Category: Books

SciFi/fantasy makes for great reading when I’m overwhelmed with too much going on. And something like this is great to just sink into. The resolution at the end is…. mindblowing! And of course, there can be no better way forward. This works even as a metaphor for life. 

Beautifully written, and what an amazing story! And I finally understood what a hedge fund does.

I wish I had read this decades ago. But then, I probably wouldn’t appreciate it at that time.

This was something that we discussed at AlgoAsylum. Depressingly accurate!  

The author is (was?)  a writer for The New Yorker, and I picked this up more for studying her style of writing. Consider crafting statements such as this: She has an apartment in Paris and a house in Beverly Hills, a room key in Manhattan, the story of Hollywood of the late sixties and seventies…

I came across an amazing quote from this book, so picked it up. However, I’m putting it down after a couple of chapters. There was no coherent framework or logic, and what I read just came across as a series of disconnected platitudes. I suppose in a couple of hundred pages, one would accidentally come…

I took an extremely long time to read this book, savoring each story for its originality and philosophy. And for the superlative writing.  Arrival (the movie) is based on The Story of Your Life. I watched this as well as Tales from the Loop, which may very well have been based on Ted Chiang’s writing. …

This book makes my blood boil.  I’ve been pretty mad at the amount of money the government spends on propping up white dinosaurs like Air India. It’s our money – the citizen’s and the taxpayer’s money. And it represents a lost opportunity, where that could have solved many other problems that need funding.  The scale…

I had to read this series to make sense of the Netflix series! Nothing much else to say – masala entertainment. 

I first read this book in the early 2000s, and I think I missed the point completely! The intelligence pointed to is not in selecting the right investments, but in the emotional intelligence needed, and the maturity required for avoiding the wrong ones. The core message is more defensive in nature (don’t lose money!). Unfortunately,…

I don’t remember where I saw a recommendation for this book and it had been on my virtual pile for quite a while, so I had no preconception of what to expect. It started off slow, and I was having second thoughts about continuing, but man, it picked up steam. What a ride (no pun…

I subscribe to the author’s 3-2-1 mailing list (it’s brilliant!) and on that basis, I had high hopes for this book. However, I guess I’ve read too many of this genre, and am too jaded… Take a look, it may be right for you!

I didn’t realize how little I know about Euler until I read this book. I had a hazy awareness of him as one of the great mathematicians (along with Gauss) and knew he had worked on number theory, was related to imaginary numbers, of course, the Konigsberg Bridge problem, Euler’s identity and my favorite number,…

I’m not sure what to make of this book. In terms of history and the individuals involved, it’s pretty depressing. In terms of mathematics, there isn’t much. There was the thrill of connection when the Japanese mathematicians Taniyama and Shimura (of the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture) pop up — this was crucial in Andrew Wiles’ proof of…

A bit of a change of pace, a bit of variety…