Well, I had an interesting weekend, at least most of it.
The party started on Friday evening itself, where I found myself inadvertently conforming to my unspoken and unwritten rule of falling a bit sick in the final month of the year. I have been (reluctantly and with vehement protest) keeping up this tradition from the past two years, and rest assured (pun intended) I did not wish to make this a three is a charm thing.
However, a couple of plates of cold (and I must confess, very tasty) mezze at the annual Christmas lunch proved to be my nemesis. Something in my head warned me (and very feebly, I should say in my defense) on the dangers of what I was injesting, but I did truly think the lukewarm coffee that accompanied the delicacies would keep my throat safe and in pristine condition…I was terribly mistaken.
So here I am, bearing a rebellious throat and a stuffy nose, making a mental note to heed to the voices that I hear the next time around. As always.
What I lost in health, I gained in reading. Absolutely devoured 1929, the latest by Andrew Ross Sorkin, who you may all know from ‘Too big to fail’ – the book for the small minority who still have the habit, and the movie for the rest. 1929 is a fly-on-the-wall account of the greatest market crash in history, which could be a laborious read at around 600 pages, but on that I breezed through in little less than a day, courtesy that engaging way in which Sorkin brought out the story.
That long sentence aside, the book is an absolute delight, and unravels like a thrilling novel more than an account of a time when the stock market didn’t play by any of the rules that are so commonplace today. Well, 2008 also showed us how impotent any rule is when faced with human greed.
“No matter how many warnings are issued, or how many laws are written, people will find new ways to believe that the good times can last forever. They will dress up hope as certainty. And in that collective fever, humanity will again and again lose its head.
Sounds familiar? (this is in no way a reference to Bitcoin, AI or any other paradigm with sound fundamentals and a long history of…never mind).
Anyways, go grab a copy and enjoy.
So I had my Sunday to fill up (the bits that Keshav allows me to), and so I picked up a (relatively) lighter read – The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig – a fictional story that starts like this:
Between life and death there is a library.
Up until now, Nora Seed’s life has been full of misery and regret. She feels she has let everyone down, including herself. But things are about to change. When she finds herself in the Midnight Library, she has a chance to make things right.
The books in the Midnight Library enable Nora to live as if she had done things differ-ently. Each one contains a different life, a possible world in which she made different choices that played out in an infinite number of ways, affecting everyone she knew as well as many people she never met. With the help of an old friend, she can now undo every decision she regrets as she tries to work out her perfect life. But things aren’t always what she imagined they’d be and soon her choices place the library and herself in extreme danger.
Before time runs out, she must answer the ultimate question: What is the best way to live?
They had me at the first line really.
Of course, it kept getting better.
A person was like a city. You couldn’t let a few less desirable parts put you off the whole. There maybe bits you don’t like, a few dodgy side streets and suburbs, but the good stuff makes it worth-while.
and
When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person.
I leave it to you to judge whether you will pick this book up for yourself. But yes, I will also possibly judge your choice of the written word, if you don’t:)
Wish me a happy read, and a better throat. See you on the morrow!