Reading on Janusworx

No More Stars

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 12:35:20 +0530

The old annual book lists have used stars to mark the books I liked/loved.

But this year, I have been mostly only listing things that I love, because I’ve gotten into the habit of putting down the things that don’t hold my attention and moving on to something else. There’s a certain joy to throwing a book across the room with a “Nooooooooo! Not reading this one any more … Life’s too short! So there!”

Now, a title only goes on the list if I’ve finished the book and I love/like it.

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Books I Read in June, 2026

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 09:33:57 +0530

Photo by Zoe on Unsplash

Got quite a bit of reading done this month, because there was little else to do with the root canal and other things that kept popping up. Reading kept me sane.

Empire Podcast: Spice Wars, The Battle of the East India Companies, Episodes 358-360
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While India had the EIC later, Indonesia and its surroundings were ground earlier under the boot of the VOC. According to Wikipedia:

Statistically, the VOC eclipsed all of its rivals in the Asian trade. Between 1602 and 1796, the VOC sent nearly a million Europeans to work in the Asia trade on 4,785 ships, and netted for their efforts more than 2.5 million tonnes of Asian trade goods and slaves. By contrast, the rest of Europe combined sent 882,412 people from 1500 to 1795. The fleet of the English, later British East India Company, the VOC’s nearest competitor, was a distant second to its total traffic, with 2,690 ships and one-fifth the tonnage of goods carried by the VOC. The VOC enjoyed huge profits from its spice monopoly through most of the 17th century.

The series details the history of the two early corporate raiders and plunderers, and the carnage they wrought in South East Asia and the Indian subcontinent.

The Rest is History, The Fall of the Incas, Episodes 644-649
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I don’t know why but I always assumed South America was colonised east to west. This series along with the Simon Bolivar series last month gives me the idea, that it went from the Caribbean to Mexico and then downwards towards the top of South America and down the west coast. I should read more history about the continent.
This series, somehow, felt even more heart breaking than the Aztecs. The greed and the avarice and the deception and the desperate, brutish, violence of it all, should leave you shaking with rage.

The Secret Pilgrim, John le Carré
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The probably will be my last le Carré for a while. Too much bleakness, while real life is in a tumult is not good. A collection of stories big and small, with Smiley playing the framing device. This is more about Ned and his adventures in the service. I loved it.

Platform Decay, Martha Wells
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Yay! New Murderbot episode! Bought and read in a day flat. Not as good as the older Murderbots, but even a middling Murderbot book is much better than most other books. Loved it to bits. Plot is the same as every other Murderbot. Murderbot rescues someone. What else is new? Murberbot now has regular “check-ins” with its feelings.

Control, Andy Diggle, Angela Cruickshank, Andrea Mutti & Vladimir Popov
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A modern hardboiled comic … err graphic novel. Cleaned out a lot of my comics. Most of the old ones have not aged well. And most of the new ones are just out there to shock you. Alan Moore really raised the bar. Nothing really comes close. His are the only ones I’ve held on to. V for Vendetta is the only one of two hardback I have. The other is my lovely Sandman series (written by the asshole who shall not be named, and illustrated by Keith, Dringenberg et al.)
Back to Control. This plays like an old potboiler. Detective is framed. Detective has to break the law to get justice and show her innocence. Pretty decent writing. But lovely art.

Chung Ju-yung & Hyundai, Farnam Street Podcast
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This is Shane Parrish trying to pull an Acquired like episode. Really, really, really good.
The (hagiographic) story of Chung Ju-Yung’s life and how he built Hyundai and was a major driving force behind South Korea turning into one of the largest economies in the world.

Steve Jobs in Exile, Geoffrey Cain
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If Becoming Steve Jobs, tracked Jobs and his personal growth through his Next years, this one fleshes out nearly everything Schlender talked about in his book. If you are interested in biographies or Steve Jobs, this is definitely worth a read. I bought it because this is the only era of Jobs’ life and career that I’m interested in. The turnaround of Apple was something started just as I entered the workforce and was something I lived through. The early Apple, I already know lots about. So I’ve always wanted to know what happened in the “lost decade.” Becoming Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs in Exile are a good duology to know everything about that era.

Apple: The First 50 Years, David Pogue
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If you want an grand overview of Apple’s history, look no further. Pogue probably leveraged damn near every connection he must have had to write this. It’s a lovely history of the company. Gets a little sloggy in parts, but a good book nonetheless.

Learning Object-Oriented Programming, Design and TDD with Pharo, Stéphane Ducasse & Damien Pollet
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I just had to understand what message passing meant, and what Objects were, in the way the original authors intended it. Pharo is a spiritual descendant of Smalltalk, and like Lisp, works in a self contained environment where darn near everything is an object and can be reconfigured. This book gave me a really good base on which to build my further programming knowledge when it comes to Object Oriented Programming. This book—along with others—is freely available on the Pharo website.

Data Structures the Fun Way, Jeremy Kubica
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Reading a No Starch book is always fun. And I read this to get a handle of just what the big picture was on Data Structures. This is a really good book that does that. Examples are clear. Ideas are well explained. And nothing gets too dreary. The coffee analogies are just … barista’s kiss!

The Art of Reading, Timothy Spurgin (The Great Courses)
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This is the companion to Adler’s, How to Read a Book. Adler is about the craft, while Spurgin is about the art. They both complement each other. Adler comes from how to use your mind to tackle the rectangular piece of dead tree in front of you, in a methodical manner. And once you have that, Spurgin then takes you on a journey of just how large the world of reading is. How to think about narration. And the basics of storytelling. Of plots and plotting. The rise of metafiction. What it means to read closely and carefully. And how even small details all contribute the the work as a whole. It truly has made me want to be, what Spurgin calls, “an artful reader.”
This series of lectures was something I bought on a whim when I was trying to learn Mathematics via the Great Courses during Covid.¹ And it just sat on the shelf, until I realised, I could just convert the videos to audio and then listen to them as I potter about the kitchen in the mornings. Halfway through the book, I also found that the Great Courses were available as audiobooks on Audible as well. So my wishlist is damn near full for the next two years now. 😂 So hopefully there will always be one of these courses I do every month. These are really lovely.
Going through this course, also finally helped me clarify to myself, just what it is that I consider a really good book. It has to be beautifully written. And the writing has to match the world and the genre. It also makes me realise books like these are few and far between, so now it also makes me a more patient book buyer :)
Some examples: Richard Powers in The Overstory, Ursula K Leguin and Tamsyn Muir with all their works of fantasy, and Peter Watts too with his hard edged, dark, science fiction. And then there’s always the classics, which I am now slowly discovering and enjoying. Wish me luck!

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don’t ask why. ↩︎

Books I Read in May, 2026

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 15:17:30 +0530

courtesy, Encyclopædia Britannica

Didn’t read as much as I wanted to. Too much, as they say, of life happened! Been reading in the small snatches of time that I get.

Sherlock & Co. Podcast
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The Three Garridebs, Season 43
Mariana (Mrs. Hudson) Ametxazurra (the amazing Marta da Silva), helms this one.
Because John is, uhm, out of the picture somehow.
This one is not filler (even though I love their fluffy episodes very much, as well) and is a bit dark.
Addictive listening as usual.

The Empty House, Season 44
The House across No. 22B Baker Street is empty!
Is the spider still around?
Once again Mariana untangles the pieces. Also Sherlock creates a pillow fort!

Vanguard, Spring 2026, Episode 3, Acquired Podcast
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St. Jack, needs no introduction to you folks if you invest in the markets (specially if you are a die hard Boglehead).
Jack Bogle took a very blue collar, common sense, attitude to investing.
And then, he brought it to the masses.
And then, he spent the rest of his life, preaching it.
If you think index funds are the bees knees, you have Jack to thank!
The podcast goes through his life and reveals just why Jack had to do things, the way he did them.

Smiley’s People, John le Carré
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George spends twenty years obsessing over a lighter and then when he actually gets it back, does not want it.
Well, that’s one way of spoiling the novel 😂
To me, it sort of put an end to one era of le Carré’s novels.
We end at another border crossing in Berlin and Smiley gets some form of closure.
If you enjoy bleak, nihilistic, yet well crafted novels, le Carré’s your man.

Empire Podcast: Simon Bolivar: the Liberator, Episodes 354-357
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“Freedom is often the first casualty of war.”
— Gabriel García Márquez, The General in His Labyrinth

A rapid run, through the complex life of the man who led six countries to freedom! (ergo, El Libertador)
He wanted freedom, but mostly for his class, not for the underclass.
And yet to gain that freedom, he ranged so wide and rode thousands of miles on horseback, leading folks to call him Iron Ass!
He fought Spain and he fought the jungle and he fought tuberculosis.
He jailed and killed his own supporters out of paranoia.
He finally had to be stripped of power and yet remains one of South America’s biggest heroes.
Well worth a listen.

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Books I Read in April, 2026

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 16 May 2026 05:30:00 +0530

April was as busy as March, with hardly any time, between returning from Kubecon, catching up with everything and then once again getting ready to visit a client in early May. Did get quite a bit reading done though.
As you can see above, I was enchanted by the magic of Dolly Parton all this month!

Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 391-400
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I’m going to stop counting these episodes as books now.
Cal’s getting more prolific and repetitive.
Neither of which are bad things at all.
But this means that I now listen to him, like I listen to my old songs or Ziglar tapes.
Just so that I can hear their voices and remember their principles.
400 seems to be a lovely place to stop counting.
His advice and work on the intersection of life and craft, is invaluable to me, and you can be sure, I’ll be listening as long as he is sharing his thoughts.

Lincoln the Unknown, Dale Carnegie
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This is a book I read when I was a child and when I came across it in a flea market, I picked it up out of sheer delight and nostalgia.
It presents Lincoln as a moral guide with plenty of stories of his life, his family and his work. No critical or academic study here. It has quite a few facts and a great deal of hagiographic admiration as well.
I absolutely loved it!

Empire Podcast
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Indian Uprising 1857, Episodes 322-329
The First War of Independence, the Indian Uprising of 1857, the Great Sepoy Mutiny, it goes by so many names.
This series goes into quite a bit of depth on the events upto and during the war for independence and presents many, many points of view.
This was a wonderful listen.

The Bronze Age Apocalypse, Episodes 332-337
A small series on a old civilisation extant in the Levant and its relationships with other places in the Mediterranean.

The Middle East: From the Arab Cold War to the Israeli Invasion of Lebanon, Episodes 346-353
If you want to know all the context for what’s happening in Iran now, go listen to this series. Very insightful.

The Beryl Coronet, The Stockbroker’s Clerk, The Six Napoleons, Sherlock & Co. Podcast, Season 40, 41 & 42
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A series of tiny adventures stringing along a much larger arc. Who is the Spider? Is it Moriarty lurking in the shadows? It’s getting thrillier and thrillier!

Literature Ideas, You Really Need to Know, John Sutherland
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Lots of concepts very simply explained and thought through. Everything I found here, will help me be more introspective about all future (good) books I read. I learned quite a lot. Here’s a bit about classics …

‘Classic’ – a debased term? Eliot’s question (what is a classic?) remains tantalizing; and the abuses of the term he joked about are still everywhere. ‘Classic comedy’ is more likely to mean Carry On Up the Khyber than Aristophanes. Football matches, rock-and-roll and tea cakes are all given honorific ‘classic’ status (cigars are also labelled ‘Hamlet’ – but that, like nags called Dante, is something else).

Overused and abused as the term is, literature still needs it. Properly applied, the idea of ‘classic’ points towards something that we hold to be centrally important – although defining that something is tricky.

