Category: Books

I’ve been struggling with Whitman for a long, long time. There are a few lines that capture the imagination, starting with some of the titles: “Leaves of Grass,” “Song of Myself” and “I Sing the Body Electric,” but when I read the poems themselves, I was left scratching my head. I’m fine with prose poetry,…

Memories of many men about EWD. He’s well known, of course, for his eponymous algorithm (and was worried that that is all he will be remembered for!), but was so much more. There are many threads that I want to follow up on, and a few things that jumped out at me The importance of…

A cheerful account of a pointless trip that brought to mind something that Jerome K. Jerome would write. I kept reading the dialogues in Derry Girls accents. And there are gems like these: ‘Yes’, I replied accurately.

Across the years between the stars, which now was the dreamer, which the dream?

Basic problem solving. If you don’t have the data you need, play with the data you have, see if something comes out of it. She’d made it through three semesters of combinatorics that way. All right. Forwarded to all my combinatorics students 🙂

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…