EpicurianContent

28/01/2025

John le Carre writes a compelling spy novel that seamlessly blends philosophical introspection and tragic romance. It asks difficult questions about personal beliefs, values, and the very nature of espionage. Alex Leamas’ journey home is simultaneously poignant and affirming. The book, for its pace, plot twists and emotional depth, remains an essential addition to one's reading list.

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Follow the link below to read Books We Recommend’s detailed review for The Spy Who Came In From the Cold.
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A compelling spy novel that seamlessly blends philosophical introspection and tragic romance. It asks difficult questions about personal beliefs, values, and the very nature of espionage. Alex Leam…

29/10/2024

What if you didn’t have a specific gender? But a person has a gender, either the one she is born with or the one he identifies with. Gender inordinately influences your life, your experiences, your opportunities and your capacities. A man can grow facial hair and a woman can bear a child. But consider the implications of not having a specific lifelong gender. Consider the implications if every month for 5 days you are either a man or a woman, but you can’t predict or control what you will be this month or next. How would such a world be?

“The Left Hand of Darkness” Ursula K Le Guin’s inspired answer to the thought experiment - what if you didn’t have a specific lifelong gender? For starters, there can’t be gender stereotypes. And a sentence like “The king was pregnant” would be perfectly normal, almost mundane. The book is set on the planet of Gethen. Gethenians have no fixed lifelong gender and its social structures have developed differently from societies where gender identity is binary.

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Follow the link below to read Books We recommend’s detailed recommendation for The Left Hand of Darkness
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What if you didn’t have a specific gender? But a person has a gender, either the one she is born with or the one he identifies with. Gender inordinately influences your life, your experiences, your…

15/10/2024

Picture this: you are visiting a new city, a city that anyone visiting falls in love with; you have always wondered why. For three days you explore the city’s immensely interesting main market street and you understand why everyone would like the city but you haven’t still fallen in love. On the fourth day you spy a lane branching off the market street and curiously you follow it. And you are blown away. The lane is even more interesting than the main market street. You see, hear, experience the city in an entirely different light. You now, truly, madly fall in love with the city.

Replace “city” with “drama series” and “days” with “seasons” and you have the making of a memorable TV series. The fourth season of “The Wire”, HBO’s epic drama series set in Baltimore, made me finally realise why critics rates the series so highly.

Follow the link below to read Books We Recommend’s detailed recommendation for The Wire: S4

https://bookswerecommend.com/2023/09/26/the-wire-s4/

01/10/2024

I live in strange times. To live and earn a living, I must exhibit my life; all of it. Everything that I do is constantly measured, rated, ranked and compared. My whole existence is reduced to a set of measurements that purports to tell me how I am leading my life. I no longer can render worth to my life and work; the Algorithms do.

Thea Lim gives words to this sense of loss. Her thoughtful essay describes how the Digital Age has turned us into hamsters on wheels. Contemplating on her own experience as a successful writer of fiction, she shows how now we must all be “content creators” and “influencers”. With all these measuring and ranking and rating, we tried to eliminate the Unknown that makes living scary. But we also ended up eliminating the Unknowable that makes living interesting.

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Follow the link below to read Books We Recommend’s reflections of “The Collapse of Self Worth”.
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I practise mindful meditation. I practise so I can learn how to deal with anxiety. I use an app to help with my meditation practice. This mediation helper app tracks how often I practise, for how l…

24/09/2024

A good book tells you a story. A great book makes you live the story. And that’s why Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is a great book. She pulls you in to the narrative, you are now part of the events unfolding, you are living them, feeling them, even smelling them. You are not just admiring a picture, you are IN the picture.

Virginia Woolf paints with words. It is an indescribable experience as you live all that’s happening to the characters and share their thoughts and emotions. You are simply transported into this world and you inhabit it like you have always belonged. Take this book with you on your next holiday, or read it over a weekend when you are alone or want to be alone. You will know what it is to live in a painting.

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Follow the link below to read Books We Recommend’s detailed review for “Mrs. Dalloway”
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Virginia Woolf paints with words. Let me explain. A great painting is great not only because of what it captures but because it lets you imagine and feel. A great painting is more than its subject …

28/08/2024

Every identity - national, linguistic, religious - is adorned with jewellery pieces made of the same material: victories in a war. We all revel in victories in wars we never witnessed, let alone fight. It makes us feel superior, cements our identity and bonds us with others like us.

Consider that the war your side won has someone like you, a human being, on the other side that lost. Now imagine that this person, unlike you, actually fought the war and ended up on the losing side. What does it feel like to lose a war? What does it feel like when your society actively tries to forget you and your efforts? What does it feel to realise that you would never have a chance to avenge this loss?

Jean Paul Sartre’s dazzling book, Iron In the Soul, eloquently describes what it feels like to be the losers of a war. Empathy is what makes humans, human. The book, hopefully, helps you discover your humanity

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Follow the link below to read Books We Recommend’s detailed review for “Iron In The Soul”
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16th December 1971: The Pakistan army surrendered in Dhaka and India took ~93,000 prisoners-of-war (POWs). 50 years later India still celebrates this victory. But have you ever wondered what it was…

23/08/2024

Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” is probably the most misunderstood phrase in macro economics. It fuelled the free market movement, arguing for no or minimal government intervention in a market’s functioning. Unfortunately, this misunderstanding also underpins most of the massive market failures in modern times. Smith never spoke of THE invisible hand; he only ever referred to it as AN invisible hand; a metaphor, not an inviolable rule of economics.

