Reviews and Comments

Take a sane US Air Force bombardier named Yossarian and put him into the middle of World War 2 in a base at a tiny island called Pianosa in Italy. Surround him with people who are almost insane and trash up his life with inane bureaucratic hurdles. You've got Joseph Heller's Catch-22, a book which is both maddening and brilliant at the same time. This is a book which I can't even describe 'cause there are no words for it. It is a comical insane trip for the mind, at the same time being fodder on the current state of the world.

Catch-22 was not an easy read. I almost gave up after the first 100 or so pages, not being able to see where the story was going. Infact what I had to really do was to just keep reading and let the extreme sarcasm and insanity of the book to sink in. The book is too long for its subject and the circular logic of Catch-22 in the dialogues are just too many and I felt that it spoils the reading. The last few chapters (starting with The Eternal City) get pretty serious and culminate with a happy ending for Yossarian. An escape for him from it all.

Since I've read more recent books in the same vein, most of the advice from this book seemed dated. Having said that, I must comment that the authors don't waste words in making up mindless blather (like other books). The book propounds its 3 simple rules for managing people using a story device---a young man who is out to discover the management secrets of a good manager.

The book is really short---more like a long essay. It can be finished within 2 hours.

"If ten people can complete a project in ten days, then one person can complete the project in one day."

That's just one of the hundreds of tips and techniques for would-be managers in the book Dogbert's Top Secret Management Handbook. This book by Scott Adams is smaller than The Dilbert Principle and concentrates on grooming the would-be manager for a Dilbertian workplace. Interspersed in the guidelines for becoming a good manager are loads of strips from the comic. The strips are concentrated mostly on the Pointy-Haired Boss and Dilbert. A recommended fun read for the weekend when you're missing the workplace.

I came across this book while I was looking for Searching For Bobby Fischer. That book+movie is about chess whizkid Josh Waitzkin who went on to be the US Chess Champion many times. This book The Art Of Learning: An Inner Journey To Optimal Performance is written by the subject of that book Josh Waitzkin, who's now much older. That book and the popular movie which was made after that brought a lot of fame to Waitzkin and (according to him) destroyed his chess game. Looking for something peaceful after that, he learnt Tai Chi. His Tai Chi master invited him to learn Tai Chi Push Hands, the martial art style of Tai Chi. Using the experiences from his chess career, Waitzkin was able to hone his Push Hands skills well enough to win the Tai Chi World Championship.

This book is part (auto)biography and part philosophical. Using his life's ups and downs as the analogy, Waitzkin tries to distill the elements which help in learning (anything). Themes touched upon include how to start learning something new, improve in it, enjoy it, increase the performance in it and finally excel in it. All through the book this discourse uses chess and martial arts metaphors from his own life for achieving this. I found the book quite useful and might read it again in a few years.

I seem to be inadvertently reading only Booker winners, like Disgrace, which I borrowed from my friend. I hadn't heard of the author J.M. Coetzee and didn't know that he had won a Nobel for Literature. The book deals with the disgrace of a man and the daughter he loves very much, set in post-Apartheid South Africa.

David Lurie is an old white man, a professor of English poetry and working on a book on Lord Byron. He has been divorced twice and is casual with satiating his sexual desires. He is thrown out of his university on charges of sexual harassment of one of his students who had consensual sex with him. Disgraced like this, he leaves town to live with his daughter Lucy who runs a dog kennel alone on a remote farm. David is a man of arrogance and ego, but he adjusts to the rural life helping Lucy and her friends with their dogs. But even his daughter's idyllic life falls apart when some locals rape her and set him on fire. Father and daughter are left to workout their relationship and find their place in the changing humanscape of Africa.

This is a tragic book where slowly, subtly and surely everyone's life goes to hell. Coetzee's prose is simple and interesting and kept me engaged even though I knew that the characters were in for a world of pain. Coetzee downplays the color of his characters, but most of their troubles stem from they being white in a post-Apartheid South Africa, a place where the natives seem to want payback for the misery they endured in the past. The lives of the characters aren't settled even when the book ends. A lot of stuff in the book is left to the interpretation of the reader. For example, I'm pretty sure the dog with a limp at the end of the book which David agrees to kill is surely a metaphor for his own ego. If you've read this book, please do share your interpretations.

At 219 pages, this is a breezy read. A movie based on this book is now in the works. While the Observer calls this the best novel of the last 25 years, I don't think so. But a haunting good tale, it is.

