Yea, Lindy. From the term popularised in Taleb’s Antifragile.
That is how most of the folks I learn from, read.

Shane Parrish uses it as a guide to choose a book.
As do the readers of his blog at Farnam Street.

Vishal Khandelwal writes about it on his awesome blog.
And also uses it as a guide to reading for investors.

So these, are my Lindy books.
The ones I cherish and have read ragged and have gifted and own multiple formats of.
The ones I reread every, single, year.

This was a good reading month. I think I have become a history geek, thanks to podcasts and books and those are going to be what I read heavily for quite a while now. Some books intentionally read, some comfort reads.
All recommended.

The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett

A mystery whodunit. I am finally in my Noir phase. And enjoying it.
Drunk retired detective, socialite wife, multiple red herrings, 30s America, what’s not to like?!

The Rest is History, The Nazis at War, Hitler Strikes West, Parts I-IV

Every year, the company of Holland and Sandbrook, walk through the events (slowly) of World Wars One and Two, in order to make up for the travesty of the coverage that they started the show with! Then entire French Revolution in 20 minutes if I remember correctly. 😂 This time, they covered the events of Nazi Germany’s march on and upto the fallo of France. The duo are lovely when they are in flow and these episodes are worth a listen.

The Rest is History, Jack the Ripper, Parts I-IV

More from the podcast, this time covering the ghastly killings of the Whitechapel Murderer. Between reading about the events with morbid fascination as a child and then growing up and reading different versions of the events (I liked Alan Moore’s, From Hell if you are a comics person or the ITV miniseries featuring Michael Caine), I thought I had heard all and seen all. The duo surprised me by telling the story from distinct and different perspectives. One was how the media influenced the events, drawing parallels to today, and the other, more importantly, was the lives of the victims, and the events from their perspective leading to their sad demise. The series leaned heavily on a Hallie Rubenhold book, The Five to do that. I bought it and it is now on the pile. This probably is the least I felt I could to to erase young Jason’s fevered fascination with killers.

The Second Stain, The Man with The Twisted Lip, and The Muskgrave Ritual, Sherlock & Co. Podcast, Seasons 37, 38 & 39

This is the other boyhood fascination that still remains. Sleuths and detectives and whodunits.
This series has several lovely takes on the original Doyle stories and are worth your time, if you want to be entertained! When they began, I felt their voices were too akin to the modern BBC series featuring Cumberbatch & Freeman, but now they’ve grown on me and the reverse feels true. Some stories are fun and relaxed and some taut all through. All of them are lovely.

Mania for Subjugation III, Hardcore History, Episode 73

This is Alexander as never told before. In true Carlin style, you wait eight months to a year between episodes, but when they come, oh boy, do they deliver. We are at the third episode in the series and Alexander has just about started his journey to conquering the world as he knew it. If you want deeply researched history, Dan Carlin’s your man. The amount of books and time and work that goes into each episode is incredible. My only nitpick, is if he could be more humane. The man comes from the other end, a wargamer who loves what-if scenarios (like young Jason with his fascination for murderers and sociopaths). He’s come a long way from his earlier episodes, but I wish for just a little more humanity. The stories have enough pathos though and he always does them justice.

Sister, Maiden, Monster, Lucy A. Snyder

I thoroughly disliked this one. This feels like someone read the Book of Revelations¹ when high and then based a sci-fi novella on it. Deliciously unhinged, reads a review. It’s unhinged, alright.

I normally don’t mention or list books that I hate or do not finish or do not agree with. This is not that. This is a prime example of a “this is not for me” book. And this probably is the first book I read, that I felt this about. The writing is competent, but it did nothing for me. So no. Not for me. A pandemic rages through the world, and people get affected differently, in different manners. All gruesome.

I think only one person does horror, the way I want and love. And I remain grateful to the stories and work of Guillermo del Toro.

The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel

I loved the old timey self help folks. Carnegie, Ziglar et al. Simple truths told with lovely stories.
Housel is the modern form of that persona. Observations on how you think about money, what is wrong with it and suggestions on how one ought to actually think. All interspersed between engaging stories. I wrote a post about the book, if you want to know more.

Shattered Lands, Sam Dalrymple

This soothed an itch, that’s been there since my childhood. Raised as I was, in the last remnants of empire and with a father and grandfather—who sometimes were sad about what was lost—I was always fascinated with British India. To learn about the length and breadth of the British Indian Empire, was both novel and yet unsurprising. More thoughts in a post I wrote when I finished the book. If you love reading Indian History, this is a must get, must read book.

History of the Alphabet, Kevin Stroud

This one felt like I already had so many disparate pieces of some whole and Stroud made them all fit, to form a beautiful tapestry.
I’m following his History of English podcast², and I bought the History of the Alphabet to try and support him, not expecting much, but I was pleasantly surprised. Weaving through times and peoples, from Egypt to the Levant to Greece to Italy with the Eruscans and later the Romans, to France and beyond. It’s a lovely tale!

A Play of Isaac, Margaret Frazer

This is a lovely piece of historical detective fiction. Set in Oxford in the middle 15th century, it follows a company of players who are staging Abraham and Isaac for a local lord and someone dies at their doorstep.

More than this specific book itself, I want to write a bit about this class of author, whose writings I have really come to enjoy. I have no name for the kind of writing they do. But I love the prose to bits. Gail Lynn Brown (writing as Margaret Frazer), is the latest. The other two I found so far were Edith Pargeter (writing as Ellis Peters) and Rosemary Kirstein.
I found Edith first, with her monumental Cadfael series of books. By the time I was in book two, I was amazed by this man who could do nuance so perfectly (Of course, it turned out to be a woman 😂). But yes, it is the nuance, the way they do turns of phrase, the way they write their characters … I don’t know what binds them togther, what the likeness is. It can’t be genre, because while Pargeter and Brown write historical detective fiction, Kirstein does not.(She seems to have created a unique genre/niche of her own.)
So like I said, while I don’t know what unites them, I will continue to ravenously read everything they write. The writing is letter perfect to my mind and heart. I enjoy them, with emphasis on joy.

These are all for now. I hope you found something in the list above that tickled your fancy.
À demain!

What do all the stars and daggers after the book titles mean?

¶ for Lindy books
* for the ones I love
† for most non fiction
‡ for tech / work / study / reference stuff
# for alternate media (like audio or video)
numbers are footnotes
Some book titles might be repeated (in addition to the annual Lindy reads :)
After all, we are what we re-read :)

January

February

I heard Morgan Housel on the latest episode of the Shane Parrish podcast recently as well as a while ago on Vishal Khandelwal’s podcast, and most of what he said resonated with what I learned and found out on my own independently over the years.
So I went and got his book.

Take the best of Taleb, Danny Kahneman, and your grandma, put them into story form with an earnest tone, and you get this book. It’s lovely.

1. Realise that you’re unique. You have your scars. Realise that colours everything that you see and do.
2. Stop idolising individuals. The patterns lie in large numbers. Not in a single individual’s story, no matter how inspiring you think it is. You have no clue of which butterfly flapped its wings to create Bill Gates’ wealth.
3. The aim ought to be enough. Which you get to decide. But there has to be a point where you say enough.
4. The gains from compounding occur at the end. The only reason Buffett has the money he has now (~90 billion dollars), is because he started investing at 10. Had he started at 30, he’d only be worth ~20 million. Like Housel says,

Effectively all of Warren Buffett’s financial success can be tied to the financial base he built in his pubescent years and the longevity he maintained in his geriatric years.

His skill is investing, but his secret is time. That’s how compounding works.

5. Making money is one thing. It’s the keeping of the money that’s harder. How does one do this? Stay in the margins. Survive. And use Taleb’s Barbell.
6. Have options. You never know which one might pan out. Also realise that options are another way of saying that one of your individual bets could die for the sake of your bigger aim, and you’ll still be ok. An individual stock might not work, but the index has always inched upwards for decades.
7. The best freedom, to paraphrase Taleb, is the ability to say, “Fuck this!” to things you don’t want to do. Or to actually quote him …

This kind of sum I’ve called in my vernacular “fuck you money” —a sum large enough to get most, if not all, of the advantages of wealth (the most important one being independence and the ability to only occupy your mind with matters that interest you) but not its side effects, such as having to attend a black-tie charity event and being forced to listen to a polite exposition of the details of a marble-rich house renovation. […] Beyond a certain level of opulence and independence, gents tend to be less and less personable and their conversation less and less interesting.

Housel puts it much more eloquently …

The highest form of wealth is the ability to wake up every morning and say, “I can do whatever I want today.”

People want to become wealthier to make them happier. Happiness is a complicated subject because everyone’s different. But if there’s a common denominator in happiness—a universal fuel of joy—it’s that people want to control their lives.

The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, for as long as you want, is priceless. It is the highest dividend money pays.

