Abhinav Agarwal

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

The Best of Sherlock Holmes

Best of Sherlock Holmes (Wordsworth Classics)

A hard-to-fault selection of Sherlock Holmes mysteries. 12 of the stories were selected by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as the best from the 44 Sherlock Holmes stories that had appeared by then. David Stuart Davies adds a further 8 to the mix, which include such classics as The Man With the Twisted Lip, The Blue Carbuncle, and Charles Augustus Milverton. The mysteries seem to lose little of their charm and appeal more than a century after their writing. Short introduction by Davies is a useful bonus that reveals interesting tidbits.

"In the March 1927 issue of The Strand Magazine, a competition was held to choose the twelve best Sherlock Holmes stories from the forty-four already published in book form. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had made his choice and placed the titles in a sealed envelope and readers were invited to match the great man's selection. ... It is fascinating to note that not one entrant chose the exact same titles. The winner, a Mr R.T. Norman, managed ten." [Introduction, pgs xiii, xv)

These are the twelve stories selected by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The Speckled Band - a personal favorite of mine
The Red-Headed League
The Dancing Men - fascinating
The Final Problem - a must-read for every Sherlock Holmes, where the detective meets his end, almost, at the hands of his nemesis, Prof Moriarty.
A Scandal in Bohemia
The Empty House - aka the Return of Sherlock Holmes.
The Five Orange Pips
The Second Stain
The Devil's Foot
The Priory School
The Musgrave Ritual
The Reigate Squires

and the 8 additional stories selected for this collection are:

David Stuart Davies was born in 1946. He was a teacher of English before becoming a full-time editor, writer, and playwright. Davies has written extensively about Sherlock Holmes, both fiction and non-fiction.^{[1] [}David Stuart Davies - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

Sherlock Holmes (pronounced /ˈʃɜrlɒk ˈhoʊmz/)^[1] is a fictional detective created by Scottish author and physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. A brilliant London-based "consulting detective", Holmes is famous for his astute logical reasoning, his ability to take almost any disguise, and his forensic science skills to solve difficult cases. [Sherlock Holmes - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, DL (22 May 1859 – 7 July 1930^[1]) was a Scottish^[2] physician and writer, most noted for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, which are generally considered a major innovation in the field of crime fiction, and for the adventures of Professor Challenger. He was a prolific writer whose other works include science fiction stories, historical novels, plays and romances, poetry, and non-fiction. [Arthur Conan Doyle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

Monday, December 6, 2010

At Home

At Home: A Short History of Private Life
(my Amazon.com review, all my Amazon.com reviews)

Every house has a story. Every room has a story. And this is the almost perfect book to tell it. Quite an amazing feat.

Starting with the house, you go into almost every nook and cranny of the house that you can think of, including the bathroom, kitchen, dining room, living room, the hall, and the things that make up the house, like electricity, the spices in the kitchen, and those two, no three, tumblers of salt and pepper. Why only salt and pepper? No one knows. Really. No one knows.

Or how did corn and potatoes become so staple a feature of our diets?

"Potatoes are from the nightshade family, which is of course notoriously toxic, and in their wild state they are full of poisonous glycoalkaloids." [pg 28]

"Had people not been tending it continuously for these thousands of years, corn would be extinct." ... "Corn kernels do not spontaneously disengage from their cobs, so unless they are deliberately stripped and planted, no corn will grow." [pg 37]

That people in olden times had little time for anything except work, which brought them money for food, which took up an enormous proportion of their incomes, is documented in stark detail in the chapter "The Kitchen"

"Up to 80 per cent of all household expenditure, according to the bread historian Christian Petersen, was spent on food, and upto 80 percent of that went on bread." [pg 63]

Which brings us to the provenance of the phrase, "baker's dozen"

"Because bread was so important, the laws governing its purity were strict and the punishment severe. ... This was a matter of real concern for bakers because every loaf of bread loses weight in baking through evaporation, so it is easy to blunder accidentally. For that reason, bakers sometimes provided a little extra - the famous baker's dozen." [pg 63]

The history of ice is equally fascinating. Or that of electricity. Or the rise of New York city in the United States. And so on.

