Book Review of "Recursion"

A SciFi book that is action packed, fast paced with just a little bit of philosophical touch - is my guilty pleasure. "Recursion" by Blake Crouch fared perfectly on all of these fronts. It has won the GoodReads SciFi book of the year award for 2019. This combined with the fact that I had really enjoyed Blake Crouch's previous book "Dark Matter", made it an obvious choice to go for "Recursion". It didn't disappoint. Its fun & fast. You are not expected to think too much about the science in the story and that's ok. "Recursion" weaves an entertaining story around memory, time travel & some cop drama with a few well rounded & crisply defined characters. A solid 4/5. Perfect read for the holidays.

Book Review of "Selfish Gene"

A book that truly leaves you awestruck. Lucidly unravels the biological & genetic reasoning, accompanied by numerous examples of animal & plant behaviors, explaining how they evolved & survived. As an engineer, I was genuinely surprised by the simple probabilistic equations that can shed light on relatedness of two organisms & the likelihood or unlikelihood of "inheriting" a trait. Docking a star because it kind of rambles on in a couple of chapters. But overall, an informative & insightful read. 

Book Review of "निर्मनुष्य

"निर्मनुष्य" हा काही एक साधासुधा गूढकथासंग्रह नाही. प्रत्यक्ष आणि वास्तवाच्या पलीकडे लपलेले, थोडेसे भयावह पण तरीही थोडेसे उत्कंठावर्धक आणि काहीसे अनाकलनीय असे काल्पनिक विश्व लेखक रत्नाकर मठकरी प्रत्येक कथेत बिनबोभाट उभे करतात ! परंतु या कथांचा हेतू फक्त भय निर्माण करणे असा वाटत नाही, लेखक त्यातून काही भाष्य करू पाहतात कधी मानवी स्वभावाबद्दल, कधी राजकारणाबद्दल तर कधी सामान्य माणसाच्या हतबलतेबद्दल. "निर्मनुष्य" वाचताना स्टीफन किंग च्या लेखनशैलीची नक्कीच आठवण होते ! प्रगल्भ आणि तरीही मनोरंजनात्मक असा "निर्मनुष्य" ४/५ च्या नक्कीच तोडीचा आहे.

Book Review of "Crucial Conversations"

Reading "Crucial Conversations" is fun - for the most part. Some of the anecdotes, some real-life examples are quite eye-opening and frankly should be actively taught in schools and colleges. A few  rundowns of how even simple conversations can go haywire and ruin professional and personal relationships beyond repair do make you stop and rethink your way of engaging and conversing.  The authors have clearly done an extensive research and they have drilled it down to a bunch of nice-sounding "principles". 

But with all being said and done, "Crucial Conversations" seriously lacks editing. There are large portions of the book where essentially the same points are repeated and nothing new is put forth. This did cause me to essentially lose interest about halfway and it was an effort to pick it up again and finish it. The first 25% and the last 25% of the book basically has about 99% of the important points I felt. 

Still, definitely a 3/5.

Book Review of "The Sense of an Ending"

“What you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you witnessed.” - says Tony Webster, your average-working-joe protagonist of Julian Barnes' extraordinarily perceptive novel, "The Sense of an Ending". The novel which appears like a simple, mundane, everyday story of an average working class British person's kind of a boring life, takes a brilliant turn in the last 10% of the book, leaving you awestruck and making you appreciate every single clue deviously planted by the author throughout the story. This is a short book - barely 150 pages or so. Told to us by Tony Webster himself, who as it turns out is an "unreliable narrator". The author, Julian Barnes, sprinkles the story with some amazing gems of quotations and remarks about memory, its fickleness and how the age affects what we remember.

Recommended - 5/5 from me.