This post comes a little late. A very brief review as before:

1. On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything (non-fiction): I missed reading Nate Silver’s first and more famous book – The Signal and the Noise – and so was excited to pick this subsequent one. The first half of the book is about gambling. The second half about Silicon Valley and effective altruism (EA) among others. Felt like it could have been two different books. Feel ambivalent about it

2. South of the Border, West of the Sun (fiction): One of the slimmer books by Haruki Murakami that I happened on at the public library. I was craving an easy fiction read, and this book turned out to be what I needed. Would I read it again? Probably not. There is a long list of Murakami books I have yet to read.

3. A Shining (fiction): At just over a 100 well-spaced pages, this felt like one of those books I might be able to read in one sitting at the library. I read the first 20 pages, kept it back, then out of curiosity looked up the author, John Fosse, a name I had never encountered before and half-expected to be one of those up-and-coming writers experimenting with form, found out that contrary to my expectations, he had won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2023. So I picked the book back up again and read the entirety of it. It does get better, and leaves you thinking about it once you put it down. A lesson not to judge a book or an author before you have given them a fair chance.

4. The Covenant of Water (fiction): I had heard enough good things about this book by Abraham Verghese, a physician and a writer, that I finally overcame my intermittent aversion to taking on really long works of fiction. The book did 2 things for me: it made me realize how much I enjoy multi-generational family sagas (the last one was Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, and I have Pachinko on my list to read), and it makes me want to visit Kerala.