The weakest chapter may well be the one on "The Drawing Room", where there are more than a few digressions and detours that don't seem to take the reader back to the starting point in quite the same way as the other chapters do.

Such an exercise can quickly turn into a literary drudgery of sorts. What keeps this book a page-turner are three things: the logical collection of facts into chapters, each of which serves to take the reader into a part of the house.
Secondly, the skillful weaving of a ton of facts, nuggets, trivia, history, and more into a seamless narrative.
Thirdly, the use of humour in writing, without overpowering the reader. Sample this, "If it was his goal to make as little an impression as possible upon history, he achieved it gloriously."

It can become a bit overwhelming if you were to attempt to read this book in one sitting. A more rewarding option would be to read it one chapter at a time, and finish the entire book in a week or two. You can keep coming back to this book again and again, and can literally open it to any page at random, start reading from that point onwards, and expect to be rewarded by pearls of discovery.

Read a sample from the book (via Amazon Kindle on the Web)

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Bill Bryson

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

2010 Election

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http://www.colbertnation.com/full-episodes/thu-october-14-2010-bill-bryson

Bill Bryson - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bill Bryson - Official Books Website
Bill Bryson: Home (Random House)
Excerpts from At Home

Search Amazon.com Books for bill bryson
Search Amazon.com Kindle Store for bill bryson
A Short History of Nearly Everything: Special Illustrated Edition
In a Sunburned Country
A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail
I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away
Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words: A Writer's Guide to Getting It Right
The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America
Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe

© 2010, Abhinav Agarwal. All rights reserved.

Bangalore Metro, MG Road

The first stretch of Bangalore Metro is now almost ready for rollout. Sometime later this month, in December, or January, the first stretch is expected to start between Byappanahalli and MG Road. The photos below are from MG Road (see route map).

This is the Metro stretch as seen from the Anil Kumble circle. You can see the route snake northwards as it proceeds towards Cubbon Park, circling around the Chinnaswamy cricket stadium.

A closeup of the same stretch above.

Immediately after the Anil Kumble traffic signal, on the left-hand side of the road there is a coach kept for public display.

This below is the MG Road station, still under completion as you can see. Hectic construction activity can be seen all around. Between now and a month from now it will all be complete, with shiny new trains running on shiny new tracks, and stopping at shiny new stations.

View Larger Map

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Click

Know your audience. This book tries to be a lot of things to a lot of people, and never quite succeeds. If you do persevere through the book, you will be rewarded by some nuggets of useful information.

You really have to get past the opening. The authors seem almost determinedly intent on putting off the reader at the beginning itself, when they talk about attraction between people in a romantic, life-partner, chance-rendezvous turning into a romantic affair manner, and almost set the narrative in this context. This is not what the book is quite about. There seems to be a lot of useful material on how people communicate with each other, empathize with each other, and how bonds of trust can be made to grow when people interact. The more you know this the better the chances that you can turn speaking with people into something that's more productive.

We all know what we mean when we or someone says "we clicked", so do we have to define it as "... an immediate, deep, and meaningful connection with another person or with the world around us."? And "click accelerators", "quick set intimacy"??? In the modern day and age of casual relationships, do we really need more information and tips on how to form relationships with the seeming click of a finger? Well, the authors tell you how to do just that. By telling us that there are five click accelerators.
1. Vulnerability
2. Proximity
3. Resonance
4. Similarity
5. Safe Place

The way these click accelerators are described seem very awfully close to the methods employed by cultists to attract and then retain members into their cults. Not a very wholesome comparison.

A lot of research is thrown our way, but almost all of it has to do with experiments conducted by psychologists. Not much by way of academically accepted theories that can credibly explain why we behave.

Sorry, but this book just didn't click for me.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion still remains the best book on this topic, on how to influence people. Read that book instead, or re-read it.

Brafman Brothers (Authors' website)
Click: The Magic of Instant Connections
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Collins Business Essentials)