After Baltasar Gracián’s worldly wisdom, the thirteenth Penguin Little Black Classic brings us back to poetry. This time, the poetry reads like poetry. Unlike Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, where the verse often flows like elevated prose, Keats writes the sort of poetry most of us imagine when we hear the word: rhyme, rhythm, melody…
In the twelfth book of this continuously engaging series, we once again encounter aphorisms. Unlike the ones in the fifth book by Nietzsche, however, these are concerned less with philosophical questions than with the practical problems of life. After wandering through ancient China with the Tang dynasty poets and medieval Japan with Kenko, Penguin…
As I had written in my post on Nightshade, I hoped Michael Connelly would keep writing the Stillwell stories. It was refreshing to read about a younger version of Bosch, though one who is not quite as burdened by department politics. Stillwell also has something Bosch rarely enjoyed: an area of jurisdiction that he…
Where Whitman was all about enterprise and the pioneer fervour, in Penguin Little Black Classic number 11 we encounter a 13th-14th century Japanese Buddhist monk who says, “Sit around a while. Why the rush?” I knew nothing about Kenko before picking up this little book. I discovered that he became a monk late in…
In my previous Penguin Little Black Classics post, I had mentioned that meeting the author of the tenth classic seems to be destined. I have been a serious reader for about three decades now and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass has been one of the books that has been recommended to me countless times…
The previous Penguin Little Black Classic – Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal left me shocked. It is one of those books that leaves you admiring the writer while hoping the next book on your shelf inhabits a gentler world. Swift’s satire is so sharp and so relentless that even after the final page, the…
One of the interesting things about writing this series every month is that after a while you stop looking only at the market. You begin noticing how investors behave. This month, I came across several articles discussing whether investors should pause or stop their SIPs because markets have delivered very little over the past…
The LBC number 8 is a satire. Specifically, a collection of satirical essays by Jonathan Swift. The book is called A Modest Proposal – For Preventing the Children of poor People in Ireland, from being a Burden to their Parents or Country; and for making them beneficial to the Publick. I love satire as…
“You’re stalling, ART-drone said. I am not. I can stand here and be useless without any ulterior motives, thanks.” We are back in the original timeline after a switch back in Fugitive Telemetry. System Collapse picks up immediately after Network Effect. And for the first time in the entire series Murderbot is not as…
”What is a random opportunity killing? When a human kills another human just because they can.” After the scale of Network Effect, Fugitive Telemetry felt surprisingly intimate. There were no sprawling rescue missions, no alien contamination threatening entire systems and no crises stretching across large sections of inhabited space. Instead, someone has been murdered…