The Tarahumara (or Rarámuri) are an indigenous tribe inhabiting Copper Canyon in West Mexico. They live isolated in natural shelters and are renowned for their long-distance running ability. Running in huarache sandals (basically traditional flip-flops) they are able to run up to 300km in a multi-day session through the canyons and on stony ground.

The long-distance running tradition has both a practical use, for hunting and inter-village communication, and a recreational one. The Rarájipari is a running game where teams of 4+ runners compete against each other. Each team has a wooden ball that they have to kick to progress. The goal is to be the first team to reach a certain agreed destination. In casual games the distance might be a few kilometers, and in inter-village competitions several hundred kilometers. To make these running events even harder, the night before involves a party where the participants get drunk on Tarahumara corn beer, Tesgüino   .

When the book was written in 2009 the Tarahumara preferred to stay isolated and didn’t participate in ultraraces outside their region. This is in part due to negative experiences they had after two of them won the 1993 and 1994 Leadville Trail 100   in Colorado.

Chris McDougall’s book introduced the Tarahumara to a wider audience. The book’s main story is that the American Micah True (Caballo Blanco) organises a local 50-mile ultrarace in the Copper Canyon celebrating Tarahumara running heritage: the best Tarahumara runners against the best American ultrarunners. Micah True died in 2012 and the race still happens every year as the Ultra Maratón Caballo Blanco. McDougall, who like most casual runners is often injured, wants to join this race and writes about his training.

Into the main story McDougall weaves introductions of the small group of participating American ultrarunners (Scott Jurek, Jenn Shelton among others) and the history of ultrarunning. The book also makes a few scientific claims, some of which are contested:

• Humans evolved for endurance running. The nuchal ligament, Achilles tendon, arched foot, big glutes, and our sweat-based cooling make humans remarkable endurance runners. Bramble and Lieberman (2004)   state that “endurance running is a derived capability of the genus Homo, originating about 2 million years ago, and may have been instrumental in the evolution of the human body form.”

• Persistence hunting   made us long-distance runners. Basically humans can outrun most game over a long hunt. We just tire the animal out over a several-hour chase. This is still an open hypothesis   .

• Modern cushioned running shoes cause injuries. He claims modern running shoes lead to bad form, e.g. heel strike. The author makes a case for running barefoot on soft ground to prevent injuries and run more naturally (like the Tarahumara). The release of the book boosted the barefoot running movement and popularised minimalist shoes like the Vibram Fivefingers   . However, it is still debated whether natural running has an overall lower injury risk. Altman, Davis (2014)   found that

  “The descriptive analysis suggests a greater number of calf injuries, but lower number of knee and hip injuries in the barefoot group. Additionally barefoot runners reported less plantar fasciitis than the shod group.”

  and this meta paper by Perkins et al. (2014)   concludes

  “Because of lack of high-quality evidence, no definitive conclusions can be drawn regarding specific risks or benefits to running barefoot, shod, or in minimalist shoes.”

As a casual runner with occasional smaller injuries, I am not yet converted to barefoot running. Instead I keep focusing on injury prevention through:

1. weekly volume management (don’t increase weekly distance by more than 10%)
2. stay in zone 2 on easy days
3. focus on good foot strike
4. strength sessions (calf raises, hip work, single-leg deadlifts, and squats).

Reading the book, I definitely got excited about (ultra-) running. I like the book’s message that humans are designed to run. We should figure out how more people can enjoy running casually without getting injured. However, I didn’t enjoy McDougall’s writing style. He was a sports writer for Esquire and the book sometimes felt like a long sports magazine article. Also some of his claims should be weakened or updated in the next edition.

Here   is a National Geographic documentary about the Tarahumara.

This book was a recommendation from a friend at a recent wedding. In the first part of the book the author describes how he found investment opportunities in 1990s Russia that helped him create one of the most profitable hedge funds at the time. In the second part of the book he details how he seeks justice for a murdered friend after his fund clashes with the Russian authorities.

Bill Browder   was born in the US, then moved to London in his twenties in 1989 to work for BCG and shortly after for Salomon Brothers   . Through his family history he had an affinity for Eastern Europe and wanted to find a job that allowed him to work there. While working on an advisory project for BCG he realised that many former state-owned companies in post-Soviet Eastern Europe and Russia were severely undervalued. On his investment in Sidanco   he writes:

This was a remarkable discovery. Everyone knew that Lukoil was a steal, since it controlled the same amount of oil and gas as British Petroleum but was ten times cheaper. Now here was Sidanco, sitting on a bit less oil than Lukoil, but not much, only it was six times cheaper than Lukoil. In other words, Sidanco was sixty times cheaper than BP!. […] On 14 October 1997, BP announced they were buying […] shares in Sidanco for a 600 per cent premium to the price we had paid a year earlier. It was a home run.

