As I have kept up with my 2017 resolution of reading and writing about one book a week, choosing a book for the last week of the year has been painfully challenging. There are a large number of books about many fascinating topics that I would love to read and so few I possibly … Continue reading The English and Their History
My book of this week is How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method by eminent mathematician George Polya. Polya was one of the most influential mathematicians of the 20th century. O'Connor and E F Robertson wrote a short biography of Polya, giving us a glimpse of this extraordinary scientist and teacher. In … Continue reading How To Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method
Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy, I had not realised it is viewed by many as a book of love stories till recently. How blind was I. Fortunately that blindness fooled me with the desire of re-reading it. Strictly speaking, listening to its audio format. Had I classified it into the category … Continue reading Far from the Madding Crowd
One Sunday afternoon recently, I decided to unpack the book boxes. Many of them. One by one. It has been a very daunting project. Right now tons of books are scattered on the floor, each of them anxiously waiting for the sentence I hand down: shelving, return to a labelled box, or donation. How … Continue reading Who Moved My Cheese?
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a collection of articles written by dozens of Google engineers and edited by Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff and Niall Richard. This book was not on my list. I had to negotiate (with myself) to remove one book and make space for this one. Why did I choose to … Continue reading Site Reliability Engineering
I read part of Never Split the Difference during a long-haul flight recently. An overnight long-haul flight serves as a great test of measuring how engaging the reading material is. In this type of settings, the book in hand typically competes for your attention against the in-flight entertainment system, motion sickness, engine noise, people … Continue reading Never Split The Difference