books to read

Read a short story by Alice Munro – “Night” (http://granta.com/night/). Chanced upon it from a tweet from someone. Name was somehow familiar, searched and found that she was the Nobel Prize winner for literature in 2013. Read few more of her stories from the New Yorker. I have a mental block when it comes to reading short stories – somehow I don’t like that it finishes too quickly and sometimes abruptly, not fully satisfying. These were good though. It kind of reminded me of why we read fiction – it gives comfort in knowing that there are other people who think similar thoughts, there are lives even in far off places and quite different circumstances, but quite human, like kindred spirits. That is one thing which is closed and sacred – other people’s thoughts. Apart from writers who risk baring it on paper for all the world to see, we have no way of knowing whether we are the only weird ones out there or the rest of world is also quite similar.

I was in the process of adding couple of her books to the reading list. Thought I will share the entire reading list itself - compiled over the years based on recommendations seen here and there. Pace of reading is slower than the rate of addition to this list.

We were in Phoenixville, a small town, for more than 5 years. It had a beautiful library – you could borrow upto 100 books, videos, magazines and audio CDs at a time (not that anybody might want to do that much). It had a tie up with libraries in 5 other counties and an online portal from where books could be searched across all the linked libraries and reserve – even if it is not in the local library, they would get it from any of the linked ones. There was hardly any book that I couldn’t find there. All this was for free – it was running on public and government funding. How I wish we had such ones here.

Categorizations have got mixed up over time, didn’t clean up much. Some day we may have a service which could take in everything we have read so far and everything we want to read and recommend the perfect books to read next in our interest areas. www.goodreads.com and Amazon recommendations are ok, but not satisfactory yet. For now if there are recommendations based on this, please leave a comment.

Business

1.       “The Book of Five Rings: The Classic Guide to Strategy” Miyamoto Musashi.

2.       48 Laws of Power

3.       "33 Strategies of War" by Robert Greene

4.       5 dysfunctions of a team, lean startup, Kanban blue book

5.       Anything You Want - Derek Sivers

6.       Design Is a Job - Mike Monteiro

7.       Rework - - Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson

8.       Hackers, the heroes of the computer revolution – Steven Levy

9.       The Inmates Are Running the Asylum - Alan Cooper

10.    Don’t make me think - Steve Klug

Creativity, Brain, Cognition, Neuroscience

11.    Beautiful Evidence - Edward Tufte

12.    Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas - Seymour A. Papert

13.    A Technique for Producing Ideas – James Webb Young

14.    The Paradox of Choice - Barry Schwartz

15.    Mindset: The New Psychology of Success - Carol Dweck

16.    Flow - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

17.    Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture"

18.    Emergence - Steven Johnson

19.    Everything Is Obvious - Duncan J. Watts

20.    Notes on the Synthesis of Form - Christopher Alexander

21.    Impro - Keith Johnstone

22.    The Psychopathology of Everyday Life - Freud

23.    The Ego and the Id - Freud

24.    Give and Take - Adam Grant

25.    Laws of Simplicity - John Maeda

26.    Set Phasers on Stun - Steven Casey

27.    I am feeling lucky - douglas edwards

28.    Ideas and Opinions – Einstein

29.    Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking - Daniel C Dennett

