant about his name not going on anything he gave to, which led to me being surprised throughout the book that he was the cause for so many great institutions to rise. He evades, very much to my frustration, all attempts to stereotype him. He makes it even harder by being evasive and secretive on purpose. He worked with feverish devotion, and made every move after being frustratingly slow and careful, his schedule was rigid, he had no impulses, and was obsessively pedantic about his money. On the other hand, he retired very young, and spent the rest of his life with youthful energy with his family in the estates he built.

There were so many big names sprinkled throughout his life, I did not know that he founded the University of Chicago, or that he was the first to start funding large scale medical research (the vaccine against hookworm, and malaria treatment research). Names like Helen Keller, who was partially given financial assistance by Rockefeller, Ida Tarbell who was Rockefeller’s kryptonite and successfully brought to light the unsavory aspects of his rise to the top, Mark Twain, I learnt that the MoMA was founded by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, wife of Junior, Carl Jung who treated his daughter Edith in Europe, and then got funded by Rockefeller money, Frederick T. Gates who helped Rockefeller invest and give away his money wisely and Teddy Roosevelt, who was a master politician, and always seemed to get away with double-crossing Standard Oil.

Chernow writes this biography with all the colour of a novel, he takes care to psychologically delve into Rockefeller’s early days, that leaves us wanting more. However, I wasn’t too fond of all the discussion about Rockefeller’s minor satellites, like his work with the Baptist church, or Junior’s life and heirs. While they were an important part of his life, I wanted more of John D. than the others. There’s also an unnecessary theme running throughout the book that Rockefeller was not as bad as Tarbell made him out to be, which felt too much like, “the lad doth protest too much”.

This makes me want to read The Power Broker by Robert Caro, which is supposed to be a better piece of writing. Watch this space!!

20. Idea Man by Paul Allen (3/5)

Allen has a line about computer programming being a meritocracy and how anyone could write programs regardless of background. And then, a few pages later, he writes about how he racked up hundreds of dollars in compute time, and his dad just paid for them. Myopic.

This venture was super interesting, considering how my first academic research was along these lines. Traf-O-Data — wikipedia.org

The book is excellent; I loved all the parts about Bill and his unrelenting leadership style. Definitely would have loved to read more about Bill. Paul Allen is super-cool, too. With his Renaissance man style of living, he probably squeezed more from the lemon than Bill Gates did. The best part is Paul Allen’s prescience, it is uncanny, and you start to wonder if his predictions were as trivial to make as he makes them sound. The appendix lists ideas in Artificial Intelligence that Allen describes, and many have been solved in the last couple of years. RIP, Paul Allen; you literally would have loved 2023.

21. The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes (5/5)

I was first aware of the effects of the twin bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from a Vikram Seth poem almost a decade ago. “A Doctor’s Journal Entry for August 6, 1945,” writes about the plight of the citizens of Hiroshima immediately after Little Man exploded in the air above their unassuming daily lives. We were made to watch a documentary about the bombing in school. We had to write essays about the inhumanity of the bombing for credit.

A couple of years later, I was introduced to Richard Feynman via his undergraduate level Physics lectures. He talks about his time in Los Alamos in his autobiography. I was reintroduced to the atomic bomb purely from a scientific perspective. The burning and mass murder of an entire city was unimportant in the face of an atom’s profound power within its nucleus. And why shouldn’t it be? We had come far from the days of Democritus and Aristotle. From Newton to Dalton to Avogadro, all of whom set the atom and the molecule firmly in stone. The electron came to life as a cathode ray when Thomson applied a voltage across two electrodes in a vacuum. Rutherford mentioned an idea for an experiment to Marsden and Geiger, resulting in the famous gold-leaf experiment that showed us the nucleus. Niels Bohr used ideas from Max Plank and Einstein to show how the electrons wouldn’t collapse into the nucleus, Rutherford split nitrogen to produce protons, and Chadwick discovered the neutron. And finally, rounding off everything, de Broglie, Schrödinger, and Heisenberg described the complete atom with electron positions as pure probabilities. The atom was whole. All that remained was the task of splitting it.

