Outliers

The book talks about why some people become successful and why some do not. One thing that has stuck with me since reading the book was the number of hours one has to put into something before one becomes an expert at it - apparently it is  10,000 hours before anyone can become good at what they do.

So is it only about effort? No... you also need to have the right opportunities to strike it good - you need to know the right people, have the right type of childhood (which enables you to put in the 10,000 hours), must have certail types of social skills and finally, might even have to be born in the right year.

Thats a lot of variables - it makes me think success is something that is very random. Maybe successful people always have some traits - such as working very hard, but having those traits will not ensure success. Makes me think that being outrageously successful is just about being lucky. I am not saying hard work wont produce success - it does. But being outrageously successful - thats usually a series of lucky breaks working for you. Going to the right college, having the right friends who put you in touch with the right people, serendipitously starting to work for some new startup after giving up other good jobs offers, deciding on moving to a new location - these are all decisions that we make without being able to fully foresee what the effects of it all may be. Thats why its just plain lucky - or maybe its just how their life was meant to be.

Good read.

Moonwalking with Einstein

This is a book on memory and memorization techniques. Well... the book was interesting initially. I thought I would find the secret to memorizing everything I ever wanted to remember. The book does actually live up to that promise, but I found that my desire to memorize everything was... well... not that practical. Memorizing stuff involved spending a lot of effort building up memory muscle and palaces into which one could store stuff. What I really wanted to memorize was code. I work with apps that have thousands of lines of code, and I thought it would be really useful if I could simply glance through it once and remember everything.. Thats part of the reason I started to read the book.

Reading the book however made me realize that I would have to spend a lot of effort trying to associate each line or class with something that was already known. And, I am not sure what to map all that code to, so I would remember it. It looked easier to simply come up with a bunch of class diagrams and refer to that every once in a while instead. And I found that the class diagrams were pretty similar to each other anyway, so I didnt really even have to memorize too many of those.

And so, I stopped reading the book :). After the motivation was gone, the book got boring. I didnt really care about all the different things various people could or could not remember. Or about the techniques that ancient people used. Or the rituals involved in getting elected into some elite memory club. I just stopped, and moved on to other stuff. But who knows, maybe you will find it interesting enough to finish.

The Omnivore's Dilemma

Ever tried to explain to your totally non vegetarian mother why you dont want to eat meat after spending the first twenty years of your life eating it pretty much everyday? At first she thought it was a fad. Then she thought it was joke. And then when she realized I was sticking to it much longer than she thought I would or could, she started to think I was rebelling. Then she started forcing me to eat it, only making me more disgusted with meat in general. It went on like that for a while, and finally when I left home, I was left on my own to make choices about what I was eating. After all these years, she seems to have gotten somewhat used to it, finally. However, she is still lost about what to cook for me when I go home, and so ends up making all the non veg stuff, all over again, because thats what everyone looks forward to eating, right? :)

Well... I am glad I found this book. It finally put into words everything I ever wanted to say about why I dont want to eat meat. I am not talking about the environmental effects or health effects that is described in detail in the book. I am talking about the final part where the author tries to hunt and eat food that he killed, himself. He describes his revulsion at seeing meat and the dead animal and not wanting to go anywhere near it. Thats really just what I feel like, each time I see non vegetarian food. Its like the author was giving shape to all the hazy fears and revlusion I feel each time I see dead animals.

Well.. thats enough digression. The book goes a lot into detail about farming and the effects of it on our planet. It goes into alternate farming practices as done by Joel Salatin, the difference between big organic and local organic, and a lot about the philosophy behind organic farming. Reading the book made me sign up for CSA boxes actually :). 

Good read, if you put as much thought into what you eat as I do.

The Body Toxic

I bought this book after watching a Ted talk about the harmful effects of atrazine on frogs. It kept me engaged for the first four or maybe five chapters. Then everything became a blur, I could not remember what arguments the author had put forth for which toxins and what the reasons were for those toxins not being regulated out. In the end, I cannot really say that I have retained a lot of stuff from this book, mostly because there were too many facts involved, and I was reading at a pace that was too fast for me to memorize all of it. What I did internalize however is the fact that we all are exposed to a lot of toxic substances and they all come from the conveniences we have surrounded us with. The book gives some advice into how to reduce your exposure.

A number of facts in the book were shocking to me. One was that asbestos is a carcinogen. Maybe everyone in the US know this for a fact. In India however, a lot of houses have this as their roof. It gets really hot to stay inside a house with such kind of roofs, but people still do it instead of the traditional tiling that were used earlier because it is durable and cheap. The tiles that were in use until maybe around 50 years ago were perfectly suited for our climate - they keep the house cool in the heat. The problem that traditional tiles have is that they need to be completely replaced from time to time, and it is an expensive and time consuming affair that one has to make sure is done before the monsoons hit. Thats why, even though it gets hot, and even though during the monsoons the noise of rain falling on these roofs make the water sound more like rocks, people continue to replace the tiles with this stuff. Pieces of the stuff soon start falling around your house, and then pretty soon kids start using these pieces to play games with. And for the very same reasons, a lot of people use it for covering their water tanks too. Oh, btw, in India, you have to have a water tank for each house, because one cannot be sure that the public water supply will always have water. Our water tank used to be covered with asbestos. I have played with it so many times. I still remember the powdery feeling your hands had if you handled some of the old pieces long enough. I had no idea I was dealing with a carcinogen, all that time. I wonder what my future is...

The other thing was PVC. I had no idea that was a harmful material. I remember seeing a lot of ads when I was younger about why it was good to use PVC pipes in your house. I guess the thinking then was that PVC was a lot better than the old metal pipes that would get rusted and broken, and worse, will need to be replaced. Wish we had only known..

I guess I have written way too much than is required for a book review. Read it.
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Women and the weight loss Tamasha

My brother in law recommended this book, thats why I decided to read it - I think it was a good read, not because of the dietary suggestions she makes - I know I will never be able to eat every 2 hours or in as small portions that she recommends. What I did like was the fact that she stresses that women should take care of their health. That, I agree with. I have watched my mother neglect herself while she took a lot of care of my father. It is only in the later years when she realized that her health had deteriorated that she started exercising and watching what she ate. So in that sense, I think the book is great - it even suggests that it is acceptable for women to cook and eat the food that they feel like eating even if no one else wants to eat it. That is another thing I have never seen my mother do. She always makes something that one of us wants to eat, I have rarely seen her make something because she liked it. I think it is important for women to consider themselves as being as important as everyone else in a family and take care of the kind of things they like to do too - so if this is a popular book, that is an achievement in itself - it means women in India are getting more conscious of their health, which is a always a good thing. She also talks about various diseases that women in India have because they neglect themselves so much. That was quite an eye opener for me. Would I recommend reading it? Yep. Read it so you at least realize it is important to take care of yourself, if you are a woman.