30.    Lean startup - Eric Ries

31.    Leonard Mlodinov - The Drunkard's Walk

32.    Management Myth - Matthew Stewart

33.    Microserfs by douglas coupland

34.    The Black Swan; and Fooled by Randomness - Nassim Taleb

35.    On Intelligence - Jeff Hawkins

36.    Pattern Language - Christopher Alexander 

37.    Picture This - Molly Bang

38.    Quiet  - Susan Cain

39.    Rolf Dobelli - The Art of Thinking Clearly

40.    Signal and noise - nate silver

41.    Steven Pinker - How the Mind Works

42.    The Art of Meditation - Mathieu Ricard

43.    The Better Angels of Our Nature - Steven Pinker

44.    The New Master Key System by Ruth Miller and Charles F Hannel

45.    The Motivation Hacker by Nick Winter

46.    The Power of Habit - Charles Duhigg

47.    The wealth of nations adam smith

48.    Think like a programmer - V. Anton Spraul

49.    Godel, Escher and Back - Douglas Hofstadter

50.    Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn - Richard Hamming

Writing

51.    "On writing well" by William Zinsser

52.    Bird by Bird - Anne Lamot

53.    Writing that works - Roman-Raphaelson

Politics

54.    Jared Diamond - Guns, Germs and Steel

55.    Jared Diamond - The World Until Yesterday

56.    India grows at night - Gurcharan Das

Philosophy

57.    A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

58.    Biology of Belief

59.    I Am A Strange Loop - Douglas Hofstadter

Personal Finance

60.    The Intelligent Investor - Benjamin Graham

61.    From the rat race to financial freedom - manoj arora

62.    Michael Covel's book - "Trend Following"

Fiction

63.    Alice Munro - Dance of the happy shades, Lives of Girls and Women, Who do you think you are?

64.    The fault in our stars - John Green

65.    Eat Pray Love - Elizabeth Gilbert

66.    Rabindrantah Tagore’s Gora;

67.    Charles Dickens “David Copperfield;

68.    Thornton Wilder’s Bridge Of San Luis Rey;

69.    Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace

70.    Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto Thor

71.    Hyderdahl’s “Kon Tiki.”

72.    A tale of two cities - Charles Dickens

73.    Hunger Games

74.    All the King’s Men - Robert Penn Warren and Noel Polk

75.    Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness - Susannah Cahalan

76.    Dorris Lessing – The grass is singing, The golden notebook, Under my skin, Waiting in the shade

77.    Great Indian Novel – Shashi Tharoor

78.    Neal Stephenson - Anathem.

79.    Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash

80.    Patrick O'Brian - sea faring novels

81.    Franny and Zooey - JD Salinger

Auto biographies, General

82.    My Life and Hard Times – James Thurber

83.    Long way down  -  Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman

84.    Tap dancing to work - warren buffet

Software

85.    Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - Abelson and Sussman

86.    Dyjkstra - Discipline of programming

87.    Knuth - Art of Programming vol 1-4

88.    How to lie with statistics

89.    Programming pearls - John Bentley

Sci-Fi

90.    Italo Calvino - Cosmicomics

91.    Ursula Le Guin

empathy

Attended a Design Thinking workshop today. One small conversation there was stuck in my mind. Instructor was talking about empathy. He asked someone that suppose the person sitting next to him got injured on the leg, how he would show empathy. I called out a response - “I feel your pain”. Instructor said that is not possible – no one can feel other’s pain. It seems in some BPO firms it has even been instructed not to tell customers that “I understand how you are feeling”, because it is not possible. Not sure of it though.

 

This reminded me of something I read about Aaron Swartz, inventor of RSS (Real Simple Syndication – format behind web feeds that was game changing), involved in Creative Commons and founder of Reddit, the front page of Internet. Not to bring up the case of yet another tortured genius. But I had read this about him – ““He had a tremendous and in some ways pathological capacity for compassion.” And in another place “Swartz touched so many because he possessed "a staggering capacity for empathy, sometimes a crippling capacity"”. I feel it is possible to physically feel bad about someone else’s suffering. But I guess too much capacity for empathy would render it impossible to continue, one should be able to ignore a lot. 

Bell Jar

Finished Bell Jar. I need to further qualify the initial assessment. It felt like a giant wheel – the ride in local fair. Sort of calmly takes you up to the pinnacle and drops you down and you keep falling – with the feeling of heart rising in anticipation of impending fall. The journey through depression, madness and various ways to commit suicide. It is a heart wrenching read – not recommended on a sunny day.. or come to think of it, on rainy day as well. Beautiful writing.. I keep taking notes these days of what I liked since memory is shot.

 

Tail end of a sweet dream..

New York was bad enough. By nine in the morning the fake, country-wet freshness that somehow seeped in overnight evaporated like the tail end of a sweet dream. Mirage-grey at the bottom of the their granite canyons, the hot streets wavered in the sun, the car tops sizzled and glittered, and the dry, cindery dust blew into my eyes and down my throat.

 

I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.

 

City hanging in the window like a poster..

The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

I knew perfectly well the cars were making a noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making a noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn’t hear a thing. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for all the good it did me.

 

Crawling in through the lines of a story..:)

I thought it was a lovely story, especially the part about the fig tree in winter under the snow and the fig tree in spring with all the green fruit. I felt sorry when I came to the last page. I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under the beautiful big green fig tree.

 

A poet defending her craft..

People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn’t see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn’t sleep.

 

Diving into depression and madness..

If being neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I am neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.

 

I took up the silver knife and cracked off the cap of my egg. Then I put down the knife and looked at it. I tried to think what I have loved knives for, but my mind slipped from the noose of the thought and swung, like a bird, in the centre of empty air.