When you read Feynman’s accounts of his time at Los Alamos, you have this impression that he was the main character and that life at Los Alamos revolved around him (or maybe I was too taken by the great man to not see the bigger picture). So it was surprising to me that he’s only mentioned thrice in the entire book and only one of those times he’s described as doing anything (setting up the radio before the Trinity test). The giants that split the atom were no less impressive than the ones mentioned above. It all started with Henri Becquerel, Marie Curie, Pierre Curie and Rutherford realizing that some nuclei undergo radioactive decay. The energetic Fermi bombarded Uranium with neutrons, leading to Otto Hahn and Lisa Meitner producing Barium from Uranium, which caused Meitner’s nephew Frisch to call the process “nuclear fission”. Enter Leó Szilárd, who realized that a chain reaction would be possible. After this final hurdle of theoretical understanding was crossed, Szilárd, Teller, and Wigner took Einstein’s endorsement and sent the famous letter to Roosevelt. The juggernaut was set into motion, with enigmatic Robert Oppenheimer leading it. Man would learn to harness a tiny bit of the force of nature, and the world would never be the same again.

The writing has the rigour of profound scientific exposition and a thriller novel’s pace. I wish I could write like this. Just for the writing, I’d recommend reading the book. The chapter on the bombing is very traumatic to read. I was finally reminded, after all these years, about what I read in Vikram Seth’s poem about people walking around like ghosts, their skin hanging off their flesh. Whether or not the US should have dropped the bombs can be argued. I have a controversial take on this, which could border on victim-blaming, that Hirohito should have surrendered earlier. And why couldn’t the US have starved Japan via a naval blockade? Was this a case of “Rome conquered the world in self-defence”?

The foreword to the latest edition is very insightful; Rhodes asks, “Why seventy thousand nuclear weapons between us when only a few were more than enough to destroy each other?” One of the great books, in league with all the big ones like The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and War and Peace. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, being a scientist myself and having looked up to all the superstars that come together in this book. One last comment I’d like to make is about how fast the Manhattan Project moved; if only we could move at that pace for everything we do.

22. Lifespan by David Sinclair (1/5)

DNF. Should’ve been a blog post. Aging is an important problem to solve, but the book is just too good at being bad to read.

23. Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson (3.75/5)

It is going to be tough for me to review this book. How do you separate the review of the biography from the review of the person? And a person as mercurial, as contemporary, as important as Musk. Elon Musk is not Isaacson’s best work, it reads like it was written in a hurry. More importantly, it reads like it was written for Musk, a literary self-portrait of sorts, where Isaacson feels the need to defend every Musk overture. Having said that, it is a great biography, and I’ve heard that it complements Ashlee Vance’s biography and Eric Berger’s LiftOff.

Musk is well and truly alive, and Isaacson spent a lot of time with him around the 2022-23 Twitter acquisition saga. Both these things mean that there is a lot more focus on the recent past, and that is where the book is the strongest. I suspect that the reason for this is we still don’t know what actions and decisions are important in the grand scheme of things. On the bright side, we get to see how someone like Musk functions every day. Spoiler: it’s right on the edge of every bell curve possible.

If Musk wanted to reclaim some public support, he got it done in the sense that the book reminds readers that Musk is human. That is in a way both redeeming and damning. His impulsive behaviour is very human, and frankly, very normal. His penchant for silly humour, his mood swings, his childlike ambition, flashes of anger, unfiltered enthusiasm for the future, are all very normal. Who among us is a monk? But on the other hand, his tendencies to exhibit his worst sides so publicly and so loudly go against his self-purported vision for humanity. He’s wasting energy and proving that absolute power corrupts absolutely. If he wants to do great things, should he just not focus on doing great things and nothing else?

It would be myopic of me to perform a character assessment from a biography, so I shall stop. The book gives a deep inner look into Musk’s personality. The episodes about the treatment from his father are traumatic to read. Everything good about Musk arises from his love of building great things, everything bad about him is his father. A perfect internalization of the worst flaws of his father, only redeemed by the bright light that is the thirst for knowledge. Isaacson keeps this theme alive all through the book, is it not possible to push your troops without also putting them down everytime you enter “demon-mode”. Leaders should not confuse ruthlessness in execution with ruthlessness towards their teams.

This leads us to the people this affects, the ones around Musk. Unsurprisingly, most quoted in the book have at best, fanatical grovelling and at worst, grudging admiration for the man. This is not a critique as much as it screams, “the lad doth protest too much”. Musk doesn’t seem to have anyone that is capable of inflicting withering feedback onto him, again, a common trope among people that wield absolute power. It is my theory that powerful personalities tend to alienate well-wishers because everytime they ignore advice and it works out, they reinforce their belief in their invincibility. The momentum of victory is a drug.