When my eyes fell on this book in the library, I just had to pick it up. Though I had seen the movie Psycho, I wanted to see how the author had created the original story. Psycho is written by a guy named Robert Bloch. The well known story goes like this - Norman Bates and his mother leave alone beside a desolate highway. They run a motel. When a pretty girl turns up, his mother murders her. When the guy investigating into the murder comes, Bates' mother again kills him. Why is she doing this? Why cannot Bates stop her? What are the secrets Bates is hiding?

The book is very thin, barely 125 pages. It's a real thriller and a very fast read. One advantage of the book over the movie is that the reader can look into the mind of Bates here, whereas in the movie it is not possible this well. You might really relish the book if you have not seen the movie. I recommend the book to everyone since it is such a short read, anybody should be able to find enough time to read it.

The book published in 1980s covers the early years of hacking from 1958 to 1983. The book is divided into 4 parts:

1. True Hackers: The first known hackers at MIT AI Lab who played with the rudimentary hardware of the time and coded on punch cards. Includes Marvin Minsky, Greenblatt, Samson, Steve Russell, Stew Nelson and others. Except for Minsky, I hadn't even heard the other names before. The significant creations of this era include the Hacker Ethic, Lisp, Spacewar and LIFE.

2. Hardware Hackers: Soon after, a hardware hacking community started on the West Coast around the Homebrew Computer Club. Familiar names start appearing from this period. Steve "The Wiz" Wozniak's brilliant hardware designs for Apple and Bill Gates' ALTAIR BASIC catch the limelight. In this period, Apple grows from a garage venture to a multi-million dollar company which brings computing into homes.

3. Game Hackers: After home computers go mainstream starts the craze of computer games. Sierra On-Line and Brøderbund are the main companies of this time (remember that this is way before Doom and its progeny appeared).

4. The Last Of The True Hackers: Mostly centers around RMS who rues how the Hacker Ethic which started at MIT got lost in all the commercialization of computers. Since the book was published in 1984, it closes with this as the end of hacking. Little did the author know about what was to follow once the Internet became accessible!

The book is well researched and detailed. It can get a bit verbose though. There is so much computer history I hadn't even heard about that it was worth reading just for that. Though the book is completely non-fictional, the narration reads like a suspense novel, so it's not boring at all. Chapters 1 and 2 of the book are available under Project Gutenberg. Recommended reading.

This is Dan Brown's first fictional work. The story involves the ultra secret NSA and its cryptographic department. The NSA has built a 3 million processor computer named TRANSLTR which can crack any ciphertext by means of brute force. But, it is one day challenged with a ciphertext that it can't crack. Also, the creator of the new encryption algorithm named Digital Fortress threatens to go public with this algo if NSA doesn't reveal to the world that it has been snooping on the world's information using TRANSLTR. But, there is more to it. There is a chance of USA's biggest secrets being revealed to the world.

Compared to The Da Vinci Code, Digital Fortress is quite amateurish, especially the former half. The main protagonist is a female cryptographer who is in love and has a fabulous figure to boot. The book rests on cryptography, so the author tries to explain every single crypto jargon in layman terms. This read quite funny to me in most cases. Thankfully, by the the time I hit the latter parts, the book was a nail biting page turner with Brown throwing up twist after twist. In parts of the book the EFF and the right to information show up. An enjoyable read.

The book is about business blogging. It's written by the popular blogger Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. In the initial chapters, the authors talk about how blogging at M$ and Sun have changed the perception of the companies in the outside world. This has been true in my case. I see a more human M$ after becoming a visitor to Channel 9. Same at Sun, where thousands of employees blog, including Jonathan Schwartz. Apple and Google come out bad in the book, both for not allowing employees to blog about work.

In the later chapters, the book takes on different kinds of people and businesses and discuss how and why blogging might help them. The book is full of anecdotes and pointers to other blogs. Though the anecdotes are interesting, there are too many of them and many are similar, so it gets boring. The book might have carried the same message in half its size.

My friend who does practises meditation regularly handed me this book from his collection when I asked him for advice. I read through the book while I was attending meditation classes at university in the last few weeks. Turning The Mind Into An Ally is written by Sakyong Mipham, a Tibetan Buddhist lama. The book is aimed at beginners to meditation, so was perfect for me. The prose flows like a graceful and simple brook going from the nature of the mind, to getting started on meditation, to the problems faced during meditation and finally to the different objects that one can place the mind on during meditation. The book is a breezy read, mainly because the author takes care not to get heavy in the details and peppers every other page with analogies from real life. Buddhism (the religion) aspects are present a bit in the beginning and towards the end, but the book for the most part is free of religion. The book ends with some appendices which have practical tips for meditation. I found the book quite useful to go along with my meditation classes. I will have to get back to the book sometime in the future again since I couldn't really take away a lot of the latter part of the book.