I’m glad to have stumbled upon this underrated gem. The main character, Josephine Rivers, is a child prodigy with a knack for numbers. Mathematics is hidden all around us and we can predict many things using applied mathematics. Josephine’s ability to physically see equations in her surroundings or when she thinks of a situation and calculate them in real time lets her make perfect predictions and take precise decisions. This makes her a target of a criminal mastermind who wants to use her powers for profit. The book was intriguing from the first page. Shifting the narrative between the past ..read more

Many countries are currently enforcing restrictions on mass movements to curb the spread of coronavirus. Some have a nation-wide lockdown as a preventive measure. All non-essential businesses are shut down and people who can’t work from home are to be given leave. Only the essential service workers are allowed to go out. Police monitor the streets and people who roam around unnecessarily can be imprisoned. In other countries, such restrictions are enforced only in major cities or places where there is already a lot of positive cases of COVID-19. In some places, there is no lockdown in place bu ..read more

Today, February 14, 2020, is a very special day. It marks the 30th anniversary of the “Pale Blue Dot” image. This is a picture of Earth taken by NASA’s Voyager-1 after passing Neptune on its way out of the solar system. In this image, Earth appears as a speck of pale blue light. You could even say it looks like a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. This iconic image shows how tiny and inconsequential our planet is in the cosmic realm. However, it inspires the opposite reaction by signifying Earth’s importance, its fragility and its uniqueness. This image was taken by Carl Sagan’s proposal an ..read more

This post is part 3 of the Reading 101 series. Say you’ve taken an interest in reading, formed a reading habit and learned to make time for reading. Sooner or later you will find that it can be pretty expensive to sustain a reading habit. Depending on whether you like to read only physical books or if you are okay with any format of books, there are ways to make your reading habit cost less or nothing at all. Here are the tips ordered from well-known options to the roads less travelled: Check out libraries This is not only an affordable way to read books, but it can also help you meet people ..read more

Equal Rites is the third book in the Discworld series and the first one in the witches series. The story starts off with a dying wizard passing on his power to the newborn Eskarina Smith without knowing that she is a girl. The only people who witness this are her father and the midwife, Granny Weatherwax, who also happens to be a witch. They decide to keep quiet about it because wizardry is the wrong kind of magic for a girl. There was no written rule, of course, but it was the general consensus that only men became wizards. If women had the potential to use magic, they became witches. In the ..read more

Last year was a roller coaster ride for me. Started the year with new responsibilities and learnings at work. Took care of parents’ health issues. My mother successfully overcame covid after a tough battle. Got married and started a new phase of life. Ended the year asking and getting more challenging work. Along the line, I completely neglected my health, my reading habit and this blog. Because I’m pretty good at planning (if I may say so myself), let me show you how I arrived at my goals so that you can also plan better. 1) Identify the Focus Areas: Before setting up a goal, it is good to an ..read more

Many Science fiction books and movies feature sentient robots or Artificial Intelligence that has evolved to gain consciousness. These stories often end up in a man versus machine theme. The robots may crave power and think they are superior to the fragile humans and decide to kill them off. Or they may enslave humans in a matrix to use us as a source of their power supply. They may even decide to end some humans for the sake of preserving humanity as a whole. There is differing opinion on how close we are to Artificial Sentience or Machine Consciousness. Some believe that it is not even possi ..read more

Alright, I know I’m almost 2 months late with this post but better late than never, right? Last year, I signed up for many reading challenges with ambitious (read unrealistic) goals. Then I fell into a reading slump like many others and ended up removing some challenges till I got down to just three. In 2021, I’m trying to be mindful of the fact that life has its own challenges and can get in the way of my reading challenges. I am planning to focus on classics and non fiction. After a whole year of a self imposed book buying ban, I got the penguin little black classics box set and will start r ..read more

This story is set in, as you may have guessed, a circus. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves. As the title suggests, it opens only at night and arrives without warning. Within its black-and-white striped tents is a magical and utterly unique experience. The descriptions of the setting was the main focus of this book. I thoroughly enjoyed the writing style. Behind the scenes, our protagonists Celia and Marco are dueling by creating exhibits in the circus. They have been trained in magic since childhood for this contest. Unbeknownst to them both, this is a game in which only one can be left standin ..read more

Hope this blog post finds you in the pink of health and great spirits. This is a difficult time and I’ve been in a reading slump like many others. For some reason after writing about my lack of motivation to read, I got very inspired and began binge reading short stories. This actually proved to be a good distraction from the tough events. If you are new here, I took up a media diet for 1000 days where I planned to read a short story and a poem a day while minimizing time spent on social media and series. I decided to club this with one of my 2020 reading challenges ca ..read more