Feed"The Story of Art" by E. H. Gombrich is a classic and popular book that charts the evolution of art through the ages. Using a plain language and written in a non-condescending style (sadly quite rare for the art books that I have seen in my life), it is a book that I wish I had read much earlier in my life. It would make a great gift for a teenager to gently initiate them into the wonderful world of art.
| Contents |
|---|
| Art |
| Biography |
| Economics |
| History |
| Miscellaneous |
| Religion |
| Science and Technology |
| Style |
Art
Biography
I did not want to read "Softwar" by Matthew Symonds at first. I thought it would be just like the numerous other biographies endorsed by their subjects that are so common these days and that are utterly banal and filled with nauseating flattery of their subjects. I also felt a bit weird for some reason reading about the company (and its CEO) that employed me.
"William Shakespeare and His Dramatic Acts" is a book written by Andrew Donkin in the "Dead Famous" series. It is a great little book that is very well-researched and packed with loads of interesting nuggets about Elizabethan England.
"Writers and Their Tall Tales" is the second book I have read in the "Dead Famous" series of books (the first one was on William Shakespeare). It is a light book written in a humourous manner and is loaded with comic illustrations.
"Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary" is a book about the life of Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, till the year 2001. It has been written by Linus and David Diamond.
Economics
Benjamin Graham, known as "The Dean of Wall Street" and as "The Father of Value Investing", was one of the greatest investors and teachers of investing principles. His disciples include some of the most famous investors, including Warren Buffett, and his approach of "value investing" still retains a dedicated following despite the advent of fancier and more popular approaches like "Modern Portfolio Theory". He is credited with bringing discipline to the field of investing via the influential textbook "Security Analysis" that he co-authored with David Dodd and that was first published in 1934.
If you are looking for a comprehensive and accessible introduction to economics, "Economics: Private and Public Choice" by James D. Gwartney, Richard L. Stroup, Russell S. Sobel and David Macpherson is the book for you. It covers both microeconomics and macroeconomics in addition to the core principles of economics. Though it is a textbook meant for an undergraduate course in economics, it is also suitable as a gentle introduction to the dismal science for the lay person. I read the tenth edition of this book that was published in 2003.
I wanted to read "Freakonomics" by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner since the time I read a review of the book in The Economist. For some reason or the other I kept postponing it, though I could not help but notice how rapidly popular it was becoming. Now that I have finally read it, I wholeheartedly agree with almost every praise showered on this book.
"The Undercover Economist" by Tim Harford attempts to explain some of the basic principles of economics using a jargon-free language that is easy to understand for the lay person. He provides several examples of these principles at work in our day-to-day life. Peppered with his great sense of humour, this book is an extremely interesting and insightful read.
Robert Shiller (of the Case-Shiller housing index fame) is one of the few level-headed economists who have been able to recognise and point out market bubbles in the making and who have had the courage to stand by their analyses even in the face of ridicule. His book "Irrational Exuberance" became famous for calling out the stock-market bubble in the US when it was published in early 2000, just some time before the bubble burst. The second edition of the book has again been remarkable for pointing out the housing-market bubble in the US when it was published in 2005, though this time it took a little over a year since then for the bubble to burst.
With a title like "The Little Book That Beats the Market", this book might appear to be peddling nothing more than snake oil to gullible people looking to make money from the stock market. It still merits a look since the author Joel Greenblatt is a respected value investor and a professor, who started and managed the hedge fund Gotham Capital that achieved an average annual return of 40% over more than 20 years.
History
Why was it that the Europeans came to dominate over the native Americans, the Africans and the aboriginal Australians and not vice versa? Why was it that civilisation flourished early on in places like the Middle East, India and China while places like sub-Saharan Africa, Australia and the Americas languished far behind for several thousand years?
"Alistair Cooke's America" is a book derived from an eponymous 13-part television series about the United States of America and its history. If you are even vaguely familiar with the history of the USA, this is the book that can provide great perspectives on the events that shaped the country and wonderful insights into the character of its people.
"Paris" by Colin Jones is a history of the city of Paris, covering the period of about 2,000 years from its days as the Roman camp of Lutetia to the present. The author chronicles its rise to prominence as one of the greatest cities in the world and a major centre for art and fashion. He does not shy away from talking about the horrible attrocities of its past either. This is a book written by someone who clearly loves the city for what it is and what it has been.
After our recent trip to Hampi, Anusha and I became quite curious to know more about the history of the Vijayanagara empire. Our high-school text-books on history barely touched upon the rise and the fall of this great empire that ruled over almost all of southern India for about three centuries beginning in the 14th century. We picked up Burton Stein's "The New Cambridge History of India: Vijayanagara" mainly because at about 150 pages it looked like a more manageable read than the other such books. It was also far more recent than the other books and therefore had a much better chance of incorporating the findings from recent research into this aspect of Indian history.
