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.

Feedback on this post?
Mail me at feedback at this domain.
P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list!

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
#

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
#

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
#

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
#

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
#

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
#

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
#

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
#

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
#

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
#

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)
#

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!

Feedback on this post?
Mail me at feedback at this domain.
P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list!

don’t ask why. ↩︎

2026

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 05:30:00 +0530

What do all the stars and daggers after the book titles mean?

¶ for Lindy books
† for most non fiction
‡ for tech / work / study / reference stuff
# for alternate media (like audio or video)
numbers are footnotes
Some book titles might be repeated (in addition to the annual Lindy reads :)
After all, we are what we re-read :)

January
#

The Rest is History, The Nazis at War, Parts I-IV^†^#
The Second Stain, Sherlock & Co. Podcast, Season 37^#
The Man with the Twisted Lip, Sherlock & Co. Podcast, Season 38^#
Mania for Subjugation III, Hardcore History, Episode 73^†^#
The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett
Sister, Maiden, Monster, Lucy A. Snyder
Shattered Lands, Sam Dalrymple^†, Related Post
The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel^†, Related Post
History of the Alphabet, Kevin Stroud^†
A Play of Isaac, Margaret Frazer
The Rest is History, Jack the Ripper, Parts I-IV^†^#
The Muskgrave Ritual, Sherlock & Co. Podcast, Season 39

February
#

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John le Carré
The Novice’s Tale, Margaret Frazer
Beyond the Rift, Peter Watts
The Servant’s Tale, Margaret Frazer
Call for the Dead, John le Carré
A Murder of Quality, John le Carré
The Outlaw’s Tale, Margaret Frazer
Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 381-390^†^#
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson
Falco, The Official Companion, Lindsey Davis

March
#

The Girl Who Played With Fire, Stieg Larsson
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Stieg Larsson
The Looking Glass War, John le Carré
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, John le Carré
The Honourable Schoolboy, John le Carré
The Bear and the Nightingale, Katherine Arden
The Girl in the Tower, Katherine Arden
The Winter of the Witch, Katherine Arden

April
#

50 Literature Ideas, You Really Need to Know, John Sutherland^†
Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 391-400^†^#
Lincoln the Unknown, Dale Carnegie^†
Empire Podcast, The Bronze Age Apocalypse, Episodes 332-337^†^#
Empire Podcast, Indian Uprising 1857, Episodes 322-329^†^#
The Beryl Coronet, Sherlock & Co. Podcast, Season 40
The Stockbroker’s Clerk, Sherlock & Co. Podcast, Season 41
The Six Napoleons, Sherlock & Co. Podcast, Season 42
Songteller, My Life in Lyrics, Dolly Parton^†^#
Empire Podcast, The Middle East: From the Arab Cold War to the Israeli Invasion of Lebanon, Episodes 346-353^†^#

May
#

The Three Garridebs, Sherlock & Co. Podcast, Season 43
The Empty House, Sherlock & Co. Podcast, Season 44
Smiley’s People, John le Carré
Empire Podcast, Simon Bolivar: the Liberator, Episodes 354-357^†^#
Vanguard, Spring 2026, Episode 3, Acquired Podcast^†^#

June
#

The Rest is History, The Fall of the Incas, Episodes 644-649^†^#
Empire Podcast, Spice Wars: The Battle of the East India Companies, Episodes 358-360^†^#
Learning Object-Oriented Programming, Design and TDD with Pharo, Stéphane Ducasse & Damien Pollet^‡
The Secret Pilgrim, John le Carré
Control, Andy Diggle, Angela Cruickshank, Andrea Mutti & Vladimir Popov
Chung Ju-yung & Hyundai, Farnam Street Podcast^†^#
The Art of Reading, Timothy Spurgin (The Great Courses)^‡^#
Steve Jobs in Exile, Geoffrey Cain^†
Data Structures the Fun Way, Jeremy Kubica^‡
Platform Decay, Martha Wells
Apple: The First 50 Years, David Pogue^†

July
#

Analysis and Critique, Dorsey Armstrong (The Great Courses)^‡^#
D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, Ingri & Edgar Parin d’Aulaire
A World is Born, Leigh Bracket
Becoming a Great Essayist, Jennifer Cognard-Black (The Great Courses)^‡^#
Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg
How to Read a Book: The Art of Reading & Dialogues about Books, Mortimer Adler & Charles Van Doren^‡^#
The Greek Interpreter, Sherlock & Co. Podcast, Season 45
The Engineer’s Thumb, Sherlock & Co. Podcast, Season 46
Pirates of Venus, Edgar Rice Burroughs

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
#

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
#

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
#

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
#

“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.

Feedback on this post?
Mail me at feedback at this domain.

P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list!

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
#

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
#

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
#

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
#

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
#

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
#

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.

Feedback on this post?
Mail me at feedback at this domain.

P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list!

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
#

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
#

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
#

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.

Feedback on this post?
Mail me at feedback at this domain.

P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list!

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
#

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
#

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
#

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
#

These came before Spy did, and read more like dark Christie novels. More detective than spy. Good fun!

Falco, The Official Companion, Lindsey Davis
#

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
#

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
#

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!

Feedback on this post?
Mail me at feedback at this domain.

P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list!

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
#

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
#

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
#

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!

Feedback on this post?
Mail me at feedback at this domain.

P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list!

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.

Feedback on this post?
Mail me at feedback at this domain.

P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list!

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.

Feedback on this post?
Mail me at feedback at this domain.

P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list!

Christian ↩︎ ↩︎
England ↩︎

2025

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 11:59:00 -1200

What do all the stars and daggers after the book titles mean?

Note to self, for this year: Read less, write more notes. Abandon more books.

January
#

Murder at the Vicarage, Agatha Christie^*
The Body in the Library, Agatha Christie^*
The Moving Finger, Agatha Christie^*
Sleeping Murder, Agatha Christie^*
A Murder Is Announced, Agatha Christie^*
They Do It with Mirrors, Agatha Christie^*
My Horrible Career, John Arundel^*^†
The Veiled Lodger, Sherlock & Co. Podcast^*
Hardcore History, Mania for Subjugation II, Episode 72^*^†
A Pocket Full of Rye, Agatha Christie^*
4.50 from Paddington, Agatha Christie^*
The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side, Agatha Christie^*
As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride, Cary Elwes & Joe Layden^*^†
A Caribbean Mystery, Agatha Christie^*
At Bertram’s Hotel, Agatha Christie^*
Nemesis, Agatha Christie^*
Miss Marple’s Final Cases, Agatha Christie^*

February
#

A Shadow in Summer, Daniel Abraham^*
Black Peter, Sherlock & Co. Podcast, Season 25^*
On Writing with Brandon Sanderson, Episodes 1-4, Brandon Sanderson^*^‡
A Betrayal in Winter, Daniel Abraham^*
I Will Judge You by Your Bookshelf, Grant Snider^*
The Art of Living, Grant Snider^*
The Shape of Ideas, Grant Snider^*
For the Love of Go, John Arundel^*^‡
Powerful Command-Line Applications in Go, Ricardo Gerardi^*^‡
Learning Go, Jon Bodner^*^‡
An Autumn War, Daniel Abraham^*
The Price of Spring, Daniel Abraham^*
Math for English Majors, Ben Orlin (Notes)^*^†
Empire Podcast, The Three Kings, Episodes 212–214^*^†^#

March
#

Companion to the Count, Melissa Kendall^*
Wisteria Lodge, Sherlock & Co. Podcast, Season 26^*
A Story of Love, Minerva Spencer^*
The Etiquette of Love, Minerva Spencer^*
A Very Bellamy Christmas, Minerva Spencer^*
Empire Podcast, The Rise and Fall of the Mughal Empire, Episodes 205–211, 215-222^*^†^#
Empire Podcast, Britain’s Last Colony, Episodes 229-230^*^†^#
Head First Java (3^rd edition), Kathy Sierra, Bert Bates & Trisha Gee^*^‡
Head First Go, Jay McGavren^*^‡
The Rest is History, The French Revolution (Part II), Episodes 503–507^*^†^#
The Rest is History, The French Revolution (Part III), Episodes 544-547^*^†^#
Morris Chang & TSMC, Spring 2025, Episode 1, Acquired Podcast^*^†^#
Rolex, Spring 2025, Episode 2, Acquired Podcast^*^†^#
Head First C, Dawn Griffiths & David Griffiths^*^‡

April
#

Head First Learn to Code, Eric Freeman^*^‡
On Writing with Brandon Sanderson, Episodes 4.5-8, Brandon Sanderson^*^‡
Spellfire Thief, Sarah Hawke^*
Thinking About Thinking, Grant Snider^*
The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax, Sherlock & Co. Podcast, Season 28^*
Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 01-10^*^†^#
Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 11-20^*^†^#
Unlovable, Darren Hayes^*^†

May
#

Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 21-30^*^†^#
Dick Barton and the Secret Weapon, Edward J Mason^*^#
Dick Barton and the Paris Adventure, Edward J Mason^*^#
Dick Barton and the Cabatolin Diamonds, Edward J Mason^*^#
Kill the Pharaoh, Victor Pemberton^*^#
On Writing with Brandon Sanderson, Episodes 8-12, Brandon Sanderson^*^‡
Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 31-40^*^†^#
Trial & Error (The Hardy Boys), Franklin W. Dixon
Understanding APIs and RESTful APIs Crash Course, Kalob Taulien (Udemy)^*^‡^#
System Collapse, Martha Wells^*
Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 31-40^*^†^#
A Sham Engagement, Fil Reid
A Hint of Scandar, Fil Reid
Gideon the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir^*^#
Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 41-50^*^†^#
Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 51-60^*^†^#
Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir^*^#

June
#

Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 61-70^*^†^#
Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 71-80^*^†^#
Apple in China, Patrick McGee^*^†
Dreaming of Elisabeth, Camilla Lackberg^*
An Elegant Death, Camilla Lackberg^*
Steve Ballmer, Summer 2025, Episode 1, Acquired Podcast^†^#
Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 81-90^*^†^#
The Rest is History, Warlords of the West, The Rise and Fall of the Franks, Episodes 520-525^*^†^#
The Rest is History, Heart of Darkness, Horror in the Congo, Episodes 538-541^*^†^#
Antifragile, Nassim Nicholas Taleb^*^†
A Man and a Woman, Robin Schone^*
Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 91-100^*^†^#
A Scandal in Bohemia, Sherlock & Co. Podcast, Season 30^*
How to Read a Book, Mortimer J. Adler^*^‡
The Secret Rules of the Terminal, Julia Evans^*^‡
The Lover, Robin Schone
Slide:ology, Nancy Duarte^*^‡

July
#

Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 101-110^*^†^#
Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 111-120^*^†^#
The Rest is History, 1066: The Norman Conquest of England, Episodes 548-557^*^†^#
Emacs Writing Studio, Peter Prevos^*^‡
Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 121-130^*^†^#
Empire Podcast, The History of Ireland, Episodes 231-246^*^†^#
The Priory School, Sherlock & Co. Podcast, Season 32^*
The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need, Daniel H. Pink^*^‡
The Sketchnote Handbook, Mike Rohde^*^‡
Business Etiquette, Ann Marie Sabath^*^‡
Dare to Tempt an Earl This Spring, Sara Adrien & Tanya Wilde^*
How to Lose Prince This Summer, Sara Adrien & Tanya Wilde^*
Empire Podcast, Victorian Narcos (The Opium Wars), Episodes 248-255^*^†^#
Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 131-140^*^†^#
Lost Islamic History, Firas Alkhateeb^*^†
Empire Podcast, Canada, Episodes 267-272^*^†^#
Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 141-150^*^†^#
100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings, Sarah Cooper^*^†

