Open

Open by Andre Agassi
My 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.


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Pete Sampras: A Champion's Mind

Pete Sampras: A Champion's Mind by Pete Sampras
My 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.


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The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Full Set)

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Omnibus: A Trilogy in Four Parts by Douglas Adams
My 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

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Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals by Robert M. Pirsig
My 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.



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The Silent Dead

The Silent Dead by Tetsuya Honda
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The book started on a very promising note for me. I enjoyed a large part of the book but the effect diminished at the climax.

Reiko Himekaway is a young, female Lieutant in the police force who delas with the gender bias regularly. Her reasons for becoming a lieutant have a background which is also an essential sub plot in the book. But the primary plot of the book deals with a serial killer who is torturing people and disposing bodies in lakes. Reiko and Stubby(another lieutant's) diverse styles in trying to nab the killer is interesting. The way he admonishes Reiko for her intuitions because she seem to stop applying logic after her bout of intuition is one of the best conversations in the book.


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Binary

Binary by John Lange
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Picked this book solely because I was surprised that its actually a Crichton book. Once upon a time Crichton used the pen name John Lange.

A very fast read; it deals with the personal complexity that arises between state department officer John Graves as he investigates a right wing businessman, John Wright. Graves is sure Wright is planning a big assault but takes sometime to unearth the plot. He also takes the challenge to unravel Wright as a personal one since Wright seems to be playing with his poker genius brain at a game.


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Keepers of the Kalachakra

Keepers of the Kalachakra by Ashwin Sanghi
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Dan Brown gave me the history-fiction genre and I have never stopped hence. When I need a quick read I usually pick up this genre.

Ashwin Sanghi, this time around talks about the concept of Kalachakra. As the heads of state are killed without leaving any trace of the murder the intelligence orgs all over the world are puzzled. In a supposedly independent track, Vijay, a Ph.D. student is hired by a shady company to continue his research for them. But obviously all is not as it seems.

A fast paced read when you want to just go around learning a few things about the Indian/Buddhist mythology.


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Contact

Contact by Carl Sagan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My first Carl Sagan book :)
I have never understood why I am such an ardent fiction fan. I devour science fiction so happily as I do Lord of the Rings. I don't understand any of the inter-galactic concepts, am almost primate in my understanding of Einstein, Planck, etc. theories but that doesn’t deter me from thoroughly enjoying science fiction.

Ellie, a radio astronomer is deeply committed to the Argus project which is about listening on different frequencies to search for messages from some other beings. Just as the project is to be shut down, there arrives a message. At first it seems to be an aberration but soon the world joins in and starts noting down the message. It soon reveals itself to be the blueprint of a machine. A machine that probably would take us to them. It gets built and Ellie is one of the chosen five to represent humanity to the other beings. They succeed. Or so they think! When they narrate their experience back on earth it is not taken seriously for they have absolutely no proof.

I particularly like the ending, because the end conversation between Kitz and Ellie is identical to the conversation between Ellie and Rankin/Joss with the tables turned. In Kitz-Ellie conversation Ellie is trying to prove a point to disapprove the hoax theory while Kitz is skeptical to anything she has to say because it’s not backed up by data and in the other case Ellie is the one skeptical of religion/God because others have no data points.

Some personal favourite lines from the book –

I have always thought an agnostic is an atheist without the courage of his convictions.

I know we all have emotions but let’s bear in mind exactly what emotions are. They are motivations for adaptive behaviour from a time when we were too stupid to figure things out.

You are not worried about being lost, Palmer. You are worried about not being central, not the reason the universe was created. There's plenty of order in my universe. Gravitation, electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, superunification, they all involve laws. And as for behaviour, why can't we figure out what's in our best interest-as a species?

Isn't a gram of observation worth a ton of theory?


Update:
Watched the movie that was based on the book. Like all movies that are made from books, it could not create the magic the book did.I cringed at the romantic liaison between Ellie and Plamer......but then got over it simply because Matthew McConaughey played the role :D


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Mandodari: Queen of Lanka

Mandodari: Queen of Lanka by Manini J. Anandani
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Ramayana from the point of view of Ravan's wife. I was expecting a different perspective but it seemed to be the same old story telling of Ramayana. Hence, didn't find it interesting.


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Artemis

Artemis by Andy Weir
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Jazz is estranged from her father and works as a delivery agent in a future world where humans have created a colony on the moon- Artemis. The book is about the brilliant Jazz trying to pull off a heist for some quick money but ends up endangering everything that she holds dear, including life on Artemis.

It is or the sci-fi lovers, with a great deal of physics and chemistry information strewn all over the place. Quite an interesting read.


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