Verdict: strong recommendation
Shantaram is about an Australian guy, Lin, who escapes prison in his homeland and on his way to Germany, makes a stopover in India where he ends up spending ten years of his life.
In that timeframe, Lin achieves more than many of us do in their lifetimes.
He works at a Mumbai slums as a doctor tending to the poor and helpless. He joins the Indian mafia to deal with drug and weapon smuggling. Later on he befriends one of the major figures in India’s underworld, a smart and shrewd Afghani and goes to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets with the rest of the mujahideen. Not bad for a complete outsider in a tight Indian culture.
While, the almost 1000-page book was an absolute page turner, I have to admit that many passages were just so on the extreme that made you wonder if what you’re reading actually happened or a figment of Lin’s wild imagination.
Nevertheless, it’s an amazing book of someone that actually lived life instead of sleepwalking through it.
“It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured…”
“Happiness is a myth, which was invented to make us buy things.”
“The size of our happiness is inversely proportional to the size of our house.”
“The biggest problem with corruption as a form of government, is that it works so well.”
“You can never tell what people have inside them, until you start taking it away”
Verdict: recommended
I don’t read biographies often (in fact I don’t remember the last biography I read) but after reading this one, I think that will change. It doesn’t really matter whether you have a Mac or a PC, an Apple fanboy or a hater, you should still give respect where it’s due and recognize Steve’s accomplishments.
Steve Jobs is an interesting insight into Steve’s life from the time he was put up for a closed adoption by his biological parents to his death after long battle from cancer.
Steve was a truly emotional man. One moment he was fully ecstatic and calling something, “insanely great” while the next second he was angry or even crying and calling something a “piece of shit”.
Despite being a bit less than 600 pages, the book is broken up in short series focusing on a certain part of Steve’s life from the iMac to the iPad. It was written well and was a fast and engaging read.
“My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.”
“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”
“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”
“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”
Verdict: recommended
In many ways, the Second Iraq War really only began after it was invaded by American troops. Thanks to a power vacuum, there was sporadic guerrilla activity, and even al-Queda was flourishing after their arch-nemesis, Saddam Hussein, was removed from power. It was no longer a physical war characterized by tanks and airplanes, but a more intelligence gathering approach to find and flush out the insurgents and their armies of suicide bombers.
While the more cruel interrogation techniques (waterboarding, Abu Ghraib scandal, etc) are highly publicized, few know that it was mostly normal conversations, albeit with a psychological twist, with the prisoners that yielded real results such as the successful raid on Zarqawi’s (al Quada’s top leader) safe house.
It’s a faced paced read as the interrogators try to figure out what made the insurgents tick. In fact, the book reads more like a psychological thriller than a war memoir.
This book will surely change the way you view insurgents and their ideologies.
Sperm Wars: Infidelity, Sexual Conflict, and Other Bedroom Battles
Verdict: recommended
Did you know that a women is far more likely to conceive through an affair rather than with her boyfriend or husband? Or that how most of a man’s sperm is actually created to battle other sperm? What about that a female is more likely to use the condom much less with a lover than her own partner and much more likely to conceive with her lover?
Reading this book is like taking the blue pill: rest assured, you will never think about sex the same.
It’s an easy and engaging read about human sexology written in a form of thirty three short stories about various sexual activities followed by a thorough explanation of why it happened the way it did.
“Initially, she can simply watch him in competition with other males. … But finally, the only real test a woman can set is whether a man can negotiate and overcome her own defenses. To test this, she has to resist first verbally, then physically. The stronger and more realistic her resistance, the better the test.”
"Less than 1% of sperm is capable of fertilizing an egg. The rest is warrior sperm, there to block any rival’s sperm."
“The shape of the penis is designed in such a way that, it can remove the semen of the rival from the vagina during intercourse. “
Verdict: recommended
I read this book because I wanted to understand Colombia in anticipation of my move earlier this year. This book did not disappoint.
It was an interesting and a quick read about Pablo’s humble beginnings as a car thief in Medellin before slowly rising to the top of the drug cartel.
I found it interesting that Pablo always began a meeting by referring to his subordinates as “caballeros” (gentlemen in Spanish). He was an extremely smart and capable man, and capturing him required the country’s full resources and more.
Each page felt like they were an inch closer to capture only to have him escape at the last minute. I finished this medium-sized book in two sittings.
“I prefer to be in a grave in Colombia than in a jail cell in the United States.”
“Everyone has a price, the important thing is to find out what it is.”
“There are two hundred million idiots, manipulated by a million intelligent men.”
“All empires are created of blood and fire."
The Upgrade
Verdict: not recommended
Being somewhat of a flash-packer (backpacker with money) myself, I had high hopes for this book, which was recommended by a jet-setter friend who flies to a new destination every weekend and stays in expensive five star hotels.
Instead, I got a story about a binge drinking Englishman who first attempted to travel around US by train. Most night outs usually ended up the same: after heavy drinking, the author barely remembered what happened and tried to retrace his steps back. Instead of trying to weave an interesting plot from the same old storyline, the book seemed like it was repeating itself many times over.
Even the traveling was hard a bit hard to follow. It started with traveling by train in US, followed by a few flights to California, only to again continue with traveling by train. Then the author went to London for a bit and somehow ended up in Spain shortly after.
The traveling had no goal, no inspiration and was written in a sloppy style that one would expect to find in a blog instead of a well written book with an interesting plot.
Maybe it’s because I’m not English, don’t understand English humor, and not a heavy drinker, a lot of things in this book (actually most of it) seemed rather ridiculous, dumb, and as an Englishman would say, rubbish.
Pass.
Verdict: buy it if you’re bored
Tales of an English teacher traveling the world teaching English, experiencing foreign lands and, occasionally trying to get laid.
Although I’ve never considered teaching English (a friend did offer it to me in Brazil), I can still relate to the author’s experiences and was nodding my head in agreement in certain situations.
His time in Russia was quite interesting.
I found the writing style a bit too informal and terse; something that’d you expect to see in a diary written by a teenage girl instead of an e-book. However, I took a liking in the author’s humility and ego-less delivery to overlook the juvenile writing style.
It was a fun and enjoyable read, and for $2.99, I couldn’t have asked for more.
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