Feed"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.
| Contents |
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| Science and Technology |
| History |
| Economics |
| Biography |
| Miscellaneous |
Science and Technology
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Miscellaneous
Lynne Truss's "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" is a delightful read about using punctuation correctly in English sentences.
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 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".
"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.
