Siddhartha Golu
Reading fiction has always been a double-edged sword for me. Some of the most intimate moments I've spent alone is while reading fictional stories, while at the same time, feeling a pang of disappointment for myself because I wasn't doing anything “productive.” Is this mere entertainment? Am I just escaping my real-life responsibilities and reading stories of make-believe? While I still haven't found sincere answers to these questions, I've grown more confident of what I enjoy and what I don't, which has consequently helped me find peace with this conflict. Over the years, I've realized that reading good literature is therapeutic for me - not to be used as an afterthought but essential to keep me functional.
Stoner was another great session in my therapy.
A story that on the surface feels depressing and sad, but curiously enough has immense hopeful undertones. This is the ordinary story of a man whose only goals in life are to attain two of the most notoriously difficult things known to mankind - knowledge, and love. He fails in both, but if you look underneath the surface, he succeeds in attaining both as well - just enough to make him feel satisfied but not enough to make the world think the same. The story is simple. A man hailing from rural American farmland attends university, falls in love with literature, and decides to dedicate himself to fulfill his passion. He starts teaching at the university, gets married by following his desire, but without falling in love, has a passionate love affair and, in the end, dies without having accomplished much.
But the way Mr. Williams writes this simple story is mesmerizing, to say the least. There's an existential dread in all the interactions, always pulsing with energy, and the prose flows with a perfection, almost to a fault. When I looked back at the book having finished my 4-hour marathon run through it, I noticed that for the first 100 pages or so, the book had a lot of markings - sentences I had loved, descriptions I had enjoyed - however as it moved further, I got tired of doing so, simply because it only got better and better. If I had continued, the whole book would have been messed up by my pencil.
Throughout the book, I could sense Camus's influence on his writing; the existential dread always present. All the characters felt as if they could easily exist in my universe. The slow torment that the protagonist went through, at times, felt too personal, as if someone had mercilessly ripped out a few chapters from my life and laid it bare for the world to see. One of these moving passages is written at approximately two-third of the book, which I can't help but quote below:
In his extreme youth, Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity, he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which he ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.
He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him. The question brought with it a sadness, but it was a general sadness which (he thought) had little to do with himself or with his particular fate; he was not even sure that the question sprang from the most immediate and obvious causes, from what his own life had become. It came, he believed, from the accretion of his years, from the density of accident and circumstance, and from what he had come to understand of them. He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge; that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.
Don't make the same mistake as I did and pick this up believing it to be an introductory work of philosophy. It's a challenging but really comprehensive history of philosophical texts, supplied of course with the usual wit and charm and brutal criticism expected from Bertrand Russell. He doesn't pull any punches in making clear whom he likes and whom he doesn't and consequently, the whole book is filled with fierce, and at times comical, opinionated criticisms.
Keep this in mind when you tackle this, and you will surely be rewarded.
I remember hearing about Elizabeth Holmes when I was in my late teens, at that impressionable age when you get hyper-inspired by reading about icons that are going to change the world. There was a profile of her in Wired, with an eye-catching image of her wearing a turtleneck black sweater holding what looked like a test-tube with a tiny amount of blood with a science-y background. I remember it had made quite a distinct impression on my mind, no doubt helped by the fact that the profile had described her as “this Stanford dropout 20-something who was hailed as being a younger version of Einstein, was going to change the world”.
Undoubtedly, as so often happens, I forgot about people who were gonna change the world as I grew up. Then I heard about this book last year, which was getting enormously praised for its exposé of a Silicon Valley firm and was really surprised to find out that the company at the center of the storm was Theranos, the brainchild of Elizabeth Holmes. This book reads like a detective novel, meticulously giving the clues and binding the threads of the deception that Holmes had so carefully and brilliantly constructed and managed to fool the entire world. Read this one if you want to get a lesson in how not to emulate a leader.
Disappointed. I am an atheist interested in the power of mindfulness and the whole world of so-called spirituality, so naturally, I am the ideal audience that Sam Harris is looking for. But it disappointed in almost every domain that I had expectations in. Using deep-sounding difficult words and wrapping them in an almost mythical aura of “Consciousness”, this one was a huge letdown. The irony is that I've been following his mindfulness meditation course and it's been the opposite experience there - in fact, his meditation course itself was what motivated me to pick up this book.
Save yourself the trouble of reading on why to meditate and instead dive into doing the practice itself and judge for yourself.
More than 1100 pages, this behemoth of a book still fails to capture the whole essence of world history - and rightly so, how can you combine over 2000 years of human history and still do justice to every element? But the unique manner in which this book - or more appropriately, collection of letters - has been written, it shines brightly amongst the plethora of history books you can find on this vast subject of world history.