Eliot saw classics as fruit of the society in which they happened. ‘A classic,’ he told his Virgilian audience, ‘can only occur when a civilization is mature; when a language and a literature are mature. And it must be the work of a mature mind.’ He doubtless made this lofty statement in an auditorium where the blackout blinds were pulled down, as part of the protective measures against German bombers aiming to blast the assembled classicists to pieces. Whatever epithet one chose in 1944¹ for the civilization that had produced Virgil (currently under the heel of Mussolini), ‘mature’ would not be it.

The classic and empire: [Frank] Kermode was sharper in his sociology than Eliot. It was not a civilization but an empire – with all the temporal (and, if necessary, brutal) cultural power imperialism implies – that supplied the foundation for the classic. If a language is, as linguists like to joke, a dialect with an army behind it, then classic literature is writing with an imperium behind it. This is easily enough tested with reference to the European Union, which currently has some 27 member countries. Which of those countries can be said to have classic literatures, as opposed to some impressive works of literature? The answer would be those which – before the twentieth-century winds of change blew – had great empires (Britain, France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Germany, Holland, Austria, Belgium). Does Luxembourg have its classics? Or Moldova? Where are their Shakespeares, Racines or Cervantes?

In a brilliant critical move Kermode argues that it is the very pliability of the classic that is its essence. It ‘accommodates’ – makes itself at home – wherever and whenever it finds itself. It is the classic’s ability to be both antique, yet modern, its infinite – but never anarchic – plurality that defines it. A work like King Lear, Kermode argues, ‘subsists in change, by being patient of interpretation’. Every generation will read, or understand, King Lear differently insofar as every generation is different from its predecessors. No final version, or interpretation, of the play can be achieved. But every generation will find its own satisfactory interpretation. And the classic is tolerant of each and every different explanation of itself.

The condensed idea
The classic is the gold standard of literature – but all that glistens is not classic

Songteller: My Life in Lyrics, Dolly Parton
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I listened to this on audio first, because I wanted to hear Dolly sing, just as I wanted to hear Sara Bareilles tell of her songs in her book and Judi Dench speak of her perfomances in hers. And then I went and bought it as an ebook as well, because I wanted to see all the pictures as well :)
My childhood was Dolly Parton (and Kenny Rogers and Willie Nelson and other country artists). And I probably listened to her as she hit her stride as an extremely successful solo artist. Because I had no idea of her variety show on television and all her work with Porter Wagoner for close to two decades before her solo work, seventies onwards.
I loved hearing her voice, humming along and laughing along and telling stories of her dad and her husband and all her big family and the struggles she faced and the way she handled fame, showcased in short, rapid vignettes. If you love her music, this is a must listen. Dolly’s amazing!

Dolly, talking about her song, “The Sacrifice” as well as reminiscing on her journey.²

This is a song that I wrote that just came out of my heart and soul, my gut. Sometimes you wonder if you’ve made all the wise choices. Would you do things differently if you could?

People say, “How come all of this success happened to you?” I say, “Because I sacrificed whatever I had to in order to get it.” You can’t veer off into this and that. You can’t lose your momentum if you’ve got a dream and a focus. I always felt like God was directing me. So I’m not going to let up until He says, “Stop.” I just keep going, like a horse with blinders on.

I wrote “The Sacrifice” because somebody asked me that question. Well, the answer is, I gave up time with family and friends. I gave up vacations for work. I “carried my pail.” Like the song says, “You don’t drink the water, if you don’t drill the well.” One of my favorite lines I ever wrote is, “I was gonna be rich, no matter how much it cost / And I was going to win, no matter how much I lost.”

It’s only in the wee hours, when you’re fading off to sleep, that you ask, “Is it worth the sacrifice?” I think I probably wouldn’t have done anything different, because I believe that this is what I was supposed to do. Who am I not to sacrifice to make things better for the people here that I am responsible for?

Yes, I would do it all again. No doubt about it.

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Eliot was addressing the Virgil Society on the subject of classics in 1944 ↩︎
This text closes the audiobook. But I’ve chosen the paraphrased text from the ebook though. Dolly’s actual ramble while lovely to listen to, meanders somewhat before it gets to her very emphatic No doubt about it :) ↩︎

Books I Read in March, 2026

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 12:10:41 +0530

courtesy, Penguin Random House

Between getting ready for Kubecon EU, 2026 (creating my poster) and getting ready for Kubecon EU, 2026 (dealing with all the travel sutff), March was a busy month.
Did get quite a bit of reading done. Did not have enough time to listen to my favourite history podcasts though :)

The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Stieg Larsson
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This is a pattern that I now see everywhere when I now read a trilogy (or series).
The first book sets up the world, the rest of them then just tell a very good story set in that world. Millennium (this series) is a very good example of this trope. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (which I read last month) sets up the bleak, colourless, cold, misogynistic world. And now Fire and Hornet’s Nest tell a single long story in that world. These should have been one book.

This time the focus is on Salander and her life. Something’s happened in the past, which leaves her broken. In the meanwhile, there are old men dying in hospitals, gang members getting beat up and stuff happening at the highest levels of government. How do all of these events tie together?
It’s immersive and wonderfully told. Lisbeth Salander is fire, like the title suggests!
I hope some other similar heroine catches my attention soon!

The Looking Glass War, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy, John le Carré
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More greedy old men trying to hang on to power.
MI6 is compromised, by the wily and smart, anti-Smiley, Karla. Who is the mole leaking British secrets to Russia?
An empathetic gangster, and an honourable schoolboy have a standoff at an island outside Hong Kong.

Le Carré was the one who saw and taught me how British influence waned on the world stage when all the while, the system still hung on to dreams of their “glory” days. He also taught me how to see in shades of grey.

The Bear and the Nightingale, The Girl in the Tower and The Winter of the Witch (Winternight trilogy), Katherine Arden
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I do not know what you should choose. Every time you take one path, you must live with the memory of the other: of a life left unchosen.
Decide as seems best, one course or the other; each way will have its bitter with its sweet.”

Here is a clearing on the border between winter and spring. Once Vasya would have said that the cusp of spring was a moment.
But now she knew that it was also a place, at the edge of the lands of winter.

I read these in two weeks in the bracing cold of Europe.
And once again, this felt like a duology rather than a set of three. The Bear and the Nightingale sets up the world while the Girl in the Tower and the Winter of the Witch feel like a long and beautiful story set in that world.
I had read a big book of Russian folk tales as a child, and they still linger in my heart and soul to this day. I don’t remember what it was called or who wrote it, save for the fact that it was a big grey hardback with a wolf head embossed on the cover. But I read about phoenixes and big grey wolves and Tsars and Baba Yaga and Vasilisa and so many wonderful characters and stories then.
Arden takes all of them (and more that I did not read about) and weaves a beautiful story through fable and history and time. She’s a lovely storyteller. The prose is lovely too! Nature comes alive. Old faith and tradtitons tangle with the new. All against the backdrop of cold wintry nights. I absolutely loved reading Vasilisa’s coming of age and finding her path through life, all the time being framed in events that were true yet beautifully enhanced by the fantastic. I hope these books entrance young folk, while also make them read and fall in love with the old tales as well.

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Books I Read in February, 2026

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 11:30:00 +0530

from https://picclick.it/Pan-THE-SPY-WHO-CAME-IN-FROM-THE-296332075807.html, via DuckDuckGo

Better late than never, so let’s begin!
This month I moved from history to historical fiction.
From modern spy novels to medieval detective fiction, I had centuries worth of fun!

Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 381-390
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Some non fiction first.

I finished catching up with all the episodes of the podcast and now I’ll keep listing them as soon as I finish a batch of ten (around 8+ hours of listening to something counts as book length to me. Unless it’s a four hour Dan Carlin episode. Those are dense 😂)
The new episodes hew toward philosopical discussions about how to live in a world that is slowly being infected with AI. What is true? What is art? Is AI really taking over the world? Is AI really an apt term for what we are seeing? Pretty interesting listen.

Beyond the Rift, Peter Watts
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Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts.
— James Nicoll

Watts is one of my favourite authors. I often wonder why he did not get popular.
The Rifters trilogy is my favourite science fiction series. Nothing has come close yet. Power is now taken from geothermal vents in the oceans. The only folks who can adapt to this environment are folks with psychological disorders. They’re given iron gills and other alterations to withstand deep sea pressure. Murder and mayhem ensue. Between the crazy beasts in the dark of the ocean and the crazies themselves.
Techno lingo mixed with poetry, crazy doomsday scenarios and lots of potty mouthedness! Nobody writes quite like him. Nobody writes what he does either. Hard biological sci-fi.
If you’d read the adventures of Lenie Clarke, then nothing about today’s creeping AI world and its dumb “intelligence” would surprise you. And that is precisely why I want to go read Starfish, Maelstrom and Behemoth once more. To see if the books still engage.
You can too! The novels are available as ebooks in various formats for free on his website.
(If you are going to print them, then caveat printor! These are chonky beasts.)

But all this is besides the point. Beyond the rift, is a lot of short stories in the world of the Rifters. It clears up, follows through or talks about other things in that setting. I loved it.

Pspsps, some short stories are available on the link I shared above as well!

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John le Carré
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Daddy gave me a even more battered copy of the book, than the pic above.
I don’t know what possesed him to do that. I don’t know what his fascination with Le Carré (& Forsyth) was. For a man who would normally be pretty optimistic and generaly full of hope, to be suggesting I read a book with such a cold, inhospitable view of the world was quite out of character. But I loved reading all about Smiley and the circus. And I spent most of my boyhood, learning about WWII and the cold war world via Smiley and gang.

The book is a modern classic, though I don’t know why. Probably just a luck of the draw? I’m not complaining though. It’s a wonderful piece of spy drama.
On teensy flimsy actions, on such tiny wings does the world turn. What if Liz and Leamas didn’t get together? Would Smiley’s plan have worked then? A cynical yet bemused Le Carré would say yes and invent some other small thing that would have things just as bleak as they turned out to be.

Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality
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These came before Spy did, and read more like dark Christie novels. More detective than spy. Good fun!

Falco, The Official Companion, Lindsey Davis
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Medieval detective fiction is no longer enough. I’m now going to ancient Rome for some crime!
I found Lindsey Davis’ Falco who is a soldier turned detective in ancient Rome. (with some Britain thrown in.)
This book is a non fiction companion to the series and the world ala GRRM’s, A World of Ice and Fire. These are Davis’ thoughts and recollections on how she created Falco, the history (actual and imagined) of the world at the time, the impetus behind why he behaves the he does and all sorts of other bits and bobs. She shares her day, her writing process and lots of intersting tidbits from here there and everywhere. This was tonnes of fun. I’m going into the series, really pumped!

The Novice’s Tale, The Servant’s Tale, and The Outlaw’s Tale, Margaret Frazer
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I turned away from Frazer’s group of players in her Joliffe series (which I began last month) and went a few decades earlier to meet Dame Frevisse.
She is a hosteller when I meet her in the Novice’s tale, which solves the problem of how a nun in a convent, is able to meet and talk to people. She’s also Chaucer’s niece which gives her a wee bit of influence.
She reads like a more wonderfully written Sexton Blake. The way they solve crimes is not a coming together of what you may have observed, but something that is happens or is shown at the very end. I hope it gets better with the solution and the foreshadowing as I go deeper into the series. What makes me want to read though is the journey, Frazer takes us on and the conversations these people have and the expositon of the lives they lead. All that is wonderfully done!

In Novice, a crazy rich woman, comes to get her niece back from the convent where Frevisse is and then gets murdered.
Servant, brings in Joliffe who I read last month into this world when his band of players come to the convent, bearing the dead body of a villager who they claim they found on the way. One of the players is blamed, and accusations fly across the three engaged parties. Who killed that loathsome villager?
Outlaw, seems like an episode of a serious K drama, where the main cast takes off to Jeju island for a holiday and something happens there. Dame Frevisse is accompanying her fellow nun to her home for a baptism, when they are kidnapped! The kidnapper is Frevisse’s cousin! And then he’s murdered!

