Category: Favourites

  • The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture

    Orlando Figes

    In The Europeans, a cultural snapshot of nineteenth-century Europe serves as the backdrop for the intertwined lives of three differently remarkable people – Pauline Viardot, her husband Louis, and the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev. The result is the origin story of what is called ‘European culture’. During their lifetime and immediately after, the continent, for long fractured by language, politics, and geography, slowly began to imagine itself as a shared cultural space with a taste graph that extended across music, literature, art, travel, and performance.

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  • Mother Mary Comes to Me

    Arundhati Roy

    I have been an unabashed fan of whatever Arundhati Roy writes, and Mother Mary Comes to Me is no exception. This is a memoir, but I’d say it’s her love letter to her mother, and to some extent, others whom she loves, including characters in her works of fiction. It is also very Arundhati Roy – poignant and visceral to the point of tear-jerking, and yet funny – sometimes with wit – both the scathing and irreverent as well as the loving kind, and sometimes with the inherent hilarity of situations.

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  • Reshuffle: Who wins when AI restacks the knowledge economy

    Sangeet Paul Choudary

    Reshuffle is a book I had been looking forward to reading ever since I started seeing Sangeet Paul Choudary’s excerpts and related posts. And despite reading all those posts, the book had sufficient meat to make it an excellent read. One that offers great perspectives on dealing with the influx of AI in work – at an individual and business level.

    I think I have a bias for the book because of a few reasons. One, it follows a clear systems thinking approach, and the logic and reasoning is robust. Two, it is a strategic and framework-driven exploration, which means it offers tools to think about this in one’s own contexts. Three, it’s not just theory. The book provides sufficient examples that can serve as starting points on how to think through this. That, as you’d notice is an elegant why-what-how approach.

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  • Humankind

    Rutger Bregman

    On one hand, I really hoped Humankind would be meaningful, and on the other, I am quite a cynic. Bregman writes towards the end of the book that cynicism is just another name for laziness, an excuse not to take responsibility. I am not sure I agree completely because I do feel the rage against injustice, and do take action sometimes, but largely my question has been ‘what is the point?’

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  • Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

    I have to admit that I began reading Nexus with a bias – courtesy Harari’s earlier works. While I liked them when I first read them, further reading and critical takes reduced the good impression considerably.

    So, while I really liked the first two chapters, I did find irony in him writing about information and truth after bring rebutted by experts on agricultural revolution and various other things he is not an expert on. And while I really like reading history, his meandering on Niall Ferguson mode in the first part of the book didn’t endear himself to me at all.

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