Thursday, January 26, 2012

Inexistentialism

NF's often been led to wonder if the existentialists' claim of finding subjective meaning in a meaningless, objective universe via love or religion or music or art or whatever isn't the classic case of the placebo effect's surprising efficacy even when its being placebo is known to the subjects.

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

The Reader

Books read in the last year: January '11 to January '12


1) Sacred Games (Vikram Chandra)
2) The Black Swan (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
3) मंटो की विश्वप्रसिद्ध कहानियां (सआदत हसन मंटो) (Manto's World Famous Stories (Saadat Hasan Manto))
4) Through the Glass Darkly (Donna Leon)
5) The Big Short (Michael Lewis)
6) Our Band Could be Your Life (Michael Azerrad)
7) 2666 (Roberto Bolaño)
8) The Overcoat and Other Short Stories (Nikolai Gogol)
9) Death in Venice (Thomas Mann)
10) The Immoralist (Andre Gide)
11) Between Parantheses (Roberto Bolaño)
12) Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy)
13) Liar's Poker (Michael Lewis)
14) River of Gods (Ian McDonald)
15) No Longer Human (Osamu Dazai)
16) The Windup Girl (Paolo Bacigalupi)
17) What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Haruki Murakmai)
18) सतह से उठता आदमी (मुक्तिबोध) (Man Rising From the Surface (Muktibodh))
19) Sputnik Sweetheart (Haruki Murakami)
20) Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (Haruki Murakami)
21) Demons (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) (reread)
22) The Blue Bedspread (Raj Kamal Jha)
23) The Third Reich (Roberto Bolaño)