-
The Woman In Me by Britney Spears 4
4/5
This book was incredibly hard to read, just so sad :(
Fame is the worst double-edged sword ever
-
Living
with a SEAL
by Jesse Itzler 4.25
4.25/5
I will never not love a David Goggins story
"don't stop when you're tired, stop when you're done"
-
The Art Thief by
Michael Finkel 2.75
2.75/5
All the hype for Breitweiser completely loses substance after he
starts stealing just because he can't control himself. Really throws out the
entire "aesthetics are more important than ethics" theme that the author tries
to sell.
What I liked about the book was the description of the artworks, and there is
further reading material at the end of the book for people that are interested
in literature about art.
-
The
Virgin Way
by Richard Branson 3
3/5
Read this once, and write down the important stuff. Not too bad imo
considering how much I loathe this genre
-
Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey 4
4/5
Alright, alright, alright
It was super fun listening to this book. The writing is fantastic, I thought
McConaughey used a ghostwriter. Superb stories, great lessons, and I learnt a
lot. Greenlight.
-
Friends,
Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing
by Matthew Perry 4.25
-
Never Finished by David Goggins 3.75
3.75/5
Look, when I first heard Goggins came out with an other book, I was
convinced it was a publicity stunt, because how can you replicate Can't Hurt Me?
That book was iconic because it was authentic, will this be authentic? Or will
it be another sub-par sophomore book by a famous personality that hit it big
with their first book? With these doubts, I just wasn't willing to read this
one, but after completing Living with a SEAL, I wanted more Goggins'
stories.
This book is just as good as Can't Hurt Me in all the places where Goggins is
narrating episodes from his life. It falls flat in places where he's not
narrating and it's just some advice that feels placed there to complete some
word count. I can never get enough of his stories, never, and for this I rate
the book very well. One-time read for sure.
-
The Chalice of the
Gods by Rick Riordan 3
3/5
Super low effort writing, this. Could've been so much more. You do
expect Percy to mature but not into a middle-aged man, which is what he sounds
like in many places. The beloved Percy Jackson sarcasm has mellowed out, and
only shows up a handful of times through the book. The ending is some of the
weakest writing I've read in a long while, the chapter breaks are forced and
pointless, just bad overall. Pains me to rate a Percy Jackson book anything but
five stars.
Was this book just promo for the new series? Seems very much like that. The
saving grace is that this is not another Cursed Child.
-
Impossible First by Colin O'Brady
3
3/5
Should've been a blog post, or a series of blog posts at the most.
Some parts of the book were very engaging, the rest were a slog. The writing
lets the book down, did no editor read it before it was published?
-
Interpreter of
Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri 4.75
4.75/5
This book will forever be special to me, it opened my mind to the
kind of stories I never thought were possible to write. Interpreter of Maladies
was my first Jhumpa Lahiri book ever, it was assigned reading to me as part of
an advanced english course in my first undergraduate semester and I couldn't get
enough of it, I think I read the book over and over again until I couldn't
savour the deliciousness of the writing anymore. Oh! How I wish I could read it
again for the first time. It is also the book I gift the most, because everyone
needs to read it :)
My favourite stories are Mrs. Sen's (which was my assigned story!) and
A Temporary Matter which is Lahiri at her best.
-
Cabin Fever by Jeff Kinney 5
5/5
no notes
-
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami 2.5
2.5/5
Sure, I can see how this book is critically acclaimed in literature
circles but Murakami has never appealed to me, and I
don't know why. The story never flows easily, and it feels very forced. Very
confused.
-
The
Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare 3
3/5
I read this a decade ago for school and I'm mad how they made us read
a sanitized version of the play. If I get the time, I'll rant more about this
and other themes I noticed in the play later.
-
The Red
Headed League
by Arthur Conan Doyle 3
3/5
I was given a book containing this and the subsequent two Sherlock
Holmes' stories as a gift from the principal of my school after I gave her a
full length book that I'd written. Everytime I read these stories, I'm reminded
of how much help I've had from my teachers.
-
The
Adventure of the Speckled Band
by Arthur Conan Doyle 3
3/5
See above review
-
The
Adventure of the Copper Beeches
by Arthur Conan Doyle 3
3/5
See above review
-
Normal
People
by Sally Rooney 3.75
3.75/5
I want to write like this
-
The Coming
of the Third Reich
by Richard Evans 3.75
3.75/5
great book, I felt it was more of an academic text at times but it was very
illuminating.