Frazer writes good page turners!

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson
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Modern detective fiction! A journalist plays detective in this one.
Take a girl on the autistic spectrum, give her a really bad childhood, and have still be as normal as possible.
An old man, keeps getting flowers on his dead grand-daughter’s birthday for close to thirty years after she dies.
A self absorbed yet talented journalist who loses darn near everything and now has such a stain on his integrity that no one will believe him.
Bring them all together, add in a pile of dead bodies in the freezing countryside of Sweden and you have a thriller!
I read it when it was first published and I turned to it again. It still holds up. It’s a fun read.
Larsson supports women and is a feminist, yet does not quite know how to write women. He still makes the book work though.

Lisbeth Salander is a woman who hates men who hate women. And she really is badass!

More next month! À bientôt!

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Books I Read in January, 2026

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 12:15:39 +0530

This was a good reading month. I think I have become a history geek, thanks to podcasts and books and those are going to be what I read heavily for quite a while now. Some books intentionally read, some comfort reads.
All recommended.

The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett
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A mystery whodunit. I am finally in my Noir phase. And enjoying it.
Drunk retired detective, socialite wife, multiple red herrings, 30s America, what’s not to like?!

The Rest is History, The Nazis at War, Hitler Strikes West, Parts I-IV
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Every year, the company of Holland and Sandbrook, walk through the events (slowly) of World Wars One and Two, in order to make up for the travesty of the coverage that they started the show with! Then entire French Revolution in 20 minutes if I remember correctly. 😂 This time, they covered the events of Nazi Germany’s march on and upto the fallo of France. The duo are lovely when they are in flow and these episodes are worth a listen.

The Rest is History, Jack the Ripper, Parts I-IV
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More from the podcast, this time covering the ghastly killings of the Whitechapel Murderer. Between reading about the events with morbid fascination as a child and then growing up and reading different versions of the events (I liked Alan Moore’s, From Hell if you are a comics person or the ITV miniseries featuring Michael Caine), I thought I had heard all and seen all. The duo surprised me by telling the story from distinct and different perspectives. One was how the media influenced the events, drawing parallels to today, and the other, more importantly, was the lives of the victims, and the events from their perspective leading to their sad demise. The series leaned heavily on a Hallie Rubenhold book, The Five to do that. I bought it and it is now on the pile. This probably is the least I felt I could to to erase young Jason’s fevered fascination with killers.

The Second Stain, The Man with The Twisted Lip, and The Muskgrave Ritual, Sherlock & Co. Podcast, Seasons 37, 38 & 39
#

This is the other boyhood fascination that still remains. Sleuths and detectives and whodunits.
This series has several lovely takes on the original Doyle stories and are worth your time, if you want to be entertained! When they began, I felt their voices were too akin to the modern BBC series featuring Cumberbatch & Freeman, but now they’ve grown on me and the reverse feels true. Some stories are fun and relaxed and some taut all through. All of them are lovely.

Mania for Subjugation III, Hardcore History, Episode 73
#

This is Alexander as never told before. In true Carlin style, you wait eight months to a year between episodes, but when they come, oh boy, do they deliver. We are at the third episode in the series and Alexander has just about started his journey to conquering the world as he knew it. If you want deeply researched history, Dan Carlin’s your man. The amount of books and time and work that goes into each episode is incredible. My only nitpick, is if he could be more humane. The man comes from the other end, a wargamer who loves what-if scenarios (like young Jason with his fascination for murderers and sociopaths). He’s come a long way from his earlier episodes, but I wish for just a little more humanity. The stories have enough pathos though and he always does them justice.

Sister, Maiden, Monster, Lucy A. Snyder
#

I thoroughly disliked this one. This feels like someone read the Book of Revelations¹ when high and then based a sci-fi novella on it. Deliciously unhinged, reads a review. It’s unhinged, alright.

I normally don’t mention or list books that I hate or do not finish or do not agree with. This is not that. This is a prime example of a “this is not for me” book. And this probably is the first book I read, that I felt this about. The writing is competent, but it did nothing for me. So no. Not for me. A pandemic rages through the world, and people get affected differently, in different manners. All gruesome.

I think only one person does horror, the way I want and love. And I remain grateful to the stories and work of Guillermo del Toro.

The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel
#

I loved the old timey self help folks. Carnegie, Ziglar et al. Simple truths told with lovely stories.
Housel is the modern form of that persona. Observations on how you think about money, what is wrong with it and suggestions on how one ought to actually think. All interspersed between engaging stories. I wrote a post about the book, if you want to know more.

Shattered Lands, Sam Dalrymple
#

This soothed an itch, that’s been there since my childhood. Raised as I was, in the last remnants of empire and with a father and grandfather—who sometimes were sad about what was lost—I was always fascinated with British India. To learn about the length and breadth of the British Indian Empire, was both novel and yet unsurprising. More thoughts in a post I wrote when I finished the book. If you love reading Indian History, this is a must get, must read book.

History of the Alphabet, Kevin Stroud
#

This one felt like I already had so many disparate pieces of some whole and Stroud made them all fit, to form a beautiful tapestry.
I’m following his History of English podcast², and I bought the History of the Alphabet to try and support him, not expecting much, but I was pleasantly surprised. Weaving through times and peoples, from Egypt to the Levant to Greece to Italy with the Eruscans and later the Romans, to France and beyond. It’s a lovely tale!

A Play of Isaac, Margaret Frazer
#

This is a lovely piece of historical detective fiction. Set in Oxford in the middle 15th century, it follows a company of players who are staging Abraham and Isaac for a local lord and someone dies at their doorstep.

More than this specific book itself, I want to write a bit about this class of author, whose writings I have really come to enjoy. I have no name for the kind of writing they do. But I love the prose to bits. Gail Lynn Brown (writing as Margaret Frazer), is the latest. The other two I found so far were Edith Pargeter (writing as Ellis Peters) and Rosemary Kirstein.
I found Edith first, with her monumental Cadfael series of books. By the time I was in book two, I was amazed by this man who could do nuance so perfectly (Of course, it turned out to be a woman 😂). But yes, it is the nuance, the way they do turns of phrase, the way they write their characters … I don’t know what binds them togther, what the likeness is. It can’t be genre, because while Pargeter and Brown write historical detective fiction, Kirstein does not.(She seems to have created a unique genre/niche of her own.)
So like I said, while I don’t know what unites them, I will continue to ravenously read everything they write. The writing is letter perfect to my mind and heart. I enjoy them, with emphasis on joy.

These are all for now. I hope you found something in the list above that tickled your fancy.
À demain!

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Which is already kooky in the first place ↩︎
The language. Not the English people. There are a lot of peoples in this story :) ↩︎

The Psychology of Money

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 15:36:56 +0530

I heard Morgan Housel on the latest episode of the Shane Parrish podcast recently as well as a while ago on Vishal Khandelwal’s podcast, and most of what he said resonated with what I learned and found out on my own independently over the years.
So I went and got his book.

Take the best of Taleb, Danny Kahneman, and your grandma, put them into story form with an earnest tone, and you get this book. It’s lovely.

Realise that you’re unique. You have your scars. Realise that colours everything that you see and do.
Stop idolising individuals. The patterns lie in large numbers. Not in a single individual’s story, no matter how inspiring you think it is. You have no clue of which butterfly flapped its wings to create Bill Gates’ wealth.
The aim ought to be enough. Which you get to decide. But there has to be a point where you say enough.
The gains from compounding occur at the end. The only reason Buffett has the money he has now (~90 billion dollars), is because he started investing at 10. Had he started at 30, he’d only be worth ~20 million. Like Housel says,

Effectively all of Warren Buffett’s financial success can be tied to the financial base he built in his pubescent years and the longevity he maintained in his geriatric years.

His skill is investing, but his secret is time. That’s how compounding works.

Making money is one thing. It’s the keeping of the money that’s harder. How does one do this? Stay in the margins. Survive. And use Taleb’s Barbell.
Have options. You never know which one might pan out. Also realise that options are another way of saying that one of your individual bets could die for the sake of your bigger aim, and you’ll still be ok. An individual stock might not work, but the index has always inched upwards for decades.
The best freedom, to paraphrase Taleb, is the ability to say, “Fuck this!” to things you don’t want to do. Or to actually quote him …

This kind of sum I’ve called in my vernacular “fuck you money” —a sum large enough to get most, if not all, of the advantages of wealth (the most important one being independence and the ability to only occupy your mind with matters that interest you) but not its side effects, such as having to attend a black-tie charity event and being forced to listen to a polite exposition of the details of a marble-rich house renovation. […] Beyond a certain level of opulence and independence, gents tend to be less and less personable and their conversation less and less interesting.

Housel puts it much more eloquently …

The highest form of wealth is the ability to wake up every morning and say, “I can do whatever I want today.”

People want to become wealthier to make them happier. Happiness is a complicated subject because everyone’s different. But if there’s a common denominator in happiness—a universal fuel of joy—it’s that people want to control their lives.

The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, for as long as you want, is priceless. It is the highest dividend money pays.

Stop playing the Keeping up with the Kumars¹.
Save money.
Being reasonable is greater than being rational.

You’re not a spreadsheet. You’re a person. Do not aim to be coldly rational when making financial decisions. Aim to just be pretty reasonable. Reasonable is more realistic and you have a better chance of sticking with it for the long run, which is what matters most when managing money.

You cannot spend your time and energy watching the world and waiting for the “best” time to make a investment. Save money. Invest it. Let it compound.
Margin of Safety. That ought to be one of the main weapons in your mental arsenal. Always have room for error. Always have slack.
You will change over time. Learn to be kind to your future self. Make sure you’re not wedded to past decisions. Make your circumstances adapt to you.
Nothing’s free. What are you willing to pay to get what you want?
Note to self: Learn Statistics. Learn probabilities. They’ll teach you more than stories that folks weave. And yet paradoxically, when you want to convince folks? Use stories. They are always more powerful!
Manage and invest your money in a way that helps you sleep at night.
The best “shortcut” to do better with your investments? Increase your time horizon and let compounding work for you.
What works for others will not work for you. They are not you. Make your own mistakes. And your own decisions. There is no single right answer; just the answer that works for you.

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Deep cut silly joke, if you loved the Kumars and Goodness Gracious me.
The Jones at No. 42 were Indian. ↩︎

Shattered Lands

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 17:31:37 +0530

I came across this little paradox of history when I read, “The Race for Paradise” in 2018.

Bashir saw the strange spectacle of the Frankish¹ lord of Antioch marching alongside Muslim troops from the lord of Aleppo, arrayed in battle against the Sultan’s representative, the Muslim lord of Mosul, who marched with his own Frankish¹ allies from Edessa.

Close to eight hundred years later, history rhymed. From Sam Dalrymple’s, Shattered Lands …

Communities divided between India and Burma like the Mizos and Chakma thus found themselves pulled into the war over Pakistan. Later India would send a battalion of Tibetan refugees against them, so that on the eastern front the battle over the future of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan ironically involved two rival Buddhist militias – neither of them Bengali.

That’s always the zeitgeist apparently.
People are dorks.
Showing grace to folks “not like us” is hard.

Let me get the one nitpick out of the way first. It’s a bit rich for Sam to play doomsayer for modern Asia or roleplay a stern parent by expecting us to behave “propah”. He thinks its an irony that

in the twenty-first century it is easier for Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis to meet in England, their former colonial power, than to meet in the subcontinent itself.

