Its set in medieval Europe stylised world, where the land is divided into seven kingdoms brought under the rule of a feudal family after an uprising that partially obliterated the previous rulers of the land. The socio-political system of the land is the richest facet of the narrative. The society, styles and mannerisms are medieval European but the political  machinations are more akin to Japanese feudal systems with houses similar to hans and the head of a house equivalent to a daimyo and bannersmen similar to faithful retainers.

There is no sole protagonist, rather the story unfolds from the perspective of different characters. This is not a novel about a knight in shining armour who is always a breath away from certain death but survives ferocious monsters and unimaginative-yet-moderately-cunning siblings to win the hand of the fairest bimbo in the land. Here characters are born, they evolve and as soon as you start to admire or hate them they die. The story unfolds a breath taking speed leaving behind favourite characters and elaborating every strand of this epic into a vivid and enrapturing tale. To summarise the plot I fear would be unjust and unwise.
Only I should warn you that this series is incomplete. The last three books of this saga have not been published nor there is little hope that they will be. None the less, the book is worth reading. And I too have involuntarily joined this cult of George Martin fans who make a weekly virtual pilgrimage to his site hoping to find that the remaining books have been written.

Strand is my favorite bookstore in  New York. I like standalones. I like standalone coffee shops, standalone restaurants etc. But unlike other standalones, where that extra something that keeps them afloat in this era of conglomerate uniformity is costly, Strand is notoriously cheap.  This place is not for the weak bibliophile. Strategically located at 12th and Broadway, it boasts of housing the largest number of books at any one store location.  The outside is littered by weathered bookshelves improvised with wheels to their base that are a book bargain hunter’s mecca. You have spent quite a few afternoons loittering this half a block crashing elbows with others. The outdoor collection is more than decade-old zagat surveys and tour guides and you have picked a few classics from here – Cancer Ward by Solzhenistyn and Bleak House by Dickens each for just a dollar(+ plus some tax; grrr… ny).

You enter and there is a visual overload of books! There are books everywhere but not in the Barnes&Noble come-sit–and-sip-coffee way. There are no defined aisles. There is a swarm of oscillation and sometimes you can move into or away from this brownian-like motion. As you enter there is a bag check to your left and on the right is a closed cabinet of old books, and in front of that a selection of that season’s fashionable readings – you always find them boring. Moving on, there are 3 tables of the latest in paperback both fiction and nonfiction. The store knows that most people here are looking for the best while still being pretty cheap. The hardbounds and the new releases combined with staff’s recommendations are dumped into a box-like basket. There is a New York City books and other photo collections table near it – you wish you could buy the lot. On the other side of the basket are  large stacks of nutrition, health and cooking books – you have never picked a book from that part of the store. As you wade your way through the sea of people carrying shopping baskets filled with books you find yourself in staring at a fine choice of history, economics and sociology reads. You remember you picked up Capitalism.. by Schumpeter, struggled hard but were steadfast and kept a Hayek back on it stack and sneaked glanced through most of  Media by Eco – which brings you to the most interesting part of strand – there are no places to sit and read. There is a small table dedicated to all things Chomsky and before you can go further in you realize that what you thought was contigous wall is actually mamoth steel bookshelves facing sideways housing large hardbounds and folios with topics that revolve around war & history. This is a diffcult place to find a specific title. The store help is always around, with the titles in genre and then author classification it could be tiring if you wish to find a particular one quickly. If you have patience and bad taste then you can find a lot of great books here. You boast of finding ‘The War for all the Oceans‘ here – discounted and then further discount and finally sold away for $3.45. As the grip of claustrophobia tightens and you find yourself back in the main thoroughfare of book buying there is a corner dedicated to true crime, mystery and fantasy. If you were flipping pages of the latest in healthy cooking and missed out on the maze of old history texts but moved past the references and dictionaries you would find yourself in the classics section. You can find cheap classic paperbacks – the thin off white pages and weak binding but also those small leathered hardbound collections that you remember seeing only in college libraries.  Now irrespective of the path you have taken you find that behind you is the fantasy section and infront are tables with stacks of the most popular in science fiction and music literature. Past that and ignoring those narrow sanctums of ‘Fiction by Author’ you are at the poetry, movies and plays desk still books all around, but the shelves have rather old books unless you are looking for something specific. And so you look around and ask if there are any books on business or science and you are directed to the basement. What ! there is another level of this method-in-madness.