By buying stocks in these companies and then demanding reforms for better corporate governance and shareholder rights, his fund Hermitage Capital Management   , generated very high returns between 1996 and 2007 and grew its $25 million seed investment to $4 billion. One of his most lucrative investments was in Gazprom   where he subsequently uncovered systematic stealing of assets by its management. (Ironically he showed that only 10% of Gazprom’s assets were stolen, not the 99% market view.) After Putin fired Gazprom’s CEO Rem Vyakhirev and the new management recovered stolen assets, the stock surged “Not 100 per cent - one hundred times.”

The book shows the chaotic transition of Russia into a capitalistic society under Boris Yeltsin and how Browder and well-connected Russian politicians and businessmen could take advantage of it. Browder describes three ways in which the oligarchy formed and could quickly amass a lot of wealth:

1. Arbitrage through the voucher privatisation. The government distributed vouchers to the whole Russian population which allowed them to acquire shares of more than 12000 companies at auctions (and at a steep discount. Browder writes that the vouchers implied a value of $10B for the whole Russian economy!). However, the population was ill-informed and often so poor that they sold a majority of those vouchers cheaply. Those vouchers were then accumulated by a few people, often the old management of those companies or organised Russian gangs. There are also stories of insiders physically blocking access to the auctions to be able to bid for the shares without competition.

2. Stealing of company assets. Management of the newly privatised companies were sometimes able to sell some of the company’s assets, e.g. a gas field, at a steep discount to themselves or relatives. Widespread corruption helped those individuals to avoid scrutiny by accounting firms, police, or judges.

3. Russian raiders. Criminal gangs would take over existing Russian corporations through falsified ownership documents by colluding with local law enforcement and judges.

At the height of Browder’s financial success in 2007, he becomes a victim of Russian raiders and at the same time the Kremlin decides to investigate him. This ultimately leads to the death of his advisor Sergei Magnitsky   in a Russian prison and an Interpol red notice for Browder himself. Deeply affected by his friend’s death, Browder seeks justice and starts lobbying the American Senate and House of Representatives to pass a visa ban and asset freeze for Russians implicated in the Magnitsky case. In 2012 President Obama signed the Magnitsky Act   into law which initially sanctioned 18 Russian individuals and which has since been extended to global scope. Inspired by this law, the EU followed in 2020 by introducing the EU Global Human Rights Sanctions Regime   .

Both parts of the book give a good insight into the 1990s Russian economy and later in the process of US Senate lobbying. The book also nicely complements Navalny’s description of Russia during that time and later in prison in Patriot . In fact Navalny briefly features in Browder’s story since he helped lobby for the Magnitsky Act.

For completeness there are also critical reports about the truthfulness of the story. Read this SPIEGEL investigation   for more details.

When Theodore Roosevelt   lost the Republican presidential nomination in 1912 to William Howard Taft, he sought distraction and new motivation by organising an expedition along one of the tributaries of the Amazon River. The initial expedition was planned to be adventurous yet relatively safe by going along the well-mapped and safely navigable Paraguay River and crossing over into the Amazon valley. Joined in Brazil by the famous explorer Cândido Rondon   , they made the decision to instead explore and chart the unknown River of Doubt from its recently discovered source. The ill-prepared expedition set off in December 1913 and encountered many dangers on their journey. Insects and malaria were causing sickness, their canoes were unsuitable for the river rapids and had to be replaced with newly built ones, and they were running low on food supplies. The biggest danger however was the Indigenous Cinta Larga   tribe, that shadowed the expedition and that could have easily killed them had they chosen to. Fortunately, due to Rondon’s long experience with Indigenous tribes they managed to avoid confrontation. After 4 months, the party finally made it through the unknown parts of the rainforest and reunited with a relief party on the Aripuanã River. Roosevelt, badly suffering from an infected leg, could not have held out much longer. Of the 19 men that travelled along the River of Doubt, only 16 made it out alive.

What was planned as a tourist adventure, turned into a genuine expedition and discovery of the river’s location, now called Rio Roosevelt   . While there was initial doubt about the expedition’s account, the British explorer George Miller Dyott confirmed the discovery on a second trip in 1927.