The fact remains that Britain abandoned its Empire. They just upped sticks and left. With nothing left for us.
Yes it is sad that there are divisions. But leave the healing to us.
I don’t want the man² who stabbed me in the back, in the dark, and looted and raped everything of mine, to come and preach to me of forgiveness or how division is bad for us..

Sam says,

The last decade has witnessed the decline of globalisation, the strengthening of borders and the resurgence of nationalism across the world. India’s Partitions are a dire warning for what such a future might hold.

I sincerely hope this is a message to the nations of the “first world” to stop ravaging our lands and not for folks in Africa and Asia. Be really hypocritical if it wasn’t.

And now to the rest of the book.
It’s a real tour de force of history.
Beginning in the late 1920s and ending in the mid 70s, the book traces the breakup of the British Indian Empire.
So many pieces of jumbled childhood memories, now make sense. The reason why so many Goans and Mangaloreans rushed to do labour in the erstwhile Trucial States in the mid 80s (modern UAE and other neighbouring countries). I have seen old Indian currency used in Aden (my relatives), as well as Indian currency that could be used in Saudi Arabia when folks went on the Haj (via friends). Why when I went to work in the Eastern part of my state (Maharashtra) in my younger years, the dialect and culture felt different (Because Dakhani. Because erstwhile Hyderabad). Why there used to be so many State Banks.

While I was fairly well informed about how Pakistan and Bangladesh came about, I wanted to learn more about of the Easternmost (Burma) and Westermost (Arabian States) flanks of the British Indian Empire. The book delivered in spades.
It’s extremely well researched, and Sam has the blood of his ranconteur papa when relating this (hi)story.
The history I loved and related to the most, was Angami Zapu Phizo’s lifelong struggle (and failure) to build a Naga nation. Phizo keeps appearing in nearly every Partition story, trying his hardest. The Nagas were the best part of the book.

I have friends, who still reel from the partitions, who have left family on the other side, who have lost lands and property and freedom.
My father (born in 1942) as well as several other older friends (born in the 1930s) used to lament of all that was lost, without being able to articulate what and how.
This book made me realise how and just how much.

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Christian ↩︎ ↩︎
England ↩︎

Focus on How Long You Read, Not How Much, aka The Best Advice I Could Give You About Reading Lots of Books

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 05:45:00 +0530

Old Post

This is just an old post, about reading, that has moved from the personal section to here.

via a Tom Gauld Book¹

Ever so often, after one of my reading updates on social media, some of my young friends ask me how I get so much reading done.

So, I decided to answer it here for posterity and then just point folk here.

You are not me.
a. I am a book worm.
b. I am much older than you, with lots more practice.
You most probably want to rush through a hard, technical book.
a. I find them as hard as you.
b. I read them at, as slow a pace as you.
c. I interleave the hard stuff, with a lot of easy, “I-Love-This” fiction
Speed Reading is Bullshit!
Once you read a lot of books, you can pattern match and speed up or slow down, through whole blocks and paras and chapters and pages.
Reading for studying’s sake is work and unavoidable and not quite related to reading for reading’s sake.
a. These I pucker up and do anyway, just like taking bad medicine.

The only things that matter, when it comes to reading are …

Be consistent. Read a little bit, daily.
The trick to reading a lot, is to read a little every day.
And the trick to reading a little every day is to, make it a habit.
Be curious. Read whatever you want. Read whenever you want. Read wherever you want.
Quit Books.
You don’t have to finish it. You don’t have to slog through it.
Set it down. Come back to it, tomorrow … or in a few decades.
Or just throw it out and forget all about it.
And if reading really becomes a sort of calling for you, then learn how to do it properly.²

That’s about it for now. If I remember something more, I’ll come back and tack it on here.

I forget which one! ↩︎
totally optional. I learnt this really late in life and while it has enriched my reading experience, it had nothing to do with my love of reading. ↩︎

How to Read a Book: 009, Elementary Reading, The First Level

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 18:16:23 +0530

image courtesy, Simon & Schuster

The book now dives into the Four Levels of Reading.

We tackle notes from the First Level of Reading, Elementary Reading, today

Stages of Learning to Read
#

1. First Stage of Learning to read (Reading Readiness)
This begins, at birth, and continues normally until the age of about six or seven. Reading readiness includes several different kinds of preparation for learning to read.
Physical readiness involves good vision and hearing. Intellectual readiness involves a minimum level of visual perception such that the child can take in and remember an entire word and the letters that combine to form it.
Language readiness involves the ability to speak clearly and to use several sentences in correct order.
Personal readiness involves the ability to work with other children, to sustain attention, to follow directions, and the like.
General reading readiness is assessed by tests and is also estimated by teachers who are often skillful at discerning just when a pupil is ready to learn to read.

2. Second Stage: Simple Material Reading Children learn to read very simple materials.
They usually begin, by learning a few sight words, and typically manage to master perhaps three hundred to four hundred words by the end of the first year. Basic skills are introduced at this time, such as the use of context or meaning clues and the beginning sounds of words.

The Miracle of Reading
It is incidentally worth observing that something quite mysterious, almost magical, occurs during this stage.
At one moment in the course of her development the child, when faced with a series of symbols on a page, finds them quite meaningless. Not much later—perhaps only two or three weeks later—she has discovered meaning in them; she knows that they say “The cat sat on the hat.”
How this happens no one really knows, despite the efforts of philosophers and psychologists over two and a half millennia to study the phenomenon. Where does meaning come from? How is it that a French child would find the same meaning in the symbols “Le chat s’asseyait sur le chapeau”?
Indeed, this discovery of meaning in symbols may be the most astounding intellectual feat that any human being ever performs—and most humans perform it before they are seven years old!

3.Third Stage: Vocabulary Acquisition
The third stage is characterized by rapid progress in vocabulary building and by increasing skill in “unlocking” the meaning of unfamiliar words through context clues.

4. Fourth Stage: Assimilation
Finally, the fourth stage is characterized by the refinement and enhancement of the skills previously acquired. Above all, the student begins to be able to assimilate his reading experiences—that is, to carry over concepts from one piece of writing to another, and to compare the views of different writers on the same subject. This, the mature stage of reading, should be reached by young persons in their early teens. Ideally, they should continue to build on it for the rest of their lives.

Stages and Levels
#

It is of paramount importance to recognize that the four stages outlined here are all stages of the first level of reading

The first stage of elementary reading—reading readiness—corresponds to pre-school and kindergarten experiences.

The second stage—word mastery—corresponds to the first grade experience of the typical child (although many quite normal children are not “typical” in this sense), with the result that the child attains what we can call second-stage reading skills, or first grade ability in reading or first grade literacy.

The third stage of elementary reading—vocabulary growth and the utilization of context—is typically (but not universally, even for normal children) acquired at about the end of the fourth grade of elementary school and results in what is variously called fourth grade, or functional, literacy—the ability, according to one common definition, to read traffic signs or picture captions fairly easily, to fill out the simpler government forms, and the like.

The fourth and final stage of elementary reading is attained at about the time the pupil leaves or graduates from elementary school or junior high school. It is sometimes called eighth grade, ninth grade, or tenth grade literacy. The child is a “mature” reader in the sense that he is now capable of reading almost anything, but still in a relatively unsophisticated manner. In the simplest terms, he is mature enough to do high school work.

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How to Read a Book: 008, More On the Activity and the Art of Reading

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 14:40:20 +0530

image courtesy, Simon & Schuster

Enlightenment or Sophmore(istry)? Reading serves both. It’s the reader who is the difference
#

To be informed is to know simply that something is the case.
To be enlightened is to know, in addition, what it is all about: why it is the case, what its connections are with other facts, in what respects it is the same, in what respects it is different, and so forth.
This distinction is familiar in terms of the differences between being able to remember something and being able to explain it.
[…] you have gained nothing but information if you have exercised only your memory. You have not been enlightened. Enlightenment is achieved only when, in addition to knowing what an author says, you know what he means and why he says it.

It is true, of course, that you should be able to remember what the author said as well as know what he meant. Being informed is prerequisite to being enlightened. The point, however, is not to stop at being informed.

Montaigne speaks of “an abecedarian ignorance that precedes knowledge, and a doctoral ignorance that comes after it.”
The first is the ignorance of those who, not knowing their ABC’s, cannot read at all.
The second is the ignorance of those who have misread many books.
They are, as Alexander Pope rightly calls them, bookful blockheads, ignorantly read. There have always been literate ignoramuses who have read too widely and not well. The Greeks had a name for such a mixture of learning and folly which might be applied to the bookish but poorly read of all ages. They are all sophomores.

Art of Reading
#

The process whereby a mind, with nothing to operate on but the symbols of the readable matter, and with no help from outside, elevates itself by the power of its own operations. The mind passes from understanding less to understanding more. The skilled operations that cause this to happen are the various acts that constitute the art of reading.

What is Reading? A couple of meanings …
#

1. When you already know things

The first sense is the one in which we speak of ourselves as reading newspapers, magazines, or anything else that, according to our skill and talents, is at once thoroughly intelligible to us.
Such things may increase our store of information, but they cannot improve our understanding, for our understanding was equal to them before we started. Otherwise, we would have felt the shock of puzzlement and perplexity that comes from getting in over our depth—that is, if we were both alert and honest

2. When you understand new things

The second sense is the one in which a person tries to read something that at first he does not completely understand.
Here the thing to be read is initially better or higher than the reader. The writer is communicating something that can increase the reader’s understanding. Such communication between unequals must be possible, or else one person could never learn from another, either through speech or writing. Here by “learning” is meant understanding more, not remembering more information that has the same degree of intelligibility as other information you already possess.

On Reading as Discovery
#

The distinction between being informed vs being enlightened is familiar in terms of the differences between being able to remember something and being able to explain it.
Enlightenment is achieved only when, in addition to knowing what an author says, you know what he means and why he says it.

To avoid error of assuming that to be widely read and to be well-read are the same thing—we must consider a certain distinction in types of learning.

In the history of education, people have often distinguished between learning by instruction and learning by discovery. Instruction occurs when one person teaches another through speech or writing. We can, however, gain knowledge without being taught. If this were not the case, and every teacher had to be taught what he in turn teaches others, there would be no beginning in the acquisition of knowledge. Hence, there must be discovery—the process of learning something by research, by investigation, or by reflection, without being taught.

Discovery stands to instruction as learning without a teacher stands to learning through the help of one. In both cases, the activity of learning goes on in the one who learns. It would be a mistake to suppose that discovery is active learning and instruction passive. There is no inactive learning, just as there is no inactive reading.
This is so true, in fact, that a better way to make the distinction clear is to call instruction “aided discovery.”

The difference between learning by instruction and learning by discovery—or, as we would prefer to say, between aided and unaided discovery—is primarily a difference in the materials on which the learner works. When he is being instructed—discovering with the help of a teacher—the learner acts on something communicated to her. She performs operations on discourse, written or oral. She learns by acts of reading or listening.
When, however, the learner proceeds without the help of any sort of teacher, the operations of learning are performed on nature or the world rather than on discourse. The rules of such learning constitute the art of unaided discovery. If we use the word “reading” loosely, we can say that discovery—strictly, unaided discovery—is the art of reading nature or the world, as instruction (being taught, or aided discovery) is the art of reading books or, to include listening, of learning from discourse.

Thinking is only one part of the activity of learning. One must also use one’s senses and imagination. One must observe, and remember, and construct imaginatively what cannot be observed. There is, again, a tendency to stress the role of these activities in the process of unaided discovery and to forget or minimize their place in the process of being taught through reading or listening. For example, many people assume that though a poet must use his imagination in writing a poem, they do not have to use their imagination in reading it.