8. Stop playing the Keeping up with the Kumars¹.
9. Save money.
10. Being reasonable is greater than being rational.

You’re not a spreadsheet. You’re a person. Do not aim to be coldly rational when making financial decisions. Aim to just be pretty reasonable. Reasonable is more realistic and you have a better chance of sticking with it for the long run, which is what matters most when managing money.

11. You cannot spend your time and energy watching the world and waiting for the “best” time to make a investment. Save money. Invest it. Let it compound.
12. Margin of Safety. That ought to be one of the main weapons in your mental arsenal. Always have room for error. Always have slack.
13. You will change over time. Learn to be kind to your future self. Make sure you’re not wedded to past decisions. Make your circumstances adapt to you.
14. Nothing’s free. What are you willing to pay to get what you want?
15. Note to self: Learn Statistics. Learn probabilities. They’ll teach you more than stories that folks weave. And yet paradoxically, when you want to convince folks? Use stories. They are always more powerful!
16. Manage and invest your money in a way that helps you sleep at night.
17. The best “shortcut” to do better with your investments? Increase your time horizon and let compounding work for you.
18. What works for others will not work for you. They are not you. Make your own mistakes. And your own decisions. There is no single right answer; just the answer that works for you.

I came across this little paradox of history when I read, “The Race for Paradise” in 2018.

Bashir saw the strange spectacle of the Frankish¹ lord of Antioch marching alongside Muslim troops from the lord of Aleppo, arrayed in battle against the Sultan’s representative, the Muslim lord of Mosul, who marched with his own Frankish¹ allies from Edessa.

Close to eight hundred years later, history rhymed. From Sam Dalrymple’s, Shattered Lands …

Communities divided between India and Burma like the Mizos and Chakma thus found themselves pulled into the war over Pakistan. Later India would send a battalion of Tibetan refugees against them, so that on the eastern front the battle over the future of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan ironically involved two rival Buddhist militias – neither of them Bengali.

That’s always the zeitgeist apparently.
People are dorks.
Showing grace to folks “not like us” is hard.

Let me get the one nitpick out of the way first. It’s a bit rich for Sam to play doomsayer for modern Asia or roleplay a stern parent by expecting us to behave “propah”. He thinks its an irony that

in the twenty-first century it is easier for Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis to meet in England, their former colonial power, than to meet in the subcontinent itself.

The fact remains that Britain abandoned its Empire. They just upped sticks and left. With nothing left for us.
Yes it is sad that there are divisions. But leave the healing to us.
I don’t want the man² who stabbed me in the back, in the dark, and looted and raped everything of mine, to come and preach to me of forgiveness or how division is bad for us..

Sam says,

The last decade has witnessed the decline of globalisation, the strengthening of borders and the resurgence of nationalism across the world. India’s Partitions are a dire warning for what such a future might hold.

I sincerely hope this is a message to the nations of the “first world” to stop ravaging our lands and not for folks in Africa and Asia. Be really hypocritical if it wasn’t.

And now to the rest of the book.
It’s a real tour de force of history.
Beginning in the late 1920s and ending in the mid 70s, the book traces the breakup of the British Indian Empire.
So many pieces of jumbled childhood memories, now make sense. The reason why so many Goans and Mangaloreans rushed to do labour in the erstwhile Trucial States in the mid 80s (modern UAE and other neighbouring countries). I have seen old Indian currency used in Aden (my relatives), as well as Indian currency that could be used in Saudi Arabia when folks went on the Haj (via friends). Why when I went to work in the Eastern part of my state (Maharashtra) in my younger years, the dialect and culture felt different (Because Dakhani. Because erstwhile Hyderabad). Why there used to be so many State Banks.

While I was fairly well informed about how Pakistan and Bangladesh came about, I wanted to learn more about of the Easternmost (Burma) and Westermost (Arabian States) flanks of the British Indian Empire. The book delivered in spades.
It’s extremely well researched, and Sam has the blood of his ranconteur papa when relating this (hi)story.
The history I loved and related to the most, was Angami Zapu Phizo’s lifelong struggle (and failure) to build a Naga nation. Phizo keeps appearing in nearly every Partition story, trying his hardest. The Nagas were the best part of the book.

I have friends, who still reel from the partitions, who have left family on the other side, who have lost lands and property and freedom.
My father (born in 1942) as well as several other older friends (born in the 1930s) used to lament of all that was lost, without being able to articulate what and how.
This book made me realise how and just how much.

What do all the stars and daggers after the book titles mean?

Note to self, for this year: Read less, write more notes. Abandon more books.

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

Ever so often, after one of my reading updates on social media, some of my young friends ask me how I get so much reading done.

So, I decided to answer it here for posterity and then just point folk here.

The only things that matter, when it comes to reading are …

That’s about it for now. If I remember something more, I’ll come back and tack it on here.

The book now dives into the Four Levels of Reading.

We tackle notes from the First Level of Reading, Elementary Reading, today

Stages of Learning to Read

1. First Stage of Learning to read (Reading Readiness)
This begins, at birth, and continues normally until the age of about six or seven. Reading readiness includes several different kinds of preparation for learning to read.
Physical readiness involves good vision and hearing. Intellectual readiness involves a minimum level of visual perception such that the child can take in and remember an entire word and the letters that combine to form it.
Language readiness involves the ability to speak clearly and to use several sentences in correct order.
Personal readiness involves the ability to work with other children, to sustain attention, to follow directions, and the like.
General reading readiness is assessed by tests and is also estimated by teachers who are often skillful at discerning just when a pupil is ready to learn to read.

2. Second Stage: Simple Material Reading Children learn to read very simple materials.
They usually begin, by learning a few sight words, and typically manage to master perhaps three hundred to four hundred words by the end of the first year. Basic skills are introduced at this time, such as the use of context or meaning clues and the beginning sounds of words.

The Miracle of Reading
It is incidentally worth observing that something quite mysterious, almost magical, occurs during this stage.
At one moment in the course of her development the child, when faced with a series of symbols on a page, finds them quite meaningless. Not much later—perhaps only two or three weeks later—she has discovered meaning in them; she knows that they say “The cat sat on the hat.”
How this happens no one really knows, despite the efforts of philosophers and psychologists over two and a half millennia to study the phenomenon. Where does meaning come from? How is it that a French child would find the same meaning in the symbols “Le chat s’asseyait sur le chapeau”?
Indeed, this discovery of meaning in symbols may be the most astounding intellectual feat that any human being ever performs—and most humans perform it before they are seven years old!

3.Third Stage: Vocabulary Acquisition
The third stage is characterized by rapid progress in vocabulary building and by increasing skill in “unlocking” the meaning of unfamiliar words through context clues.

4. Fourth Stage: Assimilation
Finally, the fourth stage is characterized by the refinement and enhancement of the skills previously acquired. Above all, the student begins to be able to assimilate his reading experiences—that is, to carry over concepts from one piece of writing to another, and to compare the views of different writers on the same subject. This, the mature stage of reading, should be reached by young persons in their early teens. Ideally, they should continue to build on it for the rest of their lives.

Stages and Levels

It is of paramount importance to recognize that the four stages outlined here are all stages of the first level of reading

The first stage of elementary reading—reading readiness—corresponds to pre-school and kindergarten experiences.

The second stage—word mastery—corresponds to the first grade experience of the typical child (although many quite normal children are not “typical” in this sense), with the result that the child attains what we can call second-stage reading skills, or first grade ability in reading or first grade literacy.

The third stage of elementary reading—vocabulary growth and the utilization of context—is typically (but not universally, even for normal children) acquired at about the end of the fourth grade of elementary school and results in what is variously called fourth grade, or functional, literacy—the ability, according to one common definition, to read traffic signs or picture captions fairly easily, to fill out the simpler government forms, and the like.

The fourth and final stage of elementary reading is attained at about the time the pupil leaves or graduates from elementary school or junior high school. It is sometimes called eighth grade, ninth grade, or tenth grade literacy. The child is a “mature” reader in the sense that he is now capable of reading almost anything, but still in a relatively unsophisticated manner. In the simplest terms, he is mature enough to do high school work.

Enlightenment or Sophmore(istry)? Reading serves both. It’s the reader who is the difference

To be informed is to know simply that something is the case.
To be enlightened is to know, in addition, what it is all about: why it is the case, what its connections are with other facts, in what respects it is the same, in what respects it is different, and so forth.
This distinction is familiar in terms of the differences between being able to remember something and being able to explain it.
[…] you have gained nothing but information if you have exercised only your memory. You have not been enlightened. Enlightenment is achieved only when, in addition to knowing what an author says, you know what he means and why he says it.

It is true, of course, that you should be able to remember what the author said as well as know what he meant. Being informed is prerequisite to being enlightened. The point, however, is not to stop at being informed.