You snake your way back to where you started and find there are stairs that plunge into this basement. You step lightly below, and the rush is far less. Ah, most people have assumed that these storage or basement books are somehow of lower quality – so not true. Right infront is the counter with the store help that can direct you to a book, stashed behind them are requests people have made for pickup, and you wonder if shopping for a book that did not have the immediate gratification of stroking the spine of a book would you request one and then come all the way again to pick it up ? So that shelve is indication of the number of people who have heard of amazon or half. You stop at the first table you see its got all of popular science lumped together. You pucker your nose at this bad taste and walk right towards the business titles, they are a respectable collection, but if you were looking for that specific tom peters’s management bible you probably wont find. Moving on you find that you are suddenly in the middle of some crazy combination of religious, philosophical, mystic and epistmelogical titles, you are amused that they are next to the business section but more amused to find richard dawkins and christopher hitchens on the table that says ‘Religion’ ! Theres a dark aisle of books curiously marked ‘Self Help’ thats the first label that you have clearly read since you stepped into this store and now you pretend to coolly drift away through philosophy titles and find yourself in stranger realms of sociology and social work. You move on to find old science books – once heralding the next big thing in science and technology some of these are more than a decade old, as you ponder when exactly will your car start flying you glance at complex mathematic titles. Not those math dumbed down for mainstream that you read but advanced graduate/professional mathematic literature that makes you blink twice and you wonder if this the best use of the real estate. You dont want to go back to the helpdesk, so you hug the shelves nearer to the back wall and turn up in an sanctum sanctorum (similar to the ones in north indian temples)  of health and disease titles. Pretending to be interested you walk briskly what seems forward but your are not sure anymore – the internal compass is awry. Skirting the journalism section you want to rant about Fox News to the columbia student reading Robert Fisk but you are prudent, you are an explorer and not very funny when trying to be sarcastic.  And there its is the oddity you could not imagine – the ‘review’ section. Books that showed up for review and never took off. It is a discouraging section of wannabes, but occassional you can find a gem – a ‘review’ book that made it big and the store overlooked a mis-shelved copy. If you find it such an entity its yours to keep at a 60% discount, good luck. You want to outsmart every one but tough luck; you move on. A box of audio books, you stare at without paying any attention, the crampy air is getting to you, you look around if you missed any corner and there – aptly under the staircase is the occult section you stand back and realize that the business titles are between occult and philosophy you look around to see if anyone else found that funny. Maybe it wasnt that funny, your parikrama is complete and you race up the stairs to level above.

You are back on the main floor, there is but a small attic perched up above. Arsty books for artsy people. The potential buyers of these books – pink haired, striped tights wearing NYU liberals sneer at you and you wish you could prove that you are a libetarian by body language – you give up, sulk and amble down with earthy nonchalance towards others.  You calculate if that slow headflick of contempt would be too belligerent in this made up fist fight of disdain. You are too meek, you sulk a little more. Looking at the khadi cloth bags with Strand’s name on it you quickly convert its price into rupees, dismiss it as being too exorbitant and quickly walk past the purchase counters and out of the store before they could label you as a lurker.

San Juan was where I went honeymooning, but I have an unhealthy fetish for books, bookstores and libraries. Since it is early in our marriage D lets me indulge. Yeah, we gonna see how long that lasts.

Back to the book, this is A.J. Jacobs’ journey on how he read the entire Britannica Encyclopedia to become smarter. Its witty, casual and personal. The quest of becoming the smartest person in the world is pretty common I guess and the encyclopedia is a good place to start. But unfortunately almost everyone that Jacobs’ wants to impress by proving the he is getting smarter by reading the encyclopedia thinks he is obnoxious and weird. The ones that Jacobs looks up to as smart think that the britannica project is useless and whimsical. Unfettered he reads on, from A to Z and thats how he stacks up chapters in this book.

If you think reading useless trivia is boring this is not for you. But if, like me, you have read parts of encyclopedias, dictionaries and thesauruses for  fun and now know what the keyboard shortcut for getting a random article on wikipedia then you will enjoy it.

Well, it can search.

I have not done a keyword search comparison between Bing and Google but my search experience with Bing has been satisfying. I did not feel that Google with the added information that it gets since am logged in does a better job, which means that bing has a smart way of solving the cold-start problem or Bing has understood that people will search the way they search as if they were using Google, which is trickier than one may think since it adds constraints to an already complicated problem.

I know Microsoft is marketing it as a decision engine, now thats a forward-looking approach which semantically makes Bing somewhere between Google and Wolfram|Alpha. I am not claiming that they are there already or that the users have grown to understand how decision engines work nor is it very clear where a commercial search engine (which by default is google) ends and a decision engine starts. It may be just a marketing trick but its working.

It looks good.

