Monday, September 23, 2019
Wednesday, September 18, 2019
1984
1984 by George OrwellMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
A classic novel!
Based in a dystopian world, where BigBrother is the head of a PARTY that controls the place where the main protagonist, Winston Smith lives.
Control is a mild world, for the party has removed the conventional languages and added a new language called Newspeak. It goes on forever changing the past, by updating documents, etc. such that one can never be sure what exactly was the past. No one remembers life before BigBrother. Winston remembers a little of his childhood but is never sure if it existed the way he thinks it did.
Winston starts a rebellion along with lover Julia, who doesn’t have high ideals for the rebellion, just pure fun. But when Julia and Winston are apprehended by the thought police for straying against the norms, the novel becomes scary.
Its a masterpiece. The way the author has created a totalitarian society and explained its repercussions is a fabulous reminder of why we one should never take one’s freedom for granted.
View all my reviews
Friday, July 5, 2019
Losing My Virginity: How I've Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way
Losing My Virginity: How I've Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way by Richard BransonMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
A real fun autobiography :) Just to think of all the things Mr. Branson has dabbled in, tires me out, and to think he actually built an empire actually doing it!
View all my reviews
Wednesday, May 15, 2019
Open
Open by Andre AgassiMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
A very interesting read!
The combination of Pete Sampras and Angre Agassi autobiographies one after the other proved to be really a worthy combination. The rivals on court couldn't be more different in real life. But then again, tennis should be glad to have both of them.
Towards the end of the book is a line about Roger Federer:
I fight through the winds, and through Federer’s hurricane-force skills, and tie the match at two sets apiece. Federer glances at his feet, which is how he registers shock.
View all my reviews
Pete Sampras: A Champion's Mind
Pete Sampras: A Champion's Mind by Pete SamprasMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Who else to give an insight into the always-calm posture of Pete Sampras than the man himself!
I had fun reading the book; especially the media takes on the boring man who dominated tennis in the 1990s. So much that next in line is his main rivals' book Open.
View all my reviews
Friday, March 15, 2019
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Full Set)
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Omnibus: A Trilogy in Four Parts by Douglas AdamsMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
What a crazy book! What a fabulous book!
I always thought it was a sci-fi book and somehow never read although I relish that genre. Off late, somewhere I saw it classified it in the humour genre and that surprised me. Hence, started the book which is 5 parts long and each part is better than the previous.
The book starts with Arthur Dent staging a protest against the civic authorities who come to demolish his house. To take a break from the protest he goes with his friend Ford Prefect to a bar and everything changes. He finds himself in a spaceship and realizes that the earth has been demolished. He survived because his friend, Ford is an alient and has helped him to hitchhike a ride across the galaxy in the same spaceship that destroyed earth.
And so begins his journey across the galaxy where he travels along the space line as well as the time line.
The one liners, the anecdotes, the analogies are too awesome and extremely difficult to explain via words. But the meaning is unusually deep and one needs to read the book to fully grasp the fun the writer had thinking and writing this. 'Somebody Elses Problem' phenomenon is one such example.
Some fab lines from the book:
- If they don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. [Ford's obseravtion about the human race]
- I refuse to prove that I exist", said God, "for proof denies faith and without faith I am nothing".
"But", says man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isnt it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own argument, you don't."
"Oh dear", says God, "I hadnt thought of that", and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
- Isnt it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?
- There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizzare and inexplicable.
- Thats not just stupid, that is spectacularly obtuse.
- The quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead.
- You live and learn. At any rate, you live
The five parts to the book:
1) The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
2) The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
3) Life, the Universe and Everything
4) So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
5) Mostly Harmless
View all my reviews
Monday, January 21, 2019
Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals
Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals by Robert M. PirsigMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Can one review this book? Well, I definitely cannot. Its as much heavy as the author's first book in terms of concentration. The chapters where Phaedrus talks to just himself are the ones to look out for. Those stay my favourite.
My favourite quotes from the book:
1) What makes killing him immoral is that a criminal is not just a biological organism. He is not even just a defective unit of the society. Whenever you kill a human being you are killing a source of thought too. A human being is a collection of ideas, and these ideas take moral precedence over a society. Ideas are patterns of value. They are at a higher level of evolution than social patterns of value. Just as it more moral for a doctor to kill a germ than a patient, so it is more moral for an idea to kill a society than it is for society to kill an idea.
2) When E.B. White wrote, 'If you want to live in New York you should be willing to be lucky', he meant not just 'lucky' but willing to be lucky.
3)It's the lifeboat problem. If you get too involved with too many people with too many problems they drag you under. You don't save them. They sink you.
4) Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.
5) That’s what funerals were: theatre. They weren’t for the corpse, certainly, but to help end the longings and old patterns of the living, who has to go on.
View all my reviews
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)