August
#

Empire Podcast, The Panama Canal, Episodes 273-277^*^†^#
Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 151-160^*^†^#
Dick Barton and the Smash and Grab Raiders, Edward J Mason^*^#
Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 161-170^*^†^#
Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 171-180^*^†^#
Empire Podcast, Partitions (The Breakup of the Britisth Indian Empire), Episodes 278-283^*^†^#
I Do Everything I’m Told, Megan Fernandes^*
Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 181-190^*^†^#

September
#

Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 191-200^*^†^#
Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 201-210^*^†^#
Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 211-220^*^†^#
300, Frank Miller^*
V for Vendetta, Alan Moore^*
The Killing Joke, Frank Miller^*
Watchmen, Alan Moore^*
Nona the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir^*^#
Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 221-240^*^†^#
Empire Podcast, The Suez Crisis, Episodes 284-288^*^†^#
Empire Podcast, The Cholas, Episodes 289-290^*^†^#
Vivian Maier: Street Photographer, John Maloof^*^†
Vivian Maier: Out of the Shawdows, Richard Cahn & Michael Williams^*^†
Mastering Fujifilm Camera Menus, Joshua Chard^*^‡^#
Learn Manual Mode Photography in Under 1 Hour!, David Eastwell^*^‡^#
Street Photography Masterclass, Adam Tan^*^‡^#

October
#

Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 241-250^*^†^#
The Rest is History, The First World War (1914–15), Episodes 594-599^*^†^#
Picture Perfect Posing, Roberto Valenzuela^*^‡
Picture Perfect Practice, Roberto Valenzuela^*^‡
Alien Overlords Series, Theodora Taylor & Eve Vaughn
The Rest is History, Greek Myths, Episodes 602-605^*^†^#
Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 251-270^*^†^#
Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 271-290^*^†^#
Abbey Grange, Sherlock & Co. Podcast, Season 33^*
The Mazarin Stone, Sherlock & Co. Podcast, Season 34^*
The Missing Three-Quarter, Sherlock & Co. Podcast, Season 35^*
The Rest is History, Greek Myths, Episodes 602-605^*^†^#
Talk Python in Production, Michael Kennedy ^*^‡
Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 291-310^*^†^#
Classics of British Literature, John Sutherland (The Great Courses) Lectures 1-10^*^‡^#
Bootstrapping Microservices, Ashley Davis^*^‡
The Book of Kubernetes, Alan Hohn^*^‡
Google, Summer 2025, Episodes 2 & 4 and Fall 2025, Episode 1, Acquired Podcast^†^#
Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 311-330^*^†^#
Empire Podcast, Gaza! The History, Episodes 291-301^*^†^#
The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas^*

November
#

Kathryn, Minerva Spencer^*
Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 331-350^*^†^#
Classics of British Literature, John Sutherland (The Great Courses) Lectures 11-31^*^‡^#
Trader Joe’s, Fall 2025, Episode 2, Acquired Podcast^†^#
GitOps, Florian Beetz, Anja Kammer & Simon Harrer^*^‡
GitOps Cookbook, Natale Vinto & Alex Soto Bueno^*^‡
GitOps and Kubernetes, Yuen, Matyshentsev, Ekenstam & Suen^*^‡
Argo CD: Up & Running, Andrew Block & Christian Hernandez^*^‡
Leveraging Kustomize for Kubernetes Manifests, Brent Laster^*^‡
Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 331-350^*^†^#
Classics of British Literature, John Sutherland (The Great Courses) Lectures 32-49^*^‡^#
Learning Helm, Butcher, Farina & Dolitsky^*^‡
Kubernetes Up and Running, Burns, Beda & Hightower^*^‡
Kubernetes Cookbook, Naik, Goasguen & Michaux^*^‡
Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 351-370^*^†^#
Wisdom Takes Work, Ryan Holiday^*^†
Right Thing, Right Now, Ryan Holiday^*^†
Soul Harvest (Dread Knight #2), Sarah Hawke^*
Dark Covenant (Dread Knight #3), Sarah Hawke^*
Rebirth (Dread Knight #4), Sarah Hawke^*
Talk of the Town, Jerry Pinto & Rahul Srivastava^*^†
The Penguin Classics Book, Henry Eliot^*^†
Flux CD for Absolute Beginners, Yogesh Raheja^*^‡^#
Wide Angle Photography, Chris Marquardt^*^‡
A Wanton Adventure, Ramona Elmes^*
A Translation of Desire, Ramona Elmes^*
The Psychology of Human Misjudgment, Charles T. Munger^*^†
Laird’s Curse, Katy Baker^*
Redemption of a Rakehell, April Moran^*
The Complete Yes Minister, Jonathan Lynn & Antony Jay^*

December
#

The Complete Yes Prime Minister, Jonathan Lynn & Antony Jay^*
Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 371-380^*^†^#
Confessions of a Rakehell, April Moran^*
Traefik API Gateway for Microservices: With Java and Python Microservices Deployed in Kubernetes, Rahul Sharma & Akshay Mathur ^*^‡
The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sherlock & Co. Podcast, Season 36^*
Coca Cola, Fall 2025, Episode 3, Acquired Podcast^†^#
The Way of Kings, Brandon Sanderson^*
Words of Radiance, Brandon Sanderson^*
Edgedancer, Brandon Sanderson^*
Altered Carbon, Richard Morgan^*

Moved From Reeder to Readkit

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 08:59:16 +0530

I used Reeder for reading all my RSS feeds ever since the app launched over fifteen years ago. RSS is how I keep up with everything in the world outside and having a pleasant reading experience is very important to me.

It no longer serves that need for me.
For a long time, the way the app worked aligned with the way I want to read. Earlier this year though, the developer decided to take the app in a different direction, with a different reading experience. The older app is still available as Reeder Classic, but only a few months of use have shown me that the app is basically abandoned. The attention to detail is obviously now being applied to the new app.

Enter ReadKit.
I had used it briefly during the Google Reader apocalypse when every feed reader was scrambling to find new backends to sync to. Reeder similarly had switched to local only mode and was taking a while before it supported other services.
ReadKit in the meanwhile already had support for Feedwrangler, and so I switched to it until Reeder came back to speed.

And I’ve switched to it for the foreseeable future.
It looks beautiful!
It does everything I want, shows everything the way and want and behaves just the way I want it to. The only knock I have against it, is that it does not feel as fluid as Reeder does. But that’s nothing compared to the constant launch and relauch dance, I have to do with Reeder nowadays. Consistency and stability matter a lot to me.
Even better, it syncs natively with Miniflux, the service I use to actually fetch and read RSS feeds on my Linux desktop. No more Google Reader API!

This is a list of all my categories (with one of them expanded, click for a larger view)

and this is a list of unread articles in a feed, alongside one that is open (once again, click to enlarge if you want to see details)

That gnawing feeling has now gone away from the back of my brain.
The experience of reading and catching up with the world is once again a glorious experience thanks to ReadKit.

Feedback on this post?
Mail me at feedback at this domain or [continue the discourse here][2].

P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list!
Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe!

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.

[2]:

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.

Feedback on this post?
Mail me at feedback at this domain or [continue the discourse here][3].

P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list!
Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe!
P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

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.

How to Read a Book: 005, On Reading Speed

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 05 Jul 2025 05:00:00 +0530

image courtesy, Simon & Schuster

This has never been a bugbear for me. A lifetime of reading has led me to read at a fairly fast clip. But Adler puts into specific words, what it is that I actually, subconsciously do. This will help me advise my younger friends, when I used to struggle earlier, with a “Just keep at it”

Below followeth Adler’s advice …

Great speed in reading is a dubious achievement; it is of value only if what you have to read is not really worth reading. A better formula is this:
Every book should be read no more slowly than it deserves, and no more quickly than you can read it with satisfaction and comprehension. In any event, the speed at which they read, be it fast or slow, is but a fractional part of most people’s problem with reading

The ideal is not merely to be able to read faster, but to be able to read at different speeds — and to know when the different speeds are appropriate.

So if that is the ideal, how do we go about increasing our speed if we are slow / irregular? Adles has an observation and a suggestion, that’ll take us most of the way there.

The eyes of young or untrained readers “fixate” as many as five or six times in the course of each line that is read. (The eye is blind while it moves; it can only see when it stops.) Thus single words or at the most two-word or three-word phrases are being read at a time, in jumps across the line. Even worse than that, the eyes of incompetent readers regress as often as once every two or three lines—that is, they return to phrases or sentences previously read.

Place your thumb and first two fingers together. Sweep this “pointer” across a line of type, a little faster than it is comfortable for your eyes to move. Force yourself to keep up with your hand. You will very soon be able to read the words as you follow your hand. Keep practicing this, and keep increasing the speed at which your hand moves, and before you know it you will have doubled or trebled your reading speed.

With a caveat however …

What exactly have you gained if you increase your reading speed significantly? It is true that you have saved time—but what about comprehension? Has that also increased, or has it suffered in the process?
It is worth emphasizing, therefore, that it is precisely comprehension in reading that this book seeks to improve. You cannot comprehend a book without reading it analytically; analytical reading, as we have noted, is undertaken primarily for the sake of comprehension (or understanding).

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 😂 ↩︎

How to Read a Book: 004, The Four Levels of Reading

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 05:00:00 +0530

image courtesy, Simon & Schuster

This is another post, that is near verbatim¹ from the book.
Because, once again, this is reference material, that I need to come back to over and over.

The Four Levels of Reading
#

They are called so, because they are cumulative.
The first level is not lost in the second, the second in the third, the third in the fourth. In fact, the fourth and highest level of reading includes all the others. It simply goes beyond them.

Level 1: Elementary Reading
#

Everyboy can read at this level!
This is the most common level there is.

The first level of reading we will call Elementary Reading. In mastering this level, one learns the rudiments of the art of reading, receives basic training in reading, and acquires initial reading skills. We prefer the name elementary reading, because this level of reading is ordinarily learned in elementary school.

The child’s first encounter with reading is at this level. His problem then (and ours when we began to read) is to recognize the individual words on the page. He is merely concerned with language as it is employed by the writer. At this level of reading, the question asked of the reader is “What does the sentence say?” That could be conceived as a complex and difficult question, of course. We mean it here, however, in its simplest sense.

Level 2: Inspectional Reading
#

This level I do very well, because of the anti-library.
Figuring out whether the book is worth reading or not, is a critical skill for me.
Too many books, far too little time, after all :)

The second level of reading we will call Inspectional Reading.

One way to describe this level of reading is to say that its aim is to get the most out of a book within a given time—usually a relatively short time, and always (by definition) too short a time to get out of the book everything that can be gotten.

Still another name for this level might be skimming or pre-reading. However, we do not mean the kind of skimming that is characterized by casual or random browsing through a book. Inspectional reading is the art of skimming systematically.