When I read a few other reviews of this book, it was mostly people complaining about how Isaacson didn’t spend 300 odd pages of the book discussing emerald mines or some variation of the sentiment. Public sentiment around Musk has never been more polarized and that might make us look at Musk as this recent pop culture phenomenon. But Musk is first and foremost an engineer, and that is the strength of this book. His calls to cut everything unnecessary, and fixate on speed is inspirational. All those anecdotes of him getting rid of unnecessary parts, or shaving of extra seconds in a factory, or condensing problems to their first principles, or finding the right metrics to measure progress are very useful to everyone. So many times when employees are outraged by some suggestion, it’s rarely because the suggestion is outlandish, and more because they don’t like how certain Musk is about his suggestion.

Musk is important because space exploration is important, because we need electric cars, we want to achieve full self-driving, and more. But Musk is wrong if he think we’ll get there with flashes of seriousness sprinkled in a bed of largely irresponsible and impulsive behaviour.

Update: A much better review from The Point Magazine

24. The Poison King by Adrienne Mayor (3/5)

It must have been hard to write this book, there are so few accounts of Mithridates that a lot of the book is a retelling of all the myths that surround him. It’s not like the author doesn’t acknowledge this, but it is more proof that this must have been a very hard book to write. I enjoyed it a lot, but there were definitely sections that were obviously filler and boring to go through. There is also some fanfic in the end.

25. The History of Rome by Mike Duncan (4.25/5)

I picked up this book to fill in my gaps of Roman History apart from the major events. I was fairly well-versed with the time of Julius Caesar until the time of his funeral. And with the Punic Wars. But everything before the Punic Wars, about the founding of Rome, to the seven kings, and the structuring of the senate and society, was all unknown. I also didn’t know about the Macedonian Wars that were taking place around the time of the Punic Wars, and how Rome had provinces in Gaul, Spain, and the East (Illyria and Greece). The era of Marius and Sulla, the threat of Mithradates, the last of the strong personalities like Cato the Younger, Pompey, Cicero, Clodius, Mark Antony. I listened to this along with Mike Duncan’s other book, The Storm Before the Storm and now I have most of my questions answered. I think I will pick up with Augustus, move all the way to Nero, and stop there, because that’s much more than I am interested in at the moment. There are way too many names for me to go on until the fall of the Western Roman Empire, much less the Byzantine.

26. The Storm Before the Storm by Mike Duncan (4.25/5)

see my review for The History of Rome by Mike Duncan and add the Gracchi brothers to the list, it is scandalous that I forgot them, considering how it was them that lit the proverbial powder keg

27. The Martian by Andy Weir (4.25/5)

Like Robinson Crusoe but in the 21st century and on Mars. The exact same archetype, so many parallels. It only deviates in the presence of a third person narrative, the presence of earth’s point of view et cetera. Great book, I think the popularity of the book is testament to how attractive our human tendency to survive against all odds is. Also, what a good scifi book. Instead of having an unrealistic scenario where the science is made up, this book has a very realistic setting and shows us how the only things that limit us are the laws of physics. If we can bring everything down to that, we can fix a lot of problems. I wonder if any other scifi book will get this close to being so technically sound and dense. Watney’s character is great, with a lot of life, very Percy Jackson coded.

28. American Kingpin by Nick Bolton (4.5/5)

What a book!! Incredibly riveting, I would say unputdownable but I was listening to it. Listening to non-fiction is not always easy, because most of them are very dense, and you need to keep track of everything in your head without a physical copy to turn back the pages. Not this one, this was a masterclass in writing.

29. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee (3.75/5)

this is lowkey a parenting guide

30. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (3.25/5)

I have nothing to say about this book that has not been already said, nor can I say it any better. I like Kafka’s descriptive style, something I always struggle with while writing.

One thing I strongly felt was that Samsa and his family should have tried to develop a system of communication with each other. The story might have been very different had his family known he understood them. This is no doubt inspired by my recent reading of The Martian, so take this opinion with a grain of salt

31. The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol (3.25/5)

That self-deprecating Russian humour will never fail to be endearing. For some reason, in my head, I vaguely remember The Overcoat as a story of a man’s coat slowly getting worn out until it just ceases to exist anymore. Something like the Ship of Theseus. I don’t know if that’s another story or if my mind is playing tricks on me.

32. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King (3.75/5)

brilliant writing! brilliant story! I held off on reading this almost a decade ago because King was associated with horror, but this book is more a thriller-comedy than a horror story. Maybe I can slowly tiptoe into King’s other works now?

one of my favourite parts about this book is how all of Trisha’s phrases and euphemisms to herself are borrowed from the people around her.

Also, “who do you call when your wind-shield’s busted?”

33. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami (4/5)

The parts about running are written better than the memoir parts, but both are still written very well. The running stuff is more interesting to learn about. I think running is such an interesting activity because the only reason to keep going after you’re completely worn out is to prove something to yourself. I liked the parts where he talks about this choice you face every time you run. It feels Sisyphean.