A Blueprint for Dismantling Society.
-
Rebecca
by Daphne du Maurier 2.75
2.75/5
"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again..."
I thought the book started way too slow, and never came to the point. Rebecca
was introduced very well, but everything
else was a slog. Things get interesting after Danvers starts antagonizing the
new bride, and my reading pace ramped up
right until the final twist. Very well done.
The main character is super neurotic, and that did not endear me to her at all.
Imagine this book if she didn't
overthink everything. But then I guess it's only natural, so I wont judge.
-
The
Third Reich in Power
by Richard Evans 4
4/5
Great book, very very well written
Not very entertaining, but that's not the point of the book. At times it felt
like something was wrong with me for
subjecting myself to this 40 hour plus history lecture but it was worth it. I
would love to have physical copies of the
trilogy to use as reference material.
-
The
Third
Reich at War
by Richard Evans 4.5
4.5/5
First of all, I am super relieved that this trilogy is done. Reading these books
was really hard, and very taxing on my
brain. While the third part was, relatively, the easiest to digest, it was still
very much academic. However, that is
not a criticism of the book, but more an admission of my shortcomings when it
comes to reading nonfiction. I already
DNF'd The Great Terror last year so I didn't want to make it a habit and I
slogged through.
I would say the effort pays off. You learn so much more when you pay attention
to how all the different threads in the
late Third Reich stem from and end in Hitler's fanatical obsession with
eliminating the Jews of Europe. At times, you
wonder why they didn't just shake off this obvious disadvantage they were
saddling themselves with (the logistics and
energy needed to conduct the Holocaust). But without this fundamental stupidity,
Hitler and the Nazis would have been
just another bunch of rabble-rousers.
I read William Shirer's famous Rise and Fall of the Third Reich a few years ago
and I even have it on my
books-that-everyone-must-read list but even that massive tome feels like popular
history compared to Evan's work.
Richard Evan's does a brilliant job in making it clear, and then underlining,
the fact that no German accidentally found
themselves in the middle of the Third Reich. Each and every one of them actively
contributed to its establishment,
continuation, and maintenance.
As far as this book goes, Nazi Germany goes to war, and wipes out entire
generations of European men. The tide of the
Nazi storm seemed unstoppable until it crashed against the Soviet breakwater at
Stalingrad. Rule number one in the art
of war is to never march on Moscow. The Soviets were always winning what was now
a war of attrition, and the Ostfront
becomes horribly bloody and inhuman. The Holocaust is in full swing, and reading
those chapters make you sick to your
stomach.
There are narrations of Nazi era jokes sprinkled throughout the book and the
rest of the contents of the book are so
dark that these jokes provide much needed comic relief. So much so that they
need not even be particularly funny. One
peeve I have with the trilogy is how Evans doesn't use German words for
organizations and posts and stuff. This made it
annoying for me to search for them while I was reading.
Definitely the best, overtakes Shirer's work in my opinion for factual
correctness, sensitivity, and intellectual
comprehensiveness.
-
The
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
by William L. Shirer 5
5/5
One of the best books I've ever read. The writing has so much personality.
-
Lenin
by Victor Sebestyen 5
5/5
Just as gripping and unputdownable as the first time I read it. Absolute power
corrupts absolutely.
-
From
Dawn to Decadence
by Jacques Barzun 3
3/5
Very comprehensive, very illuminating, took me a long time to finish. I
collected a bunch of quotes that I really
enjoyed reading...
"Perform the acts of faith and faith will come", by Ignatius of Loyola
"Science has cut Man down to size and broken his pride: Copernicus removed him
from the center of the universe; Darwin
reduced him to the status of animal; and Jung dethroned his intellect and put
instinct in its place"
"The importance attached to Time in the West is a distinctive trait: Swift’s
Gulliver looks at his watch so often that
his hosts the Brobdingnagians think he is consulting his god"
"As Goethe’s Faust says at the start of his adventure, ‘In the beginning was not
the Word, but the Act.’ The Word—an
abstraction—comes after"
"Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson rank with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and it
is hard to think of a third partnership
of equal renown. Indeed, in a fundamental sense they are the same pair, bent on
a similar quest but in a different
costume, 300 years apart"
"Finding oneself is a misnomer. A self is not found but made"
-
The
Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 5
5/5
The writing is so powerful, a must read. The first time I read it, I think I was
too overwhelmed by all the information
thrown at me, but this time, I appreciated the writing too. You cannot narrate a story with this much weight AND keep the reader hooked without being a literary genius.