When reading at this level, your aim is to examine the surface of the book, to learn everything that the surface alone can teach you. That is often a good deal.

Whereas the question that is asked at the first level is “What does the sentence say?” the question typically asked at this level is “What is the book about?” That is a surface question; others of a similar nature are “What is the structure of the book?” or “What are its parts?” Upon completing an inspectional reading of a book, no matter how short the time you had to do it in, you should also be able to answer the question, “What kind of book is it—a novel, a history, a scientific treatise?”

Level 3: Analytical Reading
#

This is the level at what I want to read regularly.
What I want to do, everytime I pick up a book to learn from and understand deeply.
This is what I have set out to learn from this book.
Francis Bacon once remarked that “some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”
I want to be able to digest the books I read!

The third level of reading we will call Analytical Reading.

Analytical reading is thorough reading, complete reading, or good reading—the best reading you can do. If inspectional reading is the best and most complete reading that is possible given a limited time, then analytical reading is the best and most complete reading that is possible given unlimited time.

The analytical reader must ask many, and organized, questions of what he is reading. […] analytical reading is always intensely active. On this level of reading, the reader grasps a book—the metaphor is apt—and works at it until the book becomes his own.

We also want to stress that analytical reading is hardly ever necessary if your goal in reading is simply information or entertainment. Analytical reading is preeminently for the sake of understanding.

Level 4: Syntopical Reading
#

This level is one, I really doubt I’ll ever do outside of work or research or learning.
That is where I use it the most. And this level of learning is something I figured out on my own, while consulting. Tackling a specific problem in a niche domain, meant that I needed to figure out all the angles beforehand. Figuring what that world was like, and how did what I want fit into that world. Syntopical Reading is very very similar. And like Adler notes, very demanding.

The fourth and highest level of reading we will call Syntopical Reading.

Another name for this level might be comparative reading. When reading syntopically, the reader reads many books, not just one, and places them in relation to one another and to a subject about which they all revolve. But mere comparison of texts is not enough. Syntopical reading involves more. With the help of the books read, the syntopical reader is able to construct an analysis of the subject that may not be in any of the books.

It is the most complex and systematic type of reading of all. It makes very heavy demands on the reader, even if the materials he is reading are themselves relatively easy and unsophisticated.

Ok, I say verbatim, but now everything is excerpted and heavily paraphrased and put in slightly out of order. You could even say, this is a Syntopical post! ↩︎

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 ↩︎

Books I Read in the First Quarter of 2025

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 21 May 2025 05:45:00 +0530

This newsletter went out to the mailing list on April 21st.
If you want to read them as soon as they come out, Subscribe!

I’m tired of making excuses for my tardiness 😂
So, like Don Cheadle says in Iron Man 2, “Look, it’s me. I’m here. Deal with it. Let’s move on.”

While I tell you about the books I loved, you can also click each month to find the complete list of titles I loved.

January
#

I think this year continues my fascination with Agatha Christie.
January was mostly spent in the world of Marple. I think I’ll be back doing Christie runs in the coming months. I don’t know what it is about her worlds, but I keep coming back to them ove and over again.
(even more than Doyle and Holmes, though I love the new fresh takes in the Holmesian world. While David Suchet and his run will always remain the canonical Poirot to me, I have no such qualms with anyone else doing Holmes)

So I spent January with Ms. Marple. The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side was my favourite. The sudden, heart-stopping realisation of what must have happened, by one of the main characters, the immense grief that must have rolled down on them all over again, summed up in the lines from Tennyson’s poem that give the book its title.

She look’d down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack’d from side to side;
‘The curse is come upon me,’ cried
The Lady of Shalott.

I also love following these pretty webs, authors lay for me. Thanks to Agatha Christie penning these words in 1962, I went looking for a poem from 1832 and thoroughly enjoyed it :)

Honourable mention to the Sherlock & Co. podcast.
I began listening to it, just for curiosity’s sake and have now been looking forward to each new adventure of our intrepid heroes. My favourite parts are when other hosts from the Goalhanger universe come in to do cameos, like Will Dalrymple and Anita Anand (Empire) did in one of my recent favorites, The Sign of Four (Season 22 on iTunes) or when Dominic Sandbrook (The Rest is History) played a crazy, stressed lawyer in The Norwood Builder (season 27 on iTunes). It’s really fun!

February
#

February started me on the road of my (hidden) goal of reading at least one technical book a month. Learning Go, by Jon Bodner taught me the language. One thing I’ve learnt though, is that I almost nearly always need 2-3 authors / books before I understand whatever it is I need to learn. I’ve realised that I have been spoiled with authors in other domains when it comes to explaining things lucidly. (plus any topic in tech is vast and no single author can fill in all the gaps of my ignorance.) My solution to this is to be a syntopical reader and figure out whatever it is I need from multiple texts.

I learnt well enough from Bodner, and Ricardo Gerardi’s Powerful Command-Line Applications in Go to go write a tool I sorely needed in Go lang. A small tool to generate RSS feeds for my audiobooks, I call Rederb. It’s still raw and unpolished, but it got my audiobook ducks in row, so I could listen to whatever struck my fancy on the recent break.

I also discovered Grant Snider this month. While full of whimsy, they are also really thought provoking. I devoured The Art of Living, and The Shape of Ideas. Highly recommended! The one that started it all for me and was specifically written for me, was I Will Judge You by Your Bookshelf.

Honourable mention to Anita Anand and William Dalrymple for doing the Three Kings (Empire Podcast, episodes 212-214), explaining the confluence of Byzantine and Persian cultures, myths and history.

March
#

was spent mostly in the company of the aforementioned Anand & Dalrymple charting the rise and fall of the Mughal Empire (Empire Podcast, episodes 205-211, and 215-222). This engaging series filled in so many gaps in my head and what the landscape of our country was like. I need to now go see what my land was like, before the Mughals.

More history was in the offing with part two of The Rest is History’s continuing history of the French Revolution. I listened to Parts Two and Three this month. (Episodes 503-507 and 544-547). Part one was last year (Episodes 475-482).
A really refreshing change of pace by Holland and Sandbrook, considering they have covered the Revolution once before in two twenty minute episodes! I love the slow, measured march this time. The more I listen, the more I wonder how much of history hinges on chance events! I also love their slightly irreverent and self deprecating tone. We’re still not done, and I look forward to revisiting France during the revolution, soon.

Honourable mention to the Acquired Podcast’s coverage of Rolex. This was one of the few I really enjoyed, besides their story on Hermès. I think I just like old company stories. Hopefully someday we’ll get Nintendo and Yamaha.

And that’s it for now. I hope you folks find something in here, that interests you too :)

Feedback on this post?
Mail me at feedback at this domain.

P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list!
Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe!
P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

Math for English Majors, Ben Orlin

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 09:21:57 +0530

Ben Orlin, the modern Maths apologist, brings to us what I’d call his Magnum Opus, the modern Mathematician’s Lament.
Everytime, I read an Orlin book, I always wish, I had teachers like him when I was young, so that I would not have had such crippling math-phobia for so much of my life.
It should actually be called, Maths for the Rest of Us.
It’s great! So great!

My highlights, from the book
#

A mathematician is hardly a reasonable person. More like a feral philosopher or a logician gone rogue.

It’s a bit peculiar to say that I add 4 and 3 to create 7; 4 and 3 simply are 7, irrespective of my efforts. When I multiply or divide or take a logarithm, the result equals whatever it equals, regardless of my labors. I do not, in a strict sense, change the numbers, but merely discover or reveal them. Operations act not upon the quantities themselves, but only upon our understandings of them.

In my childhood, back when money was made of metal and paper instead of software and lies, I learned that two quarters add up to 50 cents: 25 + 25 = 50. I loved knowing this

… the beauty of mathematical language lies in its unreality. Math lets us escape this world of crumbs and mud for a realm of rigorous abstractions. The purer the logic—that is, the further from physical reality—the deeper the truth. “As far as laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain,” said Einstein, “and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”

I sometimes envision mathematics as a tower. It leads from the earthy crust of everyday experience (piles of cookies; buckets of water; half-dollar coins) up to the thin atmosphere of abstract concepts (Lie groups, whatever those are). There’s pleasure and power in climbing to the upper floors. But there’s an equal pleasure—and a different kind of power—in descending to the bottom. Down there, you can touch the foundations, poke at the joints where math attaches to the world, and fill your half-gallon bucket with a new kind of insight

Consider 2 + 3. If + is a verb, then who is the subject carrying out the addition? Neither 2 nor 3 performs any action; those nouns just sit there being nouns. You’re the one who adds, but you’re not a part of mathematical speech

Such confusion is not limited to the youth. Adult textbook authors have been known to include gratuitous fighter jets and non sequitur cheetahs, as if the secret to math is picturing something, anything. But the hard part of math isn’t remembering what cats look like. It’s making sense of abstract ideas.

The challenge of algebra is to visualize the invisible

“The point of doing algebra,” writes math teacher Paul Lockhart, “is… to move back and forth between several equivalent representations,depending on the situation at hand and depending on our taste. In this sense, all algebraic manipulation is psychological.”

Old information, new formation

I like this rule because it’s rarely even taught. Mathematicians apply it automatically, the way fluent English speakers always say “a big ugly bath toy” and not “a bath ugly big toy.” In fact, as Mark Forsyth points out in The Elements of Eloquence, English adjectives are typically placed in a certain order: opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose. Hence, “a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife.

Likewise, in math, numbers are typically multiplied in a certain order: numeral, radical, constant, variable. Hence, we write 3πxy²z, and never (unless we’re trying to provoke someone) zy²πx3

Toward the end of a sixth-grade lesson, a chipper young fellow named Kieran raised his hand. “I don’t really understand anything you’re saying,” he informed me. “But I can still get the right answer.” He beamed a patient smile.

I stifled a sigh. “Which part can I help you with?”

“Oh, I don’t need help,” he said. “It’s just that you were talking about this extra stuff. Like, the ideas behind it. I don’t, you know, do that.”

I blinked. He blinked. A great silence passed between us.

“Is that okay?” he concluded. “I mean, as long as I can get the right answer?”

There it was, out in the open: the subtext of almost every lesson I had taught that year. Day after day, I tried to illuminate the logic behind the symbols. Day after day, my students politely ignored my prattle to focus on the symbols themselves. What made that afternoon stand out was that Kieran broke the fourth wall. He uttered the title of the film we were acting in.

To do math, must you think about the ideas, or can you just focus on the symbols?

As David Hilbert quipped, “Mathematics is a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper.” That’s symbol pushing in a nutshell. Language divorced from meaning

But a few weeks after Kieran’s query, I learned that not all mathematicians share my dim view of symbol pushing. I mentioned to my dad (a mathematician himself) that I had started writing an essay titled ”How to Avoid Thinking in Math Class.” Before I could say any more, he gave the project his stamp of approval. “Great,” he said. “I’ve always said that the point of math education is to help you not to think.”

I was taken aback. No, I explained, the title was ironic. On the question of “Should we think?” I was firmly in favor.

“Oh, yes, thinking is good,” he generously conceded. “But it’s too hard to do all the time.”