The book is very engaging and besides the main story of the expedition describes the Amazon Rainforest as a living organism similar to an ocean. As a place of constant survival among its species it is a place unsuitable for humans without modern equipment. I also learned a lot about Brazil’s and Rondon’s quest to connect the country with telegraph lines and how that caused tensions with more than a million Indigenous peoples that lived in the uncharted parts of the rainforest. In the process of building the telegraph lines, Rondon encountered many, often uncontacted, tribes and developed and promoted a peaceful approach (“die if need be, never kill”) towards them. He later founded the Indian Protection Service.

Victor Frankenstein and his monster are firmly part of pop culture. It was interesting to read the original text. I wasn’t aware that a large part of the story is described from the perspective of the monster. Besides this monster perspective, Shelley innovated the mad scientist archetype and tries to explain magic with science (e.g. the use of galvanism to explain Frankenstein’s experiments).

There is an interesting link to The Wager that I read before this book. Shelley wrote Frankenstein at the suggestion of Lord Byron   (Mary Shelley, Byron, Percy Shelley and John Polidori each agreed to write a ghost story.) Lord Byron’s grandfather John Byron   was one of the few survivors of the Wager shipwreck. Had he died on Wager Island, Frankenstein might have never been written.

Guillermo del Toro’s movie Frankenstein   captures the essence of the book and features impressive cinematography, but definitely invents new parts (the Heinrich Harlander story, the tower explosion) and changes or omits others (Victor goes to study in the UK instead of Ingolstadt, Victor’s wedding with Elizabeth, Victor’s relationship with his father).

Of course the book is out of copyright and can be read for free over at gutenberg.org   .

Not long before David Grann’s The Wager, I read Endurance and Maurice and Maralyn . So I seem to have a soft spot for shipwreck stories.

The HMS Wager was a Navy warship. In 1740 the British Admiralty sent it to South America to attack Spanish colonies and transport ships. The book portrays what happened to the crew of the Wager after it sinks while trying to round Cape Horn. Most of the crew make it to a small island just off the Patagonian coast.

The most interesting part is how quickly the strict hierarchy of the Navy broke down and several factions formed and competed with each other. The biggest group around the gunner, John Bulkeley, staged a mutiny against Captain David Cheap.
Eventually two groups make it separately back to England. All of them sail on makeshift barges to Chile/Brazil/Argentina. From there they make it back to England. Cheap’s crew of 4 people arrive 2 years after Bulkeley’s group.

The two groups’ narratives of what happened on the island strongly disagreed. Was it mutiny by Bulkeley’s group or was Captain Cheap not fit to lead? Was the Navy hierarchy formally active after the crew was shipwrecked and on land?

It is interesting to compare the fate of the crew with that of Shackleton’s Endurance   that got stuck in 1915 on the way to the Antarctic. In contrast to Cheap, Shackleton managed to maintain order and command and ensured everyone survived. According to Alfred Lansing’s book Shackleton carefully based his decisions on how they would affect morale, when to push the crew, when to give them rest and food, and how to silence troublemakers. Cheap on the other hand became captain only during the journey, had less leadership experience, and was blamed by some of the crew for the shipwrecking. He also had a strong sense of duty to the mission and prioritised this over all other considerations.

A fun fact is that John Byron   , grandfather of the poet Lord Byron   , was a midshipman of the Wager and played an important role in helping Captain Cheap get off the island.

There is an interesting documentary   about an expedition in 2006 to Wager Island to find the wreck.

This book appeared in many recommendation lists in 2025. I finally read it after my wife finished it. Navalny’s memoir is split into three parts. In the first part he describes growing up in Russia in the 80s/90s. In the second part he describes how he begins his investigations into corruption among the Russian political and business elite and the third part is written during his time in prison.

It’s interesting how he experienced the fall of the USSR in the 90s and how he explains the hope in his community that a new and open Russia could deliver the same prosperity to its population as the West. He illustrates how the prevailing system of corruption is able to divert the huge income from natural resources and former government companies away from the population and into the accounts of a few well-connected businessmen, their families, and shell companies. After Navalny is first poisoned and then, upon return to Russia, imprisoned, the book style changes to diary form. He is detailing his daily life in different Russian prisons until his death in February 2024 ( poisoned with epibatidine   ). Reading the diary entries, I was impressed how stoically he endured his situation in prison (lack of food, lack of mind stimulation, erratic and arbitrary rules to follow) and how he maintained a positive mindset about his situation and even the future of Russia.