 

I had removed my patent leather shoes after a while, for they foundered badly in the sand. It pleased me to think they would be perched there on the silver log, pointing out to sea, like a sort of soul-compass, after I was dead.

 

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream. A bad dream. I remembered everything. Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them. But they were part of me. They were my landscape.

 

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Went through some of the TED talks from the Top 20 most popular talks this weekend - https://www.ted.com/playlists/171/the_20_most_popular_talks_of_a. One was by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of “Eat, Pray, Love” (in wish list) - https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius. She was talking about artists suffering from their own creative process and losing so many of them. Her remedy was to think of genius as an invisible Gollum who takes a bit of credit when everything goes perfect and a lot of blame when the work doesn’t come out that well. A way to shift the load and the anxiety from the artist. Her stories of artists chasing after inspiration as it hits them were very interesting, a good way to think about..  

geniuses

I had bought Sylvia Plath’s (Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Plath) novel, The Bell Jar, almost a year back in one of the numerous book exhibitions in the city. I thought it needed a certain mood to be read or it will probably depress me knowing her story – I was in “see positive, think positive, hear positive” mode for some time. Picked it up as a treat last weekend for finishing the exams better than I thought it would go. After reading first page, it was feeling like how aged wine would probably feel to a connoisseur. So far it has been a very stark perspective of how things look from the other side of the gender divide – hypocritical men and stereotyped expectations. But the writing is from a true master of the craft – to write one sentence like her would be genius. What could she have accomplished if she stayed beyond 30 years?

 

Sylvia Plath reminds me of another troubled genius, Amy Winehouse, who took her life at age 27 – I had listened to songs from the album Back to Black like Love is a Losing Game, Rehab, Back to Black in repeat for hundreds of times. I still don’t know jazz from blues or any such, but these are songs that somehow never bore me, never gets old or stale. Lyrics, irreverent singing, voice and music is one package in which you can still hear new nuances even after listening too many times. If only somehow they could cross the mark of 30 years. Maybe genius is depressing like having too high expectations out of life.

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I wish I could read for hours, putting my feet up on the table, in a reclining chair, with a bag of peanuts like in olden days – finish a book in one sitting and standup with legs that have gone to sleep. The mental images created, the film in which the set, characters and the landscape all imagined with author’s guidance could be played to full. But now it is like a film in ten installments, store away the images and rewind and start from where I left off. Looking forward to a good episode of a classic at end of a long day…  

cleansing

If you could cry

Hard cleansing cry

that comes in waves

Wash away the guilt

The pain

Expectations, desires

Clear away the knots

To breath free

Thunder down like Niagara

Beat out the devil, the madness

All the noise

All the chaos

all the clouds

Let it shine again

A rain that drums down

To drench the kid again

Dream those epics

And sleep like a baby

To be free

One that lasts long enough

To wash away

The wants and the needs

To purify

And make you honest

Restore the innocence

That got stolen

All the masks, lies 

pretenses, fantasies

and impulses

Clear the web of stories

To make a man again

Like the rushing river

That restores the spring

On your feet

Song on the lips

Smile in your eyes

To make you strong

Lift the blue haze

To face the world again

With new resolve

In a brand new day

Make you truly care

And love

Those that truly matter​

morning after

When energy / enthusiasm / dopamine level is high, don’t shoot off what comes to top of your mind. It could look silly or naïve.

When disappointment literally hurts, hold on again. Otherwise it could look whiny.

In both cases realization comes only the next day morning. And “recall message” doesn’t really work.

In both cases though the message could be truer to you, since it was raw emotion, just could be too much to handle at receiving end.

Maturity comes when you can sleep it off, take the edge off emotions.

Then it could get boring too. But that is the balance needed in life.

inception

Inspired from Inception, the movie –

Cobb: What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient… highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it’s almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed – fully understood – that sticks; right in there somewhere.

How to inject an idea –

• Make it a perfect, beautiful idea, easier to believe. Make it simple, unexpected, clear, credible, emotional, stories – success formula (courtesy: Book: Made to stick)
• Give the idea more context/detail in which to believe it. Context and repetition is the key.
• Repeat every day – until the idea takes hold, even without you knowing it fully how deeply, even if you don’t understand it fully yet.