He (and, indeed, Kieran) had a point. For example, it is an algebraic truth that (x + 1)(x − 1) is the same as x2 − 1. This fact boils down to a repeated application of the distributive property; as such, you can explain it entirely in terms of pile rearrangement. But trying to do so is like ascending a sheer cliff face.

Quite a climb! Invigorating as an occasional workout, but unthinkable as a morning commute. This was exactly my dad’s point: Thinking is good. But it’s too hard to do all the time.

“Operations of thought,” wrote the mathematician Alfred North Whitehead, “are like cavalry charges in battle—they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made in decisive moments.”

In this case, there is no need to send in the cavalry. The symbol pusher, thinking only about letters and parentheses, reaches the same summit in a few effortless strides

Can you imagine if English worked this way? An object’s name would indicate its physical size, so that a chihuahua (nine letters) would be three times the size of a cow (three letters). A food’s name would encode its recipe, so that a pizza would be a “DoughSauceCheeseBake.” Chemistry would be a tediously safe area of study, because we could run experiments simply by smushing together the names of various chemicals and seeing which ones spell “explosion.”

Symbol pushing boils the laws of logic down to laws of grammar. The language becomes a scale model of reality. We can wrangle ideas simply by wrangling ink.

So who was right, me or Kieran? The answer, of course, is both. To speak mathematics is to slip back and forth between two worlds, to inhabit two distinct frames of mind: the hard joy of thinking and the mindless trance of symbol pushing. Without the ink, the ideas are befuddling; but without the ideas, the ink means nothing. Learn the logic, learn it well, and then turn off your brain and let the symbols on the page dance to the silent music of the mind.

… notations often gain popularity precisely because they lend themselves to simple mechanical rules. You could say we choose the symbols for the express purpose of pushing them around. We can then generate right answers with no insight, no inspiration, no input other than elbow grease. Just turn the crank, and new knowledge pops out

When someone is too focused on details, we say they’re missing the forest for the trees. Mathematicians, if anything, are guilty of the opposite: missing the trees for the forest. Their habit is to inspect not objects themselves, but the objects’ properties. (Not the trees, but the number of them.) Then, having distilled these properties, they look at the properties’ properties. (Not the number, but its evenness or oddness.) And so on: the properties of the properties of the properties of the things. “Matter does not engage their attention,” Henri Poincaré once said of mathematicians. “They are interested in form alone.”

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.

This Is What I Want to Do the Rest of My Life

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 12:33:12 +0530

This image has been floating around the web, once again, so I’ve snatched a copy to post here¹ and keep reminding myself of what I want to do with the rest of my life.

Susan Sontag’s annotations in her copy of Finnegans Wake. Click to slightly enlarge

I am a reader.
In the Mortimer Adler sense of the word.
This is my dream :)
To be surrounded by books.
And to be able to savour them, a line … a page at a time.

I found it this time, courtesy a Diane Duane Tumblr repost ↩︎

2024

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 00:11:59 +0530

What do all the stars and daggers after the book titles mean?

January
#

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, Charlie Mackesy^*^¶
Number Go Up, Zeke Faux^*^†
Dread Knight, Sarah Hawke^*
The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, Carlo M. Cipolla^†

February
#

Romans in Space, Episode 412, The Rest is History, Tom Holland & Dominic Sandbrook^*^†^#
Just William, Richmal Crompton^*
Iron Widow, Xiran Jay Zhao^*
Empire Podcast, Series 5, Episodes 112–125, Empires of Iran, Part II^*^†^#
The Author Blog: Easy Blogging for Busy Authors, Anne R. Allen^†
Babel, R.F. Kuang^*
The Poppy War, R.F. Kuang^*
The Complete History & Strategy of Hermès, Season 14, Episode 2, Acquired Podcast^*^†^#
Nintendo’s Origins & Nintendo: The Console Wars, Season 14, Episodes 3 & 4, Acquired Podcast^*^†^#

March
#

The Poppy War, R.F. Kuang^*
The Dragon Republic, R.F. Kuang^*
The Burning God, R.F. Kuang^*

April
#

The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackson Bennett^*
Empire Podcast, Series 6, Episodes 128–132, Buddhism (The Indosphere Part I)^*^†^#
Foundryside, Robert Jackson Bennett^*
Shorefall, Robert Jackson Bennett^*
Locklands, Robert Jackson Bennett^*
Schaum’s Outline of French Grammar, Mary Coffman Crocker^*^‡
5BX Plan, The Royal Canadian Air Force^*^‡
The Pixar Touch, David A. Price^*^†
Empire Podcast, Series 7, Episodes 133–145, Queens and Empresses^*^†^#
The Romance of Lust: A Victorian Erotic Novel, Anonymous
Sherlock & Co. Podcast, Episodes 1–15^*^#

May
#

Sherlock & Co. Podcast, Episodes 16–35^*^#
Empire Podcast, Episodes 148–155, America: The Empire of Liberty^*^†^#
The Dagger and the Coin - 01 - The Dragon’s Path, Daniel Abraham^*
The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home, Susan Wise Bauer^*^†
The Bed of Procrustes, Nicholas Nassim Taleb^*^¶^†

June
#

How Git Works, Julia Evans^*^‡
The Programmer’s Brain, Felienne Hermans^*^†
The Dagger and the Coin - 02 - The King’s Blood, Daniel Abraham^*
The Dagger and the Coin - 03 - The Tyrant’s Law, Daniel Abraham^*
The Dagger and the Coin - 04 - The Widow’s House, Daniel Abraham^*
The Dagger and the Coin - 05 - The Spider’s War, Daniel Abraham^*
The Tiger, John Vaillant^*^†
Troll Mountain, Matthew Reilly^*
The Phoenix Project, Gene Kim, Kevin Behr & George Spafford^*^†
Sherlock & Co. Podcast, Episodes 36–41^*^#
Empire Podcast, America’s Founding Fathers & the American Revolution, Episodes 146–159 ^*^†^#
A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, Holly Jackson
90 Common French Phrases Every French Learner Should Know, Frederic Bibard^‡
How to Hide an Empire, Daniel Immerwahr^*^†
How to Fail Miserably at Writing, Giselle Renard^†
The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett^*
Tarzan of the Apes, Edgar Rice Burroughs^*
The Return of Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs^*
The Beasts of Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs^*
The Girl Who Would Be Free, Ryan Holiday^*
The Rest is History, Titanic, Episodes 427–432^*^†
Empire Podcast, American Imperialism, Episodes 160–169 ^*^†^#

July
#

HIM, Geoff Ryman
Mr. Einstein’s Secretary, Matthew Reilly
The Peripheral, William Gibson
The Rest is History, Fall of the American Indigenous Peoples, Episodes 446–456^*^†^#

August
#

Podman in Action, Daniel Walsh^*^‡
Painless Tmux, Nate Dickson^*^‡
Hardcore History, Mania for Subjugation, Episode 71^*^†
The Rest is History, The Road to The Great War, Episodes 465–474^*^†
The Steerswoman, Rosemary Kirstein^*
The Outskirter’s Secret, Rosemary Kirstein^*
The Lost Steersman, Rosemary Kirstein^*
The Language of Power, Rosemary Kirstein^*
Guns & Thighs, Ram Gopal Varma
Business Maharajas, Gita Piramal^*^†
Complete Digital Photography, Ben Long^*^‡
The Rest is History, The French Revolution (Part I), Episodes 475–482^*^†
Milestones: The Story of Wordpress, The Wordpress Team^†
Aurelia, Minerva Spencer^*
Empire Podcast, The Bengal Famine of 1942, Episodes 170–171 ^*^†^#
Three Million, The Bengal Famine of 1942, Episodes 0-7 ^*^†^#
A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong, Cecilia Grant
A Lady Awakened, Cecilia Grant
A Gentleman Undone, Cecilia Grant
A Woman Entangled, Cecilia Grant
The Cabinet of Dr. Leng, Douglas Preston & Linconln Child
Angel of Vengeance, Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

September
#

Empire Podcast, American Imperialism, Episodes 172–178^*^†^#
Empire Podcast, The Indosphere, Episodes 179–185^*^†^#
Powerful Command-Line Applications in Go, Ricardo Gerardi^*^‡
The Rest is History, The Hundred Years’ War Part I, Episodes 485–490^*^†
Empire Podcast, Scotland & Empire, Episodes 186–189^*^†^#

October
#

Head First Go, Jay McGavren^*^‡
The Rest is History, The Roman Conquest of Britain, Episodes 499-502^*^†
All Systems Red, Martha Wells^*
Artificial Condition, Martha Wells^*
Rogue Protocol, Martha Wells^*
Exit Strategy, Martha Wells^*
Network Effect, Martha Wells^*
Fugitive Telemetry, Martha Wells^*
System Collapse, Martha Wells^*
Grit, Angela Duckworth^†
The Art of Resilience, Ross Edgley^*^†
When the World Screamed, Arthur Conan Doyle^*
The Disintegration Machine, Arthur Conan Doyle^*
The Lost World, Arthur Conan Doyle^*
The Captain of the Polestar, Arthur Conan Doyle^*
Playing With Fire, Arthur Conan Doyle^*
How It Happened, Arthur Conan Doyle^*
One Crowded Hour, Arthur Conan Doyle^*
The Fall of Lord Barrymore, Arthur Conan Doyle^*
Dreams With Sharp Teeth, Harlan Ellison & Erik Nelson^*^†^#
A Rare Benedictine, Ellis Peters^*
A Morbid Taste for Bones, Ellis Peters^*
Once Corpse Too Many, Ellis Peters^*
Monk’s Hood, Ellis Peters^*
Saint Peter’s Fair, Ellis Peters^*
The Leper of Saint Giles, Ellis Peters^*
The Sealed Room, Arthur Conan Doyle^*
The Lost Special, Arthur Conan Doyle^*
The Sanctuary Sparrow, Ellis Peters^*
Github Actions in Action, Michael Kaufmann, Rob Bos & Marcel de Vries^‡
Strange Beasts, Susan J. Morris^*
Death on the Nile, Agatha Christie^*
Powerful Command-Line Applications in Go, Ricardo Gerardi^*^‡
Murder in Mesopotamia, Agatha Christie^*
The Devil’s Novice, Ellis Peters^*
Dead Man’s Ransom, Ellis Peters^*
The Pilgrim of Hate, Ellis Peters^*

November
#

Murder on the Orient Express, Agatha Christie^*
An Excellent Mystery, Ellis Peters^*
The Raven in the Foregate, Ellis Peters^*
The Rose Rent, Ellis Peters^*
The Hermit of Eyton Forest, Ellis Peters^*
The Confession of Brother Haluin, Ellis Peters^*
The Heretic’s Apprentice, Ellis Peters^*
The Potter’s Field, Ellis Peters^*
The Mystery of the Blue Train, Agatha Christie^*
Evil Under the Sun, Agatha Christie^*
Five Little Pigs, Agatha Christie^*
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, Agatha Christie^*
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie^*
The Murder on the Links, Agatha Christie^*
Lord Edgeware Dies, Agatha Christie^*
Sad Cypress, Agatha Christie^*
After the Funeral, Agatha Christie^*
The A.B.C. Murders, Agatha Christie^*

December
#

Peril at End House, Agatha Christie^*
How to Sell a Book, David Kadavy^*^†
Appointment with Death, Agatha Christie^*
Cards on the Table, Agatha Christie^*
Three Act Tragedy, Agatha Christie^*
Death in the Clouds, Agatha Christie^*
The Summer of the Danes, Ellis Peters^*
Sherlock & Co. Podcast, The Sign of Four (The Entirety of Season 22, on iTunes Podcasts)^*^#
Taken at the Flood, Agatha Christie^*
One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, Agatha Christie^*
The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding, Agatha Christie^*
The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Agatha Christie^*
Elephants Can Remember, Agatha Christie^*
Mrs McGinty’s Dead, Agatha Christie^*
Dead Man’s Folly, Agatha Christie^*
The Blaft Anthology of Gujarati Pulp Fiction, Vishwambhari S. Parmar & Rakesh Khanna^*
Sherlock & Co. Podcast, The Three Gables (Season 23 on iTunes, Episodes 1-3)^*^#
Morgan’s Run, Colleen McCullough^*
The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas^*
The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry^*
The Song of the Bird, Anthony de Mello^*
Brave Enough, Cheryl Strayed^*

I Read Like Grandma Does

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 09 Jun 2024 05:45:00 +0530

1943!