Montaigne speaks of “an abecedarian ignorance that precedes knowledge, and a doctoral ignorance that comes after it.”
The first is the ignorance of those who, not knowing their ABC’s, cannot read at all.
The second is the ignorance of those who have misread many books.
They are, as Alexander Pope rightly calls them, bookful blockheads, ignorantly read. There have always been literate ignoramuses who have read too widely and not well. The Greeks had a name for such a mixture of learning and folly which might be applied to the bookish but poorly read of all ages. They are all sophomores.

Art of Reading

The process whereby a mind, with nothing to operate on but the symbols of the readable matter, and with no help from outside, elevates itself by the power of its own operations. The mind passes from understanding less to understanding more. The skilled operations that cause this to happen are the various acts that constitute the art of reading.

What is Reading? A couple of meanings …

1. When you already know things

The first sense is the one in which we speak of ourselves as reading newspapers, magazines, or anything else that, according to our skill and talents, is at once thoroughly intelligible to us.
Such things may increase our store of information, but they cannot improve our understanding, for our understanding was equal to them before we started. Otherwise, we would have felt the shock of puzzlement and perplexity that comes from getting in over our depth—that is, if we were both alert and honest

2. When you understand new things

The second sense is the one in which a person tries to read something that at first he does not completely understand.
Here the thing to be read is initially better or higher than the reader. The writer is communicating something that can increase the reader’s understanding. Such communication between unequals must be possible, or else one person could never learn from another, either through speech or writing. Here by “learning” is meant understanding more, not remembering more information that has the same degree of intelligibility as other information you already possess.

On Reading as Discovery

The distinction between being informed vs being enlightened is familiar in terms of the differences between being able to remember something and being able to explain it.
Enlightenment is achieved only when, in addition to knowing what an author says, you know what he means and why he says it.

To avoid error of assuming that to be widely read and to be well-read are the same thing—we must consider a certain distinction in types of learning.

In the history of education, people have often distinguished between learning by instruction and learning by discovery. Instruction occurs when one person teaches another through speech or writing. We can, however, gain knowledge without being taught. If this were not the case, and every teacher had to be taught what he in turn teaches others, there would be no beginning in the acquisition of knowledge. Hence, there must be discovery—the process of learning something by research, by investigation, or by reflection, without being taught.

Discovery stands to instruction as learning without a teacher stands to learning through the help of one. In both cases, the activity of learning goes on in the one who learns. It would be a mistake to suppose that discovery is active learning and instruction passive. There is no inactive learning, just as there is no inactive reading.
This is so true, in fact, that a better way to make the distinction clear is to call instruction “aided discovery.”

The difference between learning by instruction and learning by discovery—or, as we would prefer to say, between aided and unaided discovery—is primarily a difference in the materials on which the learner works. When he is being instructed—discovering with the help of a teacher—the learner acts on something communicated to her. She performs operations on discourse, written or oral. She learns by acts of reading or listening.
When, however, the learner proceeds without the help of any sort of teacher, the operations of learning are performed on nature or the world rather than on discourse. The rules of such learning constitute the art of unaided discovery. If we use the word “reading” loosely, we can say that discovery—strictly, unaided discovery—is the art of reading nature or the world, as instruction (being taught, or aided discovery) is the art of reading books or, to include listening, of learning from discourse.

Thinking is only one part of the activity of learning. One must also use one’s senses and imagination. One must observe, and remember, and construct imaginatively what cannot be observed. There is, again, a tendency to stress the role of these activities in the process of unaided discovery and to forget or minimize their place in the process of being taught through reading or listening. For example, many people assume that though a poet must use his imagination in writing a poem, they do not have to use their imagination in reading it.

The art of reading, in short, includes all of the same skills that are involved in the art of unaided discovery: keenness of observation, readily available memory, range of imagination, and, of course, an intellect trained in analysis and reflection. The reason for this is that reading in this sense is discovery, too—although with help instead of without it.

On Present and Absent Teachers (Or as Munger would have put it, the eminent dead)

We have been proceeding as if reading and listening could both be treated as learning from teachers. To some extent that is true. Both are ways of being instructed, and for both one must be skilled in the art of being taught. Listening to a course of lectures, for example, is in many respects like reading a book; and listening to a poem is like reading it.
Yet there is good reason to place primary emphasis on reading, and let listening become a secondary concern. The reason is that listening is learning from a teacher who is present—a living teacher—while reading is learning from one who is absent.

If you ask a living teacher a question, she will probably answer you. If you are puzzled by what she says, you can save yourself the trouble of thinking by asking her what he means.
If, however, you ask a book a question, you must answer it yourself. In this respect a book is like nature or the world. When you question it, it answers you only to the extent that you do the work of thinking and analysis yourself.

This does not mean, of course, that if the living teacher answers your question, you have no further work. That is so only if the question is simply one of fact. But if you are seeking an explanation, you have to understand it or nothing has been explained to you. Nevertheless, with the living teacher available to you, you are given a lift in the direction of understanding her, as you are not when the teacher’s words in a book are all you have to go by.

[…] (for us readers though) our continuing education depends mainly on books alone, read without a teacher’s help. Therefore if we are disposed to go on learning and discovering, we must know how to make books teach us well. Reading, like unaided discovery, is learning from an absent teacher.

Paraphrased and excerpted as usual …

Thinking is vitally important, but the modern world does not let us …

One of the reasons for this situation is that the very media we have mentioned are so designed as to make thinking seem unnecessary (though this is only an appearance).
The packaging of intellectual positions and views is one of the most active enterprises of some of the best minds of our day. The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, (the “consumer” of modern internet streams —mjb) is presented with a whole complex of elements—all the way from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics—to make it easy for one to “make up one’s own mind” with the minimum of difficulty and effort.
But the packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up their own mind at all. Instead, they inserts a packaged opinion into their mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. They then push a button and “play back” the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. They have performed acceptably without having had to think.

On the ability to read actively & the need to make an effort to match the author’s

Since reading of any sort is an activity, all reading must to some degree be active. Completely passive reading is impossible; we cannot read with our eyes immobilized and our minds asleep. Hence when we contrast active with passive reading, our purpose is, first, to call attention to the fact that reading can be more or less active, and second, to point out that the more active the reading the better.

Reading and listening are commonly thought of as receiving communication from someone who is actively engaged in giving or sending it. The mistake here is to suppose that receiving communication is like receiving a blow or a legacy or a judgment from the court.
On the contrary, the reader or listener is much more like the catcher in a game of baseball.
Catching the ball is just as much an activity as pitching or hitting it. The pitcher or batter is the sender in the sense that his activity initiates the motion of the ball. The catcher or fielder is the receiver in the sense that his activity terminates it. Both are active, though the activities are different.
If anything is passive, it is the ball. It is the inert thing that is put in motion or stopped, whereas the players are active, moving to pitch, hit, or catch. The analogy with writing and reading is almost perfect. The thing that is written and read, like the ball, is the passive object common to the two activities that begin and terminate the process.

We can take this analogy a step further. The art of catching is the skill of catching every kind of pitch—fast balls and curves, changeups and knucklers.
Similarly, the art of reading is the skill of catching every sort of communication as well as possible.

It is noteworthy that the pitcher and catcher are successful only to the extent that they cooperate. The relation of writer and reader is similar. Successful communication occurs in any case where what the writer wanted to have received finds its way into the reader’s possession. The writer’s skill and the reader’s skill converge upon a common end.

There is one respect in which the analogy breaks down. The ball is a simple unit. It is either completely caught or not.
A piece of writing, however, is a complex object. It can be received more or less completely, all the way from very little of what the writer intended to the whole of it. The amount the reader “catches” will usually depend on the amount of activity he puts into the process, as well as upon the skill with which he executes the different mental acts involved.

What does active reading entail?
Given the same thing to read, one person reads it better than another, first, by reading it more actively, and second, by performing each of the acts involved more skillfully. These two things are related.
Reading is a complex activity, just as writing is.
It consists of a large number of separate acts, all of which must be performed in a good reading. The person who can perform more of them is better able to read.

I’ve always been precious about the physical books, I have.
Partly because the books I read when I was a child, didn’t belong to me.
And so, I wrote notes. Gentle pencil marks as I read (to be erased, before I returned them), and then writing them all out into a notebook (and later typed in to a computer when I could afford one.)

I’ve longed to write in the damned books themselves, but old habits die hard. Until I read Adler, that is.

And then the clouds parted.

Marking a book, making it your own, highlighting it, questioning it, raging at it, whispering to it, completing the conversation, the author wishes to have with you … all of it, is such a sheer, physical, visceral experience.
I wonder why I didn’t do it sooner. Better late than never though. I’ve been marking every physical book and highlighting and annotating every electronic book, ever since I got back into reading, ten years ago.

Here’s Adler on why one needs to physically manhandle a book.¹

Merely asking questions [of a book] is not enough. You have to try to answer them. And although that could be done, theoretically, in your mind only, it is much easier to do it with a pencil in your hand. The pencil then becomes the sign of your alertness while you read.