"If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere
insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were
necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the
line dividing good and evil cuts through
the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own
heart?"
-
The
Gulag Archipelago, Volume 2
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 5
5/5
While the first volume is far more entertaining to read, this is the volume that
is more important to read. I went
through chapter multiple times because of how much wisdom was compressed in each
story. I think I finally understand why
the book is subtitled, "An Experiment in Literary Investigation."
The Fan Fanych essay is the best part, other honourable mentions go to
descriptions of the stool pigeons, the camp
guards, the kids in camp, and what camp does to people's psychology.
-
Better Living Through
Algorithms, by Naomi Kritzer 4.5
4.5/5
this was strangely motivational, i wish it were a much longer story. i am going
to go and draw
-
Cat Pictures Please,
by Naomi Kritzer 4.5
4.5/5
i simply had to go read another naomi kritzer story and this did not disappoint.
midway, i realized that the theme was how you need to care for yourself as if
you were caring for another person.
-
The
Gulag Archipelago, Volume 3
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 5
5/5
this entire work is a very very important piece of literature in history, i hope
to return to it many more times
-
The
Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov3.5
3.5/5
"cowardice is the most terrible of vices"
when I first started reading this, I didn't really know about how the book is a
well-acclaimed in literary circles for
its satirical take on Soviet life. Coming from finishing the Gulag Archipelago,
I wanted some light fiction, and I wow,
my choice could not have been more ironic. With that in mind, I struggled with
the writing initially, reading the first
chapter four times before I got comfortable with the style.
It is not the most accessible of prose, but there is a switch midway when
everything beings to click and then reading
becomes effortless. The Pontius Pilate arc is simply wonderful, I can't say
enough about this, I would love to read that
as a standalone novel. There is a shooting scene between a cat hanging from a
chandelier and the police, which is
written so well that I wanted to copy down the words carefully.
Obviously, the Soviet satire pops up very quickly, and my P&V translation
already had a lot of footnotes to nudge me
along that direction. The secret police, the sudden disappearances, unexplained
misfortunes, the insistence on
documentation, the blatant corruption, the slow moving bureaucracy, "manuscripts
don't burn" among others.
Sometimes things don't make sense, but I don't think they take away anything
from the overall story. But you want to
impatiently get over some obviously unnecessary fantastical elements or
descriptions. I, for one, didn't really get what
the whole thing with the ball was. I haven't read Goethe's Faust, so I couldn't
really appreciate that angle, but I
gather that it has something to do with making a deal with the devil. Also, this
should've had a better title, that
focused on Woland, neither the Master nor Margarita are particularly impressive
in my opinion.
I would not recommend reading this book like a critic/lit-major would, but
rather, read it like a child would, a
fairytale from the shelf of the school library.
-
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott
Fitzgerald 4.5
4.5/5 (2x read!)
The writing is other-worldly. One of those books where the dialogue pales in
comparison to the descriptions. I read it
once, then did it again. What an experience!
-
To Build a
Fire
by Jack London 2.75
2.75/5
ehh, it ain't bad, but I didn't get what the hype was all about. I too came from that YouTube video about fear of cold or something. Both the video and the book were a waste of time.
-
Genius by James Gleick 5
5/5
Feynman will forever be the benchmark I measure myself against
-
Gilgamesh, translated by Stephen Mitchell 4.5
4.5/5
There is nothing I can say about this epic that hasn't been said before. I mean, this story is more than four millenia old and has lasted through wars and famines and much more. I am not going to review this and pretend I am above it all. I liked the recurring theme of sleep and death. I liked the portrayal of Gilgamesh's grief at Enkidu's death, and the hero journey in his search for immortality. The mother of all hero stories. Cannot complain. I wish it were longer though.