Folks who been reading the blog, for a while know about the reading lists.
I began writing down what I read, just to keep track, ever since I started this incarnation of the blog.

And then just a few days ago, serendipity led me to that pic above, on Twitter.
User, Ben Myers’ grandmother has been doing exactly what I have been doing, for the past eight decades! (rather, I have been doing what she has 😂)

This makes me so giddily happy!

Feedback on this post? Mail me at feedback at this domain

P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list!
Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe!
P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

My Reading Life

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 07 Apr 2024 11:30:48 +0530

from somewhere on Tumblr. I lost the source. Apologies, original poster!

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

Note to Self, Cal Newport’s Minimal Notes System

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 02 Mar 2024 16:35:56 +0530

My old-style slow notetaking process.
Replaced now with Elipsa Annotations, which then move along with my thoughts into Org Roam Notes.
Click to see bigger

Cal Newport recently did a deep dive on his podcast, on a minimalist note taking system for various areas of your life.
Video’s on Youtube, if you want to watch. It’s called A Productivity System To Remember Everything You Learn.

It matches, what I’ve organically been doing all these years.
And I was really happy to see it structured and rendered so well.
So I wrote and paraphrased and jotted it all down below.
Note: These are my mangling of Cal’s words, not what he actually said. The audio/video above should give you exact specifics.

Why?
#

Minimal Friction
#

too much friction with other systems
friction in work that matters is ok, is good, is perfect. McPhee & Caro! But for most other things, not needed.
- Cal goes on to verbally list what McPhee does, but my notes are better.
- In a nutshell, friction slows him (McPhee) down in a way that’s beneficial, that lets him do his best work
Notetaking does not need such friction. When information is coming at you, your time to act + energy to think are limited
Friction stops you from taking action. That information could then be lost
- For e.g. a complicated note taking process when reading a book, might stop you from getting into the book or ever keep you from reading the book altogether.
Your system should therefore reduce friction, so that you can capture as much information as possible quickly, efficiently, painlessly

Outsource your brain? No!
#

When it comes to things that matter, stuff should live in your brain. So that stuff percolates into your value systems and mental models and you evolve!
Your brain needs to be part of this curation process. Your brain needs to build hooks. To remember the big things. For accuracy and precision, details can always be looked up.

The System
#

For Books (the Corner Marking Method)
#

If there’s somethng interesting on the page, mark the corner fo the page (dog ear with pen) and then …
- Mark up the thing that interest you! Simple marks in the margins. Put a box around text. Checkmarks next to a line. Curly braces next to a paragraph to remember
- Occasionally write a short note, to help you remember the context, or to tell yourself what it reminds you of, or is there any other place where you’d find this useful?
Barely slows you down. Does not get in your way. Does not prevent you from reading
Then when you go back to your book, and look at your dog marks and then look at stuff you marked on those pages? You will in a few minutes, reconstitute all the ideas from that book.
Bonus: One “shortcoming”? You need to remember! Oh that book? That was the one that had the interesting ideas about such and such
- That is not a problem. This is the one bit of friction that is useful. It allows you to use the gist of what you learned from the book in the schemas of knowledge that I am constructing and modifying and growing in my head. So that’s not really a bug, rather a feature. In English? It helps me build better Mental Models!
- You become a better reader

Projects (Professional and Personal)
#

Where do notes relevant to a project go?
Store notes relevant to a project in the location where you will one day work the project.
- I do this on a personal level too. Everything is where my mind says, I ought to look for them, not where they “ought to be.” Which is why my keys are next to my Minnie mouse plushie and my flash drives live in an old, soup bowl.
So when it comes time to do the work, everything that you’ve gather is all there for you to use.
Duplication is ok. (If there’s too much duplication, which happens rarely, I organically figure something out)
Bonus: Whenever you add something new to the pile, you always encounter your old stuff and it keeps refreshing a mental picture of the project in your mind and helps create new mental grooves

Ideas about Life? Your values, your inspiration, you want to do something with and in your life
#

Keep a fancy, awesome, cool, aspirational notebook!
A fancy pen you like
Basically whatever you used when you started your journey? You wrote notes, you made headlines, you had marginalia in your pages, you did everything by hand. Just use the classiest things you like and can afford, to give it heft and meaning.
Your life has few ideas, important as they are. Easy to keep track of them in a notebook
You want the form to matter.
Digital notebooks? They’re cool too, if you like them.
All you need is semi regular review and process
- A good lazy way to do it is when the notebook fills up
- Review and copy over the summaries of everything good and lasting and important
- See what sticks

Iron Widow

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 09:22:44 +0530

courtesy, Xiran Jay Zhao

What happens when you take all the pulpy goodness from Indian soaps and K-dramas, mash it up with Pacific Rim and Robotech, infuse it with a lot of authentic Chinese history, and aim it at teens (err, young adults)?

You get Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao, that’s what!

I wish someone takes Indian history and creates such awesome fictional worlds from them.
This was such a crazy, rollicking ride! I cannot wait for their next.

My highlights, from the book
#

In hindsight, I was such a fool to have assumed Qieluo would stand by me just because she’s also female.
It was my grandmother who crushed my feet in half.
It was my mother who encouraged me and Big Sister to offer ourselves up as concubines so our brother could afford a future bride.
It was always the village aunties who’d sit around gossiping about which girl hadn’t been married off yet, despite complaining nonstop about their own husbands. And then they’d congratulate new mothers for being “blessed” to have a boy, despite being female themselves.

How do you take the fight out of half the population and render them willing slaves? You tell them they’re meant to do nothing but serve from the minute they’re born. You tell them they’re weak. You tell them they’re prey.
You tell them over and over, until it’s the only truth they’re capable of living.

Babel

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 09:12:29 +0530

image courtesy, Harper Collins India

Reading Babel, constantly gave me strong déjà vu as I leafed through its pages.¹
Until I realised what I was experiencing was an author enjoying their words, their lines, their exquisite craft. Where words themselves crawl into your mind, and say yes, we are. We will tell you this story. You need not make any effort here.
Richard Powers’, The Overstory was that way. So was Arundhati Roy’s, The God of Small Things. And Tamysyn Muir, with her Locked Tomb books.

This is alternate history Empire. The British still rule the world, but here they do so, on the strength of magic, silver-work and words and language.
Kuang then uses all that heft to bash our brains in.²
There’s Robin and Ramy and Victoire and Letty and it’s them against the world³

This was one of those rare books⁴ where I wanted very little to do with the story and just wanted to lose myself in the world. I wanted to study languages the way they did, and do magic the way they did. The way some of them come to choose violence reminded me of Bhagat and Azad.

The history’s wonderful.
The way she uses language and words, even more so!

My highlights, from the book
#

Inside, the heady wood-dust smell of freshly printed books was overwhelming. If tobacco smelled like this, Robin thought, he’d huff it every day. He stepped towards the closest shelf, hand lifted tentatively towards the books on display, too afraid to touch them – they seemed so new and crisp; their spines were uncracked, their pages smooth and bright. Robin was used to well-worn, waterlogged tomes; even his Classics grammars were decades old. These shiny, freshly bound things seemed like a different class of object, things to be admired from a distance rather than handled and read.

‘If you can see?’ The woman raised her voice and overenunciated her every syllable, as if Robin had difficulty hearing. (This had happened often to Robin on the Countess of Harcourt; he could never understand why people treated those who couldn’t understand English as if they were deaf.)

‘But that’s impossible for me,’ said Ramy. ‘I have to play a part. Back in Calcutta, we all tell the story of Sake Dean Mahomed, the first Muslim from Bengal to become a rich man in England. He has a white Irish wife. He owns property in London. And you know how he did it? He opened a restaurant, which failed; and then he tried to be hired as a butler or valet, which also failed. And then he had the brilliant idea of opening a shampoo house in Brighton.’ Ramy chuckled. ‘Come and get your healing vapours! Be massaged with Indian oils! It cures asthma and rheumatism; it heals paralysis. Of course, we don’t believe that at home. But all Dean Mahomed had to do was give himself some medical credentials, convince the world of this magical Oriental cure, and then he had them eating out of the palm of his hand. So what does that tell you, Birdie? If they’re going to tell stories about you, use it to your advantage. The English are never going to think I’m posh, but if I fit into their fantasy, then they’ll at least think I’m royalty.’

‘Does Mirza really mean “prince”?’ Robin asked, after he’d overheard Ramy declare this to a shopkeeper for the third time.
‘Sure. Well, really, it’s a title – it’s derived from the Persian Amīrzādeh, but “prince” comes close enough.’
‘Then are you—?’
‘No.’ Ramy snorted. ‘Well. Perhaps once. That’s the family story, anyhow; my father says we were aristocrats in the Mughal court, or something like that. But not anymore.’
‘What happened?’
Ramy gave him a long look. ‘The British, Birdie. Keep up.’

After all, we’re here to make the unknown known, to make the other familiar. We’re here to make magic with words.’

‘Which seems right to you? Do we try our hardest, as translators, to render ourselves invisible? Or do we remind our reader that what they are reading was not written in their native language?’
‘That’s an impossible question,’ said Victoire. ‘Either you situate the text in its time and place, or you bring it to where you are, here and now. You’re always giving something up.’
‘Is faithful translation impossible, then?’ Professor Playfair challenged. ‘Can we never communicate with integrity across time, across space?’
‘I suppose not,’ Victoire said reluctantly.
‘But what is the opposite of fidelity?’ asked Professor Playfair. He was approaching the end of this dialectic; now he needed only to draw it to a close with a punch. ‘Betrayal. Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?’

we can think of etymology as an exercise in tracing how far a word has strayed from its roots. For they travel marvellous distances, both literally and metaphorically.’ He looked suddenly at Robin. ‘What’s the word for a great storm in Mandarin?’
Robin gave a start. ‘Ah – fēngbào?’
‘No, give me something bigger.’
‘Táifēng?’
‘Good.’ Professor Lovell pointed to Victoire. ‘And what weather patterns are always drifting across the Caribbean?’
‘Typhoons,’ she said, then blinked. ‘Taifeng? Typhoon? How—’
‘We start with Greco-Latin,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘Typhon was a monster, one of the sons of Gaia and Tartarus, a devastating creature with a hundred serpentine heads. At some point he became associated with violent winds, because later the Arabs started using tūfān to describe violent, windy storms. From Arabic it hopped over to Portuguese, which was brought to China on explorers’ ships.’
‘But táifēng isn’t just a loanword,’ said Robin. ‘It means something in Chinese – tái is great, and fēng is wind–’
‘And you don’t think the Chinese could have come up with a transliteration that had its own meaning?’ asked Professor Lovell. ‘This happens all the time. Phonological calques are often semantic calques as well. Words spread. And you can trace contact points of human history from words that have uncannily similar pronunciations. Languages are only shifting sets of symbols – stable enough to make mutual discourse possible, but fluid enough to reflect changing social dynamics.