It is an old saying that you have to “read between the lines” to get the most out of anything. The rules of reading are a formal way of saying this. But we want to persuade you to “write between the lines,” too. Unless you do, you are not likely to do the most efficient kind of reading.

When you buy a book, you establish a property right in it²
But the act of purchase is actually only the prelude to possession in the case of a book. Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it—which comes to the same thing—is by writing in it.

Why is marking a book indispensable to reading it?
First, it keeps you awake—not merely conscious, but wide awake.
Second, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The person who says they knows what they think but cannot express it usually does not know what they think.

The Art of Reading, according to Adler, is that we take part in a great conversation.
I am talking to the author, but they have learnt from other masters elsewhere and are passing on their thoughts and knowledge, thus taking part in a single great conversation of humankind through the ages.

Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author.
Presumably she knows more about the subject than you do; if not, you probably should not be bothering with her book.
But understanding is a two-way operation; the learner has to question themselves and question the teacher. They even has to be willing to argue with the teacher, once they understand what the teacher is saying.
Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay them

Mortimer Adler’s methods of marking up a book and making it your own

I’m not particularly religious about using them all, because I’ve already been using something similar (a subset) all my life

There are all kinds of devices for marking a book intelligently and fruitfully. Here are some devices that can be used:

1. UNDERLINING—of major points; of important or forceful statements.

2. VERTICAL LINES AT THE MARGIN—to emphasize a statement already underlined or to point to a passage too long to be underlined.

3. STAR, ASTERISK, OR OTHER DOODAD AT THE MARGIN—to be used sparingly, to emphasize the ten or dozen most important statements or passages in the book. You may want to fold a corner of each page on which you make such marks or place a slip of paper between the pages. In either case, you will be able to take the book off the shelf at any time and, by opening it to the indicated page, refresh your recollection.

4. NUMBERS IN THE MARGIN—to indicate a sequence of points made by the author in developing an argument.

5. NUMBERS OF OTHER PAGES IN THE MARGIN—to indicate where else in the book the author makes the same points, or points relevant to or in contradiction of those here marked; to tie up the ideas in a book, which, though they may be separated by many pages, belong together. Many readers use the symbol “Cf ” to indicate the other page numbers; it means “compare” or “refer to.”

6. CIRCLING OF KEY WORDS OR PHRASES—This serves much the same function as underlining.

7. WRITING IN THE MARGIN, OR AT THE TOP OR BOTTOM OF THE PAGE—to record questions (and perhaps answers) which a passage raises in your mind; to reduce a complicated discussion to a simple statement; to record the sequence of major points right through the book. The endpapers at the back of the book can be used to make a personal index of the author’s points in the order of their appearance.

To inveterate book-markers, the front endpapers are often the most important. Some people reserve them for a fancy bookplate. But that expresses only their financial ownership of the book. The front endpapers are better reserved for a record of your thinking. After finishing the book and making your personal index on the back endpapers, turn to the front and try to outline the book, not page by page or point by point (you have already done that at the back), but as an integrated structure, with a basic outline and an order of parts. That outline will be the measure of your understanding of the work; unlike a bookplate, it will express your intellectual ownership of the book.

But, wait! There’s more!

Marking up a book is all fine and dandy, but what about recording your thoughts? And questions?

Adler to the rescue again with The Three Kinds of Note-making.
Which kind you make depends upon the level at which you are reading.

1. Notes during Inspectional Reading
The questions answered by inspectional reading are: first, what kind of book is it? second, what is it about as a whole? and third, what is the structural order of the work whereby the author develops his conception or understanding of that general subject matter?
You should make notes concerning your answers to these questions, especially if you know that it may be days or months before you will be able to return to the book to give it an analytical reading. (These kind of notes have served me really well, since I tend to keep the book down and then come back to it after a while)
Notes at this stage, primarily concern the structure of the book, and not its substance—at least not in detail.
The best place to make such notes is on the contents page, or perhaps on the title page, which are otherwise unused in the scheme we have outlined above.

2. Notes during Analytical Reading
In the course of an inspectional reading, especially of a long and difficult book, you may attain some insights into the author’s ideas about his subject matter. Often, however, you will not; and certainly you should put off making any judgment of the accuracy or truth of the statements until you have read the book more carefully.
Then, during an analytical reading, you will need to give answers to questions about the truth and significance of the book. The notes you make at this level of reading are, therefore, not structural but conceptual. They concern the author’s concepts, and also your own, as they have been deepened or broadened by your reading of the book.

3. Notes during Syntopical Reading
There is a step beyond even that, however, and a truly expert reader can take it when he is reading several books syntopically. That is to make notes about the shape of the discussion—the discussion that is engaged in by all of the authors, even if unbeknownst to them. We prefer to call such notes dialectical.
Since they are made concerning several books, not just one, they often have to be made on a separate sheet (or sheets) of paper. Here, a structure of concepts is implied—an order of statements and questions about a single subject matter.

It took me five times as long to transfer and organise the file, as it took me to read the book. This was very painful!
I am writing this down, so that my future self remembers!
Very, very, painful!

So I need to be intentional about books that I need to analytically read and change my reading habits.

1. Have a one to one ratio for notes vs reading.
   This means for every ten minutes I want to read, I need to allocate at least the same amount of time for bringing my notes in.
2. All of the above, has to be a single session.
   So reading, followed by a bit of reflection, followed by transferring my notes and annotations out to Org Roam. So my old hour of reading is now 30m of reading, followed by 30m of thinking and jotting my thoughts down.
3. Cross my fingers, and hope that it’ll all work out. Hope that something sane, something intelligible emerges in the end.

This has never been a bugbear for me. A lifetime of reading has led me to read at a fairly fast clip. But Adler puts into specific words, what it is that I actually, subconsciously do. This will help me advise my younger friends, when I used to struggle earlier, with a “Just keep at it”

Below followeth Adler’s advice …

1. Great speed in reading is a dubious achievement; it is of value only if what you have to read is not really worth reading. A better formula is this:
   Every book should be read no more slowly than it deserves, and no more quickly than you can read it with satisfaction and comprehension. In any event, the speed at which they read, be it fast or slow, is but a fractional part of most people’s problem with reading
2. The ideal is not merely to be able to read faster, but to be able to read at different speeds — and to know when the different speeds are appropriate.

So if that is the ideal, how do we go about increasing our speed if we are slow / irregular? Adles has an observation and a suggestion, that’ll take us most of the way there.

1. The eyes of young or untrained readers “fixate” as many as five or six times in the course of each line that is read. (The eye is blind while it moves; it can only see when it stops.) Thus single words or at the most two-word or three-word phrases are being read at a time, in jumps across the line. Even worse than that, the eyes of incompetent readers regress as often as once every two or three lines—that is, they return to phrases or sentences previously read.
2. Place your thumb and first two fingers together. Sweep this “pointer” across a line of type, a little faster than it is comfortable for your eyes to move. Force yourself to keep up with your hand. You will very soon be able to read the words as you follow your hand. Keep practicing this, and keep increasing the speed at which your hand moves, and before you know it you will have doubled or trebled your reading speed.

With a caveat however …

• What exactly have you gained if you increase your reading speed significantly? It is true that you have saved time—but what about comprehension? Has that also increased, or has it suffered in the process?
  It is worth emphasizing, therefore, that it is precisely comprehension in reading that this book seeks to improve. You cannot comprehend a book without reading it analytically; analytical reading, as we have noted, is undertaken primarily for the sake of comprehension (or understanding).

Been listening to Joseph Conrad’s, Heart of Darkness in the little cracks of time in the day¹ and as always being led to the sad and inevitable conclusion that we always fail to learn from what came before.

It was as unreal as everything else—as the philanthropic pretence of the whole concern, as their talk, as their government, as their show of work. The only real feeling was a desire to get appointed to a trading-post where ivory was to be had, so that they could earn percentages. They intrigued and slandered and hated each other only on that account—but as to effectually lifting a little finger—oh, no.

By heavens! there is something after all in the world allowing one man to steal a horse while another must not look at a halter. Steal a horse straight out. Very well. He has done it. Perhaps he can ride. But there is a way of looking at a halter that would provoke the most charitable of saints into a kick.

Aaron Swartz had to give his life for his beliefs, yet when the robber barons thieve everything is suddenly alright.
Greed, like love, never dies!

As I go through How to Read a Book, I’ve realised that I need to digest a book in a manner of speaking, specially on my subsequent reads.

My ideal is to pick up a book, and read through it at the speed it ought to take; highlighting, annotating and writing down my thoughts as I go.
And while I do that, also write things down here on the blog, as I’ve been attempting to do with Adler.

