Category: Books

  • Reading The Hyphen

    I heard that Vivek Shanbhag had launched a literary magazine with translations into English of stories from various regional languages. I think this is a great way to access works in Indian languages.

    I saw the announcement on X while I was trying to follow the news of the Starship towing.

    I then read the Scroll interview with Shanbhag where he talks about the story behind the name:

    Hyphen takes its inspiration from the poet, scholar, and translator AK Ramanujan, who once described himself as the “hyphen” in Indo-American. This striking metaphor aptly conveys the idea of connection and serves as a guiding principle for bringing diverse literatures and cultures into dialogue.

    I visited the website and found that if I logged in with your email id, I could read one story. I read Benyamin’s The Postman.

    Benyamin is a Malayalam writer I want to read in the original Malayalam one day. Manjaveyil Marangal is of interest to me. But, his most known work is Adujeevitam, which was made into The Goat Life.

    The Hyphen carried his The Postman. This story was translated to English by J Devika. The story is about a postman who is otherwise very particular about following the rules of postal delivery but who does not delivers certain letters because he believes it could affect their lives. I would love to read this in the original Malayalam.

    You can either read The Postman or see who else has written in this edition of The Hyphen. The best case would be to read someone you know of who has written in your mother tongue. After you read it in The Hyphen in English, try to read it in your mother tongue as well.

    I subscribed to both the print and digital edition of The Hyphen which is available in India, but they do not ship it internationally yet. I plan to read the physical copy of the magazine and then donate it to the public circulating library that I am a member of. There is also a page on The Hyphen’s website that has a list of places where you can buy the magazine.

    After The Postman, I am reading Indulkar, written by Kiran Gurav and translated from Marathi by Shanta Gokhale.

  • My Journey to Devi by Priyanka Dalal

    I followed Priyanka Dalal from the early days of Twitter. I followed her probably because she was from Mumbai. I then followed her blogs – one on travel and one on spirituality.

    I saw a pinned post on her X profile stating that her book was out for pre-order. When I went on Amazon, I found that the book was already available on Kindle. I purchased the book and began reading it.

    It is rare to read books of rational spiritual experiences and how paths are taken and left behind. The experience of reading this book also touched one aspect of my own spiritual path. I think it is important to read this book to understand your own path better.

    The book was a fast read for me and got me back to reading.

  • Consider Phlebas 

    I listened to Consider Phlebas by Iain M Banks on Audible. It is the first book in the Culture series. I picked up the book on Audible soon after listening to this podcast episode of People by WTF between Nikhil Kamath and Elon Musk (Episode 16).

    I had heard about the Culture series from this blog post by Vitalik Buterin after first reading the book as a college-goer. He was looking for AI futures in which we would want to live in. Vitalik describes the book as follows:

    The Culture series features a far-future interstellar civilization primarily occupied by two kinds of actors: regular humans, and superintelligent AIs called Minds.

    This description of the series did not get me to read the book, though. This was in 2023.

    Musk talks about how energy will replace money as the ultimate currency. He says:

    Energy is the real, is the true currency. This is why I said Bitcoin is based on energy. You can’t legislate energy. You can’t just pass a law and suddenly have a lot of energy.

    He then pointed to Iain Bank’s Culture series as a good example of a depiction of a society that operates without money. I would discount the timeline he provides in the podcast but perhaps, not the direction. If the world were being built by engineers, this is the direction it would take.

    After I picked up the book on Audible, I listened to it on my drives to work.

    The title of the book is taken from a poem by T S Eliot, called The Waste Land (in Section 4), which is a brief description of a drowned merchant. The Waste Land, written in 1922, is a poem said to be about spiritual emptiness, disillusionment, and the breakdown of society after the First World War.

    The end of the story reminded me of the Malayalam movies of the 1980s, where heroes died at the end. Since, this book was written in 1987, I wasn’t surprised.

    I really liked the names of spaceships being longer than just a single or a couple of words. I liked how I guess the author struggled in the bribing scenarios in the book because of a lack of meaningful money. I found the clash between a religious humanity and an AI interesting. I look forward to reading the rest of the series. I may not read the next book in the series, though.

    I finished the book a few days into the New Year and I am happy to score this as the first book I completed in 2026. I need to make notes the next time when I hear something interesting.

  • National Novel Writing Month 2025

    I have been unhappy with 2025 and want to make the most of the year. I’m planning to rewrite a novel I drafted last year for NaNoWriMo. I envision it as a solarpunk story. You can find the previous version of Chapter 1 here. I have changed the storyline based on feedback from last year.

    I will link to each chapter in this blog post.

    Chapter 1

    Chapter 2

    Chapter 3

    Chapter 4

  • Black Death (Book 2 of Six Paths)

    I finished reading Book 2, Black Death of Six Paths. I am enjoying the storytelling and the good pace at which the story is progressing.