And the influences on English were so much deeper and more diverse than they thought. Chit came from the Marathi chitti, meaning ‘letter’ or ‘note’. Coffee had made its way into English by way of Dutch (koffie), Turkish (kahveh), and originally Arabic (qahwah). Tabby cats were named after a striped silk that was in turn named for its place of origin: a quarter of Baghdad named al-‘Attābiyya. Even basic words for clothes all came from somewhere. Damask came from cloth made in Damascus; gingham came from the Malay word genggang, meaning ‘striped’; calico referred to Calicut in Kerala, and taffeta, Ramy told them, had its roots in the Persian word tafte, meaning ‘a shiny cloth’.

English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular. And Robin found it incredible, how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods.

‘The Germans have this lovely word, Sitzfleisch,’ Professor Playfair said pleasantly when Ramy protested that they had over forty hours of reading a week. ‘Translated literally, it means “sitting meat”. Which all goes to say, sometimes you need simply to sit on your bottom and get things done.

He waved a hand, gesturing at an invisible map. ‘It’s junctures like that where we have control. If we push in the right spots – if we create losses where the Empire can’t stand to suffer them – then we’ve moved things to the breaking point. Then the future becomes fluid, and change is possible. History isn’t a premade tapestry that we’ve got to suffer, a closed world with no exit. We can form it. Make it. We just have to choose to make it.’⁵

Oxford, and Babel by extension, were, at their roots, ancient religious institutions, and for all their contemporary sophistication, the rituals that comprised university life were still based in medieval mysticism. Oxford was Anglicanism was Christianity, which meant blood, flesh, and dirt.*

‘The British aren’t going to invade with English troops. They’re going to invade with troops from Bengal and Bombay. They’re going to have sepoys fight the Afghans, just like they had sepoys fight and die for them at Irrawaddy, because those Indian troops have the same logic you do, which is that it’s better to be a servant of the Empire, brutal coercion and all, than to resist. Because it’s safe. Because it’s stable, because it lets them survive. And that’s how they win, brother. They pit us against each other. They tear us apart.’

‘I don’t think I’ll ever forget what I saw.’ He rested his elbows against the bridge and sighed. ‘Rows and rows of flowers. A whole ocean of them. They’re such bright scarlet that the fields look wrong, like the land itself is bleeding. It’s all grown in the countryside. Then it gets packed and transported to Calcutta, where it’s handed off to private merchants who bring it straight here. The two most popular opium brands here are called Patna and Malwa. Both regions in India. From my home straight to yours, Birdie. Isn’t that funny?’ Ramy glanced sideways at him. ‘The British are turning my homeland into a narco-military state to pump drugs into yours. That’s how this empire connects us.’

Free trade. This was always the British line of argument – free trade, free competition, an equal playing field for all. Only it never ended up that way, did it? What ‘free trade’ really meant was British imperial dominance, for what was free about a trade that relied on a massive build-up of naval power to secure maritime access? When mere trading companies could wage war, assess taxes, and administer civil and criminal justice?

Robin saw a great spider’s web in his mind then. Cotton from India to Britain, opium from India to China, silver becoming tea and porcelain in China, and everything flowing back to Britain. It sounded so abstract – just categories of use, exchange, and value – until it wasn’t; until you realized the web you lived in and the exploitations your lifestyle demanded, until you saw looming above it all the spectre of colonial labour and colonial pain.

My point being, abolition happened because white people found reasons to care – whether those be economic or religious. You just have to make them think they came up with the idea themselves. You can’t appeal to their inner goodness. I have never met an Englishman I trusted to do the right thing out of sympathy.’

‘Eventually.’
Anthony laughed gently. ‘Do you think abolition was a matter of ethics? No, abolition gained popularity because the British, after losing America, decided that India was going to be their new golden goose. But cotton, indigo, and sugar from India weren’t going to dominate the market unless France could be edged out, and France would not be edged out, you see, as long as the British slave trade was making the West Indies so very profitable for them.’

Colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence.
— FRANTZ FANON, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox

‘It’s so odd,’ Robin said. Back then they’d already passed the point of honesty; they spoke to one another unfiltered, unafraid of the consequences. ‘It’s like I’ve known you forever.’ ‘Me too,’ Ramy said. ‘And that makes no sense,’ said Robin, drunk already, though there was no alcohol in the cordial. ‘Because I’ve known you for less than a day, and yet . . .’ ‘I think,’ said Ramy, ‘it’s because when I speak, you listen.’ ‘Because you’re fascinating.’ ‘Because you’re a good translator.’ Ramy leaned back on his elbows. ‘That’s just what translation is, I think. That’s all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they’re trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.’

how could there ever be an Adamic language? The thought now made him laugh. There was no innate, perfectly comprehensible language; there was no candidate, not English, not French, that could bully and absorb enough to become one. Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No; a thousand worlds within one. And translation – a necessary endeavour, however futile, to move between them.

ok, I swiped on my Elipsa. But you get the idea! ↩︎
in a good way ↩︎
a lot like Bardugo’s, Six of Crows ↩︎
the only other one for me, was The Lord of the Rings. I suspect Kuang, just like Tolkien, had the words and the language and the world ready. And then she just when and wrote a book to show some of it. ↩︎
reminds me of Steve Jobs, and his dent in the universe. ↩︎

On Invisible Inequity and Entrenched Privilege (In Open Source and the World)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 09:27:18 +0530

courtesy, R.F. Kuang & Carlton Gibson

I was reading R.F. Kuang’s Babel and watching Carlton Gibson’s talk on surviving open source¹ a few days ago.
They both touch upon ingrained privilege in their book/talk.
The popular proverb urges us to engage with the world as it is, not as we would have it be.²
But sometimes, we are so caught up that we need other, wiser eyes to see. That’s what Rebecca & Carlton have done for me :)

Here’s Carlton. I paraphrased the relevant bits from his talk. It begins at around the 10m, 10s mark. (all emphases mine.)

We’re not getting paid. But we don’t always act like we know that.
We give far more than is reasonable given the fact that it’s a volunteer thing that we are doing

It has a consequence.
Open Source skews overwhelmingly white, male and English speaking.
The bottom line is that contributing to open source is a privilege that only a few can afford.
We like to think it’s meritocracy. Well, you do the time, you do the hard yards, you work on your project, you get the rewards, but well Sorry! Meritocracy, my arse!

What’s really going on is that pre-existing economic relations are being reinforced by contributors leveraging the inequality of opportunity that those economic relations provide.
Sorry!
In English.
If you let it, Open Source extracts such a cost; physical, financial, and emotional, that the only folks who can do it are the global rich and of those, only the ones that are either directly supported by, or can make their way around the patriarchy. English speaking, white, men.

And these series of quotes from Babel.

‘If you can see?’ The woman raised her voice and overenunciated her every syllable, as if Robin had difficulty hearing. (This had happened often to Robin on the Countess of Harcourt; he could never understand why people treated those who couldn’t understand English as if they were deaf.)

Free trade. This was always the British line of argument – free trade, free competition, an equal playing field for all. Only it never ended up that way, did it? What ‘free trade’ really meant was British imperial dominance, for what was free about a trade that relied on a massive build-up of naval power to secure maritime access? When mere trading companies could wage war, assess taxes, and administer civil and criminal justice?

My point being, abolition happened because white people found reasons to care – whether those be economic or religious. You just have to make them think they came up with the idea themselves. You can’t appeal to their inner goodness. I have never met an Englishman I trusted to do the right thing out of sympathy.

Anthony laughed gently. ‘Do you think abolition was a matter of ethics? No, abolition gained popularity because the British, after losing America, decided that India was going to be their new golden goose. But cotton, indigo, and sugar from India weren’t going to dominate the market unless France could be edged out, and France would not be edged out, you see, as long as the British slave trade was making the West Indies so very profitable for them.’

Watch the talk.
Read Babel.
You’ll be better off, having done both.

not at the same time. I know I’m cuckoo, just not that cuckoo. ↩︎
I love this one from Saul Alinsky’s, Rules for Radicals:
“I start from where the world is, as it as, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be–it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working in the system.” ↩︎

When a Book Kicks You Up Your Backside

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 08:56:29 +0530

image courtesy, Harper Collins India

Here I was, trying to laze away my day by getting lost in a book, when the book kicks my behind and tells me to go work 😂

‘The Germans have this lovely word, Sitzfleisch,’ Professor Playfair said pleasantly when Ramy protested that they had over forty hours of reading a week.
‘Translated literally, it means “sitting meat”.
Which all goes to say, sometimes you need simply to sit on your bottom and get things done.

— R.F. Kuang, Babel

The Kobo Elipsa 2e, Six Months Later

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 09:28:55 +0530

My beloved, battered, Elipsa 2e. Click the image for a larger image.

It’s been close to ~~six~~ seven months, since I moved over from the Oasis to the Elipsa.

Here’s my list of things / experiences with the Elipsa 2e, positive and negative, in no order whatsever. Also this is not representative of a typical ebook reader¹. I, umm … have a lot of books, and the Elipsa carries most of them. So every action that it does, it does with that number of books (either physically or with its database) …

I love it!
It’s very light for its size. I don’t feel the weight of this 10″ device as much as I felt the old 7″ Oasis.
It’s very fast.
I use it just like a book. It lends itself to such use as well. Part of it is the weight, part of it, is its responsiveness.
This is also how I broke it. I threw it on the bed and then it slipped right over the edge, and cracked the screen 😂 You can see the big chonky part that is permanantly dead, as well as the thin, dead, vertical and horizontal lines. Since I read with fat margins, the chonky part does not get in my way² and the lines are mostly invisible.
~~I cannot enlarge images in a book. I tap, I double tap, I pinch to zoom … nothing. This is the one thing I miss from the Oasis.~~ A few hours later: Of course, now it works! 😂 Double tapping an image, opens up the image where I can zoom and pan around! My fault for not noticing this earlier.
I love it!
It hangs loading complicated books or large pdfs, but it recovers quickly. This does not happen that often.
It randomly hangs and/or crashes. This happens quite often. But I’ve learnt to reboot it with the power button, and it comes right back up, quickly. It reminds me of the Am386 machines, I’d assemble for use as Netware thin clients in my youth. They would run hot and crash ofen, but we didn’t mind, because they rebooted right back so darned fast 😂
Not that the Elipsa runs hot. It just runs fast and crashes. And then comes back on and carries on as if nothing ever happened.
Did I tell you, I love it?
On paper, the screen specs look inferior to the Oasis. In practice, it made no difference to these old eyes.
The user experience is not as good is it could be, but it’s miles better than anything else I’ve used. I figured out most of it intuitively. I love just running my finger along the left edge to adjust the brightness. Helps a lot when I’m reading in bed, so that the better half does not get disturbed (or grumble at me much.)
Books on the Kobo store are a bit more expensive than the Amazon store. (New releases tend to cost the same.)
The database that it uses, gets corrupted quite often, which then leads to it no longer being able to talk to my PC or not showing the books in the device³. I doubt, I’d love the Elipsa as much as I do, if the Calibre ecosystem didn’t support it so well.⁴
- I can backup and restore the database at will, thanks to the awesome Kobo Utilities plugin.
- I’m getting old and impatient and want to read a lot more. So I’ve given up on taking notes by hand and moved over to highlighting and making notes in the Elipsa. I wouldn’t do this if not for the lovely Annotations plugin, which lets me get all my notes and highlights out of the Elipsa and into Calibre. (pic below, click to embiggen) The jury’s still out on this one.
I love it so much, that when I heard a friend was going to the USA, I bullied them into buying me another one to replace this one when it dies.