Rather, I thought I would do that with Adler.
But through force of habit, I’ve gone and done the same thing I’ve always done.
Read through the entire book, highlighting as I go.
So now I have a book full of notes, and a few thoughts, but all the “brilliant”¹ insights that struck me as I read the book have vanished from my mind, as has any tentative mental model of the structure of the book.
And I’m frustrated with this state of affairs.
What happens then, is me having just a page full of notes without any of my thoughts in there, or trying to recapture lighting in a bottle over months of agonising effort.
Neither appeals to me.

The only things I can think of doing right now are:

1. Keep a notebook beside me and write my thoughts down. The flyleaves are barely enough for me to keep track of running highlights across pages.
2. Intentionally slow down, even more. I don’t know what this will do to my flow.
3. Read in chunks. And then stop and write about them. I’ll probably miss the big picture. But I’ll arrive at it slowly, eventually. And the writing will reflect that. Is that good or bad? I don’t really know.

So I think I’m going to buckle down and finish getting my notes from Adler into posts in the coming weeks and try the above on my next book.

This is another post, that is near verbatim¹ from the book.
Because, once again, this is reference material, that I need to come back to over and over.

The Four Levels of Reading

They are called so, because they are cumulative.
The first level is not lost in the second, the second in the third, the third in the fourth. In fact, the fourth and highest level of reading includes all the others. It simply goes beyond them.

Level 1: Elementary Reading

Everyboy can read at this level!
This is the most common level there is.

The first level of reading we will call Elementary Reading. In mastering this level, one learns the rudiments of the art of reading, receives basic training in reading, and acquires initial reading skills. We prefer the name elementary reading, because this level of reading is ordinarily learned in elementary school.

The child’s first encounter with reading is at this level. His problem then (and ours when we began to read) is to recognize the individual words on the page. He is merely concerned with language as it is employed by the writer. At this level of reading, the question asked of the reader is “What does the sentence say?” That could be conceived as a complex and difficult question, of course. We mean it here, however, in its simplest sense.

Level 2: Inspectional Reading

This level I do very well, because of the anti-library.
Figuring out whether the book is worth reading or not, is a critical skill for me.
Too many books, far too little time, after all :)

The second level of reading we will call Inspectional Reading.

One way to describe this level of reading is to say that its aim is to get the most out of a book within a given time—usually a relatively short time, and always (by definition) too short a time to get out of the book everything that can be gotten.

Still another name for this level might be skimming or pre-reading. However, we do not mean the kind of skimming that is characterized by casual or random browsing through a book. Inspectional reading is the art of skimming systematically.

When reading at this level, your aim is to examine the surface of the book, to learn everything that the surface alone can teach you. That is often a good deal.

Whereas the question that is asked at the first level is “What does the sentence say?” the question typically asked at this level is “What is the book about?” That is a surface question; others of a similar nature are “What is the structure of the book?” or “What are its parts?” Upon completing an inspectional reading of a book, no matter how short the time you had to do it in, you should also be able to answer the question, “What kind of book is it—a novel, a history, a scientific treatise?”

Level 3: Analytical Reading

This is the level at what I want to read regularly.
What I want to do, everytime I pick up a book to learn from and understand deeply.
This is what I have set out to learn from this book.
Francis Bacon once remarked that “some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”
I want to be able to digest the books I read!

The third level of reading we will call Analytical Reading.

Analytical reading is thorough reading, complete reading, or good reading—the best reading you can do. If inspectional reading is the best and most complete reading that is possible given a limited time, then analytical reading is the best and most complete reading that is possible given unlimited time.

The analytical reader must ask many, and organized, questions of what he is reading. […] analytical reading is always intensely active. On this level of reading, the reader grasps a book—the metaphor is apt—and works at it until the book becomes his own.

We also want to stress that analytical reading is hardly ever necessary if your goal in reading is simply information or entertainment. Analytical reading is preeminently for the sake of understanding.

Level 4: Syntopical Reading

This level is one, I really doubt I’ll ever do outside of work or research or learning.
That is where I use it the most. And this level of learning is something I figured out on my own, while consulting. Tackling a specific problem in a niche domain, meant that I needed to figure out all the angles beforehand. Figuring what that world was like, and how did what I want fit into that world. Syntopical Reading is very very similar. And like Adler notes, very demanding.

The fourth and highest level of reading we will call Syntopical Reading.

Another name for this level might be comparative reading. When reading syntopically, the reader reads many books, not just one, and places them in relation to one another and to a subject about which they all revolve. But mere comparison of texts is not enough. Syntopical reading involves more. With the help of the books read, the syntopical reader is able to construct an analysis of the subject that may not be in any of the books.

It is the most complex and systematic type of reading of all. It makes very heavy demands on the reader, even if the materials he is reading are themselves relatively easy and unsophisticated.

My primary reading device is my Kobo.
For the simple reason, that I will need to buy a whole new home, for my books otherwise. The anti-library is just too large.

But as I was reading, How to Read a Book, I realise I’ll probably need a copy on the Kobo as well as a physical copy in hand, for any book that I want to read in depth.
If reading is effort, as the book suggests, then I might as well have the right tools for the right kind of effort.
Rapidly scanning through, marking things up, jotting thoughts down, and all other assorted marginalia is very easy with a physical book. Looking words up in a dictionary, copying notes in and out, and searching are very easy with the Kobo.
When it comes to writing my thoughts elsewhere or doing research, it is easy to scan through a physical book, find the relevant page, and then I am back in that mental space I was, that triggered the thought. This realisation; that books are spatial memory, is new to me (I might have been using it subconsciously all along). An e-reader cannot give me that.

So I’m going to make the best of both worlds and use both!

The Four Basic Questions:

This is the basic idea, that permeates the entire book down to its bones and colours every piece of advice Adler offers.

I’m quoting this verbatim, without any paraphrasing, because these questions are what I will be returning to time and again, in the coming days (and weeks and months and years.)

The one simple prescription for active reading.
It is: Ask questions while you read—questions that you yourself must try to answer in the course of reading.

1. What is the book about as a whole?
   You must try to discover the leading theme of the book, and how the author develops this theme in an orderly way by subdividing it into its essential subordinate themes or topics.

2. What is being said in detail, and how?
   You must try to discover the main ideas, assertions, and arguments that constitute the author’s particular message.

3. Is the book true, in whole or part?
   You cannot answer this question until you have answered the first two. You have to know what is being said before you can decide whether it is true or not. When you understand a book, however, you are obligated, if you are reading seriously, to make up your own mind. Knowing the author’s mind is not enough.

4. What of it?
   If the book has given you information, you must ask about its significance. Why does the author think it is important to know these things? Is it important to you to know them? And if the book has not only informed you, but also enlightened you, it is necessary to seek further enlightenment by asking what else follows, what is further implied or suggested.

A few thoughts on books and how long it takes me to read them, as they relate to what I learned reading this book

1. Reading for joy, is just that. Reading for joy! Nothing needs to come in the way of that.
2. Books can take as long as they need to be read. Comprehension is key. Not how many I finish.
3. I was wondering how so many folks read so many books “better” faster than me. The book assures me that reading books analytically, reading ideas syntopically across a swathe of books is inherently slow. I cannot read everything that way. Nor should I want to obviously. The book needs to be worthy of that kind of time and attention. To quote Adler …

A good book can teach you about the world and about yourself.
You learn more than how to read better; you also learn more about life.
You become wiser. Not just more knowledgeable—books that provide nothing but information can produce that result. But wiser, in the sense that you are more deeply aware of the great and enduring truths of human life.

4. And I always worried about how I would go about reading all the great books there were, when there were so many? How would I get to them all? Adler assures me that such books are few and far between. And Having read thousands of books by now, I agree. A good book, a good Lindy book is really hard to find. The last great expository / philosophical / non fiction book I read was Antifragile close to twelve years ago. The last great fiction book, luckily was Harrow in 2020. Great books don’t come by often.
   Here’s Adler again …

… if the book belongs to the highest class—the very small number of inexhaustible books—you discover on returning that the book seems to have grown with you. You see new things in it—whole sets of new things—that you did not see before. Your previous understanding of the book is not invalidated (assuming that you read it well the first time); it is just as true as it ever was, and in the same ways that it was true before. But now it is true in still other ways, too.

How can a book grow as you grow? […] what you only now begin to realize is that the book was so far above you to begin with that it has remained above you, and probably always will remain so. Since it is a really good book—a great book, as we might say—it is accessible at different levels. Your impression of increased understanding on your previous reading was not false. The book truly lifted you then. But now, even though you have become wiser and more knowledgeable, it can lift you again. And it will go on doing this until you die.

There are obviously not many books that can do this for any of us. Our estimate was that the number is considerably less than a hundred. But the number is even less than that for any given reader. Human beings differ in many ways other than in the power of their minds. They have different tastes; different things appeal more to one person than to another. You may never feel about Newton the way you feel about Shakespeare, either because you may be able to read Newton so well that you do not have to read him again, or because mathematical systems of the world just do not have all that appeal to you. Or, if they do then Newton may be one of the handful of books that are great for you, and not Shakespeare.