-
The Best Short Stories 2023, edited by Lauren Groff 3.75
3.75/5
finally finished this, very slow by my standards but I am glad I got through it, I think the short story format is very enjoyable only if you accept that it will end. I spent too much time thinking about each story and didn't want to start the next ones.
stories I really liked were:
- Man Mountain, Catherine Lacey
- The Complete, Gabriel Smith
- Xifu, K-Ming Chang
stories I absolutely did not like (and which contributed to me avoiding the book for weeks) were:
- 'Me, Rory and Aurora', Jonas Eika
- Elision, David Ryan
- Temporary Housing, Kathleen Alcott
-
Spurious Correlations by Tyler Vigen 3
3/5
hilarious, the "headlines", stuff in the footnotes, the graphs, hilarious.
-
East of Eden by John Steinbeck 5
5/5
It has been a long time since a book has consumed me thus. The best book I've read this year.
-
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens 1
1/5
this book is just the protagonist introducing people to the reader, what a waste of time. i resolved at a very young age to never read dickens after suffering through a tale of two cities, and i shouldn't have changed my mind.
-
The Blue Umbrella by Ruskin Bond 2.5
2.5/5
short, quaint, and nice
-
The Iliad by Homer, translated by Robert Fagles 5
5/5
cr
-
Napoleon: A
Life by Andrew Roberts 5
5/5
Vive l'Empereur!!
-
Nothing Ventured
by Jeffrey Archer 2
2/5
not his best work...
still pretty good
-
Hidden in Plain
Sight by Jeffrey Archer 2
2/5
alright, but nowhere near his best. The ending was a solid 0/5.
-
Turn a Blind
Eye by Jeffrey Archer 4.5
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.
-
The Hero with a
Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell 3
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)
-
The
Iliad & The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Robert Fagles 4
4/5
not the best translation, it gets so many things wrong. But the
story stands tall, un-blemishable.
-
The Great Terror by
Robert Conquest 0.5
0.5/5 DNF!!
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.
-
Circe by Madeline Miller 5
5/5
I thought it was pronounced suhrsee, but the Greeks would have said
kierke with a short eya sound.
-
Complications by Atul
Gawande 5
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.
- The Silent Patient by
Alex Michaelides
- Normal
People by Sally Rooney
- The Innovators by Walter Isaacson
- A
Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman *
- Carrie Soto is
Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid
- Amazon Unbound by Brad Stone 4.25
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.
- Uncommon
Type by Tom Hanks 2.5
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.
- The Sittaford Mystery by Agatha Christie 2.5
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.
- Harry Potter by J.
K. Rowling 5
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.
- Titan
by Ron Chernow 4.25
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!!
-
Idea Man by Paul Allen
3
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.
-
The
Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
5
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.
-
Lifespan
by David Sinclair
1
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.
-
Elon
Musk by Walter Isaacson
3.75
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
- The
Poison King by Adrienne Mayor 3.0
3.0/5
It must have been hard to write this book, there are so few accounts
of Mithradates 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.
- The History of Rome by
Mike Duncan 4.25
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.
-
The
Storm Before the Storm by Mike Duncan 4.25
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
-
The Martian by Andy Weir 4.25
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.
-
American
Kingpin by Nick Bilton 4.50
4.50/5
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.
-
To Kill A
Mockingbird by Harper Lee 3.75
3.75/5
this is lowkey a parenting guide
-
The
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka 3.25
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
-
The
Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol 3.25
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.
-
The
Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King 3.75
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?"
-
What
I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami 4
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.
-
The Paris Apartment by
Lucy Foley 3.5
3.5/5
This is the kinda book I imagine people that watch TV series will
love to read.
-
A
Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles 5
5/5 (2x read!!)
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.
-
The Stranger by
Albert Camus, translated by Matthew Ward 5
-
Crime and
Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Constance Garnett 5
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.
-
A
Prisoner of Birth by Jeffrey Archer 5
5/5
Archer's best after Kane and Abel, remains a five star read.
-
Troy by Stephen Fry 4.25
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.
-
As
The Crow Flies by Jeffrey Archer 5
5/5
I wonder if Jeff Bezos ever read this book
-
Born
a Crime by Trevor Noah 4.75
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.
-
Last Man in Tower by
Aravind Adiga 2.75
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.
-
Love
in the Time of Cholera
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez 3.75
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.
-
The Tattooist
of Auschwitz by
Heather Morris 3.25
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.
-
Chess Story by
Stefan
Zweig
2.75
2.75/5
Much ado for nothing. And the book is way too overpriced.