The art of reading, in short, includes all of the same skills that are involved in the art of unaided discovery: keenness of observation, readily available memory, range of imagination, and, of course, an intellect trained in analysis and reflection. The reason for this is that reading in this sense is discovery, too—although with help instead of without it.

On Present and Absent Teachers (Or as Munger would have put it, the eminent dead)
#

We have been proceeding as if reading and listening could both be treated as learning from teachers. To some extent that is true. Both are ways of being instructed, and for both one must be skilled in the art of being taught. Listening to a course of lectures, for example, is in many respects like reading a book; and listening to a poem is like reading it.
Yet there is good reason to place primary emphasis on reading, and let listening become a secondary concern. The reason is that listening is learning from a teacher who is present—a living teacher—while reading is learning from one who is absent.

If you ask a living teacher a question, she will probably answer you. If you are puzzled by what she says, you can save yourself the trouble of thinking by asking her what he means.
If, however, you ask a book a question, you must answer it yourself. In this respect a book is like nature or the world. When you question it, it answers you only to the extent that you do the work of thinking and analysis yourself.

This does not mean, of course, that if the living teacher answers your question, you have no further work. That is so only if the question is simply one of fact. But if you are seeking an explanation, you have to understand it or nothing has been explained to you. Nevertheless, with the living teacher available to you, you are given a lift in the direction of understanding her, as you are not when the teacher’s words in a book are all you have to go by.

[…] (for us readers though) our continuing education depends mainly on books alone, read without a teacher’s help. Therefore if we are disposed to go on learning and discovering, we must know how to make books teach us well. Reading, like unaided discovery, is learning from an absent teacher.

[2]:

How to Read a Book: 007, Highlights from the Activity and the Art of Reading

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 18:55:42 +0530

image courtesy, Simon & Schuster

Paraphrased and excerpted as usual …

Thinking is vitally important, but the modern world does not let us …
#

One of the reasons for this situation is that the very media we have mentioned are so designed as to make thinking seem unnecessary (though this is only an appearance).
The packaging of intellectual positions and views is one of the most active enterprises of some of the best minds of our day. The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, (the “consumer” of modern internet streams —mjb) is presented with a whole complex of elements—all the way from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics—to make it easy for one to “make up one’s own mind” with the minimum of difficulty and effort.
But the packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up their own mind at all. Instead, they inserts a packaged opinion into their mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. They then push a button and “play back” the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. They have performed acceptably without having had to think.

On the ability to read actively & the need to make an effort to match the author’s
#

Since reading of any sort is an activity, all reading must to some degree be active. Completely passive reading is impossible; we cannot read with our eyes immobilized and our minds asleep. Hence when we contrast active with passive reading, our purpose is, first, to call attention to the fact that reading can be more or less active, and second, to point out that the more active the reading the better.

Reading and listening are commonly thought of as receiving communication from someone who is actively engaged in giving or sending it. The mistake here is to suppose that receiving communication is like receiving a blow or a legacy or a judgment from the court.
On the contrary, the reader or listener is much more like the catcher in a game of baseball.
Catching the ball is just as much an activity as pitching or hitting it. The pitcher or batter is the sender in the sense that his activity initiates the motion of the ball. The catcher or fielder is the receiver in the sense that his activity terminates it. Both are active, though the activities are different.
If anything is passive, it is the ball. It is the inert thing that is put in motion or stopped, whereas the players are active, moving to pitch, hit, or catch. The analogy with writing and reading is almost perfect. The thing that is written and read, like the ball, is the passive object common to the two activities that begin and terminate the process.

We can take this analogy a step further. The art of catching is the skill of catching every kind of pitch—fast balls and curves, changeups and knucklers.
Similarly, the art of reading is the skill of catching every sort of communication as well as possible.

It is noteworthy that the pitcher and catcher are successful only to the extent that they cooperate. The relation of writer and reader is similar. Successful communication occurs in any case where what the writer wanted to have received finds its way into the reader’s possession. The writer’s skill and the reader’s skill converge upon a common end.

There is one respect in which the analogy breaks down. The ball is a simple unit. It is either completely caught or not.
A piece of writing, however, is a complex object. It can be received more or less completely, all the way from very little of what the writer intended to the whole of it. The amount the reader “catches” will usually depend on the amount of activity he puts into the process, as well as upon the skill with which he executes the different mental acts involved.

What does active reading entail?
Given the same thing to read, one person reads it better than another, first, by reading it more actively, and second, by performing each of the acts involved more skillfully. These two things are related.
Reading is a complex activity, just as writing is.
It consists of a large number of separate acts, all of which must be performed in a good reading. The person who can perform more of them is better able to read.

How to Read a Book: 006, Own Your Book

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 19:02:52 +0530

image courtesy, Simon & Schuster

I’ve always been precious about the physical books, I have.
Partly because the books I read when I was a child, didn’t belong to me.
And so, I wrote notes. Gentle pencil marks as I read (to be erased, before I returned them), and then writing them all out into a notebook (and later typed in to a computer when I could afford one.)

I’ve longed to write in the damned books themselves, but old habits die hard. Until I read Adler, that is.

And then the clouds parted.

Marking a book, making it your own, highlighting it, questioning it, raging at it, whispering to it, completing the conversation, the author wishes to have with you … all of it, is such a sheer, physical, visceral experience.
I wonder why I didn’t do it sooner. Better late than never though. I’ve been marking every physical book and highlighting and annotating every electronic book, ever since I got back into reading, ten years ago.

Here’s Adler on why one needs to physically manhandle a book.¹

Merely asking questions [of a book] is not enough. You have to try to answer them. And although that could be done, theoretically, in your mind only, it is much easier to do it with a pencil in your hand. The pencil then becomes the sign of your alertness while you read.

It is an old saying that you have to “read between the lines” to get the most out of anything. The rules of reading are a formal way of saying this. But we want to persuade you to “write between the lines,” too. Unless you do, you are not likely to do the most efficient kind of reading.

When you buy a book, you establish a property right in it²
But the act of purchase is actually only the prelude to possession in the case of a book. Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it—which comes to the same thing—is by writing in it.

Why is marking a book indispensable to reading it?
First, it keeps you awake—not merely conscious, but wide awake.
Second, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The person who says they knows what they think but cannot express it usually does not know what they think.

The Art of Reading, according to Adler, is that we take part in a great conversation.
I am talking to the author, but they have learnt from other masters elsewhere and are passing on their thoughts and knowledge, thus taking part in a single great conversation of humankind through the ages.

Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author.
Presumably she knows more about the subject than you do; if not, you probably should not be bothering with her book.
But understanding is a two-way operation; the learner has to question themselves and question the teacher. They even has to be willing to argue with the teacher, once they understand what the teacher is saying.
Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay them

Mortimer Adler’s methods of marking up a book and making it your own
#

I’m not particularly religious about using them all, because I’ve already been using something similar (a subset) all my life

There are all kinds of devices for marking a book intelligently and fruitfully. Here are some devices that can be used:

UNDERLINING—of major points; of important or forceful statements.
VERTICAL LINES AT THE MARGIN—to emphasize a statement already underlined or to point to a passage too long to be underlined.
STAR, ASTERISK, OR OTHER DOODAD AT THE MARGIN—to be used sparingly, to emphasize the ten or dozen most important statements or passages in the book. You may want to fold a corner of each page on which you make such marks or place a slip of paper between the pages. In either case, you will be able to take the book off the shelf at any time and, by opening it to the indicated page, refresh your recollection.
NUMBERS IN THE MARGIN—to indicate a sequence of points made by the author in developing an argument.
NUMBERS OF OTHER PAGES IN THE MARGIN—to indicate where else in the book the author makes the same points, or points relevant to or in contradiction of those here marked; to tie up the ideas in a book, which, though they may be separated by many pages, belong together. Many readers use the symbol “Cf ” to indicate the other page numbers; it means “compare” or “refer to.”
CIRCLING OF KEY WORDS OR PHRASES—This serves much the same function as underlining.
WRITING IN THE MARGIN, OR AT THE TOP OR BOTTOM OF THE PAGE—to record questions (and perhaps answers) which a passage raises in your mind; to reduce a complicated discussion to a simple statement; to record the sequence of major points right through the book. The endpapers at the back of the book can be used to make a personal index of the author’s points in the order of their appearance.

To inveterate book-markers, the front endpapers are often the most important. Some people reserve them for a fancy bookplate. But that expresses only their financial ownership of the book. The front endpapers are better reserved for a record of your thinking. After finishing the book and making your personal index on the back endpapers, turn to the front and try to outline the book, not page by page or point by point (you have already done that at the back), but as an integrated structure, with a basic outline and an order of parts. That outline will be the measure of your understanding of the work; unlike a bookplate, it will express your intellectual ownership of the book.

“That outline will express your intellectual ownership of the book”
Click to embiggen

But, wait! There’s more!
#

Marking up a book is all fine and dandy, but what about recording your thoughts? And questions?

Adler to the rescue again with The Three Kinds of Note-making.
Which kind you make depends upon the level at which you are reading.

1. Notes during Inspectional Reading
The questions answered by inspectional reading are: first, what kind of book is it? second, what is it about as a whole? and third, what is the structural order of the work whereby the author develops his conception or understanding of that general subject matter?
You should make notes concerning your answers to these questions, especially if you know that it may be days or months before you will be able to return to the book to give it an analytical reading. (These kind of notes have served me really well, since I tend to keep the book down and then come back to it after a while)
Notes at this stage, primarily concern the structure of the book, and not its substance—at least not in detail.
The best place to make such notes is on the contents page, or perhaps on the title page, which are otherwise unused in the scheme we have outlined above.

2. Notes during Analytical Reading
In the course of an inspectional reading, especially of a long and difficult book, you may attain some insights into the author’s ideas about his subject matter. Often, however, you will not; and certainly you should put off making any judgment of the accuracy or truth of the statements until you have read the book more carefully.
Then, during an analytical reading, you will need to give answers to questions about the truth and significance of the book. The notes you make at this level of reading are, therefore, not structural but conceptual. They concern the author’s concepts, and also your own, as they have been deepened or broadened by your reading of the book.

3. Notes during Syntopical Reading
There is a step beyond even that, however, and a truly expert reader can take it when he is reading several books syntopically. That is to make notes about the shape of the discussion—the discussion that is engaged in by all of the authors, even if unbeknownst to them. We prefer to call such notes dialectical.
Since they are made concerning several books, not just one, they often have to be made on a separate sheet (or sheets) of paper. Here, a structure of concepts is implied—an order of statements and questions about a single subject matter.

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Mail me at feedback at this domain or [continue the discourse here][3].

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edited and paraphrased ↩︎
emphasis, mine ↩︎

Observations as I Learn to Read, 2

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 17:55:31 +0530

I finally got done transferring all my highlights and thoughts and notes from Adler into a notes file on the computer. This was my first, really large notes file, filled with heirarchies of headlines and tags and Org Mode handled it like a champ!

It took me five times as long to transfer and organise the file, as it took me to read the book. This was very painful!
I am writing this down, so that my future self remembers!
Very, very, painful!

So I need to be intentional about books that I need to analytically read and change my reading habits.

Have a one to one ratio for notes vs reading.
This means for every ten minutes I want to read, I need to allocate at least the same amount of time for bringing my notes in.
All of the above, has to be a single session.
So reading, followed by a bit of reflection, followed by transferring my notes and annotations out to Org Roam. So my old hour of reading is now 30m of reading, followed by 30m of thinking and jotting my thoughts down.
Cross my fingers, and hope that it’ll all work out. Hope that something sane, something intelligible emerges in the end.

Joseph Conrad Forsees Aaron Swartz and the AI Bandits

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 08:17:20 +0530

via PRH NZ

Been listening to Joseph Conrad’s, Heart of Darkness in the little cracks of time in the day¹ and as always being led to the sad and inevitable conclusion that we always fail to learn from what came before.