You should seek out the few books that can have this value for you. They are the books that will teach you the most, both about reading and about life. They are the books to which you will want to return over and over. They are the books that will help you to grow.

5. And suddenly it isn’t so hard any more. The path I have now before me, is to go find my small set of great books. The books I can learn from and grow old with. Oh joy!

To quote Nux, Oh, what a day! What a lovely day!

Why do I need to learn how to read? What has brought me to this?

Some thoughts …

• I feel like, for all my reading, whenever I come across a great book, I don’t quite get as much out of it, as I ought to. (Anthony D’Mello, Tamsyn Muir and Nassim Taleb are a few who come to mind.)
• Most of my note taking has been intuitive. And then I struggle to draw insights. To add insult to injury, the struggle is unique for each book. I need a framework, to get atleast 80% of the way there, predictably, every time.

Why this book?

Because I like it.¹
I love the old-timey feel of the book. Yes, it is a product of its time and I really, desperately wish, they update it to become a whole lot more inclusive when it comes to a great many things. Not the least being gender. Also faith.
But for the actual lessons that it does try to teach; I resonate with the author’s voice.

What’s the plan now? What do I hope will happen?

Read it.
Make notes.
Write about it in tiny bits.
Write down, thoughts, insight, stuff that strikes me, paragraphs from the book, quotes, and everything in between

Let it take as long as it does.

The biggest lesson, I took away from the book last time I read it, was that the intentional reading of a good book, takes time. I want to be able to do this with the books I like, so I’m getting the ball rolling with this one itself.

The note I wrote to myself at the beginning of the year was …

Read less, write more notes. Abandon more books.

By reading less, I meant I wanted to read good books slower and longer, which is what I hope I will do, once I get done reading this book.

I’m tired of making excuses for my tardiness 😂
So, like Don Cheadle says in Iron Man 2, “Look, it’s me. I’m here. Deal with it. Let’s move on.”

While I tell you about the books I loved, you can also click each month to find the complete list of titles I loved.

January

I think this year continues my fascination with Agatha Christie.
January was mostly spent in the world of Marple. I think I’ll be back doing Christie runs in the coming months. I don’t know what it is about her worlds, but I keep coming back to them ove and over again.
(even more than Doyle and Holmes, though I love the new fresh takes in the Holmesian world. While David Suchet and his run will always remain the canonical Poirot to me, I have no such qualms with anyone else doing Holmes)

So I spent January with Ms. Marple. The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side was my favourite. The sudden, heart-stopping realisation of what must have happened, by one of the main characters, the immense grief that must have rolled down on them all over again, summed up in the lines from Tennyson’s poem that give the book its title.

     She look’d down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack’d from side to side;
‘The curse is come upon me,’ cried
     The Lady of Shalott.

I also love following these pretty webs, authors lay for me. Thanks to Agatha Christie penning these words in 1962, I went looking for a poem from 1832 and thoroughly enjoyed it :)

Honourable mention to the Sherlock & Co. podcast.
I began listening to it, just for curiosity’s sake and have now been looking forward to each new adventure of our intrepid heroes. My favourite parts are when other hosts from the Goalhanger universe come in to do cameos, like Will Dalrymple and Anita Anand (Empire) did in one of my recent favorites, The Sign of Four (Season 22 on iTunes) or when Dominic Sandbrook (The Rest is History) played a crazy, stressed lawyer in The Norwood Builder (season 27 on iTunes). It’s really fun!

February

February started me on the road of my (hidden) goal of reading at least one technical book a month. Learning Go, by Jon Bodner taught me the language. One thing I’ve learnt though, is that I almost nearly always need 2-3 authors / books before I understand whatever it is I need to learn. I’ve realised that I have been spoiled with authors in other domains when it comes to explaining things lucidly. (plus any topic in tech is vast and no single author can fill in all the gaps of my ignorance.) My solution to this is to be a syntopical reader and figure out whatever it is I need from multiple texts.

I learnt well enough from Bodner, and Ricardo Gerardi’s Powerful Command-Line Applications in Go to go write a tool I sorely needed in Go lang. A small tool to generate RSS feeds for my audiobooks, I call Rederb. It’s still raw and unpolished, but it got my audiobook ducks in row, so I could listen to whatever struck my fancy on the recent break.

I also discovered Grant Snider this month. While full of whimsy, they are also really thought provoking. I devoured The Art of Living, and The Shape of Ideas. Highly recommended! The one that started it all for me and was specifically written for me, was I Will Judge You by Your Bookshelf.

Honourable mention to Anita Anand and William Dalrymple for doing the Three Kings (Empire Podcast, episodes 212-214), explaining the confluence of Byzantine and Persian cultures, myths and history.

March

was spent mostly in the company of the aforementioned Anand & Dalrymple charting the rise and fall of the Mughal Empire (Empire Podcast, episodes 205-211, and 215-222). This engaging series filled in so many gaps in my head and what the landscape of our country was like. I need to now go see what my land was like, before the Mughals.

More history was in the offing with part two of The Rest is History’s continuing history of the French Revolution. I listened to Parts Two and Three this month. (Episodes 503-507 and 544-547). Part one was last year (Episodes 475-482).
A really refreshing change of pace by Holland and Sandbrook, considering they have covered the Revolution once before in two twenty minute episodes! I love the slow, measured march this time. The more I listen, the more I wonder how much of history hinges on chance events! I also love their slightly irreverent and self deprecating tone. We’re still not done, and I look forward to revisiting France during the revolution, soon.

Honourable mention to the Acquired Podcast’s coverage of Rolex. This was one of the few I really enjoyed, besides their story on Hermès. I think I just like old company stories. Hopefully someday we’ll get Nintendo and Yamaha.

And that’s it for now. I hope you folks find something in here, that interests you too :)

Ben Orlin, the modern Maths apologist, brings to us what I’d call his Magnum Opus, the modern Mathematician’s Lament.
Everytime, I read an Orlin book, I always wish, I had teachers like him when I was young, so that I would not have had such crippling math-phobia for so much of my life.
It should actually be called, Maths for the Rest of Us.
It’s great! So great!

My highlights, from the book

A mathematician is hardly a reasonable person. More like a feral philosopher or a logician gone rogue.

It’s a bit peculiar to say that I add 4 and 3 to create 7; 4 and 3 simply are 7, irrespective of my efforts. When I multiply or divide or take a logarithm, the result equals whatever it equals, regardless of my labors. I do not, in a strict sense, change the numbers, but merely discover or reveal them. Operations act not upon the quantities themselves, but only upon our understandings of them.

In my childhood, back when money was made of metal and paper instead of software and lies, I learned that two quarters add up to 50 cents: 25 + 25 = 50. I loved knowing this

… the beauty of mathematical language lies in its unreality. Math lets us escape this world of crumbs and mud for a realm of rigorous abstractions. The purer the logic—that is, the further from physical reality—the deeper the truth. “As far as laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain,” said Einstein, “and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”

I sometimes envision mathematics as a tower. It leads from the earthy crust of everyday experience (piles of cookies; buckets of water; half-dollar coins) up to the thin atmosphere of abstract concepts (Lie groups, whatever those are). There’s pleasure and power in climbing to the upper floors. But there’s an equal pleasure—and a different kind of power—in descending to the bottom. Down there, you can touch the foundations, poke at the joints where math attaches to the world, and fill your half-gallon bucket with a new kind of insight

Consider 2 + 3. If + is a verb, then who is the subject carrying out the addition? Neither 2 nor 3 performs any action; those nouns just sit there being nouns. You’re the one who adds, but you’re not a part of mathematical speech

Such confusion is not limited to the youth. Adult textbook authors have been known to include gratuitous fighter jets and non sequitur cheetahs, as if the secret to math is picturing something, anything. But the hard part of math isn’t remembering what cats look like. It’s making sense of abstract ideas.

The challenge of algebra is to visualize the invisible

“The point of doing algebra,” writes math teacher Paul Lockhart, “is… to move back and forth between several equivalent representations,depending on the situation at hand and depending on our taste. In this sense, all algebraic manipulation is psychological.”

Old information, new formation

I like this rule because it’s rarely even taught. Mathematicians apply it automatically, the way fluent English speakers always say “a big ugly bath toy” and not “a bath ugly big toy.” In fact, as Mark Forsyth points out in The Elements of Eloquence, English adjectives are typically placed in a certain order: opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose. Hence, “a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife.

Likewise, in math, numbers are typically multiplied in a certain order: numeral, radical, constant, variable. Hence, we write 3πxy²z, and never (unless we’re trying to provoke someone) zy²πx3

Toward the end of a sixth-grade lesson, a chipper young fellow named Kieran raised his hand. “I don’t really understand anything you’re saying,” he informed me. “But I can still get the right answer.” He beamed a patient smile.

