Robin Marantz Henig: Monk in the Garden: Life of Gregor Mendel
An amazing biography. The perseverance and meticulousness with Mendel performed the experiments is very inspiring. He was not the typical gifted/talented student either. He would face many difficulties at school as well as while trying to be a priest.
If I were to just pick one favorite, it is not even a contest. Heck, challenge me to pick one favorite in a decade, it would still be this. Charlie Munger!
Charlie Munger: Poor Charlie’s Almanack
I even wrote about this: https://krishna2.com/munger
Just like countless others, I too grew up bewildered by Jackie Chan's movies and his stunts. And I liked his autobiography.
Jackie Chan: Never Grow Up
I read "The Poppy War" - even though I liked it, I didn't want to go down a full-fledged series. I read "Yellowface" and loved it so much. I have "Babel" on my shelf - but (irrationally) I am not reading it thinking that it would be over if I read it.
R. F. Kuang: Yellowface
I can't wait for what R.F. Kuang's going to come up with next.
This is an old classic -- my son recommended this to me. I enjoyed it.
Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther
What an amazing biography. Very very inspiring.
Robin Marantz Henig: Monk in the Garden: Life of Gregor Mendel
I had gotten her "Ember in the Ashes" in 2016 or so but never got to it - but this story snipper caught my attention. What a lovely book. It is set in a Motel in a Sierra Nevada town in California. Loved the book. Promptly went back to read "Ember in the ashes". This book (all my rage) won the National Book Award for Young Readers.
Sabhaa Tahir: All my Rage
Everyone's bound to get on this train sooner or later (I think this is being made into a movie) -- 440,000+ reviews on amazon. I got curious and got this book. Liked it.
Freida McFadden: The Housemaid
I am keeping the recommendations to a general audience and hence skipping my Vedanta books (which I thoroughly relish/read and read again many times). Oh, there are a bunch of business books too, a bunch more fiction this year (than my usual ratio) including a few LitRPG and of course, some running related. As always, you can see the full list here:
Poor Charlie's Almanac by Charlie Munger is one of my favorites. It keeps on giving. Amazed that Munger had access to all this wisdom 40 or 50 or even more years ago.
Likewise![1] I apply it to all aspects of life and also whatever book[2] I read, I end up seeing something from the Gita in there. (or a movie or song).
Bhagavad Gita : Various translations and commentaries by many authors. Fascinating to see a fairly small text (roughly 700 verses @ ~1400 lines) that lends itself to so many interpretations and thoughts.
In every reading, there is always something new that I learn, a new perspective and new lessons that I can apply to daily life.
Very interestingly this is the first scale for anyone learning Carnatic Music (classical Indian music predominantly popular and taught in South India).
Such an inspiring post. Awesome to hear your story. Did you do it part time or full time? And yes, a +1 to the comment and to the idea that you should write a blog post. Thanks!
Thank you. The PhD was full time. I am not a fan of part-time anything .. either you are doing two sub-par jobs, or you are busting a nut doing two full-time jobs.
In my earlier responses, I haven't credited my wife enough. It is one thing for me to take a chance, but it is altogether a different ball of wax for her to say we are in this adventure together.
I liked the way Ray Bradbury writes about this in Fahrenheit 451. When you read books, you have time to think about it, re-read it and question it. Whereas while watching video, things move so fast that the decision is made up for you.
I agree with this. I've found that for myself, reading is much more effective because everything has to go through my inner monologue first, whereas videos circumvent that.
My inner monologue is where I really begin to understand / remember / question concepts.
That's also why I like writing difficult concepts down, because then I will be forced to put it through my inner monologue once more.
> I liked the way Ray Bradbury writes about this in Fahrenheit 451. When you read books, you have time to think about it, re-read it and question it. Whereas while watching video, things move so fast that the decision is made up for you.
You can literally watch a video at any pace you want.
I don't get romanticism around books and I can't help but eye roll when someone a) gushes about reading or b) waxes poetic about the past.
We have access to nearly every book, article, paper, video, song, etc. ever written or recorded within seconds. When I want to learn, the most efficient path is usually not through a single author. Why should it be? Why is it bad if we predominantly piece together information through multimedia? I don't get this article or the "reading club" mentality at all. Though I often hear it come out at parties as virtue signal.
> You can literally watch a video at any pace you want.
True in a literal sense, but irrelevant.
In order to change the pace a video, you need to actively interact with the video player; it's hard or impossible to get into a state of flow[1] if you need to constantly press buttons to pause, skip or replay parts of the video, change its speed, or find the specific second you want to analyze.
This affects the depth of reasoning about the concepts you're getting from the media. In a written text, you can naturally pause and reflect upon a paragraph, or re-read recent paragraphs only by moving the eyes up, slowing down at particularly difficult or interesting sections.
This state of mind of "intense mental concentration" when reading is a good basis for learning and reflection, and can be combined a more powerful range of options when reading; with video you can also get into that state, but then the video moves forward uniformly, and the pace at which you're confronted with the concepts is defined by the media, not your mental processes.
Maybe you just represent (echo) the hubris of the new century? The past doesn't need any more romanticising or contemporary poetry than it needs new Mozarts, Shakespeares, Balzacs and Einsteins, whereas the twenty-first century is in dire search of true genius, for all the torrent of information being churned and churned. The ratio of intelligent study decays as the numbers of daily YouTube views sharply rise. It astounds me that people really believe progress is being made on the habits of deep intellectual work with new gadgets.
Yes, consuming audio and video for information has improved in recent years. It is now practical to change the playback speed and return to a particular point using transcripts. While these tools are not universally available, they are certainly gaining traction for educational content. On the other hand, it is not quite the same as reading a text for the reasons described by TuringTest.
> We have access to nearly every book, article, paper, video, song, etc. ever written or recorded within seconds.
While I have some reservations about digital texts, I agree that the situation is far better than it was 30 years ago. I fear that many people have forgotten how long it used to take to find information in the past, never mind obtain it, never mind the financial cost.
As for those reservations, they are mostly the product of the digital environment that we have created and accepted. They have very little to do with access to access to or the nature of books. The article hinted at this when it mentioned greed. Common dedicated e-readers are designed to sell books as much as designed to read books. Most websites are designed to deliver advertising as much as delivering content. General purpose devices present a continuous stream of distractions that leave us victim to our own vices. It does not have to be that way, but it takes a proactive approach for it to be otherwise.
We would be better served if we acknowledged the shortcomings of electronic texts (as well as audio and video delivery) then took the initiative to address them.
An amazing biography. The perseverance and meticulousness with Mendel performed the experiments is very inspiring. He was not the typical gifted/talented student either. He would face many difficulties at school as well as while trying to be a priest.