It was as unreal as everything else—as the philanthropic pretence of the whole concern, as their talk, as their government, as their show of work. The only real feeling was a desire to get appointed to a trading-post where ivory was to be had, so that they could earn percentages. They intrigued and slandered and hated each other only on that account—but as to effectually lifting a little finger—oh, no.

By heavens! there is something after all in the world allowing one man to steal a horse while another must not look at a halter. Steal a horse straight out. Very well. He has done it. Perhaps he can ride. But there is a way of looking at a halter that would provoke the most charitable of saints into a kick.

Aaron Swartz had to give his life for his beliefs, yet when the robber barons thieve everything is suddenly alright.
Greed, like love, never dies!

after hearing it being heavily referred to, in The Rest is History’s episodes on the rape, pillage and exploitation of the Congo (Episodes 538-541) ↩︎

Observations as I Learn to Read, 1

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 18:33:37 +0530

This is a smol log as I try to reason out what is bothering me about getting the most out of the books I want to, uh, get the most out of.
Something is rankling me, but I don’t know what.

As I go through How to Read a Book, I’ve realised that I need to digest a book in a manner of speaking, specially on my subsequent reads.

My ideal is to pick up a book, and read through it at the speed it ought to take; highlighting, annotating and writing down my thoughts as I go.
And while I do that, also write things down here on the blog, as I’ve been attempting to do with Adler.

Rather, I thought I would do that with Adler.
But through force of habit, I’ve gone and done the same thing I’ve always done.
Read through the entire book, highlighting as I go.
So now I have a book full of notes, and a few thoughts, but all the “brilliant”¹ insights that struck me as I read the book have vanished from my mind, as has any tentative mental model of the structure of the book.
And I’m frustrated with this state of affairs.
What happens then, is me having just a page full of notes without any of my thoughts in there, or trying to recapture lighting in a bottle over months of agonising effort.
Neither appeals to me.

The only things I can think of doing right now are:

Keep a notebook beside me and write my thoughts down. The flyleaves are barely enough for me to keep track of running highlights across pages.
Intentionally slow down, even more. I don’t know what this will do to my flow.
Read in chunks. And then stop and write about them. I’ll probably miss the big picture. But I’ll arrive at it slowly, eventually. And the writing will reflect that. Is that good or bad? I don’t really know.

So I think I’m going to buckle down and finish getting my notes from Adler into posts in the coming weeks and try the above on my next book.

very debatable 😂 ↩︎

I Need Two Copies of a Book Now

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 10:37:50 +0530

via Know Your Meme

My primary reading device is my Kobo.
For the simple reason, that I will need to buy a whole new home, for my books otherwise. The anti-library is just too large.

But as I was reading, How to Read a Book, I realise I’ll probably need a copy on the Kobo as well as a physical copy in hand, for any book that I want to read in depth.
If reading is effort, as the book suggests, then I might as well have the right tools for the right kind of effort.
Rapidly scanning through, marking things up, jotting thoughts down, and all other assorted marginalia is very easy with a physical book. Looking words up in a dictionary, copying notes in and out, and searching are very easy with the Kobo.
When it comes to writing my thoughts elsewhere or doing research, it is easy to scan through a physical book, find the relevant page, and then I am back in that mental space I was, that triggered the thought. This realisation; that books are spatial memory, is new to me (I might have been using it subconsciously all along). An e-reader cannot give me that.

So I’m going to make the best of both worlds and use both!

How to Read a Book: 003, The Four Basic Questions (A Reader Asks)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 19:13:01 +0530

image courtesy, Simon & Schuster

The Four Basic Questions:
#

This is the basic idea, that permeates the entire book down to its bones and colours every piece of advice Adler offers.

I’m quoting this verbatim, without any paraphrasing, because these questions are what I will be returning to time and again, in the coming days (and weeks and months and years.)

The one simple prescription for active reading.
It is: Ask questions while you read—questions that you yourself must try to answer in the course of reading.

What is the book about as a whole?
You must try to discover the leading theme of the book, and how the author develops this theme in an orderly way by subdividing it into its essential subordinate themes or topics.
What is being said in detail, and how?
You must try to discover the main ideas, assertions, and arguments that constitute the author’s particular message.
Is the book true, in whole or part?
You cannot answer this question until you have answered the first two. You have to know what is being said before you can decide whether it is true or not. When you understand a book, however, you are obligated, if you are reading seriously, to make up your own mind. Knowing the author’s mind is not enough.
What of it?
If the book has given you information, you must ask about its significance. Why does the author think it is important to know these things? Is it important to you to know them? And if the book has not only informed you, but also enlightened you, it is necessary to seek further enlightenment by asking what else follows, what is further implied or suggested.

How to Read a Book: 002, A Few Thoughts on Books

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 20:22:08 +0530

image courtesy, Simon & Schuster

A few thoughts on books and how long it takes me to read them, as they relate to what I learned reading this book

Reading for joy, is just that. Reading for joy! Nothing needs to come in the way of that.
Books can take as long as they need to be read. Comprehension is key. Not how many I finish.
I was wondering how so many folks read so many books “better” faster than me. The book assures me that reading books analytically, reading ideas syntopically across a swathe of books is inherently slow. I cannot read everything that way. Nor should I want to obviously. The book needs to be worthy of that kind of time and attention. To quote Adler …

A good book can teach you about the world and about yourself.
You learn more than how to read better; you also learn more about life.
You become wiser. Not just more knowledgeable—books that provide nothing but information can produce that result. But wiser, in the sense that you are more deeply aware of the great and enduring truths of human life.

And I always worried about how I would go about reading all the great books there were, when there were so many? How would I get to them all? Adler assures me that such books are few and far between. And Having read thousands of books by now, I agree. A good book, a good Lindy book is really hard to find. The last great expository / philosophical / non fiction book I read was Antifragile close to twelve years ago. The last great fiction book, luckily was Harrow in 2020. Great books don’t come by often.
Here’s Adler again …

… if the book belongs to the highest class—the very small number of inexhaustible books—you discover on returning that the book seems to have grown with you. You see new things in it—whole sets of new things—that you did not see before. Your previous understanding of the book is not invalidated (assuming that you read it well the first time); it is just as true as it ever was, and in the same ways that it was true before. But now it is true in still other ways, too.

How can a book grow as you grow? […] what you only now begin to realize is that the book was so far above you to begin with that it has remained above you, and probably always will remain so. Since it is a really good book—a great book, as we might say—it is accessible at different levels. Your impression of increased understanding on your previous reading was not false. The book truly lifted you then. But now, even though you have become wiser and more knowledgeable, it can lift you again. And it will go on doing this until you die.

There are obviously not many books that can do this for any of us. Our estimate was that the number is considerably less than a hundred. But the number is even less than that for any given reader. Human beings differ in many ways other than in the power of their minds. They have different tastes; different things appeal more to one person than to another. You may never feel about Newton the way you feel about Shakespeare, either because you may be able to read Newton so well that you do not have to read him again, or because mathematical systems of the world just do not have all that appeal to you. Or, if they do then Newton may be one of the handful of books that are great for you, and not Shakespeare.

You should seek out the few books that can have this value for you. They are the books that will teach you the most, both about reading and about life. They are the books to which you will want to return over and over. They are the books that will help you to grow.

And suddenly it isn’t so hard any more. The path I have now before me, is to go find my small set of great books. The books I can learn from and grow old with. Oh joy!

To quote Nux, Oh, what a day! What a lovely day!

How to Read a Book: 001, Begin!

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 19:25:58 +0530

image courtesy, Simon & Schuster

Why do I need to learn how to read? What has brought me to this?
#

Some thoughts …

I feel like, for all my reading, whenever I come across a great book, I don’t quite get as much out of it, as I ought to. (Anthony D’Mello, Tamsyn Muir and Nassim Taleb are a few who come to mind.)
Most of my note taking has been intuitive. And then I struggle to draw insights. To add insult to injury, the struggle is unique for each book. I need a framework, to get atleast 80% of the way there, predictably, every time.

Why this book?
#

Because I like it.¹
I love the old-timey feel of the book. Yes, it is a product of its time and I really, desperately wish, they update it to become a whole lot more inclusive when it comes to a great many things. Not the least being gender. Also faith.
But for the actual lessons that it does try to teach; I resonate with the author’s voice.

What’s the plan now? What do I hope will happen?
#

Read it.
Make notes.
Write about it in tiny bits.
Write down, thoughts, insight, stuff that strikes me, paragraphs from the book, quotes, and everything in between

Let it take as long as it does.

The biggest lesson, I took away from the book last time I read it, was that the intentional reading of a good book, takes time. I want to be able to do this with the books I like, so I’m getting the ball rolling with this one itself.

The note I wrote to myself at the beginning of the year was …

Read less, write more notes. Abandon more books.

By reading less, I meant I wanted to read good books slower and longer, which is what I hope I will do, once I get done reading this book.

“a rare phenomenon, a living classic …” is how the publisher refers to it ↩︎

On Neil Gaiman

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 13:48:39 +0530

Considering how much I’ve quoted Neil Gaiman (here, here, here, here, here and many other places on the blog) and how much his stories have influenced me, I feel a bit obligated to put this personal statement out.

What he did was really, really wrong! Horrifyingly wrong!
The girls, the women, were wronged. Grossly so. Often violently so.

Never meet your heroes and idols with feet of clay and all that.

So I’ve given away (or deleted) all my Gaiman books, save two. My collected editions of Sandman. And my signed copy of What you Need to Be Warm.
While it is true that Gaiman shot to stardom with Sandman, that was not the reason I bought this collected edition. I bought it for the young boy, who would scramble the lanes of Matunga and Fort, looking for more erudite comics after reading Moore’s V for Vendetta and Watchmen. Sandman was something I discovered on my own and enjoyed so much.
Besides it was never about the writing at that stage. It was the stories. From all over the world and across cultures. That he’d reimagine for Sandman. (Ramadan, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Thermidor, The Dream Hunters … ) And even more importantly it was the pictures, the drawings, the gorgeous art. (Yoshitaka Amano, Dave McKean, Todd Klein, and all the others) So Sandman stays. And with What You Need to Be Warm, the money went to a smol shop and to a good cause both. So I don’t feel bad owning it.

“Man’s not dead while his name is still spoken” — Terry Pratchett

And so this is the last, I speak your name. You’re dead to me.

Books! Do What You Will, With Them

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 03 Mar 2024 05:45:00 +0530

My bookshelf. Click for a larger pic.

You are allowed
#

nay, encouraged to …

buy books you’ll never read
abandon books halfway through
read your favorites over and over again
read ‘easy’ books
read books you don’t totally understand
just look at the pictures
start in the middle
take notes
break spines
read the book after you saw the movie
skip the boring parts
keep books out of sentiment
bring a book everywhere
read comics
return books to the library unread

The point, my dear reader, is joy.

— stolen verbatim from Lady Grey’s Library on Tumblr

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Books I Read, November 2020

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 14 Dec 2020 05:45:00 +0530

This post was first sent to my newsletter on November 30th, 2020.
[You really ought to subscribe][1] :)

Now that life is picking back up, I have slowed down on the reading.
I stuck to fiction this month. Only this month was at my normal pace 😄
The speed demon of September and October is no more 😂

Actually I stuck with Jack Reacher this month.
I thought I would be done with him, but he does not seem to be done with me.
There was another new Reacher published last month, to be tacked on to the end of the queue.

Not that I am complaining. 😄
Jack Reacher is no Sandman, but as as stoic vigilante, he rocks!

Speaking of stoicism, the one book I did read other than Child’s series was my evergreen favourite; Colleen McCullough’s epic about the early settlers of Australia and Norfolk Island, Morgan’s Run.