After Hard Land this is the second Benedict Wells book that I have read (a gift from my sister). The protagonist Jules and his siblings lose their parents early in a car crash. The book explores how each of them deals with losing their parents, with their loneliness, and how they try to find love and connection. It’s a good holiday book. I enjoyed reading it.

David Deutsch is making the case that knowledge is infinite and that our civilisation can manage to get on a path where we continuously grow our knowledge via conjecture and criticism. To do this we need an error-correcting political system, and an open and dynamic society that values scientific exploration and problem solving.

This book is about Maurice and Maralyn Bailey   who in the 1970s sold their house in England and bought the sailing boat Auralyn. Their goal was to sail across the world to New Zealand. On their way to the Galapagos Islands their yacht was damaged by a whale and sank. The couple survived for 118 days in a dinghy and a life raft before being rescued by another ship. The first two-thirds of the book detail how they organised their days to stay sane and find food and water. A big part of their survival was the fight against boredom on the raft. Their own account of this was published in the book 117 Days Adrift   .

As a sailor who has done a sea survival course in the past, this was really interesting to read about. It’s incredible to think how they managed to sustain themselves on raw turtle and shark meat, fish, and rainwater. It also highlighted how important it is to have a way to signal your location to other boats close by since they were missed by three passing boats who didn’t see them. The last third of the book is about their life after the rescue. Interestingly, they immediately tried to buy another boat to sail to Patagonia which they accomplished. The book ends on quite a sad note when Elmhirst describes Maurice’s loneliness after the passing of his wife in 2002.

Martin Suter’s books are one of my favourite things to read during holiday time. I really enjoy his Allmen detective series. Montecristo was okay in comparison. It’s about a video journalist in Zurich who happens to stumble upon a financial conspiracy. It was a decent read, but the ending of the book missed the typical twists that normally happen in Suter’s books. So the book left me quite unsatisfied, which to be fair, could be the author’s intention based on how the story plays out.

This book is similar to Burkeman’s earlier book 4000 weeks, which I summarised here . However, the approach he takes in this book is different. The book is split into 28 chapters that the reader is meant to read in 28 days. I found this book in a local charity shop and read it in book-club-style together with my wife.

His writing is easily digestible and he reuses several ideas from stoic philosophy. The main takeaway is to not approach daily life as the quest to finish a to-do list that hopefully leads to a better future. But instead embrace the finitude of self and life, and therefore focus on the present. The daily working on the to-do list ends up being the life that one lives. Therefore, one should focus on the items on the list that are important, enjoy and be present in the process, and not to expect to ever finish the list or strike every item off it.

This is a classic in the UK. Since I didn’t grow up here I never read it as a child. So for this Christmas I decided to change that. I enjoyed the glimpse into 19th century London that Dickens tends to give the reader in his books. I think the takeaways from the book are still as applicable as in 1843. Be generous to your friends and family. Don’t hoard money for the sake of it. Approach your environment in a positive, friendly, and open-minded manner and it will be reflected back to you.

My German friend recently recommended the author Benedict Wells to me and suggested this particular book. Benedict Wells has become well known in Germany after his debut book Becks letzter Sommer in 2008.

Hard Land is set in the fictional town Grady in Missouri. The main story is set in the summer of 1985. It’s a classic coming-of-age story. The main character, Sam, is a shy teenager without friends. His life and thoughts are consumed by the illness of his mother and how it affects their family. During the summer holidays he starts a job at the local cinema and meets Cameron, Hightower, and Kirstie. Together they spend a memorable summer, in which Sam is confronted with his fears, shyness, love, and grief. The book makes many references to the films and cinema of the 1980s. At first it felt a bit strange to read a story about an American teenager in an American town, written in German, but that feeling went away as the story unfolded.

In his book Jon Gertner details the history of the Bell Labs   , an industrial research lab created by AT&T in 1925. Well-funded by AT&T’s monopoly on telecommunication in the US, the researchers at Bell Labs worked under the unique combination of available capital, freedom to explore ideas, and a long time horizon for projects. This attracted many PhD graduates (at one point more than 1000) to join the Labs and subsequently make several breakthrough discoveries: vacuum tubes, transistors, solar cells, fibre optic communication, radar, communication satellites, deepsea cables, the laser, UNIX, C, and the development of information theory.

Gertner explores how the lab was set up (having many researchers from different departments in the same building and encouraging cross-department collaboration and serendipitous discovery) to achieve these inventions and whether innovation can be planned.