  • Six Paths (Book 1, The School of Bharata)

    Six Paths, Book 1 of The Schools of Bharata

    I finished book 1 of the Schools of Bharata series. I liked the storyline but don’t understand why the characters look the way they do. It isn’t written like a manga, although that seems to be the inspiration. But, this is a great effort for the first series.

    Cross-posted from Instagram.

  • The Notebook by Roland Allen

    The algorithm seems to have worked overtime to recommend this book to me again and again. This is a Eurocentric history of the notebook that sometimes seems to be endowed with powers like saving us from doomscrolling to helping get things done.

    I read about the book first on Julian Hess’ Substack called Noted. I then heard his interview on YouTube with Parker Settecase.

    The book showed how the notebook that started with helping many Italian city states keep accounts affected many areas of European life. It helped artists make drafts, it helped people write about important life events, it helped novels be copied into notebooks as commonplace quotes, and as a diary. I found more fun reading the last chapter on The Extended Mind, a paper written by Clark and Chalmers in 1998.

    I have not been very focussed with my note taking and note making so far. I intend to get serious now.

  • Moustache – S. Hareesh (translated Jayasree Kalathil)

    A Bookstagrammer accused me of reading Murakami and not S. Hareesh. I was indeed reading Haruki Murakami’s latest book, The City and its Uncertain Walls at the time and felt guilty.

    It took me a couple of replays to get the name right. A search revealed that S Hareesh was a Malayalam author. He had written Meesa in 2018. It seems to have been controversial at first but which then won much acclaim.

    The book was translated as Moustache into English by Jayasree Kalathil and the Audible version was available when I searched for it in January 2025. To be fair, I wanted to consume S Hareesh just the way I had consumed Murakami. I enjoyed the narration by Mary Joseph.

    The story, at its heart, is the story of one man who grows up in Kuttanad in Kerala. He grows a moustache to play a role in a drama staged there. His acting strikes fear in the hearts of the people who watch the play.

    The moustache then gets endowed with fantastical powers. People make sightings, associate the moustache with various mysterious events, and create a myth that grows through the story.

    Add the magical pre-electricity Kerala as a backdrop, you get a mixture of the magical and the fantastical. Add people’s ego, imagination, and fears, and I think you get a good idea of what Moustache would read like.

    Listening to this book made me realize that I had such an imagination when I was a child. I was mesmerized by the customs, temples, and traditions followed in Kerala that I witnessed on my summer vacation trips there.

    But, I too imagined magical and fantastical stories behind temple paintings and wooden carvings. That same imagination kept me company when I walked with my father and mother at night along the paddy fields which stopped the road from reaching my father’s ancestral home. The swinging arcs of the torchlight in my father’s hand was the only tenuous link to reality.

    Education seems to have filled me with rationality that made me lose touch with that wild imagination. Reading this book seems to have rekindled it.

  • The City and its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami

    I mentioned in Weekly Notes 51/2024 that 2024 wasn’t a good year for reading. I found out in 2011 that reading Murakami helped me get back into the habit, and I often use it as a trick. I chose this book with that aim.

    This book is interesting because it is a new version of his first story, which was a novella (a long short story, as Murakami calls it).

    I listened to this book on Audible. The narrator’s voice was very calming for me.

    I loved the worlds Murakami creates in this book – a town surrounded by tall walls and a town surrounded by mountains. There are some music mentions, but not as many as in his other books. The worlds also felt like they were connected to each other.

    I didn’t enjoy the first part of the book because I was trying to figure out the metaphors, and my mind was full of questions. Once I stopped doing that, I enjoyed listening to the book. I made a few notes during that time that I should tear out and burn.

  • Red Team Blues by Cory Doctrow

    I have been following Cory Doctrow since his days at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and when he was the Editor of Boing Boing. I stopped following him for a long time in between. I found him again when I followed him on Tumblr.

    I read a really wonderful blog post by him called The true post-cyberpunk hero is a noir forensic accountant. This post on Tumblr led me to buy the first Martin Hench novel, Red Team Blues.

    I love reading whodunnits and I liked reading this forensic whodunnit. The descriptions are crisp and just right in places. In other places, I had to work a lot to not jump to the paragraph where the action is. I enjoyed reading the technical explanations that he offers in the novel. But there are two paragraphs that I totally enjoyed reading. I absolutely enjoyed reading the technical explanations for the red and blue teams and on cyber security.

    One, where he goes to buy a car and expresses his hatred for Elon Musk. He says:

    From there, I maneuvered to this year’s car listings, checking the box for all- electric and unchecking the box for Teslas. I just don’t like the man. I’ve spent enough years around enough bullshitters that I can spot them a mile away. In his case, I could spot him from orbit, using one of his overpromised, underdelivered satellites.

    Another, where he talks about technical writing:

    So she became the company’s first tech writer, then its first documentation specialist, then, as her docs and organization of support requests produced solid sales leads and high customer satisfaction, she got a team.

    After reading this book, I think I have turned back to reading fiction again.