From Mal’s point of view. How to self-destruct for an (wrong) idea –

• Keep thinking about it, don’t let it go. Don’t believe when your own mind says it might be irrational, impossible, illogical, impractical – for certain kind of ideas like hope, faith and love, logic doesn’t play much role.
• Keep filling finer detail around the idea from your own imagination, even if it is not real. It happens to dreamers, the romantics.
• Idea, even a wrong one, will get rationalized. Even a murderer justifies himself in the court of his conscience, he has to – otherwise he can’t live with himself.
• Don’t let it go even when you act out of character, even when you risk everything, be obsessive – because you think you are going to achieve the impossible idea, get a reconciliation. You take a leap of faith, what a fatal contradiction.  ​

AR, favorite music, friendship

Few months back, i was returning from Bangalore after one of the BITS exams. I cannot sleep on bus usually, so this time had taken a sleeper bus. But that also was turning out to be futile. Such sleepless nights are crazy, drifting in and out of consciousness, trying to force start new dream scenarios to invite sleep to take them on and try it out and the dreams become bizarre after some time. Huge headache in the morning is the net result. In this case, one good thing was the music – driver was playing AR Rahman’s Tamil songs – they must have played that entire night. Their playlist had some of the old songs too, long forgotten. I was thinking that it was incredible that AR can fill an entire night of lonely people with great music.

For past few weekends though, I was listening to AR again. There is a program hosted by singer Anuradha Sreeram, in one of the FM channels, 3 hours each on Sat and Sunday night. AR has created enough to fill multiple nights with great music. This weekend in between studying for another upcoming BITS exam and struggling with logical clocks, scalar and vector time etc of Distributed Computing, listened to songs like Enna solla pogirai, poongatrile un swasathe, anpe vaa en anpe vaa, mannippaya, uyire, snegithane, Evano Oruvan aasikkirai, kannukku mai azhaghu, Enna Vilaiyazhagae, Nenjukullae, Enge enathu kavithai etc.

Some of these songs take me back to old times, when I heard it first or when it was the favorite. I used to study with music on, cassettes on repeat – I don’t know how it worked, but it didn’t hurt badly in the long run I guess. Mix of Kishore Kumar, Enigma, Power Ballads, Metallica, Savage Garden and sometimes AR. Like Uyire Uyire – I remember repeat playing that in my mind and writing IIT entrance exams. I was alone for that exams somehow, none of the friends in that center or something. Fighting through the problems felt like discovering some of the medieval forests imagined by the likes of JRR Tolkien or CS Lewis. Standing on Govt Model School (Kris Gopalakrishnan’s school, the one he is trying to revive now) grounds on a rainy morning in between exams, with this song in mind – that surreal feeling will not go away.

I had a good friend in college in same class, from the neighborhood, with whom I went everywhere on most days. He was an AR devotee. He would wait for the release dates of next cassette by AR, buy it on the first day and listen to it nonstop for few days. Many of the songs would be like alien music those days. But his music was distinctive, it was creating almost a new genre, it grows on you and soon will become favorites. My friend never doubted like me and after few days every track in the new cassette would be his favorites. I was thinking about it recently again – had chanced upon “Kannukkul pothi vaipen” (not by AR) on radio, thought it was nice, heard again for one or two times later and finally it was an absolute favorite.

I don’t understand Tamil much, can make out the general feel and the emotion. I had another of such close friends in college who was from a Tamil family, settled in Kerala. Someone with whom I went to some Tamil movies until he got tired of live translation, especially after attempting to translate the funny scenes. He would come home most evenings, sometimes on a rented bicycle. We would play Carroms, talk about anything and everything under the sun – books read recently, philosophy, Aynd Rand. I will go out to see him off, end up talking at the gate for another hour and then decide to walk over to the other friend’s house. Listen to music, talk again.

I don’t think I have talked to anyone for hours at end for long time, someone who can listen to all the madness and not judge – there is no time for that and no one with the right frequency. A week back, old college class mates started the group in Whatsapp. Most of them exactly same even now, some lingos upgraded here and there, but basically the same. I haven’t talked to my two friends for more than 10 years now. One of them married a German girl, I don’t know how to face him and what to talk to him about. This is one of the regrets – not keeping good friends. Commitments, crossroads in life taking people farther and farther away, frequencies tuning out..

Few weeks back, I got introduced to a long timer in Infy, during the week he was leaving Infy for a startup. On his last day, I was standing in breakfast queue in front of him, for my usual Idli/Sambar. Lady at the counter put out a plate of hot Pongal, my recent acquainted asked me which part of Tamil Nadu I am from. I told him that plate is for someone else, but I would still like to try it out. I did try it another day and it was delicious..:)