Every run transforms you, and you learn something about your body and mind that you didn’t know before. I feel this is very true for a lot of sport where you push yourself to get better and better with time. The satisfied player sticks to what they do well, the unsatisfied player is never happy with anything they do. Runners are, by definition, unsatisfied.

This is the first time I’ve read the articulation of the amount of physical effort it takes to sit and write. Sometimes, writing is the most draining work I do, a few hours wipe me out for the entire day. I’m also adding the run from Athens to Marathon to my bucket list.

Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.

34. The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley (3.5/5)

This is the kinda book I imagine people that watch TV series will love to read.

35. A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles (5/5)

What a book, I would say this takes the top spot for the year along with Complications. Maybe this slightly edges Complications in novelty, but maybe not in importance. This is the kind of book one should read very quickly first, and then very slowly a second time, taking in every single sight, smell, taste and touch. Russia remains the greatest literary muse!

One of my favourite quips of the Count is the wisdom from his father about the twice-tolling clock. The first toll is to indicate that one’s day of honest work is done, and the second toll is an admonishment about why one is still awake at that hour. Nina Kulikova has to be the most arresting character, her spectre looms so large over the entire story. The unlabelling of the wine bottles was a very clever metaphor about the times and their signs. So was Mishka’s proclamation about the Burning of Moscow to inconvenience Napoleon. Seven stars.

36. The Stranger by Albert Camus, translated by Matthew Ward (5/5)

The First Line of The Stranger

37. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Constance Garnett (5/5)

One of the greatest literary works ever written. I read this book first in the Monsoon of 2016 and I remember not being impressed by the monologues and the stories of characters peripheral to Raskolnikov. And that is why one re-reads books of this stature, to realize how much one has grown.

I hope to write a longer essay about this book someday but for now, I’ll just list the themes that stood out to me while I was reading the book. I read the Constance Garnett translation for now but the Michael Katz translation is something I want to read before everything else.

• The psyche of Raskolnikov (murderer, extraordinary man, depression, kindness) (the psychological effects of the crime) (all four of Raskolnikov’s nightmares)
• Marmeladov’s speech in the tavern to Raskolnikov (“why should I be pitied?”)
• Raskolnikov’s reluctance to accept help from everyone apart from Sonya
• Raskolnikov & Porfiry Petrovich (the legal system, the debate about his essay, Porfiry as a father figure to Raskolnikov)
• Raskolnikov & Svidrigailov (extraordinary men, immorality vs. amorality)
• Raskolnikov & Sonya (the theist and the atheist, both hopeless, and their attempts to understand) (Sonya as cathartic agent to Raskolnikov’s suffering)
• Crime and Punishment as a commentary on Russian society at the time (this is probably beyond my scope and ability)
• Crime and Punishment as a book about matricide.

38. A Prisoner of Birth by Jeffrey Archer (5/5)

Archer’s best after Kane and Abel, remains a five star read.

39. Troy by Stephen Fry (4.25/5)

This has to be the most accessible and captivating trilogy of books in the modern age for people interested in Greek myths. I listened to the audiobook, and that only enhances the experience.

The story of Troy remains peerless in it’s ability to capture my imagination, so I am biased, but this is a great book.

40. As The Crow Flies by Jeffrey Archer (5/5)

I wonder if Jeff Bezos ever read this book

41. Born a Crime by Trevor Noah (4.75/5)

Brilliant book, I’d forgotten most of it since the time I first listened to the audiobook so it was almost like reading it for the first time, and boy, I have no regrets. Such good writing, I wonder who the ghostwriter is. Funny, inspiration, instructive (about apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa), and emotional. The audiobook takes all of this to another dimension, Noah’s accents and voices are too good.

42. Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga (2.75/5)

Flashes of good writing obscured by a drawn-out, and needlessly complicated plot.

It felt like the author had a bunch of metaphors he absolutely wanted to use and so, sprinkled them throughout the book without much thought. The end of the book is plain bad, such a disappointment after all the build-up.

43. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (3.75/5)

My first GGM book! and it did not disappoint. This book is a mix of narrative and descriptive storytelling although just from this work, it feels like narration is Marquez’ stronger suit.

44. The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris (3.25/5)

Sometimes it feels like these authors take a monumentally interesting story and think of ways to write it in the most boring, blande, and cliched way possible.

45. Chess Story by Stefan Zweig (2.75/5)

Much ado for nothing. And the book is way too overpriced.

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