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January 2007
1/28/07
Armughan's 2007 Reading List
1/26/07
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Sunday, January 28, 2007
January is a good time to put up this post -- I think the list is pretty final but may change here and there as the year goes on (e.g. if Dan Brown's Solomon Key is published this year that'll of course get added to the list). January has almost ended but I think I'm on track so far. As I finish the books, I'll update this post with quick reviews, or if the book warrants, post a separate review.
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Armughan's 2007 Reading List
Non-Fiction (in no particular order)
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Great book about the author's mission to open up schools in the impoverished northern areas of Pakistan. He was scaling K2 -- the second highest mountain in the world -- when he got lost and was near death when some villagers found him and helped him regain his stength. Out of gratitude, he vowed to return and build a school in the area. Amazon will donate 7% of proceeds of ALL your book purchases to the author's nonprofit Central Asia Institute www.ikat.org - if you go through the link on www.threecupsoftea.com -- every dollar can make a difference (In rural Pakistan or Afghanistan it costs CAI only about $1 per month per student to educate a child, about $ 1 daily for a teacher's salary, and a penny to buy a pencil!) | |
| Rory Stewart's account of journey through Afghanistan on foot after the fall of the Taliban. | ||
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WWII naval battles from the perspective of four naval commanders. | |
 The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857 |
A supposedly riveting account of Bahadur Shah Zafar -- the last mughal Emperor of India. He was emperor in name only, the British East India Company exercising real administrative and political control. I leafed through this at a bookshop in Lahore during my recent trip and made a mental note to get it from Amazon. Should've gotten it from Lahore as it is more expensive on Amazon ... oh well | |
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747-800 & 787 vs A380 & A350 .. .bring it on! | |
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The obligatory military science book...a British General's perspective should be interesting as compared to the Wesley Clarks and Tommy Franks... | |
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I've always wanted to learn more about Game Theory after being introduced to "The Prisoner's Dilema" in an undergrad micro-economics course. And of course, watching "A Beautiful Mind" only reinforced that.... | |
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Crash course in physics and beyond. | |
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I have always been fascinated by Robotics but could not formally take a robotics class in my undergrad or grad work at CMU. This text is used by several intro robotics courses in good universities and I just want to gain a basic understanding of motion planning, forward and reverse kinematics, basic computer/robot vision.... | |
 Hacking Roomba: ExtremeTech |
I love my Roomba and want it to do more.... | |
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James Tomayko was one my my professors at CMU. He passed away a couple of years ago and this text seems to be a good intro to an often overlooked aspect of software engineering ... the people! | |
| Agile methods of software development. Some material in here should be review for me of Scrum, XP etc but browsing the ToC on Amazon it seems to have some other interesting topics. | ||
 The Indus Saga |
I picked this up in Lahore. A Cambridge-educated lawyer by training, Aitzaz Ahsan is a prominent politician in Pakistan. In 'The Indus Saga' he traces the centuries-old identity of the people of the Indus region. | |
| Picked this up in Lahore as well. Orhan Pamuk of course having won the Nobel prize last year has shot to fame. Istanbul is his part-autobiographical depiction of this great Turkish city. |
Fiction
One of Orhan's acclaimed fiction pieces. I'll read this one and decide if I like him enough to get Snow and some of his other works. The problem is that all of these are of course translated into English from his native Turkish ... and I don't know if it really captures Orhan's writing or things get lost in translation. | ||
| Saw it reviewed in BusinessWeek ... | ||
| Recommended by my wife... | ||
| My colleague KimOutlaw had recommended this last year. Its a good, quick read focusing on the (supposed) mystery around the TWA 800 crash. The ending is an interesting twist. | ||
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Demille's sequel to Night Fall. | |
| Sree said its a page-turner so can't be all that bad? | ||
| A mystery set in 1865 Boston. | ||
| Harry Potter for adults? Okay okay I'll get around to reading Rowling's series too ... next year perhaps. | ||
| Exploring the unknown is always fascinating. | ||
| This has won all sorts of sci-fi awards ... |
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This entry has 2 comments: (Add your own)
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I will pay you a dollar for every book you finish. Finish is defined as "read every single word " :-) I will trust you to not cheat ;-)
PS: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is highly recommended, though that book alone could take you close to a month.
1/29/07 9:40 AM