Lately and unfortunately, people in my country have been going down a dangerous political hole and it is almost becoming a fashion statement now to indulge in tales of “revisionist history”, especially when it's related to foundations of India and the exact roles played by political parties of the time. It's shameful to hear people bashing Nehru for whatever “wrongs” he committed, while at the same time, being ignorant about his accomplishments and the monumentally difficult task he faced of leading and building India during its first few years of Independence.
The personal nature of the letters and the choice of the subject notwithstanding - or more accurately, I should say BECAUSE of these characteristics - this book is also a revealing window to the character and intelligence of our first Prime Minister.
This one would surely go onto my favorites' stand :)
I have been a lover of music since my early childhood - runs in the family - and have imitated and performed songs (mostly inside my own head) on numerous occasions. Despite this lifelong love affair with music of all kinds, there was one particular genre of music that always baffled me. Mostly because of my own ignorance, but partially also because nobody else was talking about it. Nobody else in my own vicinity that is. It didn't play on the radio, you won't hear it playing on any of the countless music channels and certainly, nobody was going on tours giving live performances.
This was the wonderful genre of concert music.
We have all probably heard the following names: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky. But, and this is especially true in India, very few listeners would be able to identify a piece of concert music by its composer, the way they would a Linkin Park song for example. Now I realize the comparison is a bit unfair, and I'm not trying to pit one musician against another - it's just to illustrate a point - the point being that we are grossly unfamiliar with these great composers apart from reading a passage about them in history books about what geniuses they were.
This series of lectures is dedicated towards amending this misstep. Narrated by the ever passionate and wonderful Dr. Robert Greenberg, this is a collection of 48 lectures of 45 minutes each (36 hours in total), which takes you on a musical journey starting from the ancient Greek music up until the first half of the twentieth century. For the lack of a better word, these lectures are absolutely amazing - especially because of the narrator. His enthusiasm is simply so infectious!
Do give this one a listen. I promise it'll be worth it.
I've always had a weird fascination with David Foster Wallace since the moment I first listened to “This is Water”. The way he so astutely and brilliantly confronts the everyday banalities and does it in such a hilarious fashion that you sometimes don't know whether he's acting funny or simply telling the truth. This collection of essays would be a good introduction to his works, albeit you can skip some parts.
There are few books which leave you in a mesmerizing state after having read them. You ponder about it for days to come, want to scream your head off about it to anyone who'd listen, and then dwell in this fear of picking up another book because how can something else ever come close to being this perfect! I have felt this way before - first when I'd finished The Complete Sherlock Holmes, later when I was left in a daze for multiple days after finishing the notorious and brilliant House of Leaves, and much more recently when I was unable to sleep after reading Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.
Behave is one of those few books.
I first heard about Dr. Sapolsky when my then-girlfriend recommended me one of his lectures on Depression (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc&t=632s) from his popular lecture series titled “Human Behavioral Biology” (Playlist available on Youtube). I was immediately taken in. He reminded me of those hilariously brilliant and yet humble grand-dads with whom you can be best friends with (of course, only seen in the movies) - and I picked up this book the very next day.
Dr. Sapolsky is a neuroendocrinologist by profession and currently a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford. To save you the pain of having to look up neuroendocrinologist - it's the branch of biology which studies how the brain regulates the hormonal activity in the body. From the late 70s to early 90s, he spent a vast majority of his time studying the social behaviors of baboons in the wild - something that features prominently in this book where he discusses different social behaviors of humans and how they relate to our biology. He writes early on in the book -
Some of the time, we are indeed just like any other animal. When we're scared, we secrete the same hormone as would some subordinate fish getting hassled by a bully. The biology of pleasure involves the same brain chemicals in us as in a capybara. Neurons from humans and brine shrimp work the same way. House two female rats together, and over the course of weeks, they will synchronize their reproductive cycles so that they wind up ovulating within a few hours of each other. Try the same with two human females (as reported in some but not all studies), and something similar occurs. It's called the Wellesley effect, first shown with roommates at all-women's Wellesley College. And when it comes to violence, we can be just like some other apes—we pummel, we cudgel, we throw rocks, we kill with our bare hands. So some of the time an intellectual challenge is to assimilate how similar we can be to other species. In other cases, the challenge is to appreciate how, though human physiology resembles that of other species, we use the physiology in novel ways. We activate the classical physiology of vigilance while watching a scary movie. We activate a stress response when thinking about mortality. We secrete hormones related to nurturing and social bonding but in response to an adorable baby panda. And this certainly applies to aggression—we use the same muscles as does a male chimp attacking a sexual competitor, but we use them to harm someone because of their ideology.