To conclude, the Elipsa 2e is wonderful.
It has flaws that I can live with.
It serves me well.
I love it!

the person, not the device ↩︎
much ↩︎
This point I think, is more a me problem, than a device problem ↩︎
Note to the Kobo folk, please care about your device software a smidgen. Please! At least at as much, if not more than these lovely open source folk do! ↩︎

Poor Ceres Always Gets the Short End of the Stick

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 08:08:52 +0530

Courtesy, NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA, Public Domain, via Wikipedia

I just finished Tamsyn Muir’s Nona, last month.
And of course, I’m now stuck along with the rest of the world waiting for Alecto to come along.¹ In the meanwhile I’m having fun with the rest of the world, dissecting the old books to pieces with various pieces of headcanon and wild theories, one of the popular ones being trying to find analogies between the houses of the books and our solar system

And then I ran into this little head exploder² …

Which made me remember this, on the Expanse³ …

And all I could then think of, was Aww, poor Ceres!
No matter what universe, dimension or time period, it’s always oppressed and languishing.
Here’s to me finding some piece of fiction, someday, where Ceres is all powerful!

Tamsyn, please give us the book now! I kid, I kid! If I can patiently wait for the old man across decades as he weaves his saga, I can just as patiently wait for you ↩︎
via sentientcitizen on Tumblr ↩︎
the best scifi I’ve read ↩︎

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, Carlo Cipolla

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 08:47:30 +0530

Short Booklet.
Very Taleb–esque writing. Very entertaining.
Tells us there are lots of stupid people, with a really precise definition of stupid; those folks that would cut their nose to spite their face, or like the book would say, stupid folks are they who would cause losses to other folks, even when they stand to gain nothing or possibly, ever incur losses!

It reads like an erudite rant. But unlike Taleb, ends with no advice or suggestion.

Let me offer one then, in the form of one of those old folksy grandma quotes,

“What’s the sense of wrestling with a pig?
You both get all over muddy … and the pig likes it.”

A Signed Copy of Neil Gaiman’s, “What You Need to Be Warm”

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 14 Jan 2024 10:38:58 +0530

I went and fulfilled an old dream of mine.

A signed copy of Neil Gaiman’s, What You Need to Be Warm.

A New Year’s Gift! From me, to me 😂

I got mine from The Golden Notebook, an indie bookshop in Woodstock New York, who are kind and prompt and ship world wide.¹

Feedback on this post? Mail me at feedback@janusworx.com

P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list!
Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe!
P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

I got to know of them from Neil’s tumblr. Methinks, this is his local bookstore. And he signs books there often(ish) ↩︎

Read, Read, Read, Everything

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 10 Jan 2024 19:41:04 +0530

With eternal gratitude to Bruinhilda the Librarian, for writing this.
And with lots of apologies for stealing it wholesale and making it my new reading manifesto :)

As a library worker, there’s something I want to say to you.

You do not have to apologize for the books you choose to read.

At all. To anyone. You owe nobody any explanations; you need no excuse or “good reason” to be reading the book.

You do not have to be ashamed for wanting to read “bad” books. You wanna read Twilight? We got Twilight. Need a banal, cookie-cutter-plot mystery or thriller? Those are always fun. Our regulars check them out by the towering stack. Ask Betty for recommendations; she’s read them all. 50 Shades of Oh Fucking No? We’ve got it, we even got it in large print. Have fun. Check out the rest of our porn too. Oh, and the sex manuals are a MUST if you want to “experiment” yourself. Don’t be afraid to ask; they’re here for a reason.

Want to read a book written by a huge asshole everyone hates and agree was a monster? Yeah, we have those. No, we don’t think you’re an asshole for wanting to know what was actually written in there, or judging things for yourself.

You are not too old for Diary of a Wimpy Kid, The Babysitter’s Club, or Captain Underpants. You are not too young for Sherlock Holmes. There’s nothing wrong with a boy reading The Princess Academy or Sweet Valley High. There’s nothing wrong with a girl being into The Hardy Boys or Artemis Fowl instead.

You do not have to pull the shame face and offer me an excuse when you check out your books. I don’t care if I got so angry at that book I threw it against a wall when I read it: you have the right to read it, and enjoy it if it’s enjoyable for you. THAT’S WHY THE LIBRARY HAS IT IN THE FIRST PLACE. If we only stocked pure, unproblematic literature everyone approved of, by authors of unquestionable virtue, we wouldn’t have any books at all. Or music. Or movies. It would be utterly fucking boring. And it certainly wouldn’t be a library.

My Year in Reading, 2023 Edition

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 18:19:09 +0530

I normally hide Easter eggs or just random comments into my footnotes. And so normally it does not matter if you folk read it or not. But this post was really off the cuff and there are some details that have snuck into the footnotes. So, please do give ’em a peek

courtesy, Tom Gauld

Reading is my one thing.
The thing that most people I know, can say without reservation, that I do.
There’s only been a brief period of time when I did not read¹²
Nevermind that. It’s all water under the bridge now.

Riffing off Tom’s toon
#

The Unread Book Pile: I should keep track of just how much my unread book pile increases or decreases every year. Who am I kidding? This is never going to happen 😂 But just for kicks, my current unread pile is around four and a half thousand books. Most of these have been lying around in one form or another since the late 90s when I discovered Palm ebooks and the Gutenberg project. I have to get around to converting most of them some day. Which leads me to …
Most Considered Authors: The reason I downloaded all of them. Someday, young Jason said, I will read all the classics. Joyce and Proust and Tolstoy and Dickens and JKJ and Keats and Yeats and Donne and Dickinson and Wordsworth and all the Brontës and Newton in Latin and Montaigne along with du Châtelet in French and Epictetus and all the folks who I admired. So I got them all! They were free! And then instead of reading those, I got sucked into sci-fi and fantasy with PKD and Asimov and Moore and Gaiman and GRRM and Peter Watts and Le Guin and Duane and Jemisin. Whither the classics? I’ve barely scratched the surface. Someday! Someday soon! I live in deluded hope :)
Non-Fiction: I learnt to skim modern non fiction quite rapidly. If something appeals to me, I make notes, so that my distracted magpie brain remembers. And if something doesn’t, then non fiction is the one genre where I’ve no qualms about dropping the book like a hot potato. The old stuff, is where it’s at. Despite being a product of their times, Andy Grove and Maya Angelou and Anne Lamott still whoop anything modern.
Audiobooks: This was the year I finally found my groove, with audiobooks. They helped me in the past when I was so busy, I barely had time to read. But then I would miss my notes. So I couldn’t quite do it with most fiction or non-fiction that I liked and wanted to pay close attention to. Listening and taking notes was joyless. But ever since I switched to History as an audiobook niche, I’ve fallen in love again. While I do listen to history books, most of my history listening this year has been long series on various history podcasts. Anand and Dalrymple’s Empire is outstanding. They began with the Raj and then covered other empires. I loved Persia (which I think still isn’t over) and the Ottomans too. Holland and Sandbrook’s, The Rest is History is pretty neat too. Dan Carlin is the one who blazed this path with Hardcore History. I have no words to describe what he does. Suffice to say, that everytime an episode drops³, the whole internet⁴ rejoices. The amount of research and work that goes into these is astounding.⁵ The two series I really enjoyed⁶ and learnt from were Supernova in the East (Japan in WWII) and my favourite series of them all, Wrath of the Khans (six long episodes on the Mongol Empire). And finally I really wanted to know why English is the way it is. John McWhorter’s, Our Magnificient Bastard Tongue taught me a lot, but Kevin Stroud’s, The History of English is something else. A leisurely walk from antiquity to today⁷
Loans: I never loan a book. I either give them away and buy myself new copies if I miss them; or I never give them away, in the first place. I’ve haven’t lost many books, but the few I have I miss dearly. I miss my first edition of Anthony DeMello’s, The Song of the Bird to this day. It was Daddy’s copy. I was very sentimentally attached to that dead tree.

Riffing Some More
#

I reread quite a bit this year. I’ve begun hankering for some feeling I would get when reading certain books, and so now I keep going back to them. The Little Prince and The Count of Monte Cristo. I went and got a lot of old Hardy Boys and Nancy Drews too⁸ and have been making my way through them slowly. I have close to a baker’s dozen of friends, I call Book Santas. And thanks to one of them who shares my love of comics⁹ and so I am now the proud owner of the entire Goscinny/Uderzo Asterix run, as well as the gorgous three volume Sandman omnibus. Reading them was so much fun! I reread all the books of A Song of Ice and Fire, because believe it or not, I haven’t watched the TV series. I have been patiently waiting for that grumpy old fart¹⁰, to finish the series and so I read the books again to remind myself of where I was in that world. I gave talks after quite a bit, so I went back to Nancy Duarte’s Slide:ology and Resonate as well as Scott Schwertly’s Deck ’Em. I reread American Gods, this time as a graphic novel. I surprisingly did not read any Poirot this year, but that probably because I watched the Suchet series and the Branagh movies this year and so that cup was full. I did however read all of Holmes, twice! And what else? Oh yes, I read How to Pronounce Knife and The Overstory. Both of them are so evocative, so raw, so real, so … it feels less like reading and more like experiencing them.

Three lines from the Overstory, always haunt me. They keep popping up at random times.

“I ask you. Has there ever been such a little nation of two?”

“places remember what people forget.”

“It seems most of nature isn’t red in tooth and claw, after all. For one, those species at the base of the living pyramid have neither teeth nor talons. But if trees share their storehouses, then every drop of red must float on a sea of green.”

“How do I recognize this already? Why does this all feel so much like remembering?”

Ok, that’s four. But it is that kind of book. The kind that grabs you and never lets go.