Another theme of the book is AT&T’s struggle with the US government to keep its monopoly on telecommunication. For many decades the government agreed to the monopoly because of the natural monopoly of long-distance communication lines, AT&T’s commitment to improve communication technology for its customers and its strategic importance during and after WW2 (they also famously guaranteed not to enter the computer market). This constant struggle reminded me of the situation with the US oil companies in Yergin’s The Prize where the US government faced a similar strategic dilemma (more competition vs. strategic and military importance).

Jon Gertner gave a talk about his book   at a Google event.

Following Seveneves and Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon is the third Neal Stephenson book I have read. Weirdly, I stumbled upon all three books in different second-hand book shops.

The story is built around the theme of cryptography. The author takes you into two major storylines. The first is about the encryption arms race between the Allies and the Axis forces during World War II. In the second storyline, which is set in the late 1990s, the characters use encryption to build a secure data haven. Established in an autocratic South East Asian country this data haven is built to host permissionless files and establish a digital currency pegged to gold.

I read this book during my trip through India whenever we were driving between places. I enjoyed the character and relationship development and the nerdy explanations of the different technologies (one-time pad encryption, Van Eck phreaking, etc.) at play. While India is not the Philippines, reading this book in a hot and busy country brought the main characters’ adventures in the Philippines to life even more.

I recently got to visit Bletchley Park, which housed the British WWII code breakers, and is featured in the book:

I read this book to prepare for my trip to India next week. I didn’t know very much about India’s history other than a vague notion of Alexander The Great trying to invade it, the Mughals ruling it at some point, and then first the East India Company and last the British Empire colonising it.

Zubrzycki gives a decent high-level overview of India’s history from the Harappān civilisation (c. 3300 - 1300 BCE), via subsequent Muslim invasions via modern-day Iran and Afghanistan, then British rule, and lastly its independence in 1947. He also explains Pakistan’s origin story and its dispute with India over the Kashmir region, and intra-India Hindu-Muslim tension.

In abundant detail Yergin describes the history of oil in the late 19th century, and how it created economic growth worldwide, played a central role in world war strategies, and shaped political outcomes in many countries. A very dense book, but I learned a great amount.

As a European I only have surface level knowledge of American history. I learned about it for a semester in high school and watched the movie Lincoln   . So I did have a sense of Abraham Lincoln’s role in the civil war and in abolishing slavery.

This book gave me a much deeper insight into the political struggle to end slavery and how Abraham Lincoln managed to balance competing factions in his own cabinet, in parliament, and in the country.

Abraham Lincoln won the presidency to the surprise of most observers at the time. He carefully positioned himself as a down-to-earth, quirky character in just the right political niche to get support from the different political groups when they realised that their favourite candidate wouldn’t be able to get a majority. After he won the presidential election in 1860 he did something unusual. He installed some of his opponents from the presidential race into key positions of his cabinet (this is where the book title comes from).

The first part of the book is about him gaining the respect of his contemporaries that underestimated him for a long time. It’s also about his clever interactions with the key characters in the cabinet to keep them aligned and utilise their individual strengths.

The second part of the book goes deeper into his role during the civil war where he has to make difficult military decisions, like firing generals, and keeping the Confederacy internationally isolated. While at the same time waiting for just the right moment when public sentiment was ready to support the abolishment of slavery.

I learned a lot about political decision making and balancing power.

I wrote about this book in Book notes: How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner .

Annie Jacobsen describes the operational chain-reaction that would be caused by a North Korean nuclear attack on Washington D.C. In her scenario, a nuclear war between North Korea, the US, Russia, and Europe would be underway within one hour of noticing the North Korean ICBM on the early detection satellite (She doesn’t mention China’s reaction). The dust blown into the atmosphere after a nuclear exchange with ~2000 nuclear warheads would cause the global temperature to drop significantly. This combined with limited access to fresh water, crops, and livestock will make most places on the globe uninhabitable for thousands of years.

Her minute-by-minute account of the operational protocols explains why the equilibrium of nuclear deterrence is unstable and spirals out of control once perturbed by one irrational actor. In this scenario, a vengeful and jealous North Korean leader.

The problem is that once the deterrence paradigm is broken, all actors follow policies developed during the Cold War ( Launch on Warning   ) that compel them to retaliate within minutes. Moreover, the decisions are made by Heads of State that are not prepared for the situation and before the full extent of the attack and its intent are known. Jacobsen adds insufficient communication between US and Russia and inaccurate Russian satellite intel as compounding factors to her scenario.

