“After The Quake” is a collection of six short stories by Haruki Murakami (translated into English from the original Japanese by Jay Rubin). All the stories in this collection are linked in some way or another to the Kobe earthquake in 1995 and take place some time after that. The characters in the stories are not physically affected by the earthquake, but the news of the destruction unleashed by the earthquake affect them in some way.
Archive for 2017
[2017-12-31] “After The Quake”
[2017-12-29] “Cloud Atlas”
I first read about “Cloud Atlas”, the novel, when I came across “Cloud Atlas”, the film. Written by David Mitchell, it turns out to be more a collection of six linked stories than what is traditionally called a novel. The author has referred to these stories elsewhere as forming a Matryoshka doll of tales of reincarnation spread across space and time.
[2017-12-27] “Myth = Mithya”
“Myth = Mithya” is “a handbook of Hindu mythology” written by the prolific Indian author Devdutt Pattanaik that seeks to gently guide the reader through the vast set of somewhat confusing myths that are generally considered to form this mythology. Through this process, the author expounds upon the underlying philosophical framework that binds this mythology.
[2017-08-09] ICFPC 2017
I participated in ICFPC 2017 this year after a gap of two years. As in 2012 and 2015, the task this year seemed to be inspired by a game as well - specifically, Ticket To Ride, the board-game. You had to connect a few producer sites containing “lambda mines” to various other consumer sites interested in these “lambdas” along rivers connecting sites to one another (forming an undirected graph) by claiming one river per turn for a limited number of turns. You were pitted against one or more adversaries. It was quite fun, with some improvements over my performance at previous attempts at ICFPC, though not enough to make much of a dent.
[2017-07-04] “50 Greatest Short Stories”
“50 Greatest Short Stories” is a book put together by Terry O’Brien that contains stories all right, but reasonable people will very likely differ on whether these are really the “greatest” in this genre or whether some of them can even be called “short”. That said, everyone is likely to find an enjoyable and memorable story or two in here.
[2017-02-15] “Out Of Their Minds”
“Out Of Their Minds” by Dennis Shasha and Cathy Lazere is an early (circa 1995) book on the lives of then-living 15 influential computer scientists - some well-known among the students of Computer Science, some not quite so well-known. The stated aim of the book is to get these people to talk about their inspirations, their contributions and where they see the future of their field. As it was published just around the time the world-wide web was becoming popular and computers in general were becoming ubiquitous, it provides very interesting perspectives and historical background.