John Cassidy’s wonderful book “How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities”, chronicles the rise and development of “reality-based” economics that opposed the free/rational market dogma. I recommend it as a cure to the touching belief in market’s ability to solve all social and economic problems.

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Follow the link below to read Books We Recommend’s detailed review for “How Markets Fail”
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Most of you have heard/read about the stock market meltdown of 2008. Some of you, like me, will forever remember the nightmare as stocks lost 40% of their value in just 12 months. Would another suc…

13/08/2024

So when was the last time you made a friend - a real friend. Someone who you can meet by just showing up at her doorstep; someone who you meet for coffee or dosa because he was in your neighbourhood and called. You a had a bunch of such friends when you were younger, in school and college. But as you grew up, they drifted away and you haven’t been able to replace them with new friends. And you wonder “Why?”

Kelly Stout decided to do something about this situation. She set herself a goal of making one new friend in a month. This essay chronicles her adventures. Stout writes with rare humour and empathy and you will chuckle along as you read. Her essay gives voice to an almost universal lament, and the fact that she (kind of) succeeded gives you hope.

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Follow the link below to read Books We Recommend’s review of “One Friend In One Month”.
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The author reflects on the importance of friendships and difficulties in making new friends as an adult, drawing inspiration from Kelly Stout’s essay on challenges when making new friends.

20/07/2024

Some days you are overwhelmed by all the bad news. The corrupt, the vile, the uncaring and the seemingly impregnable System you live with, horrifies you. Even more degrading is that you seem incapable of fighting back. The life of a Coward may be comfortable but impotent.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, unlike me, is a true Hero. But he is also understanding and empathetic of the coward in me. In this essay, he offers ideas on how even I can resist the System. He brings hope that a small, relatively inconsequential actions of mine can add to the overall effort to push and right the System.

This is an essay that not only should you read but share with your children. They are the ones to inherit the world and help prepare them deal with the System better.

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Follow the link below to read Books We Recommend’s recommendations for “Live Not By Lies”.
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You know bad news sells – sells newspapers, boosts TRPs, and what-not. But some days still are really hard. You can’t get past news that illuminates the starkly horrible System we live in. Th…

14/05/2024

It takes years, even millennia, for Civilisation to emerge from the Jungle. But Civilisation is a fragile state. The Jungle lives within all of us. It doesn’t take a lot for the Jungle to overwhelm Civilisation. The descent from Civilisation back to the Jungle is swift. This is the cautionary tale that Joseph Conrad tells in his astounding book, “Heart of Darkness”.

Conrad paints a bleak picture of us humans, but it is a picture you are well advised to examine and acknowledge. Conrad writes such incandescent prose that you feel the horror viscerally, like you witnessed it first-hand. This novella will haunt you for long.

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Follow the link below to read Books We Recommend’s detailed recommendations for “Heart of Darkness”
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Conrad paints a bleak picture of us humans but it is a picture you are well advised to examine and acknowledge.

11/05/2024

You are overwhelmed by all the Noise around you - people, mobiles, TV, traffic. Your mind screams for some peace and quiet, some silence. So you lock yourself in a resort, retreat, your own room. It feels nice for the first few hours and then you start to feel strangely troubled. Your brain seeks simulation, you can no longer stand the Silence. What’s going on here?

Jeannette Cooperman’s meditative essay “Variations on the Theme of Silence” explores how, perhaps, Sound and Silence are two sides of the same coin. Maybe it isn’t sound that we seek to escape, but what it represents. Maybe it isn’t silence we fear, but what it means.

Read this surprisingly calming essay and maybe you will find the abiding, comforting Silence that is within you.

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Follow the link below to read Books We Recommend’s recommendations for “Variations on the Theme of Silence”.
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Silence ISN’T absence of Sound. Review of Jeannette Cooperman’s meditative essay on Silence and Sound are two sides of the same coin,

27/04/2024

For an organ that weighs only about 1.2-1.4 kgs, the adult human brain is a gas guzzler. The brain consumes a whopping 20% of our body’s energy output. Evolution responds to this energy guzzling by trying to make the brain function as efficiently as possible. The result is rather unforeseen. The human brain is lazy and its default setting is to find an answer quickly, and with minimal effort.

Daniel Kahneman is an Economics Nobel laureate of 2002 and his research focussed on the consequences of a lazy brain. In his seminal book “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, Kahneman presents the consequences of living with a lazy brain. The book is filled with stunning insights on how humans make choices and mostly sub-optimal or “irrational” choices. Kahneman also offers a framework to understand how the brain responds to choices, and in critical situations, with sufficient self-awareness, you can use this framework to “hack” your brain’s lazy behaviour.

Make this book a part of your library, and read it again and again. I guarantee you will paid back many times over what it cost to buy the book.

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Follow the link below to read Books We Recommend’s recommendations for “Thinking, Fast and Slow”.
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Daniel Kahneman presents his seminal research findings of a lazy human brain that relies on heuristics and biases to, often, make suboptimal decisions.