The book contains short explainer sections on why it’s near impossible to defend against ballistic missiles, how the nuclear triad works, and the dangers of a satellite-launched EMP strike.

The book is a fascinating read, but it gave me nightmares. The current accepted status quo of mutual self-destruction appears like an example of a nonlinear system resting in an unstable equilibrium from Steven Strogatz’s book   . The other aphorism that came to my mind was

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

Carl Sagan

Only because deterrence has worked so far doesn’t mean it will work over long periods of time with changing (possibly irrational) players. It only has a track record of 80 years.

I finished this exciting book in three days. The incredible story of the British explorer Ernest Shackleton’s 1914 attempt to cross the Antarctic continent. He and his crew of 27 get stuck aboard the Endurance, which is trapped in the ice in the middle of the Weddell Sea. Their survival attempt includes camping for months on different drifting ice floes. Then sailing in three lifeboats to the uninhabited Elephant Island, sailing another 800 miles to South Georgia Island, and then being the first to cross the South Georgia Island by foot. The author Alfred Lansing benefits from the fact that many of the crew wrote their diaries, kept navigation logs, and took photos. This allows him to give a detailed account of the daily challenges the crew faced: tiredness, ongoing anxiety about finding food, navigation in probably the most dangerous part of the world, boredom, and not knowing when help might arrive.

I learned about Shackleton’s leadership style and ability to base his decisions on how they would affect the morale and safety of the crew. When to push them and when to let them rest, when to ration food and when to celebrate, and how to deal with potential troublemakers. Shackleton seemed to feel a deep burden until the last day to get everyone back to safety. I was also impressed how Stoic and content the crew remained amid all the challenges that they encountered. It’s ironic that Shackleton and his crew failed with their original expedition, but achieved something more remarkable and with a lower chance of success with their struggle for survival.

Here are two quotes from the book that I liked:

“For scientific leadership, give me Scott. For swift and efficient travel, Amundsen. But when you are in a hopeless situation, when there seems to be no way out, get on your knees and pray for Shackleton.”

Sir Raymond Priestley

and

“That evening a crude reception was held [on South Georgia island]. Four white-haired, veteran Norwegian skippers came forward. Their spokesman, speaking in Norse with Sørlle translating, said that they had sailed the Antarctic sea for forty years, and that they wanted to shake the hands of the men who could bring an open 22-foot boat from Elephant Island through the Drake Passage to South Georgia. […] the whalermen of the southern ocean stepped forward one by one and silently shook the hands with Shackleton, Worsley, and Crean.”

It’s cool that the geographical locations of their journey were recorded and that photos are available. You can really nerd out and get a better idea of what it must have been like for the Endurance crew. Here is a map   of their journey. There are some photos available here   . And some photos   about the Endurance22 mission that found the ship wreck in March 2022.

I wrote some notes about this book here .

I bought a beautiful copy of this book at the Shakespeare and Company   bookshop in Paris. This is a collection of timeless advice from Seneca the Younger, a Roman Stoic philosopher whose life included episodes of extreme wealth, power, and tragedies. I found his advice on how to lead a good life very readable and practical. I was surprised several times how the major themes of his writing have equal importance in modern life, e.g. building good friendships, acquiring a good character, dealing with wealth, success, adversity, and mortality.

Interesting account of Boris Herrmann on his first participation in the Vendée Globe in 2020, a single-handed, nonstop, unassisted round-the-world yacht race. The race typically takes longer than 70 days. It’s mind-boggling how he organises his sleep patterns, how he keeps himself entertained, and how he deals with loneliness and the inevitable damages to his yacht. He also talks about his search for Kevin Escoffier who had to abandon his sinking yacht, and how the race turned into a rescue mission.

An excellent biography that captures both the military genius and administrative prowess of Napoleon. Roberts does a masterful job of balancing the personal and political aspects of Napoleon’s life.

A great collection of science fiction short stories by Ted Chiang. I particularly liked “Understand” which is about a man who takes an experimental drug and gets exponentially smarter, and “Tower of Babylon” in which he describes the building process of the Tower of Babylon and the consequences after the project goal is reached.

I would rank the stories in the following descending order:

• Understand
• Tower Of Babylon
• The Evolution of Human Science
• Liking What You See: A Documentary
• Story of Your Life
• Hell Is the Absence of God
• Division by Zero
• Seventy-Two Letters

I wrote down some notes here .

I wrote down some notes here .