Books that started 2023

 So far, this year has been dominated by watching OTT & Movies. Lots were pumped out every week, it feels like. But I did manage to squeeze in a few books. 

Lessons in Chemistry - by Bonnie Garmus

Peppy writing style even on some very very serious events. 

Began the year with this one. Later found out they are making a movie too. I doubt the movie will be able to capture some of the perspective that come out in text. This sort of sarcastic & indirect style will be hard to translate on screen. I hope they make the movie interesting in some other way atleast.

Gen Z @ Work - by David Stillman and Jonah Stillman

Got this book in-order to make sense of this ever changing world. The world styed sameish for about 100 years. Then the pace of change was decade. And since past 25 years, things have been changing every 5 or lesser years. So tough to catch up. 

More than that, the existential question - should we catch up with the new which will go away in a few months or stay grabbing to the past which has survived of decades and more ? 

By coincidence it turned out to be by Minnesota based authors. Its not mentioned in the blurb or anywhere. I found out while reading through the passages.

Format of the book is interesting. David is Gen X and Jonah is a teenager Gen Z. To differentiate their commentary & perspective on different topics, they used normal and italics for their separate generation voices.  That helped, I will say. 

This book explains a lot of things in this ever changing world. The approach is mostly to showcase how each generation (traditionlist, boomer, Gen X, Milleniels & then the new Gen Z) thought, acted and their situation in each. Some assumptions where very simplistics - like boomers being parents of Milenials and Gen X being parent of Gen Z. For some it correctly lists out a lot of things that are typical of Gen Z while comparing with the Millenials, Xers and Boomers about the same topic. Lots of topics covered in the different chapters.

Press Start to Play - Short story collection

Last Black Friday, I bought XBox for myself, to step into the work of Video Games. Read more here about those adventures... With my past experience being limited to Tetris and Minessweeper, I decided to read up on games before I started.

Wide variety of short stories. Lot of them sci-fi and some in twilight horror category.

Notable ones - Andy Wiers, Anda's Game by Cory Doctorow.

The Tetris Effect - The Game That Digitised The World - Dan Ackerman

Got to see the Tetris movie released recently. Book was better. I mean, the movie is thriller format with lot of physical action. Same events & situations happen in the book but in a realistic fashion; and yet they were no less thrilling.

Covers a lot on how software business deals happened, at least in 80s & 90s. Communication might be faster now of course, but people dynamics still are the same. One book about current s/w business world was in the Instagram book. Other insights were about the beliefs and philosophy of the coding world - about the passion for free nature of open code and it becomes a sin when its popular, sharing via floppy disks and 80s & older models of desktops.

Part 1 dealt with the origin - Alexey Pajitnov and Henk Rogers. Page 109 at best boom and bust cycles of the video game industry would go through over the years. In part 1, Bonus Level 1, Chapter 7 - Pa 73, Effect of Tetris on brain. I used to dream of Tetris bricks. Turns out was a universal phenomenon. Called Phantatronic.

Chapter 19 - Pg 191 to 195 - Cherry at the Gates was the most delicious chapter on direct negotiation meetings, various politics and consequences.

The Invisible Life of Addie Laurie - by V.E. Schwab

Whimsical, mystical,  Flowy language; poetic in many chapters. That alone lulls you to read more and never want to end the book.

 Faustian deal of soul is the basic premise. Set in NYC but travels to various places across different times. Deals with the theme of timelessness. Pg 201 (Food) and Pg 257 (miss structure).

Only Human - by Slyvain Neuvel

I am sorry but to be honest, I couldn't plod through the last book of this trilogy; even while I loved the previous two books. I flipped through the pages to get to the ending and even that I couldn't make it through.

Andrew Wyeth Close friends 

A collection of his paintings, made at different stages, of his neighbour friends from the place where he grew up & lived later years.

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