Author: Shrirang Karandikar

The author is pretty well known for his epic series, so I decided to give it a try, with the Stormlight Archive. I still have one more to go, but  I don’t think I’ll continue — there were flashes of brilliance, especially at the climax, but the rest was too…. boring. Especially given that I […]

What a bunch of self-centered, selfish, nasty, horrid people! How can anyone be like this? And I’m not referring to the Vanderbilts, but rather, the entire “society” of the time. I guess the equivalents today would be the Trumps, and in terms of ostentatious houses, the Ambanis.  The battles that the Commodore fought are fairly […]

A wonderful book that delights in demonstrating, well, how not to write. And it’s full of lines like: Unlike the period, which decisively separates complete thoughts, or the comma, which gently separates phrases, the semicolon is the Cleopatra of punctuation marks; she separates and connects at the same time, making hungry where most she satisfies.

I have a bit of a mixed reaction to this book, but mainly due to my expectations. I didn’t realize that the book was published around 2014, just around the time Roy was arrested, so it doesn’t cover that part of the saga. That’s one downside. The second one is that the author presumes too […]

I enjoy the few pieces that I’m familiar with (Symphonies 5 –9, the Egmont overture, Fur Elise (duh!) and the Moonlight Sonata) simply because they ‘sound nice’. I need to relisten to them with this book in hand to understand why they do so! I’m sure the intricacies will be lost on me, but that’s […]

What if you slept… by Samuel Taylor Coleridge What if you slept And what if In your sleep You dreamed And what if In your dream You went to heaven And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower And what if When you awoke You had that flower in your hand Ah, what then?

I probably read this book for the first time around ’97-’98, and it was an eye-opener. It should be required reading for all engineering students. This time around, I read it in a fraction of the time that it took me then, and I’m happy with how comfortable I am with the contents. It also […]

Slice of life and society, and what a contrast to Musashi and Shogun. Well, not surprising, considering that this one is set in the 20th century! And then there’s this: The Seven Ways to Attain Victory Suppressing the opponent’s ki Anticipating the attack Responding to the attack Holding down Driving back Overwhelming Proper adjustment The […]

How little we know about the world around us! And how interconnected everything is — I hadn’t realized that a Star Trek Discovery character was named after a ‘shroom expert! Plenty of recalls to ‘How to Change Your Mind.’ And, we understand so little about the world around us..

This was not intentional, but I ended up reading a book a week this year — probably more than I ever have! I went back and looked at what I’d read, and here’s a bit of a summary. This year was dominated by sci-fi, but these were mainly entire series (total 24 books!): 3-body (3), […]

What a wonderful way to end out an absolutely fantastic reading year! My notes: Three basic questions: What should we do? What is there? How do we know? And different -ism’s: Metaphysics or what sorts of things are there? Dualism (mind & matter), v. Materialism and Idealism Epistemology, or how do we know? Empiricism (perceiving […]

I honestly don’t know what the purpose of this book is. Introspect on your life? Stuff matters? It violently clashes with my current exploration of my own philosophy, so probably wasn’t a good time for me to read it…

Wow! This is one way that we evolve into post-human constructs. And people currently worried about the ethics of AI should add a whole new dimension about what could happen!