Rahul gives unsolicited advice

On a bet with my wife, I tried to read 12 books between February 6, 2023 and March 10, 2023. I ended up reading 14 . For most books, I linked earlier blogposts where I wrote about them. Open Circuits by Eric Schlaepfer, Windell H. Oskay  (Highly recommended for kids) Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch with Jeffrey Zaslow Free Voice by Ravish Kumar Undocumented by Rejimon Kuttappan The Twits by Roald Dahl  (audiobook) The Book That No One Wanted to Read by Richard Ayoade  (audiobook) Animal Farm by George Orwell  (audiobook) The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida  (audiobook) The Impatient Woman's Guide to Getting Pregnant by Jean M. Twenge PhD  (Highly recommended for people who intend to get pregnant) Pregnancy Notes by Rujuta Diwekar Radioactive by Lauren Redniss  (Highly recommended for people who love Graphic Novels) River of Stories by Orijit Sen  (Highly recommended for Indian audience) The Wi...

I read  The Impatient Woman's Guide to Getting Pregnant by Jean M. Twenge PhD  and  Pregnancy Notes by Rujuta Diwekar  this week. Pregnancy Notes, by "India's top health expert", is a book that talks about before, during and after pregnancy. Mostly, the book deals with diet before pregnancy, during each of the trimesters and after delivery. One of the recurring themes in the book is the need unearth Indian recipes and customs meant for pregnant women that are commonly practiced in various parts of the country. The author talks about how western science is catching up to the benefits of food items that are part of various traditional Indian cuisines. I broadly agree with the sentiment because I have seen the impactful work that People's Archive of Rural India does. The problem is that the author goes further and flirts with pseudo science. For example, The moon represents the water element in our body and if you follow the moon closely, you would notice fluctuatio...

There has been a lot of interest in audio books but I had never listened to one. Not until Saturday that is. I needed to drive to and from Banglore this weekend and it takes 4+ hours each way, not taking into account potential traffic within the city itself. Usually, i'm on the phone or i'm listening to podcasts. But, given the bet I have with Preeti this month, I thought listening to audio books would be a better use of my time. So I went through the entire catalogue of ebooks available on the Library app and picked five, four of which I ended up actually listening to. The first was The Twits by Roald Dahl , narrated by Richard Ayoade , who you might know from the IT Crowd. It was short and hilarious. Richard Ayoade does an amazing job with the narration. I was smiling practically the entire time I was listening to the audio book. It was roughly an hour long so not a big audio book. In a few years time, when my son starts reading books, I'm definitely buying all of Roald D...

Open Circuits by Eric Schlaepfer, Windell H. Oskay I think I heard about Open Circuits on Hacker News three or four months back. I found it very interesting and I eventually gifted it to my sister-in-law and her husband, both of who are electronics engineers and run a small hardware consulting firm. Their first reaction was that they wished they had this book when they were younger. I read this book early this week while I visited them and I felt the same. The book is more of a coffee table book in my opinion with large pictures of the inside of various electrical and electronic components with brief explanation on the components themselves. This would have been a great book to start exploring the field of electronics as a young kid, potentially leading to a ton of questions on the various components in the book. One constant question I had throughout the entire book was regarding the manufacturing process of these intricate electronic components. This is high on my list of books that...

At some point in November of 2019, I asked a work colleague to be my mentor. He is a CPython core contributor, he has been at Enthought for over a decade and I wanted to learn from him. I don't exactly remember why but we decided that we would start reading a book and discuss it every week. My broad goal was to get better at writing software, which is why I think we chose to read and discuss the book  Clean Architecture by Robert Martin . For those of you who don't know, it's one of the classic texts on software and software architecture. Initially, it was supposed to be just the two of us but others in the office were interested in the book as well so there were three of us when we first met to discuss the book on the 22nd of Nov 2019. We added one more person when we met a week later. I think we discussed a few chapters every week, depending on how big the chapters were or how interesting we felt they were. We didn't have a fixed deadline to finish the book so there w...