Miscellaneous
It is not easy to put "Fooled by Randomness" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb into one of the standard book categories like "Business" or "Science" or "Philosophy". This is because the book is about all of these and more. The main message of the book is that humans have an innate tendency to overlook the randomness of most of the events in their lives and they must learn to recognise this. Chance plays a much greater role in our lives than we are willing to believe. The success or failure of a person depends a lot on luck as well as the usual suspects like skills, hard work, risk-appetite, etc.
As I struggle with opening a fruit-juice pack by tugging at its inconveniently-placed pastic ring (that hurts your finger if you pull it too hard or for too long) or try to open a cola can by trying to get my thick finger under the metal ring that is placed too close to the surface of the can, I think to myself: "Who designs such things? What were they thinking?" In "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman I find a kindred spirit who is frustrated by the apparent lack of thought put into the design of most of the things around us and who suggests several ways of improving such designs.
"The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a follow-up to his last book "Fooled by Randomness". A Black Swan is a completely unforeseen event with significant consequences. It could be the sudden crash of the stock market after a prolonged bull phase or the unexpected success of a book by a previously-unknown author. The term refers to the shattering of the long-held idea of a swan always being white by the sighting of black swans in the newly-discovered land of Australia. The book is a warning against using induction to derive conclusions that are then prone to Black Swans.
Granta is a quarterly magazine dedicated to new writing. It usually contains a motley collection of fiction, essays, photographs, poems, etc. Granta 100 is a special issue celebrating the 100th edition of this magazine featuring contributions from the likes of Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Doris Lessing, Hanif Kureishi, Ian McEwan, etc.
"The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell is a book that expands upon an article by the author in the New Yorker published in 1996. It seeks to explore how ideas, products, messages and behaviours "tip over" and suddenly spread through or recede from society, just like pathological epidemics through a population. These are termed "social epidemics" by the author. Understanding such phenomena can help us effect a desired change in society (e.g. market a product or spread a message).
"101 Essential Tips: Wine" by Tom Stevenson is an introductory little book for those interested in wine. It is a copiously-illustrated book with easy-to-read text and is so small that it can be finished in just a single sitting. It serves its purpose fairly well, though the title is a little misleading.
"Buyology" by Martin Lindstrom is a book that purports to show that our subconscious drives our buying decisions in ways that we rarely suspect. Marketers can successfully sell products to their target consumers by understanding these factors; otherwise their campaigns are a waste of time, effort and money. The author tries to back these claims by citing the results of some studies.
Religion
"God is Not Great" by Christopher Hitchens might well become the little red book of modern antitheism. The roughly 350 pages in this book are an erudite exposition of its subtitle "How Religion Poisons Everything". The book seeks to show that it would do modern society a lot of good to get rid of religion. If you are an atheist, you will find a lot of reaffirming material in this book. If you are religious, this book might rekindle some of the suppressed incredulity you probably felt when you were first introduced to your particular dogma.
"Holy Blood Holy Grail" (HBHG) by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, was published in 1982 and contains a lot of the interesting hypotheses that appear in "The Da Vinci Code" (TDVC), down to the breaking of Sangraal to either read "Holy Grail" or "Royal Blood". I think I would not have been so gripped by TDVC had I read HBHG before.
Science and Technology
"A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson is the kind of book everyone who is even remotely interested in science, or even slightly intrigued by it, should read.
"How to Solve it" is the classic book on problem-solving by G. Polya that shows how to approach and attack problems in a way that you are ultimately able to solve them as well as verify your solutions. Polya provides heuristics for mathematical problems but I think the approach applies quite well to problems in other domains as well.
I have come to believe that statistics is one of those important subjects that most of us know woefully little about even as we increasingly rely on the results of various studies to drive our lifestyle choices or on data visualisation to take decisions at our workplace. That said, I have been procrastinating on my resolution to study this subject in greater depth than what was afforded by an introductory course I took in college ages ago. The first step towards that goal has now been precipitated due to the nature of my current work. Unfortunately for me, most of the books on this subject looked too dull or intimidating to serve as a useful review of the basic concepts. "Head First Statistics" by Dawn Griffiths presented a welcome contrast with its pages full of informal text and fun pictures, though I was sceptical at first of its utility. I am happy to report that my scepticism was entirely misplaced.
In "The Calculus Wars", Jason Bardi writes about the bitter fight in the beginning of the 18th century between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz over the right to be known as the inventor of calculus. Since this episode paints an extremely unflattering picture of the two great men, it is either ignored or only mentioned in passing by most authors writing about the history of mathematics.
"The Search" is a book by John Battelle that seeks to explain "How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture". The book highlights how searching for something or someone on the Internet is becoming such an integral part of our lives and how companies are trying to profit from this opportunity.
Style
Lynne Truss's "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" is a delightful read about using punctuation correctly in English sentences.
"The Elephants of Style" by Bill Walsh is a style guide for written English. The title is a play on the title of that classic book on style by Strunk and White, "The Elements of Style".