Various muscles have moved, and a behavior has happened. Perhaps it is a good act: you've empathically touched the arm of a suffering person. Perhaps it is a foul act: you've pulled a trigger, targeting an innocent person. Perhaps it is a good act: you've pulled a trigger, drawing fire to save others. Perhaps it is a foul act: you've touched the arm of someone, starting a chain of libidinal events that betray a loved one. Acts that, as emphasized, are definable only by context.
If you had to boil this book down to a single phrase, it would be “It's complicated.” Nothing seems to cause anything; instead, everything just modulates something else. Scientists keep saying, “We used to think X, but now we realize that . . .” Fixing one thing often messes up ten more, as the law of unintended consequences reigns. On any big, important issue, it seems like 51 percent of the scientific studies conclude one thing, and 49 percent conclude the opposite. And so on. Eventually, it can seem hopeless that you can actually fix something, can make things better. But we have no choice but to try. And if you are reading this, you are probably ideally suited to do so. You've amply proven you have intellectual tenacity. You probably also have running water, a home, adequate calories, and low odds of festering with a bad parasitic disease. You probably don't have to worry about Ebola virus, warlords, or being invisible in your world. And you've been educated. In other words, you're one of the lucky humans. So try.
Find this review - and some more - on my website here.
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Started with a tightly-knit structure, but faltered at the end. The last few chapters were a slog to get through - mostly because of numerous “business-class” style case studies.
Main takeaway? Other than the central idea around which the book revolves (and succinctly mentioned as the book subtitle too), the idea of interleaving is what struck me the most. I had already read about this particular method in Michael Nielsen's brilliant post on Anki (Augmenting Long-term Memory) and it was interesting to read about it formally in the book. Interleaving is the technique of mixing up your learning in varied environments so that it makes some unusual connections that you'd normally won't think about - and might come in handy when you are faced with a problem in a new environment you haven't previously encountered.
In the end, “Range” suffers from the same deficiencies that a lot of other pop-psychology/self-management books suffer from - too many anecdotal evidence and case studies. A reviewer here on Goodreads summed it the best - “Finally, Range is designed to appeal to people who are already skeptical of specialization/ enthusiastic about generalized skillsets. I worry that some of the appreciation of this book is just a soothing exercise in confirmation bias for generalists.”
Still, I'd recommend it to people who (like me) are skeptical about their tendency to dabble in too many disparate fields at the same time - this might be the soothing pill that you were looking for.
Reading alongside the popular Harvard course taught by the author (Here's the link if anyone wants to check it out - https://www.edx.org/course/justice-2), this was an extraordinary experience. Maybe my thoughts about this book got clouded by the thought-provoking lectures that accompany them, but that in no way takes away the credit of this book being an excellent introduction to political and moral philosophy.
Normally, I dislike the case-based approach of tackling a subject (I'm looking at you, Cal Newport), but it was the most suitable method of discussing disparate notions of moral philosophy. Prof. Sandel expertly intertwines the hard and difficult questions of the day - be it affirmative action, same-sex marriages or debates about rights - with the theories of political philosophers who attempt to answer them. I particularly loved this notion, which is present in all the debates throughout the course, that there's no such one perfect answer for these problems. You can't just say that one side is completely wrong and other is completely right. There's no black and white. Each side has merits and demerits and the real struggle exists in how to combine them together for an appropriate solution.
Apart from reading this book, I would highly recommend taking the course as well. You won't get solutions to all the mentioned problems, but you would come out with a greater understanding of problems themselves and how to tackle them.
“And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good”.
A beautiful and at times heartbreaking story of good and evil and the shades in between, and how our choices ultimately make us who we are. I was getting tired of seeing posts of “Wow, I read East of Eden and was blown away!” on reddit and finally decided to take the plunge and dive headlong into the saga, and I'm a little ashamed to admit that I belong to the same category. This was a beautiful book and I don't want to read anything by Steinbeck for a long time - because I want to savor this age-old ripe wine and shine in the afterglow.