Following the disappearance of his only son and the death of his beloved wife, Richard Morgan is falsely imprisoned and exiled to the penal colonies of eighteenth-century Australia. His life is shattered but Morgan refuses to surrender, overcoming all obstacles to find unexpected contentment and happiness in the harsh early days of Australia’s settlement.

From England’s shores to Botany Bay and the rugged frontier of a hostile new world, Morgan’s Run is the epic tale of love lost and found, and the man whose strength and character helped settle a country and define its future.

It isn’t masterful writing.
But it is a masterful potrayal of a man who is buffetted by the storms of life and yet, holds on to his core.
And it has another important (to me) characteristic. It is looong at close to 900 pages.
So oftentimes, I just open to one phase of Richard Morgan’s life and get lost in it.
His false imprisonment, or his early halcyon life, or how he makes the most of his imprisonment in Australia or his easy ability to inspire loyalty.
Like I write under its title, it is one of my Lindy Books.
It has been my soul food and constant companion for the last twenty years.
It taught me stoic principles, before I even knew what Stoicism even was.
I cannot imagine, how I would have gotten through my tough times, if it wasn’t for Morgan’s Run.

And that was my run for November.
I’ll be back with more of what I read, next month 😄

If you want to see the titles, click here.

Books I Read, October 2020

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 30 Nov 2020 05:45:00 +0530

This post was first sent to my newsletter on November 2nd, 2020.
[You really ought to subscribe][1] :)

Nothing really exciting this month.
I had lots of work and could not quite focus on reading hard books or non fiction.
I needed to escape from the humdrum of life

So, I read a lot of Jack Reacher.
I decided to read all of the Lee Child novels featuring the character.

And all of that, started because I read a book, that followed Lee Child around for a year, describing his writing process and the work that goes into a Reacher novel.
It’s been fun, reading. Like meeting an old friend.
Considering that he writes about one a year, I find it slightly alarming that I have now read seventeen years of Child’s work in a month.

I wonder what I’ll do when I get done with all the books.
Well I don’t really have to wonder. I’ll just go read another one.

I have more books, I want to read than I have life left :)
So here’s to reading! See you next month!

If you want to see the titles, click here.

Books I Read in 2019.

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 06 Jan 2020 11:56:29 +0530

Want to know what I was up to, with my reading last year?
The whole big list is here.
I read in November and December too, but some books you just … cannot :)

via the ever creative, Tom Gauld

If you want to see the books I read over and over again, every single year, here is my Lindy list.

I hope to learn more, enjoy more, read more this year.
I got so much more out of my books this year, by being more mindful as I read.
I enjoyed my pulp and my crass fiction too :)

I owe some of you kind folk, loads of gratitude.
I started the [feed my reading, list][4] on a lark and some of you have actually gone and bought me books :)
This probably is the kindest thing, people have done for me and I internally squeal with glee, every time a book comes home.
From Rumi, to Computer Science Problems, to Market Cycles, to communicating well using drawing … you have indulged my every whim.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I start, as I usually do with the Lindy list and then lets see what the New Year holds.
I hope something from that list catches your fancy and you do read this year.

Because like Gaiman says,

Books are the way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. There are tales that are older than most countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were first told.

Einstein does one better,

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”

I wish you, Happy Reading! :)

Books I’ve Read, October Edition

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 11 Nov 2019 05:45:00 +0530

Before we begin the festivities, here’s a small aside to the techheads who follow me and the tech muggles who care about privacy.
(Which should actually be all of us, considering the various invasions of privacy happening)
My friend and mentor, Kushal writes short newsy notes on what goes on in that world. Why privacy matters and how the powers that be are stripmining our privacy and what we can do to protect it.

Go, subscribe now!

October
#

Alright, back to the music.
As you know, I spent most of last month cooped up in bed.
What do I do if I am sick?
I read :)
So this month is a big doozy :)

Can’t Hurt Me, David Goggins
(absolutely must read. Lindy read.
My second Lindy read in a month! I must be really lucky.
I’ve been fascinated by David, ever since I read Living with a Seal.
This book reveals the mental mindset behind his superhuman feats.
If you’re wondering who David is, this will help.)
The 33 Marks of Maturity, Brett & Kate McKay
(absolutely must read. Lindy read.
this book is short and packed with wisdom, about what it takes to be, well, mature.
in the real adult mature sense.
it reads like your dad or your older brother talking you through life’s truths)
Our Magnificient Bastard Tongue, John McWhorter
(must read. this was one of the best and funniest pieces of non fiction I have read in a while.
if you are curious about why English is the way it is, this book provides a few answers.
here’s a quote, “German, Dutch, Swedish, and the gang are, by and large, variations on what happened to Proto-Germanic as it morphed along over three thousand years. They are ordinary rolls of the dice. English, however, is kinky. It has a predilection for dressing up like Welsh on lonely nights.”
McWhorter is funny, and insightful)
The Perpetual Beginner, Dave Isaacs
(Music maestro Dave, has a lot of advice for folk like me;
the beginners who cannot seem to get over the beginning hump, the ones who do not yearn for mastery, just the ability to be fluent enough to translate what they hear in their head into notes on the guitar.
worth a read.)
The Revelation Space Omnibus, Alastair Reynolds
(fun read. this kept me good company as I lie in bed sick.
it’s an awesome world to lose yourself in, taking you as it does across thousands of years of space and time.)
- Chasm City
- Redemption Ark
- Absolution Gap
- Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days
- The Prefect
Retire Inspired, Chris Hogan
(good read. another Dave Ramsey title.
I reread this just to keep myself on track.
i may not have money now, but i know what to do once I reinvent myself)
The Greatest Trade Ever, Gregory Zuckerman
(the story of how John Paulson, saw the subprime bubble and made a killing.
If you liked The Big Short, you’ll like this.
Not Michael Lewis level writing though)
The Odessa File, Frederick Forsyth
(there’ll probably be a whole lot of Forsyth after this one.
all of them, must reads.
Forsyth is the master of his genre. fuck that. he practically owns the genre.
Nazi war criminals have been hounded because of his fiction!
and like Caro, he is the master of his craft.
you know how he develops his characters, you kinda know how it all works, but every new novel is still fun.
and for me, I am on my umpteenth reread of his work.
and I enjoy myself even now after all these years.)
The Deceiver, Frederick Forsyth
Avenger, Frederick Forsyth
The Day of the Jackal, Frederick Forsyth
(my first Forsyth novel)
The Fox, Frederick Forsyth
The Kill List, Frederick Forsyth
The Fist of God, Frederick Forsyth
The Afghan, Frederick Forsyth
The Cobra, Frederick Forsyth
Icon, Frederick Forsyth
The Dogs of War, Frederick Forsyth
The Biafra Story, Frederick Forsyth
(Forsyth at his journalistic best.
a beautiful, haunting, empathic recounting of the Nigeria-Biafra civil war from the Biafran point of view.)
The Outsider, Frederick Forsyth
(lots of life stories compiled.
not quite an autobiography.
more like a drunk uncle telling awesome stories of his life.
(all of which happen to be true, however fantastic they sound.))
The Proximity Principle, Ken Coleman
(another book from the Dave Ramsey stable.
more common sense advice.
this time for your career.
worth a read)
Forever and Ever, Amen, Randy Travis
(it’s always sad, when you discover as you grow older, that your heroes are only human and your idols have feet of clay.
I’ve listened to every Randy Travis album ever since my cousin brother gifted me Storms of Life all those years back.
And it seems strange that for all I learnt about life from those songs, the baritone who sang them, did not.
I learnt from those songs and became a man. Randy stayed a man child.
It’s a raw book. Randy lays his life bare.
It’s funny, poignant, cautionary and uplifting.
And there’s the names and people parading through his life.
I did not know the Terminator gave Randy fitness tips.
Or that Dirty Dancing Swayze sang backup vocals for him.
definitely worth a read if you are a country music fan.
It’s a portrait of a flawed life yes, but also a life filled with lots of love and friendship and music and devotion and faith.)
The Body, A Guide for Occupants, Bill Bryson
(Bill is a guide. The best kind there is.
He tells it like it is. and tells it pithily and funnily.
Be it the evolution of English, how our homes came to be, or just a history of everything, Bill has done it all.
This time he tackles a new frontier. The human body.
From head to tail, err … toe, Bryson explores every part of the human body.
And as usual it is exceedingly awesome.
Sample this, “Although Funk coined the term “vitamines,” and is thus often given credit for their discovery, most of the real work of determining the chemical nature of vitamins was done by others, in particular Sir Frederick Hopkins, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in 1929—a fact that left Funk permanently in one.”
You will learn lots and laugh lots.
Go read.)
Morgan’s Run, Colleen McCullough
(I don’t know why, but this is the one of the few pieces of modern fiction, I re–read a lot.
Probably because Richard Morgan, the protaganist is a stoic hero.
And I love the Stoics.
It’s all about how Australia and Norfolk Island (the focus of the story) got settled, by the riff raff England did not want.
About how they struggled.
About how they made the most of the very meagre natural resources at the time.
I kept hoping against hope that she’d write a sequel, because I so wanted to know more about this part of history.
It’s a lovely read. A lose yourself in history book)

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Books I’ve Read, September Edition

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 04 Nov 2019 05:45:00 +0530

Hello, folks!
Let’s get this show back on the road, shall we?
Before we resume, I just want to thank you for all your notes of encouragement and good wishes.
I still am not out of the woods, yet, but healthy enough to resume writing these littles notes :)

September
#

Everyday Millionaires, Chris Hogan
(must read. but only for folks like me who are a little slow with money. it’s a typical Dave Ramsey book. short. to the point. all meat, no bones. lots of stories.
the book itself is an exploration of their study of 10,000 millionaires in the USA. no, she does not own a fancy penthouse. she is more likely to be a high school teacher in her early to mid fifties.)
The Veteran, Frederick Forsyth
(must read. found my old copy and reread it.
this is a collection of 5 novellas of varying lengths, each with a twist you don’t see coming.
The Veteran is classic Forsyth.
My favourite, Whispering Wind, is Forsyth trying to do a L’Amour and coming within striking distance. Old western, time travel and reincarnation; this one has it all)
Myths, Lies, and Half-Truths of Language Usage, John McWhorter
The Revelation Space Omnibus, Alastair Reynolds
- Galactic North
- Revelation Space

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Books I’ve Read, August Edition

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 23 Sep 2019 05:45:20 +0530

August

Ultralearning, Scott H Young
(must read.
if you are looking to tackle something foundationally important, this book gives you one solid approach.
it’s mostly common sense.
but common sense that is laid out in a really logical manner.
i learnt to plan my project, that hard learning is normal, that failure is normal, and that persistence is a prerequisite.
all critical things, since learning no longer “comes naturally” to me.)
Memories, Lang Leav
(must read)
The Universe of Us, Lang Leav
(must read. Leav writes beautifully haunting poetry)
Dissent on Aadhaar, compilation, Reetika Khera (editor)
(must read. this insightful, erudite read, tackles the various issues of Aadhaar on multiple levels, with multiple experts from various fields, voicing their concern.
if you want to know, why Big Brother is Bad Business, why Aadhaar is a bad idea and what its fallout c(w)ould be, this is the book to read)
Learning Python, Mark Lutz
(this was a text book I needed to read to learn programming. loved it.)