I stifled a sigh. “Which part can I help you with?”

“Oh, I don’t need help,” he said. “It’s just that you were talking about this extra stuff. Like, the ideas behind it. I don’t, you know, do that.”

I blinked. He blinked. A great silence passed between us.

“Is that okay?” he concluded. “I mean, as long as I can get the right answer?”

There it was, out in the open: the subtext of almost every lesson I had taught that year. Day after day, I tried to illuminate the logic behind the symbols. Day after day, my students politely ignored my prattle to focus on the symbols themselves. What made that afternoon stand out was that Kieran broke the fourth wall. He uttered the title of the film we were acting in.

To do math, must you think about the ideas, or can you just focus on the symbols?

As David Hilbert quipped, “Mathematics is a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper.” That’s symbol pushing in a nutshell. Language divorced from meaning

But a few weeks after Kieran’s query, I learned that not all mathematicians share my dim view of symbol pushing. I mentioned to my dad (a mathematician himself) that I had started writing an essay titled ”How to Avoid Thinking in Math Class.” Before I could say any more, he gave the project his stamp of approval. “Great,” he said. “I’ve always said that the point of math education is to help you not to think.”

I was taken aback. No, I explained, the title was ironic. On the question of “Should we think?” I was firmly in favor.

“Oh, yes, thinking is good,” he generously conceded. “But it’s too hard to do all the time.”

He (and, indeed, Kieran) had a point. For example, it is an algebraic truth that (x + 1)(x − 1) is the same as x2 − 1. This fact boils down to a repeated application of the distributive property; as such, you can explain it entirely in terms of pile rearrangement. But trying to do so is like ascending a sheer cliff face.

Quite a climb! Invigorating as an occasional workout, but unthinkable as a morning commute. This was exactly my dad’s point: Thinking is good. But it’s too hard to do all the time.

“Operations of thought,” wrote the mathematician Alfred North Whitehead, “are like cavalry charges in battle—they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made in decisive moments.”

In this case, there is no need to send in the cavalry. The symbol pusher, thinking only about letters and parentheses, reaches the same summit in a few effortless strides

Can you imagine if English worked this way? An object’s name would indicate its physical size, so that a chihuahua (nine letters) would be three times the size of a cow (three letters). A food’s name would encode its recipe, so that a pizza would be a “DoughSauceCheeseBake.” Chemistry would be a tediously safe area of study, because we could run experiments simply by smushing together the names of various chemicals and seeing which ones spell “explosion.”

Symbol pushing boils the laws of logic down to laws of grammar. The language becomes a scale model of reality. We can wrangle ideas simply by wrangling ink.

So who was right, me or Kieran? The answer, of course, is both. To speak mathematics is to slip back and forth between two worlds, to inhabit two distinct frames of mind: the hard joy of thinking and the mindless trance of symbol pushing. Without the ink, the ideas are befuddling; but without the ideas, the ink means nothing. Learn the logic, learn it well, and then turn off your brain and let the symbols on the page dance to the silent music of the mind.

… notations often gain popularity precisely because they lend themselves to simple mechanical rules. You could say we choose the symbols for the express purpose of pushing them around. We can then generate right answers with no insight, no inspiration, no input other than elbow grease. Just turn the crank, and new knowledge pops out

When someone is too focused on details, we say they’re missing the forest for the trees. Mathematicians, if anything, are guilty of the opposite: missing the trees for the forest. Their habit is to inspect not objects themselves, but the objects’ properties. (Not the trees, but the number of them.) Then, having distilled these properties, they look at the properties’ properties. (Not the number, but its evenness or oddness.) And so on: the properties of the properties of the properties of the things. “Matter does not engage their attention,” Henri Poincaré once said of mathematicians. “They are interested in form alone.”

What he did was really, really wrong! Horrifyingly wrong!
The girls, the women, were wronged. Grossly so. Often violently so.

Never meet your heroes and idols with feet of clay and all that.

So I’ve given away (or deleted) all my Gaiman books, save two. My collected editions of Sandman. And my signed copy of What you Need to Be Warm.
While it is true that Gaiman shot to stardom with Sandman, that was not the reason I bought this collected edition. I bought it for the young boy, who would scramble the lanes of Matunga and Fort, looking for more erudite comics after reading Moore’s V for Vendetta and Watchmen. Sandman was something I discovered on my own and enjoyed so much.
Besides it was never about the writing at that stage. It was the stories. From all over the world and across cultures. That he’d reimagine for Sandman. (Ramadan, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Thermidor, The Dream Hunters … ) And even more importantly it was the pictures, the drawings, the gorgeous art. (Yoshitaka Amano, Dave McKean, Todd Klein, and all the others) So Sandman stays. And with What You Need to Be Warm, the money went to a smol shop and to a good cause both. So I don’t feel bad owning it.

“Man’s not dead while his name is still spoken” — Terry Pratchett

And so this is the last, I speak your name. You’re dead to me.

I am a reader.
In the Mortimer Adler sense of the word.
This is my dream :)
To be surrounded by books.
And to be able to savour them, a line … a page at a time.

What do all the stars and daggers after the book titles mean?

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

You are allowed

nay, encouraged to …

• buy books you’ll never read
• abandon books halfway through
• read your favorites over and over again
• read ‘easy’ books
• read books you don’t totally understand
• just look at the pictures
• start in the middle
• take notes
• break spines
• read the book after you saw the movie
• skip the boring parts
• keep books out of sentiment
• bring a book everywhere
• read comics
• return books to the library unread

The point, my dear reader, is joy.

— stolen verbatim from Lady Grey’s Library on Tumblr

What happens when you take all the pulpy goodness from Indian soaps and K-dramas, mash it up with Pacific Rim and Robotech, infuse it with a lot of authentic Chinese history, and aim it at teens (err, young adults)?

You get Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao, that’s what!

I wish someone takes Indian history and creates such awesome fictional worlds from them.
This was such a crazy, rollicking ride! I cannot wait for their next.

My highlights, from the book

In hindsight, I was such a fool to have assumed Qieluo would stand by me just because she’s also female.
It was my grandmother who crushed my feet in half.
It was my mother who encouraged me and Big Sister to offer ourselves up as concubines so our brother could afford a future bride.
It was always the village aunties who’d sit around gossiping about which girl hadn’t been married off yet, despite complaining nonstop about their own husbands. And then they’d congratulate new mothers for being “blessed” to have a boy, despite being female themselves.

How do you take the fight out of half the population and render them willing slaves? You tell them they’re meant to do nothing but serve from the minute they’re born. You tell them they’re weak. You tell them they’re prey.
You tell them over and over, until it’s the only truth they’re capable of living.

Reading Babel, constantly gave me strong déjà vu as I leafed through its pages.¹
Until I realised what I was experiencing was an author enjoying their words, their lines, their exquisite craft. Where words themselves crawl into your mind, and say yes, we are. We will tell you this story. You need not make any effort here.
Richard Powers’, The Overstory was that way. So was Arundhati Roy’s, The God of Small Things. And Tamysyn Muir, with her Locked Tomb books.

This is alternate history Empire. The British still rule the world, but here they do so, on the strength of magic, silver-work and words and language.
Kuang then uses all that heft to bash our brains in.²
There’s Robin and Ramy and Victoire and Letty and it’s them against the world³

This was one of those rare books⁴ where I wanted very little to do with the story and just wanted to lose myself in the world. I wanted to study languages the way they did, and do magic the way they did. The way some of them come to choose violence reminded me of Bhagat and Azad.

The history’s wonderful.
The way she uses language and words, even more so!

My highlights, from the book

Inside, the heady wood-dust smell of freshly printed books was overwhelming. If tobacco smelled like this, Robin thought, he’d huff it every day. He stepped towards the closest shelf, hand lifted tentatively towards the books on display, too afraid to touch them – they seemed so new and crisp; their spines were uncracked, their pages smooth and bright. Robin was used to well-worn, waterlogged tomes; even his Classics grammars were decades old. These shiny, freshly bound things seemed like a different class of object, things to be admired from a distance rather than handled and read.

‘If you can see?’ The woman raised her voice and overenunciated her every syllable, as if Robin had difficulty hearing. (This had happened often to Robin on the Countess of Harcourt; he could never understand why people treated those who couldn’t understand English as if they were deaf.)

