Books I read during vacations

Books.md

Books I've read

• Coraline (Neil Gaiman) - The only idea worth mentioning is parallel parents. But even that goes away and is revealed to be the machinations of an evil power. The set and setting is interesting, but otherwise, move on bitch.

• The Graveyard Book (Neil Gaiman) - How disappointed was I after reading all that. Nothing there. Nothing new, nothing terribly lovely about the narration itself. Just a waste of time.

• Stardust (Neil Gaiman)

Of all Neil Gaiman books, Stardust was the best. Others gave me huge hopes, but ultimately I've lost confidence in Gaiman as a writer. I think he is overhyped.

• The Princess Diary. - Now, seriously? I went on till the end for something great to happen, to turn the book around and make me gasp at the wonderness of it all. Crap.

• Practical Object Oriented Guide to Ruby. Yeah. Have to re-read. Good stuff there. A little boring at times.

• Flow (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) Well good stuff about Happiness. I've written a note called Flow about this book. I decided to read it after seeing DHH's recommendation on a post he wrote about Happiness.

• Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts. This with Flow has formed the basis of my theory of happiness. It talks about mindfulness and drives home the idea that the past is irrecovably lost, the future is too hard to predict and useless; the present is all that matters. Lovely reading.

• How to win friends and influence people. Dated language, dated examples. Comes off as your classic self-help books. But this is the 'original' of self-help books. The advice and principles are very obvious things when you think about it. But the knack of the book is in actually making it explicit. Simple stuff like 'Think as the other person'. Very worth reading by anyone who deals with people. I've heard people complain it is 'manipulative'. It depends on how you want to use it. The exhortion that listening to others will increase the chance of them liking you can be used for deliberate manipulative end, or to realize that you should shut up once in a while and let the other person talk. If you think it is manipulative, you are reading the book wrong.

• Flowers for Algernon: Someone of a very low intelligence gets an intelligence boost after a drug experiment, along with a rat. A diary that chronicles it. Not great or something. Just kinda interesting. Safely be skipped.

• The Master and Margarita. Saw someone on HN recommending it related to existentialism. I skipped stuff towards the ending. It is supposed to have so many references to Stalinist Russia. I think so, but towards the end, I don't know what the book was about. There is Satan, a bunch of minions, who make fun of people of Moscow. Mostly that. And some people considered mad because they actually saw Satan and rationalist can't accept that. Is it about subjective realities and how one's truth is another's madness? Is it about how evil must exist like the second side of a coin - objects produce shadows - you can't have it without. Does it have some deep meaning when it comes to Pontius Pilate and Jesus Christ? The hell. I don't get this book, and I consider it time wasted.

• Zen Meditation in Plain English - read it before I went to Bodhi Zendo. Was useful. Understood some things about meditation.

• 1984 - Alright, with the recent Snowden stuff, I decided it was time I read it. And I read it. But first I read Animal Farm. Animal Farm describes how an autocratic rules comes about, 1984 is about what happens in such a rule. The ideas presented in 1984 have stood the test of time - we have telescreens already, the thought police can operate thru massive amounts of online trails we leave. The book is not a literary masterpiece. It is recommended read though.

• Animal Farm. (George Orwell). It is a great thought experiment and mimics how a 'ruling' class always tend to subjugate the rest. Very insightful and helps draw parallels in political/social contexts and identify them easily. I liked Animal Farm better than 1984 as a work of fiction as well as non-fiction. A very recommended read.

• Plato and Platypus walk into a bar. Basic philosophy/logical stuff explained thru arguments between people. Good light reading and a refresher on philosophical thoughts.

• Bird by Bird, Anne Lamot. A great read. She describes the life of a writer, and you realize a programmer (say like me: trying to build something without any clue whether people will like it, whether the quality of work is good etc., and having to sit everyday and work - produce 1000 words a day kind of thing - make 15 commits a day maybe). Lovely reading. Recommended to understand what goes in the head of the writers.

• Zen in the Art of writing: I read this long before Bird by Bird. Wasn't captivated much. He deals with how he stores topics in his head. Stuff that happened in childhood, he writes down keywords and let it sit and simmer over a lifetime. Some scribbles become plots and stories etc. Never completed the book. But this one made me interested in books written by authors about their writing experience, and the decision to read Bird by Bird was influenced by this book.

• Fahrenheit 451. I read it in the same vein as Animal Farm and 1984. I had high expectations due to the hype around the anti-censorship theme of the book. I was quite disappointed because I was looking for a fully formed novel or a story. The characters were quite one dimensioned: there isn't much apart from how they feel in the context of a world without books, and forced to enjoy a television that has pervaded life as the everything of the wife of the protagonist firefighter. I'm quite sure it was moving in the context of censorship for people who loved it. But having been through a diastopic prediction of the future in Hacker News et al, and since the idea of burning books does not resonate with me given the accepted (which probably is flawed, and that is the bigger question) fact of permanence of the internet archives.

• The 4 hour chef: I never managed to complete this book, but it is written around items available in the American supermarket, and caters to an American food palette. And I'm disgusted that he makes use of packaged food (canned tomatoes, canned peas, canned everything), and calls the stuff he makes out of it 'real food'. I was also taken aback at the kitchen utensisls he enumerated: we have a functioning kitchen with utensils that cost under 6k, and gas/induction cooker all around at 8k. But Tim Ferris kitchen could easily run into a couple thousand $ of stuff.

I was initially very receptive to the book and thought the idea of smelling each food ingredient/spice separately to grok it was fascinating. But it is a disgusting piece of read when he talks about his various exploits over and over again (learning Salsa, doing Kickboxing, etc.). Half the book is meant for Tim Ferris boasting. The food that I wanted to try but didnt' have the courage/stuff to try was the oven cooked Beef + Wine - the dish he recommends as high tolerance for error, and high chance of being good to eat anyways, and easy to prepare. I guess I didn't go thru with the book because the Oven and stuff required for his even initial Beef easy prepartion wasn't available to me.