I discovered Erotic-Sci-Fi-Opera, courtesy Sarah Hawke and historical couple everything courtesy Minerva Spencer. They were really good. They were really hot. ’Nuff said.
Being an enthusiastic Sherlockian, I’m always on the lookout for folk who put their own stamps on Holmes and Watson. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar¹¹ writes Mycroft, but they didn’t appeal to me. The TV series led me to the Enola Holmes books, but I haven’t read those yet. Bonnie MacBird is wonderful at it though! I really loved Art in the Blood
This was my year of Sanderson. He reminds me a lot of GRRM. Rough, workman like prose, but lovely worlds and lovely people! Tress of the Emerald Sea and Yumi and the Nightmare Painter were my favourites. I’m only through one third of his books. I still have more to enjoy!
And finally, I had my mind bent¹², by the Locked Tomb. Most folks are really polarised by the books. I’m one who won’t accept a single bad thing about them. They’re really good! I’m really blessed to be living in the age of Muir and Bardugo and Jemisin!
Finally, finally, yes, I did read Taleb

In Parting …
#

I realise that I’m doing a lot of this, because of my battle with the black dog and books help me cope. The sheer quantity will definitely drop off once I get back on the horse, but the reading will continue.

And oh, before I forget, Charlie Munger died this year. And I learnt so much from him. What could a old white billionaire teach a poor, brown kid in his early twenties? Plenty it turned out, over the years.¹³ While I reread a couple of his biographies and listened to a live podcast this year, I did not read his own Poor Charlie’s Almanack this year. So now you know what I’m going to begin next year with :)
But why just me? You can too. Stripe Press has turned the book into a gorgeous website for everyone to enjoy.

I leave you with this wonderful Gaiman wish for the New Year

I hope you will have a wonderful year,
that you’ll dream dangerously and outrageously,
that you’ll make something that didn’t exist before you made it,
that you will be loved and that you will be liked,
and that you will have people to love and to like in return.
And, most importantly
(because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now),
that you will,
when you need to be,
be wise,
and that you will always be kind.

— Neil Gaiman, courtesy The Toymaker’s Journal

P.S. I’ve only written about, what still resonates at the end of the year.
To see the complete list, go here.

Feedback on this post? Mail me at feedback@janusworx.com

P.P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list!
Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe!
P.P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

in my twenties when I took someone’s well meant, but ignorant advice and stopped. ↩︎
three years! Oh, the books I could have read 😂 ↩︎
Methinks, this year there were just the two Viking episodes ↩︎
atleast, my corner of it ↩︎
Complement, Empire’s Persian History run, with Carlin’s King of Kings ↩︎
you cannot really “enjoy” them. They are full of all sorts of situations. Lots of them, not good. ↩︎
which I don’t know if he has reached or not. I am still at episode 100, while the podcast is at 178. ↩︎
once again, products of their time. Treat them as such ↩︎
Graphic Novel say you? Po-tay-toe, Po-tah-toe say I ↩︎
I jest. GRRM is kind and gracious. As a young boy, new to the internet and at a time when authors did reply to their email, it was he, who turned me on to quite a number of other authors. Maurice Druon and Daniel Abraham, to name a couple. Was it him? Or a minion writing on his behalf? It was the 90s and I was 17. I choose to believe it was him :) ↩︎
Yes, that one ↩︎
in a really good way ↩︎
The two best things I learnt? 1. Be a Stoic 2. I can only have an opinion if I can state the opposing arguments better than the people who support it do and 3. Always be learning, so that someday you gain wisdom ↩︎

A New Hole Hawg, the Kobo Elipsa 2e

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 08:11:04 +0530

Update, 2024-02-16: Six months later …

A couple of years ago, around this time, I upgraded to the best reading experience I could afford at the time. I got me a Kindle Oasis.

I called it my Hole Hawg. And boy, has it served me like one.
And while it has done, everything it promised it would do, I found myself outgrowing it and needing something more powerful.

What I need
#

A device that could handle nearly every format that I could throw at it.
Something that was not beholden to the Bezos beast.¹
While I love the Oasis’ speed, I want something faster.
Something that would let me read PDF files, without making want to scratch my eyeballs out.
A large screen, because PDFs and because I am getting old and blind as a bat.
While also doing everything else that the Oasis did with the same aplomb
Bonus: Being able to read comics.

A little bit of research led me to the Kobo Elipsa 2e.
It isn’t sold here in India, so a kind cousin got it for me. It has a pen and it marks up books and all that jazz, but I don’t know how much I will use that feature. What I need is what I wrote above and the Elipsa does it all. Very, very, well.

The big screen is gorgeous

The screen is a lower ppi than the Oasis (227 vs 300), but the screen is large and I hold it farther away from my face, to notice any difference. I can also turn off that crazy Kindle full justification, to have my beloved ragged right. It’s extremely responsive, flipping orientation without that heartbeat of a pause, I would have with the Oasis.

The Elipsa 2e vs the Oasis in size.
Did I mention the screen was bigger? Much bigger?
And that it was gorgeous?!

My only regret? I miss my page turn buttons.
But that is a small price to pay for the myriad formats that I can now read on the Elipsa.
Comics, Technical Books, old scanned PDfs, all my fiction, everything!
I love it!

Hat tip to MWL, for that lovely term ↩︎

Mandy Brown Celebrates Fifteen Years of Her Blog

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 08:28:03 +0530

This was a thread on my fediverse account, that grew too long.
Posting it here, all together, the way my thoughts spilled out.

All I knew about Mandy Brown when I began following her a year ago is

she has a doggie called Furiosa
she thinks about books the way I do
she reads books and then writes about reading them, the way I always dreamed I could
she’s a prominent member of my circle of the Eminent Dead

Today, as she celebrates the quinceanera of her blog, I realised that she also:

is an awesome people herder
is one of the forces behind A Book Apart
is one of the leading lights of web design world
has put in time as a suit (CEO)

Which leads me to understand how she writes so resonantly.
It’s not just her beautiful mind, but also that she writes with her scars.

From her celebratory post,

And this is a home, in more ways than one. There are books here that have taken up residence in my mind. Or perhaps more accurately, I have lived long residencies within them, have curled up under their eaves and stretched out on the porch, have explored the basements and attics and crawl spaces. I read on paper still, so the evidence of time spent is visible in dog-eared corners and coffee stains, in curling covers and the occasional broken spine. I’m hardest on the books I love the most, so that more than one of them is neighbored by a newer edition: not replaced (because I would never forsake my margin notes) but accompanied by a copy that will decay in its own way, soon enough.

And maybe that’s a good way to think about blogging, too. The new stuff sits next to the old but doesn’t supplant it, doesn’t shove it out of the way. Each new post lays atop the next like sediment, and all the old layers remain exposed for you to meander through, with their mediocre sentences and lapsed claims, all the sloppy thinking ever on display. It’s a great exercise in humility, keeping a blog for this many years. But in exchange for the keen awareness of how far I still have to go as a writer, I have the space to keep going. I have the home to keep coming back to. And I will. I will return, again and again

Thank you, Mandy!
For all you do, for all you’ve taught me, for the worlds you’ve led me to, and the all the dreams you’ve shown me.

Feedback on this post? Mail me at feedback@janusworx.com

P.S. I now have to go catch up with thirteen to fourteen years worth of writing. There goes June!
P.P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list!
Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe!
P.P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

Books Saved My Life

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 05:45:00 +0530

This post was first sent to my newsletter on January 27, 2023.
You really ought to subscribe :)

From A Velocity of Being. Art by Yara Kono

An extract from the page I read today from A Velocity of Being.

Dani Shapiro writes …

My Dear Future Friend,

I will probably never know you. We may not ever walk this earth at the same moment. But listen carefully.

Books saved my life.

In the stillness of reading. the silence save for the sandpapery sound of my fingers turning the page, I was born. In the quiet of a summer afternoon spent in a hammock, of a winter night spent sneaking under the covers with a flashlight, dawned the awareness, slow but unmistakable, that I was not alone. That I was not insane. That my heart was not so very different from everyone else’s.

Books made me feel less ashamed. Less weird. Less different.
They connected me deeply to my own humanity.

What I Learned Today (2nd of February, 2023)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 02 Feb 2023 19:30:55 +0530

Long day today¹. I thought I got nothing much done, until I wrote this post.
So, more incentive to keep writing these.

Python
#

Learning about how to make keyword arguments stick.
And how to think about structuring programs

Devops
#

Deep dive into how to add prow job listings to the dashboard and viceversa; how to go about looking for the job from the dashboard

Urdu / French
#

Lots of practice with vowels and the ‘jiim’ group of letters. Since I know Hindi, Urdu progress is much, much, much faster than French. I think that is because, I am forcing my English grammar / vocabulary on another Romance language that has Germanic influences. This is leading to a lot of cognitive dissonance and slow progress.
Much of my Urdu vocabulary comes from Hindi, which I learnt as a kid, and I definitely did not go looking for the “right” way to speak it. Better to just do French similarly as well. While I cannot do immersion, I can do what I want to do with French. Begin reading what I want to. Whether I understand it or not. I realise this will take me a lot longer than Urdu or Hindi, but that’s ok. Émilie du Châtelet, Montaigne and Dumas are not going anywhere, and neither am I :)
My frame of learning now, after doing these two languages, as well as the rest of the stuff I am doing, is to just begin doing². And figure out / learn the rules, the grammar, the conventions as you go.

Physical Activity
#

They call it chest and arm day. I presume, the exercises are meant to strengthen them. Right now, it’s just a stiff, painful mess.
I cannot wait for this phase to be over.

Books / Reading
#

Finished reading, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy. It’s a hauntingly, beautiful book. A spiritual successor to the Little Prince and a Lindy book for sure.

I hate the gym ↩︎
Priyanka, Pradhvan, Rahul and Kushal be like, We told you so! ↩︎

Some Books

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 02 Feb 2023 05:00:00 +0530

This post was first sent to my newsletter on January 19, 2023.
You really ought to subscribe :)

Art by Ricardo Siri

Some books are toolkits you take up to fix things, from the most practical to the most mysterious, from your house to your heart, or to make things, from cakes to ships.
Some books are wings.
Some are horses that run away with you.
Some are parties to which you are invited full of friends who are there even when you have no friends.
In some books you meet one remarkable person; in others a whole group or even a culture.
Some books are medicine, bitter but clarifying.
Some books are puzzles, mazes, tangles, jungles.
Some long books are journeys, and at the end you are not the same person you were at the beginning.
Some are handheld lights you can shine on almost anything.

…

I piled the books around me for protection and withdrew inside their battlements, building a tower in which I escaped my unhappy circumstances.
There I lived for many years, in love with books, taking refuge in books, learning from books a strange data-rich out-of-date version of what it means to be human.

— Rebecca Solnit
from Maria Popova’s, A Velocity of Being

Read the whole letter, along with Maria’s¹ annotations.

brilliant, as usual ↩︎

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) #

2026

January #

February #

March #

April #

May #

June #

July #

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

2025

January #

February #

March #

April #

May #

June #

July #

August #

September #

October #

November #

December #

Moved From Reeder to Readkit

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 #

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)
#

January
#

February
#

March
#

April
#

May
#

June
#

July
#

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
#

January
#

February
#

March
#

April
#

May
#

June
#

July
#

August
#

September
#

October
#

November
#

December
#

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 Levels of Reading
#

Level 1: Elementary Reading
#

Level 2: Inspectional Reading
#

Level 3: Analytical Reading
#

Level 4: Syntopical Reading
#

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?
#