I got lucky in March 2022. I happened to be in Bhopal for two weeks. Specifically, I was at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Bhopal with my wife. She was wrapping up some work at the TrEE lab in the Biology department. She successfully defended her PhD thesis in 2021 but she needed to go back to wrap up some loose ends. I went along with her and I got to meet her labmates. That's how I came across Improbable destinies by Jonathan Losos . As far as I can remember, it's the first biology/ecology book that I have read. It's technically a popular science book but it's not something that a school student can read and understand. But, it's damn good. I would definitely recommend it to biology and science undergraduates who are yet to understand and decide where their interests lie in. Preeti likes the fact that I can atleast know of and can use some of the vocabulary she works with on a day-to-day basis. The book introduces the reader to con...

 The books on my bookshelf that I haven't touched yet, some of which I bought 2 or 3 years ago. Showa : A History of Japan - 1926-1939 Bottle of Lies : Ranbaxy and the dark side of Indian pharma Big Billion Startup - The untold Flipkart story I do what I do Extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds Everybody loves a good draught. I've read this twice but I need to read it again this year. Vagina problems - Endometriosis, painful sex and other taboo topics The impatient woman's guide to getting pregnant The 7 habits of highly effective people On Writing by Stephen King . It improved my writing the first time I read it and that was a while back so I need to read it again. Good Strategy, Bad Strategy Being mortal The inner game of Tennis . This too I've read once but I don't remember much of it now. You can be rich too The invisible man The body The making of the Atomic Bomb The hour between dog and wolf The once and future king . This was a gift. As y...

I came across this interesting graphic on the Author's website that will hopefully get you interested in the book - Word by Word by Kory Stamper https://korystamper.wordpress.com/word-by-word/ There are things around us that we usually don't pay attention to. Things that have a rich and interesting story behind them if we took the time and energy to read up on them. This book, Word by Word, opens up the world of dictionaries, the people who make them and the English language. Before I talk about the book, let me talk about why I read this book. I've been interested in reading Strunk & White's Elements of Style for a while now. I'm interested in the English language and I'm interested in writing better and Elements of Style is one of the books I've come across a number of times as a good starting point to better my writing. When I was discussing this with a work colleague (Hi Jonathan!), he recommended that I read Word by Word instead. Now...

I'm reading Word by Word by Kory Stomper which is funny, insightful and delightful. I highly recommend it. One of the words I came across in the book is "cowlick". I didn't know that "cowlick" is actually a word defined in the dictionary. Specfically Merriam-Webster defines "cowlick" as a lock or tuft of hair growing in a different direction from the rest of the hair This reminded me of the comic strip Side note : I'm a little sad that images of the comic strip I've come across don't mention the original creator of the strip. I'm not sure if the watermark was stripped (likely) or if the original creator never added the watermark in the first place (highly unlikely.) Also, a "Tract" i...

I finished reading Scott Kelly's Endurance yesterday. It took me four days to read the whole thing, spending a couple of hours everyday. I picked the book up when trying to buy a few books for friends of mine (Hi Alex & Anna!). If you didn't know, Scott Kelly is an astronaut and being a spacenut, I thought it'd be interesting to read his book. The book was itself an autobiography which revolves around the path he took to become an astronaut and the year he spent in space aboard the ISS. The flow of the book keeps you interested by alternating between stories of how he became who he is and his year long mission in space. All in all, I definitely recommend the book to anyone who is interested in space and science. There is some profanity in the book and I came across a young readers version of the book which I guess has been cleaned up. Moving on, in the book, Scott Kelly paints a picture of the Space Shuttle, the Soyuz, the ISS and more. I have seen a few picture...