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Books I’ve Read, July Edition

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 05 Aug 2019 05:45:09 +0530

Lots of fantasy, a lovely book of poetry, a beautifully written nonfiction book.
All this, on July’s list of books :)

July

Love Looks Pretty on You, Lang Leav
(must read. in my imagination, leav is a talented younger sister, who has been through a lot more and writes her advice just for me, in her poems)
Working, Robert Caro
(if you haven’t read the Power Broker, you should
if you haven’t read the Lyndon volumes, you should
this book is Caro’s account of the work, that went into those works.
the ceaseless toil, the thankless years, the people and their stories
Caro is Caro, master of the craft.
There are only a few explicit lessons here.
but plenty if you care enough to read between the lines
plenty if you make this an annual read, like i will)
The Broken Earth Trilogy, N. K. Jemisin
(if you love fantasy, this is an absolute read.
world building at its finest.
The journey she takes me on! The magic she creates! The world she imagines!
It’s such a harsh world, but gosh darn it, I want to live there.
Jemisin’s awesome.)
- The Fifth Season
- The Obelisk Gate
- The Stone Sky
The Inheritance Trilogy, N. K. Jemisin
(This was Jemisin’s older trilogy and it shows.
The language is rougher and the characters drag on a bit
Minor quibbles though. It was a really good read)
- The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
- The Broken Kingdoms
- The Kingdom of Gods

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Books I’ve Read, June Edition

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 08 Jul 2019 05:45:00 +0530

It was my better half’s birthday! Happy Birthday, Abby!

’Twas a good month for reading :)

June

The Song of the Bird, Anthony de Mello
(absolutely read. buy and give people copies.
this book for me, goes beyond a quake book.
it has shaped my life, and thoughts, since boyhood, subconsciously then and with intent now.)
The Mysterious Affair at Styles (Poirot #1), Agatha Christie
(re-reading my way through the Poirot canon.
these books take me to the age I think I belong to, the late 1800s, early 1900s absolutely delightful)
Epigrams on Men, Women and Love, Honoré de Balzac
(beautiful set of quotes)
Mother American Night, John Perry Barlow
(a man who lived life. founder of the EFF and the FSF.
and more importantly (to me), lyricist for the Grateful Dead)
Word by Word, Anne Lamott
(must listen (it’s an old audiobook.)
excellent companion to Bird by Bird.
imagine Anne teaching you how to write using BbB as a text book.
she’s awesome.
the book’s awesome.)
Indian Love Poems, Peter Pauper Press
(absolutely loved it)
Love Poems and Love Letters for All the Year, Peter Pauper Press
Flower Thoughts, Peter Pauper Press
Thoughts for a Good Life, Peter Pauper Press
Epigrams by Oscar Wilde, Peter Pauper Press
Murder on the Links (Poirot #2), Agatha Christie
(need i say, you ought to read it :))

Books I’ve Read, May Edition

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 03 Jun 2019 06:00:00 +0530

If you are looking for something to read, you might find something interesting here.

May
#

The Great Mental Models, Shane Parrish
(the first of a soon to be multivolume work.
must read times a hundred.
this book teaches you how to think.
and how to do it well.
have i said it’s a must read? you must read it.)
Coraline, Neil Gaiman
(must read. scarily charming.)

April
#

Keep Going, Austin Kleon
(must read. new annual read. timely. beautiful quotes. hugely inspirational)
Chocolate Wars, Deborah Cadbury
(must read. as a child growing up in the shadow of the large Cadbury factory, near home, Cadbury has always fascinated me. i still remember their school tours where we could go see how the chocolate was made and come home with a couple of bars of Dairy Milk. the factory is now shutdown, and the tempting aroma of chocolate no longer fills the air. this book delves into nearly 200 years of Cadbury’s (as well as its contemporaries) history. a lovely nostalgic throwback to a more innocent, more generous age.)

March
#

Titan’s Wrath, Rhett C Bruno
Never Grow Up, Jackie Chan
(charmingly mistitled, because it is all about Jackie growing up, albeit a little too late. beautiful notes of apology and gratitude to the people in his life and of course, being Jackie, loads of hilarious stories)
Company of One, Paul Jarvis
Titan’s Son, Rhett C Bruno
(something to get my mind off studies. the series is still fun)
Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport
(must read. short. an in-depth practical treatise on getting out of the clicky, clicky, swipe, swipe circle of digital death i was in. found it really helpful)
Never Eat Alone, Keith Ferrazzi & Tal Raz
(good read. if you’re an introvert like me, this is a good stepping stone to help you get out there.)
Thinking in Bets, Annie Duke
(must read. short treatise on how you need to think probabilistically and divorce your efforts and your work, Arjun-like, from their results)
Titanborn, Rhett C Bruno
(short fun read. in the vein of Asimov’s detective stories)

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Reading on Janusworx

No More Stars

Books I Read in June, 2026

Empire Podcast: Spice Wars, The Battle of the East India Companies, Episodes 358-360 #

The Rest is History, The Fall of the Incas, Episodes 644-649 #

The Secret Pilgrim, John le Carré #

Platform Decay, Martha Wells #

Control, Andy Diggle, Angela Cruickshank, Andrea Mutti & Vladimir Popov #

Chung Ju-yung & Hyundai, Farnam Street Podcast #

Steve Jobs in Exile, Geoffrey Cain #

Apple: The First 50 Years, David Pogue #

Learning Object-Oriented Programming, Design and TDD with Pharo, Stéphane Ducasse & Damien Pollet #

Data Structures the Fun Way, Jeremy Kubica #

The Art of Reading, Timothy Spurgin (The Great Courses) #

Books I Read in May, 2026

Sherlock & Co. Podcast #

Vanguard, Spring 2026, Episode 3, Acquired Podcast #

Smiley’s People, John le Carré #

Empire Podcast: Simon Bolivar: the Liberator, Episodes 354-357 #

Books I Read in April, 2026

Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 391-400 #

Lincoln the Unknown, Dale Carnegie #

Empire Podcast #

The Beryl Coronet, The Stockbroker’s Clerk, The Six Napoleons, Sherlock & Co. Podcast, Season 40, 41 & 42 #

Literature Ideas, You Really Need to Know, John Sutherland #

Songteller: My Life in Lyrics, Dolly Parton #

Books I Read in March, 2026

The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Stieg Larsson #

The Looking Glass War, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy, John le Carré #

The Bear and the Nightingale, The Girl in the Tower and The Winter of the Witch (Winternight trilogy), Katherine Arden #

Books I Read in February, 2026

Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 381-390 #

Beyond the Rift, Peter Watts #

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John le Carré #

Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality #

Falco, The Official Companion, Lindsey Davis #

The Novice’s Tale, The Servant’s Tale, and The Outlaw’s Tale, Margaret Frazer #

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson #

Books I Read in January, 2026

The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett #

The Rest is History, The Nazis at War, Hitler Strikes West, Parts I-IV #

The Rest is History, Jack the Ripper, Parts I-IV #

The Second Stain, The Man with The Twisted Lip, and The Muskgrave Ritual, Sherlock & Co. Podcast, Seasons 37, 38 & 39 #

Mania for Subjugation III, Hardcore History, Episode 73 #

Sister, Maiden, Monster, Lucy A. Snyder #

The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel #

Shattered Lands, Sam Dalrymple #

History of the Alphabet, Kevin Stroud #

A Play of Isaac, Margaret Frazer #

The Psychology of Money

Shattered Lands

Focus on How Long You Read, Not How Much, aka The Best Advice I Could Give You About Reading Lots of Books

How to Read a Book: 009, Elementary Reading, The First Level

Stages of Learning to Read #

Stages and Levels #

How to Read a Book: 008, More On the Activity and the Art of Reading

Enlightenment or Sophmore(istry)? Reading serves both. It’s the reader who is the difference #

Art of Reading #

What is Reading? A couple of meanings … #

On Reading as Discovery #

On Present and Absent Teachers (Or as Munger would have put it, the eminent dead) #

How to Read a Book: 007, Highlights from the Activity and the Art of Reading

Thinking is vitally important, but the modern world does not let us … #

On the ability to read actively & the need to make an effort to match the author’s #

How to Read a Book: 006, Own Your Book

Mortimer Adler’s methods of marking up a book and making it your own #

But, wait! There’s more! #

Observations as I Learn to Read, 2

Joseph Conrad Forsees Aaron Swartz and the AI Bandits

Observations as I Learn to Read, 1

I Need Two Copies of a Book Now

How to Read a Book: 003, The Four Basic Questions (A Reader Asks)

The Four Basic Questions: #

How to Read a Book: 002, A Few Thoughts on Books

How to Read a Book: 001, Begin!

Why do I need to learn how to read? What has brought me to this? #

Why this book? #

What’s the plan now? What do I hope will happen? #

On Neil Gaiman

Books! Do What You Will, With Them

Empire Podcast: Spice Wars, The Battle of the East India Companies, Episodes 358-360
#

The Rest is History, The Fall of the Incas, Episodes 644-649
#

The Secret Pilgrim, John le Carré
#

Platform Decay, Martha Wells
#

Control, Andy Diggle, Angela Cruickshank, Andrea Mutti & Vladimir Popov
#

Chung Ju-yung & Hyundai, Farnam Street Podcast
#

Steve Jobs in Exile, Geoffrey Cain
#

Apple: The First 50 Years, David Pogue
#

Learning Object-Oriented Programming, Design and TDD with Pharo, Stéphane Ducasse & Damien Pollet
#

Data Structures the Fun Way, Jeremy Kubica
#

The Art of Reading, Timothy Spurgin (The Great Courses)
#

Sherlock & Co. Podcast
#

Vanguard, Spring 2026, Episode 3, Acquired Podcast
#

Smiley’s People, John le Carré
#

Empire Podcast: Simon Bolivar: the Liberator, Episodes 354-357
#

Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 391-400
#

Lincoln the Unknown, Dale Carnegie
#

Empire Podcast
#

The Beryl Coronet, The Stockbroker’s Clerk, The Six Napoleons, Sherlock & Co. Podcast, Season 40, 41 & 42
#

Literature Ideas, You Really Need to Know, John Sutherland
#

Songteller: My Life in Lyrics, Dolly Parton
#

The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Stieg Larsson
#

The Looking Glass War, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy, John le Carré
#

The Bear and the Nightingale, The Girl in the Tower and The Winter of the Witch (Winternight trilogy), Katherine Arden
#

Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 381-390
#

Beyond the Rift, Peter Watts
#

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John le Carré
#

Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality
#

Falco, The Official Companion, Lindsey Davis
#

The Novice’s Tale, The Servant’s Tale, and The Outlaw’s Tale, Margaret Frazer
#

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson
#

The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett
#

The Rest is History, The Nazis at War, Hitler Strikes West, Parts I-IV
#

The Rest is History, Jack the Ripper, Parts I-IV
#

The Second Stain, The Man with The Twisted Lip, and The Muskgrave Ritual, Sherlock & Co. Podcast, Seasons 37, 38 & 39
#

Mania for Subjugation III, Hardcore History, Episode 73
#

Sister, Maiden, Monster, Lucy A. Snyder
#

The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel
#

Shattered Lands, Sam Dalrymple
#

History of the Alphabet, Kevin Stroud
#

A Play of Isaac, Margaret Frazer
#

Stages of Learning to Read
#

Stages and Levels
#

Enlightenment or Sophmore(istry)? Reading serves both. It’s the reader who is the difference
#

Art of Reading
#

What is Reading? A couple of meanings …
#

On Reading as Discovery
#

On Present and Absent Teachers (Or as Munger would have put it, the eminent dead)
#

Thinking is vitally important, but the modern world does not let us …
#

On the ability to read actively & the need to make an effort to match the author’s
#

Mortimer Adler’s methods of marking up a book and making it your own
#

But, wait! There’s more!
#

The Four Basic Questions:
#

Why do I need to learn how to read? What has brought me to this?
#

Why this book?
#

What’s the plan now? What do I hope will happen?
#

You are allowed
#

October
#

September
#

May
#

April
#

March
#