Books I Read in 2020

This was suggested to me by a coworker and I enjoyed reading it. I loved how he mixed his personal and his business accounts, as well as his sense of mission.

It took me a while to finish reading the three essays, and I wish I was introduced to Leo Strauss’s writings earlier in my life, when I was struggling with understanding classical Greek philosophy in my twenties. I have read the subject material of the three essays (Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Politics, Thucydides’ Peloponnesian Wars) before, but I have struggled to relate them to today’s world. Except perhaps the very early realization that I was not a big fan of the society and the system described by Plato in the Republic. I have also not accepted the simplistic version of Thucydides’ Trap that is used in describing US–China relations as declining-power / rising-power dynamics.

Unlike the previous book (The City and Man), which took me multiple months of interrupted reading, I was able to finish this over one weekend night. It is a summary of their eleven-volume The Story of Civilization. I really loved how the chapters were divided into: earth, biology, race, character, morals, religion, economics, socialism, government, and war. And then ending with growth and decay and the final “is progress real?” I really liked the speed and brevity of this book.

This was on my reading list for a while. And like Leo Strauss, I wish I had read Hirschman’s writings earlier. The writing argues out what is mentioned in its subtitle: political arguments for capitalism before its triumph, by building up the intellectual and philosophical foundations from Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Sir James Steuart, John Millar, Adam Smith, Tocqueville, and Schumpeter. I did have to pause a number of times and understand the subject matter of the background material.

Revel’s collection of conversations with his son Matthieu Ricard, the molecular biologist turned Buddhist monk. It is a fascinating dialog that combines Jean-François’ western enlightened skepticism with his son’s explanation of monastic Buddhism to a mainly western audience. The book covers various aspects of the meaning of life, personal accounts of the ability of some monks to read minds and to understand rebirth, the current state of Tibetan Buddhism, and the history of spiritual thought in the East.

Part of my self-education on the complex and untaught history of racism in the US, and to learn how one can make a difference and change.

I felt that I was finally ready to read the Farsi original. At first, I compared the literal text with Edward FitzGerald’s interpretive translation and got a bit worried about how different they were.

which FitzGerald translated as:

When I started wondering what it really meant, and why the bird is singing in Pehlevi (old Persian) to the yellow rose, I realized that not only is the text untranslatable, any deep interpretation has to be in poetry as well. And that’s when I realized what an admirable job Edward FitzGerald did with his translation. Everything in this poem (the day, the not-hot not-cold wind, the dusted faces of the rose trees, the rain clouds cleaning them, the nightingale singing in high Pehlvi, the yellow rose, and of course the wine) has a different meaning from the literal one. It is close to impossible to tie them together in prose.

Swami Yogananda’s book, Wine of the Mystic, also helped me understand the deeper context of many of the quatrains (ruba’i). But frankly, I feel it will take me at least one lifetime of reading and understanding to get any close to the real meaning of the poetry.

Reading this slowly, in the original, and slowly understanding the meaning has become a fun weekend activity for me. Here’s a really interesting one, from Qissa-i deedan-i khaleefa Laila-ra (the story of the Caliph’s seeing Laila):

If you ask someone who has read the Bhagavad Gita what this reminds them of, they will probably point to Bhagavad Gita 2.69:

The question is whether these are independent thoughts, or whether one influenced the other? Molavi’s poetry is full of verses that make one wonder. Like the Rubaiyat, I think it will take me more than one entire lifetime to understand the real meaning of Molavi’s poetry.

This started coming up in my Facebook promoted feed and I bought the book after watching the summary video. A lot of the principles match mine, and the book is a good framework for building a meritocratic and accountable work culture.

The book starts with the issues of how medicine is practiced today, including the author’s own, personal, and painful experiences. He covers the advances of artificial intelligence and gives a good overview of how that can be (will be, is being) applied to generate better diagnosis, detecting mental health issues, drug discovery, neuroscience research, diet management, and becoming a virtual medical assistant. I would highly recommend it to someone who is remotely interested in the future of medicine and health care.

I came across this book while I was trying to finish one of my blog posts. It gave me a good mental framework to think about contemporary geopolitics in the context of a multi-century narrative. The part that impressed me a lot was how he started the South Asian chapter with a brief overview of Kautilya’s Arthashastra, and the Bhagavad Gita.

It was mainly my curiosity that got me to understand the elements of Tamil classical culture. I felt that the English translation did a good job (I don’t speak the language) but may have simplified the overall meaning.

This had been recommended by too many smart people to ignore, and I succeeded in finishing it on my second attempt. The initial account of the horrors of the Cultural Revolution turned me off, but the book ended in an interesting way. I am reading the sequel now.

A recommendation from a coworker when we were discussing genetics in one of our team happy hours. This is fascinating research, especially the science and the mathematics behind it. His Harvard lab page, especially the list of software tools, is very interesting too. Discussing the genetics of South Asia has its political undertones, and he has done a commendable job of staying clear of that.

I had fun reading both of them together. Farsi was India’s official and court language for more than 500 years, from the 13th century to the late 18th century. It was also interesting to note how these two books documented the two major regime changes India (South Asia) went through. The first was a transition from a Sanskritized age to the Persianate age. And then, from a Persianate age to the Anglicized age. The second book, about the medieval history of Bengal, covers the expansion of Islam in Bengal, which eventually caused the political division of the region.

The memoirs (1508–1556) were written by Humayun’s sister, Gulbadan Begum. Humayun was the second Mughal emperor, who presided over a very shaky empire and lost his empire for 15 years until he regained it with some help. The memoirs cover the events from his birth to the reconquest in 1555. It felt like a continuation of the Baburnama, but from a different point of view.