Its very un-microsoft. Now maybe microsoft has changed but the microsoft sites that I have to visit on my day job are always an information-overload-trying-to-sneak-another-application, which is worse since the firm has an across-the-spectrum account with MS and if there was a new product we’d buy it too. MSDN is comprehensive bordering on verbose but since its community-driven, which makes people like me part of the problem, I’ll let it slide. Back to bing, it is refreshing. Since the rise of Google search, theres been a somewhat tacit but widely accepted agreement that a spartan, functional look was the answer to the overdose that is Yahoo.  But bing, is neat without being stark. The images on the mainpage are as a rule always interesting but never overpowering. The images have not so subtle showcases about bing’s power and sometimes they can surprise you.

The search results look good. I like the extra-fetch when I scroll over the search result. The extra-fetch blob is clickable, so I can open the result in a new tab right from there with minimum mouse movement. I like that.  I dont like the sponsored links because with immediate previous searches & similar popular searches on the left and the sponsored results on the right I get less space for my results!

The name is smart.

Its a small word, pretty accent-agnostic and it has a potential to be treated as a verb. I’ll google bing it. Its smart, maybe far-fetched and would not have crept in if I did not think bing was here to stay.

It could do more, I hope.

I wish there is an option to collate my existing search result with my previous search or a popular search (the ones that show up on the left) which is more than just the result of the putting all the keywords in the search field. Something like google squared but better.

The New York Times reporter for Iraq has shared the time he spent in Iraq. His writing has no agenda, it has his opnions, but this is not muddled by the washington rhetoric, its beyond the fake righteousness of the right and past the loopiness of the left.

His writings are one man’s struggle to understand the obsfucating greyness that is Iraq today. The book is a collection of essays, mostly in chronological order, tiny tidbits compared to the articles that are printed everyday in newpapers. They are stark portrayals of a troubled people in a troubled land. But the style of writing has a jaded resignation, like the author expects to get up any moment from this hellish nightmare. I think this is the ultimate journalistic benchmark. To pretend to be unaffected such that the reader has to ask:  ” Is this happening somewhere in the world right now and all I can do about it is read?”

There are strikingly honest descriptions of soldiers and terrorists. How the policy and fanaticism has faded in the background and these people are trying to survive a war, all sides trying to outlive the other. Kids, american and iraqi, lost to the madness of a civil war; forever.

I have little respect for conventional journalists, especially the american journalists seem too complacent with their own 20 second sound-bite or the 200 word op-ed, but this is radically different. This is bold, genuine and unapologetically thought-provoking.

Pattern Recognition

This is the first Gibson that I have read. And I like it.

Pattern Recognition is not exactly traditional sci-fi. Its does not have space travel and it does not have nano bots. There are obscure internet boards and movie fanatics. The interleaved life of a video nut and an a logo-agnostic aesthete who is ironically allergic to her day job. There is a certain charm and credibility in her psychosomatic character. Its a curious mystery this media junkie picks up at a high-end brand consulting job. The quest is to go around the world hoping to find an artist who no one knows. The American and west European corporate elite, Japanese nerds and Russian mafia – its got it all with lucid descriptions that you can picture the Grey streets of London evening, the neon night of red light Tokyo and crisp morning of Moscow. There seems to be a shadowy big brother always lurking. One keeps guessing if any of the events are coincidental or orchestrated. Its a light, engaging read.

I like the build up to the epidemic. It starts with the vermin dying away. The townspeople realize this is an evil omen. The first case is considered an oddity and authorities don’t pay any attention. But gradually the enormity of their troubles dawns upon them – the lucky and the resourceful are rushed away, while the determined, the poor and the expendable stay to endure.

The epidemic is the protagonist. The disease follows the known pattern. There is the first wave that chokes the town in grief and then slowly the people learn to live with the disease chewing them away. There is a lull in the disease and the spirits are up but the disease fights, the more virulent strain hits back. There is always that ambiguous hope of a vaccine. The disease finally fades away, the scars from the town are cleaned away, the ones etched into the minds of survivors remains.

Its a short intense novel.

My name is red

I like the way Orhan Pahmuk thinks. Alas, some play in the way he writes may have been lost in translation. But this an interesting read. The style of writing is different from Istanbul. And if it wasn’t set in the same city I would not have guessed that its by the same author.

Its like a Sherlock Holmes mystery written as an intertwined James Clavell tale set in a medieval Ottoman Cluedo game.

Took me 10 odd pages to get an handle of the tone. But once used to it, the multiple point of view buildup makes it an impatient read. Theres much more to it than the mystery, with which the book opens. There are tales within tales that sometimes hint and sometimes misguide. I like the formality in speech coupled with chicanery of thought of the players. The wordplay, the deliberate obfuscations, the oriental ‘go-between’ . There aren’t many that can capture of all of that in a first person narrative.