I love to fall asleep while reading a book, but this might be one of those rare books that made me apprehensive about the ordeal while at the same time getting me excited for what comes next (the other one would be “House of Leaves”). I used to dread reading it at night because I knew somewhere down the line, there would be a chapter on Cathy, and I would get nightmares of her evil doings after that. It sounds silly when I say it out loud, but in my eyes, that speaks for the brilliance of this book. The length of the book allows it to explore each and every character to its core and oftentimes lead to conversations that would make me close my kindle and just think about what I had just read. The most illuminating pick of all those interesting conversations would be the one where the father-figure-cum-servant of the house discusses “Timshel” with one of the characters.
“Thou mayest”
I think if I ever get a tattoo (which might not be too distant a future), Timshel would surely feature prominently on my skin.
Two main takeaways from this book:
* Developing/Developed world categorization is bullshit - instead divide the world into four levels of income.
Level 1 (poorest) - approx. 1 billion people
Level 2 (lower-to-middle income) - approx. 3 billion people
Level 3 (middle-to-upper income) - approx. 2 billion people
Level 4 (richest) - approx. 1 billion people
* Dollar Street - an amazing idea of seeing people living the same kind of life across countries on the same income level. So keep in mind that affluent Africans are living as lavishly as affluent Americans and poorest Indians the same as poorest French, on an equal basis of income.
Despite some reservations, I would recommend this to my pessimist friends who think that the world is just doomed. It probably is - but it's also getting better.
Find this review - and some more - on my website here.
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This book falls into the category of books that I like to call “Fast-food books”. They won't necessarily make you healthier or your mind sounder, but it'll feel really good while you're eating them. There's only so many anecdotes you can digest. The most common criticism that people have with these kind of books are that they could've been summarized in a much shorter format - probably a blog post or two. The same applies here - only the irony is that it is BECAUSE of those blog posts and the reaction it generated that prompted the author to write a whole book about it.
Probably should have let the blogs say it all.
Well, now that my rant is over, I'd like to list some of the positive things that I got out of this book. While tiring at times, reading through the different stories and the paths ordinary people take to become successful made me appreciate the importance of THINKING about your career. For people in my field (software developers), it can be a daunting task to get ourselves out of the autopilot and start questioning things - which includes the choices that we've made for our own careers. But doing exactly that is an important and necessary step towards achieving a fulfilling career.
Give this one a read if you haven't obsessively read all those countless Quora and Medium posts. Otherwise, skip it.
I'm unable to give a rating to this book - partly because I find myself unable to judge a work of philosophy which is unanimously considered to be brilliant, and partly because there were a lot of things that went way over my head. Especially in the middle of the book where Camus goes heavy handed into explaining what the Absurd is and his critics of the contemporary philosophers. I was unable to follow because it requires at least a general understanding of the works of people that he criticises.
This will require at least one, and possibly multiple, re-reads for me to finally be able to say that yes, I read The Myth of Sisyphus and I “understood” it. Until then, this essay will remain an enigma to me.
Edit: Recently, I came across an article quite critical of the facts presented in this book, which came as a shock to me. Here's the link to the article - Why We Sleep is riddled with scientific and factual errors . While this severely damages the reputation of the book, my stance remains unchanged - that sleep is of utmost importance in our lives and we really do need to give it prominence.
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Original Review:
An exceptional book that is also a cautionary tale for our society. In our productivity-obsessed twenty-first century, sleep usually takes the backseat in our race to get more done with our limited time. I myself have been guilty of that, on multiple occasions - trying to fit all the things that I want to do in a day and consequently ignoring this wonderful remedy to all my problems. We have idolized people who seem to achieve extraordinary things on less than an optimal amount of sleep for far too long.
We need to pull ourselves back from the race, slow down, and get a good night's sleep. As it turns out and quite contrary to the popular belief - the more sleep you get, the more productive you are.
PS: For anyone wondering about the optimal duration of sleep, eight hours really is the recommended time - which includes the time you take to drift off to sleep (normally 10-15 mins), five cycles consisting of NREM and REM sleep of 90 mins each, and the time you take to get fully conscious after waking up (another 10 mins).
I need to gather my notes before I can write a proper review, however, below are some of my off-the-shelf takeaways/critics of the book:
* Dawkins is too intimidating in his opinions - he hammers on and hammers on until either you have changed your opinion or you get exhausted. Neither sounds good for someone having a constructive argument.
* The crux of the argument is - and this is something that I've wondered for quite some time - keeping aside the hard religious conservatism, why even the so-called liberal values teach us that we should question everything, except when it comes to religion. Religion is somehow the holy grail of the argument (pardon my pun) - you can't just question it, no matter what. That's bewildering, to say the least.
* The problem of “Unquestioned faith is a virtue” and the power of religion to “console” us through the bad times. Believing in God and believing in belief are not the same thing.
