The Caliph's House

A very interesting book I finished reading recently was Tahir Shah's "The Caliph's House". A personal account of a family's transplant from a first world country to Morocco albeit into an erstwhile Caliph's bungalow. A dilapidated bungalow that was past its prime is bought by Tahir and his wife Rachana and the book is the story of their year long struggle in getting it transformed into a livable paradise straight from the Arabian Nights.

It is so difficult to fathom how every culture reacts differently to circumstances and Tahir captures that so succinctly in his book. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I liked the story telling style of Tahir. His personal biography is pretty interesting too, a writer of Anglo-Afghan-Indian ancestry with Sufi traditions thrown in, he has written many other books too. I definitely want to read the others including the one he wrote while he lived in India for a while. That's the time he met Rachana in Bombay I guess.

References:
Tahir Shah
Caliph's House Review by New York Times
Buy the book at Amazon

The God Delusion

I recently finished reading Richard Dawkins' book 'The God Delusion'. I bought the book, at my local Costco after reading the back cover, which lead me to believe that the book would provide a set of logical explanations and conclusively prove that God does not exist. After finishing the book this is my take on it.

Even though it tends to succeed in certain areas of the argument, I found the writing style to be pretty drab, meandering about, sometimes even rambling with no focus. It felt more like an attempt at a research paper with references being thrown all over the place, just to add credibility to the arguments. Yet at the end of it, I was thinking, is that all ? Is that all your argument is against the existence of God ?

I definitely loved the parts where he goes after organized religion....a pet peeve of mine too. About how religious orders and religious minutemen usurp the original intent of organized religion to be a provider of a social net for people to believe in and gain collective strength. That has long been lost in a maze of rituals and blind faith, bordering on fanaticism. Be it the Abrahamic faiths or the other major religions in the world, almost every one of them is guilty of such faulty principles, even though the original creators probably never had such intent in mind.

Yogi's Rating : 3 stars.

References:
Wikipedia
www.amazon.com

On my desktop

On my desktop currently...

Technical
1) Documenting Software Architectures: Views and Beyond
by Paul Clements, Felix Bachmann, Len Bass, David Garlan, James Ivers, Reed Little, Robert Nord, Judith Stafford
Great book for creating architectural documents. UML based views and approaches to capturing architectural patterns in docs.

2) The Timeless Way of Building (Hardcover) by Christopher Alexander
Rereading this. Classic work. A bible for both classic architects and software architects.

Fiction
1) Life of Pi (Paperback) by Yann Martel
A book about an Indian kid traveling by ship. Interesting read so far.

2)The Alchemist: A Fable About Following Your Dream by Paulo Coelho
A fairy tale of sorts... I was impressed by some portions of it, but it sounded too goody two shoes, kids fairy tale like, for my taste.

Non Fiction
1) Thus Spake Zarathustra (Paperback) by Friedrich Nietzsche
This is hardcore fringe western philosophy. ..please don't blame me if you don't like it..please read a chapter on amazon before buying it. I mean he claims that God is dead and that we are living in the age of the super man. I had read the first volume, so when I got a deal for the three volumes for 5 bucks, I went for it.

2) The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need by Andrew Tobias
A classic investment book, been constantly updated for the last 25 years now. Some of the ideas are pretty common sense based, but some gems worth knowing about. Only useful for the US markets though...a lot of material only about here and not useful if you are interested in world wide fund management strategies.