I've been using goodreads.com to track what I want to read and what I read for the last two years. At some point, there was a reading challenge on goodreads, which I participated in in 2017 and 2018. As you can see here , I more than exceeded my goal in 2017. I almost reached my 2018 goal, which you can find here . But, if you look closely, you'll notice that there are times of the year when I read voraciously and there are times of the year when I don't touch a book. Or times when it takes me a month or more to read a book that usually takes me no more than a week, at best. That's what I want my 2019 reading challenge to be. Not the number of books I read but read regularly. Read every month. Every week. Every day. Further, I spend a lot of time reading articles online, both short articles related to tech news which don't take more than a couple of minutes per article and long form reports that take anywhere between 30 minutes and an hour. I've wanted...

This is the last blogpost among a series of 3, which list all the graphic novels that I read in the last 6 weeks, while I was visiting the Austin office of my company. Most of these books were suggested to me by my colleagues, something that really surprised me. I didn't know there were so many work colleagues who were into graphic novels and comic books. Joe The Barbarian - Is one of the best graphic novels I've read these past two months. It's the story of a hypoglycemic kid and it's wonderfully told. It's one that I recommend everyone read. Watchmen - You might've seen the movie. I liked the graphic novel better than the movie, even though the movie was on the back of my mind the whole time. I liked it better because of the full page scenes and how much deeper the story is, when compared to the movie. It's a classic and I'd definitely recommend it if you're interested in graphic novels. 300 - Again, you might've watched the movie. Ag...

In the last post , I talked about some of the graphic novels and books I'd read over the last 6 weeks. Most of the books in that post were multiple volumes of a series that I'd started reading. A few of the books listed here might be part of a series but I haven't (yet) read the other volumes in the series. Volume I of Maus . Maus is the story of a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, being told by his son. It's visually different than anything else I've read, especially because the Jews are represented as Mouse and the Nazis as Cats in the graphic novel. People of other races are represented as other animals, for example the Polish people are represented as Pigs, if i remember correctly. It's a sad but powerful read. Snow Piercer : The Escape is part I of a 3 part series about a fictional future where all life on the planet has been wiped off because of severe cold. Earth is blanketed with snow and humans survive on a train, that chugs along the cont...

To give you some context, I've been in Austin, Tx since August the 3rd. Starting the first weekend of August, I've been voraciously reading graphic novels or, as you might call them, comic books. Loads and loads of comic books. And what an awesome time it has been. Over the course of the last 6 weeks, I have read a total of 37 books, 35 of which were comic books and 2 of which were books. Let me get the books out of the way first. I read The Postmortal , which is the story of a future where people could take a shot to prevent aging. It's an interesting read, not just because of the premise but also because of the way in which it's written. I wouldn't mind reading it again and I would definitely suggest it to someone interested in science fiction. The second book I read is When breath becomes air , which is an autobiography of the Stanford neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi and his life before and after he was diagnosed with Lung Cancer. It's a beautiful story and ...

I just read 300. Yes. Read, not watched. The movie 300 is based on the graphic novel 300, by Frank Miller. If you are interested in comic books and graphic novels, you would've heard of Frank Miller. You would be familiar with his work if you are fan of Batman. Now, coming to the actual book, it was beautifully drawn and interesting to read. I kept comparing it to the movie, in the back of my head. I no doubt prefer the book to the movie. The book felt more visually appealing than the movie. It was also better at grabbing and holding on to my attention better than the movie. I don't know why but I very much prefer reading the story than watching the story, even if the movie had followed the story exactly. Coming to deviations between the book and the movie, the story arc is probably the most prominent, atleast in the beginning of the book. The book takes a non-linear arc where we see the 300 prepare for war as we learn about how Leonidas became king and how the war started...

Having watched ' Good morning, Vietnam ' till after midnight, I slept through most of the day. The rest of the day was spent between me reading ' The Last Lecture ' by Randy Pausch and attending the EDM night during Saarang, opened by the psychedelic rock band, ' Tiny Fingers '. I guess I should get back to work now, I mean get started with it.