‘But that’s impossible for me,’ said Ramy. ‘I have to play a part. Back in Calcutta, we all tell the story of Sake Dean Mahomed, the first Muslim from Bengal to become a rich man in England. He has a white Irish wife. He owns property in London. And you know how he did it? He opened a restaurant, which failed; and then he tried to be hired as a butler or valet, which also failed. And then he had the brilliant idea of opening a shampoo house in Brighton.’ Ramy chuckled. ‘Come and get your healing vapours! Be massaged with Indian oils! It cures asthma and rheumatism; it heals paralysis. Of course, we don’t believe that at home. But all Dean Mahomed had to do was give himself some medical credentials, convince the world of this magical Oriental cure, and then he had them eating out of the palm of his hand. So what does that tell you, Birdie? If they’re going to tell stories about you, use it to your advantage. The English are never going to think I’m posh, but if I fit into their fantasy, then they’ll at least think I’m royalty.’

‘Does Mirza really mean “prince”?’ Robin asked, after he’d overheard Ramy declare this to a shopkeeper for the third time.
‘Sure. Well, really, it’s a title – it’s derived from the Persian Amīrzādeh, but “prince” comes close enough.’
‘Then are you—?’
‘No.’ Ramy snorted. ‘Well. Perhaps once. That’s the family story, anyhow; my father says we were aristocrats in the Mughal court, or something like that. But not anymore.’
‘What happened?’
Ramy gave him a long look. ‘The British, Birdie. Keep up.’

After all, we’re here to make the unknown known, to make the other familiar. We’re here to make magic with words.’

‘Which seems right to you? Do we try our hardest, as translators, to render ourselves invisible? Or do we remind our reader that what they are reading was not written in their native language?’
‘That’s an impossible question,’ said Victoire. ‘Either you situate the text in its time and place, or you bring it to where you are, here and now. You’re always giving something up.’
‘Is faithful translation impossible, then?’ Professor Playfair challenged. ‘Can we never communicate with integrity across time, across space?’
‘I suppose not,’ Victoire said reluctantly.
‘But what is the opposite of fidelity?’ asked Professor Playfair. He was approaching the end of this dialectic; now he needed only to draw it to a close with a punch. ‘Betrayal. Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?’

we can think of etymology as an exercise in tracing how far a word has strayed from its roots. For they travel marvellous distances, both literally and metaphorically.’ He looked suddenly at Robin. ‘What’s the word for a great storm in Mandarin?’
Robin gave a start. ‘Ah – fēngbào?’
‘No, give me something bigger.’
‘Táifēng?’
‘Good.’ Professor Lovell pointed to Victoire. ‘And what weather patterns are always drifting across the Caribbean?’
‘Typhoons,’ she said, then blinked. ‘Taifeng? Typhoon? How—’
‘We start with Greco-Latin,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘Typhon was a monster, one of the sons of Gaia and Tartarus, a devastating creature with a hundred serpentine heads. At some point he became associated with violent winds, because later the Arabs started using tūfān to describe violent, windy storms. From Arabic it hopped over to Portuguese, which was brought to China on explorers’ ships.’
‘But táifēng isn’t just a loanword,’ said Robin. ‘It means something in Chinese – tái is great, and fēng is wind–’
‘And you don’t think the Chinese could have come up with a transliteration that had its own meaning?’ asked Professor Lovell. ‘This happens all the time. Phonological calques are often semantic calques as well. Words spread. And you can trace contact points of human history from words that have uncannily similar pronunciations. Languages are only shifting sets of symbols – stable enough to make mutual discourse possible, but fluid enough to reflect changing social dynamics.

And the influences on English were so much deeper and more diverse than they thought. Chit came from the Marathi chitti, meaning ‘letter’ or ‘note’. Coffee had made its way into English by way of Dutch (koffie), Turkish (kahveh), and originally Arabic (qahwah). Tabby cats were named after a striped silk that was in turn named for its place of origin: a quarter of Baghdad named al-‘Attābiyya. Even basic words for clothes all came from somewhere. Damask came from cloth made in Damascus; gingham came from the Malay word genggang, meaning ‘striped’; calico referred to Calicut in Kerala, and taffeta, Ramy told them, had its roots in the Persian word tafte, meaning ‘a shiny cloth’.

English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular. And Robin found it incredible, how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods.

‘The Germans have this lovely word, Sitzfleisch,’ Professor Playfair said pleasantly when Ramy protested that they had over forty hours of reading a week. ‘Translated literally, it means “sitting meat”. Which all goes to say, sometimes you need simply to sit on your bottom and get things done.

He waved a hand, gesturing at an invisible map. ‘It’s junctures like that where we have control. If we push in the right spots – if we create losses where the Empire can’t stand to suffer them – then we’ve moved things to the breaking point. Then the future becomes fluid, and change is possible. History isn’t a premade tapestry that we’ve got to suffer, a closed world with no exit. We can form it. Make it. We just have to choose to make it.’⁵

Oxford, and Babel by extension, were, at their roots, ancient religious institutions, and for all their contemporary sophistication, the rituals that comprised university life were still based in medieval mysticism. Oxford was Anglicanism was Christianity, which meant blood, flesh, and dirt.*

‘The British aren’t going to invade with English troops. They’re going to invade with troops from Bengal and Bombay. They’re going to have sepoys fight the Afghans, just like they had sepoys fight and die for them at Irrawaddy, because those Indian troops have the same logic you do, which is that it’s better to be a servant of the Empire, brutal coercion and all, than to resist. Because it’s safe. Because it’s stable, because it lets them survive. And that’s how they win, brother. They pit us against each other. They tear us apart.’

‘I don’t think I’ll ever forget what I saw.’ He rested his elbows against the bridge and sighed. ‘Rows and rows of flowers. A whole ocean of them. They’re such bright scarlet that the fields look wrong, like the land itself is bleeding. It’s all grown in the countryside. Then it gets packed and transported to Calcutta, where it’s handed off to private merchants who bring it straight here. The two most popular opium brands here are called Patna and Malwa. Both regions in India. From my home straight to yours, Birdie. Isn’t that funny?’ Ramy glanced sideways at him. ‘The British are turning my homeland into a narco-military state to pump drugs into yours. That’s how this empire connects us.’

Free trade. This was always the British line of argument – free trade, free competition, an equal playing field for all. Only it never ended up that way, did it? What ‘free trade’ really meant was British imperial dominance, for what was free about a trade that relied on a massive build-up of naval power to secure maritime access? When mere trading companies could wage war, assess taxes, and administer civil and criminal justice?

Robin saw a great spider’s web in his mind then. Cotton from India to Britain, opium from India to China, silver becoming tea and porcelain in China, and everything flowing back to Britain. It sounded so abstract – just categories of use, exchange, and value – until it wasn’t; until you realized the web you lived in and the exploitations your lifestyle demanded, until you saw looming above it all the spectre of colonial labour and colonial pain.

My point being, abolition happened because white people found reasons to care – whether those be economic or religious. You just have to make them think they came up with the idea themselves. You can’t appeal to their inner goodness. I have never met an Englishman I trusted to do the right thing out of sympathy.’

‘Eventually.’
Anthony laughed gently. ‘Do you think abolition was a matter of ethics? No, abolition gained popularity because the British, after losing America, decided that India was going to be their new golden goose. But cotton, indigo, and sugar from India weren’t going to dominate the market unless France could be edged out, and France would not be edged out, you see, as long as the British slave trade was making the West Indies so very profitable for them.’

Colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence.
— FRANTZ FANON, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox

‘It’s so odd,’ Robin said. Back then they’d already passed the point of honesty; they spoke to one another unfiltered, unafraid of the consequences. ‘It’s like I’ve known you forever.’ ‘Me too,’ Ramy said. ‘And that makes no sense,’ said Robin, drunk already, though there was no alcohol in the cordial. ‘Because I’ve known you for less than a day, and yet . . .’ ‘I think,’ said Ramy, ‘it’s because when I speak, you listen.’ ‘Because you’re fascinating.’ ‘Because you’re a good translator.’ Ramy leaned back on his elbows. ‘That’s just what translation is, I think. That’s all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they’re trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.’

how could there ever be an Adamic language? The thought now made him laugh. There was no innate, perfectly comprehensible language; there was no candidate, not English, not French, that could bully and absorb enough to become one. Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No; a thousand worlds within one. And translation – a necessary endeavour, however futile, to move between them.

It reads like an erudite rant. But unlike Taleb, ends with no advice or suggestion.

Let me offer one then, in the form of one of those old folksy grandma quotes,

“What’s the sense of wrestling with a pig?
You both get all over muddy … and the pig likes it.”

An extract from the page I read today from A Velocity of Being.

Dani Shapiro writes …

My Dear Future Friend,

I will probably never know you. We may not ever walk this earth at the same moment. But listen carefully.

Books saved my life.

In the stillness of reading. the silence save for the sandpapery sound of my fingers turning the page, I was born. In the quiet of a summer afternoon spent in a hammock, of a winter night spent sneaking under the covers with a flashlight, dawned the awareness, slow but unmistakable, that I was not alone. That I was not insane. That my heart was not so very different from everyone else’s.

Books made me feel less ashamed. Less weird. Less different.
They connected me deeply to my own humanity.