Category: books

Book recos needed

I’m in Bangalore next weekend. I’ll be in town from Thursday late night to Sunday afternoon. Apart from finishing off some pending official work and catching up with friends and relatives, one of my agendas for the trip is to finish up my book coupons, which I had won in various quizzes.

I have about 2.5K to 3K worth of coupons with me (not sure of the exact amount). Of this, Rs. 1000 is at Crossword, and will expire in February. I don’t know if I’ll be visiting Bangalore again before that, and I have no enthu to hunt for a Crossword store in Delhi, so I plan to exhaust them then.

The rest of the coupons are for the Premier Bookshop, which I am told is going to close sometime next month. So, I need to spend these coupons too next week. Which means that during the course of the second half of next Saturday, I’ll be probably indulging in the second biggest book binge of my life, the biggest having been in 2004, when I spent Rs. 4000 worth of coupons at Landmark.

Now, I don’t really know what to buy. I don’t have any books in mind that i really really want. So please to be recommending. To help you people with your recommendations, a few pointers from my side. I don’t want you to spend your valuable time and energy recommending books that I definitely don’t want to read, right?

  • I don’t read fiction. I have limited reading time, and want to utilize that to get fundaes in life. So, no fiction please
  • I think I’ve outgrown popular economics books, so they are out too. The last one I read was “why popcorn costs so much at the movies” and it hardly added any value. I think I know enough economics that I don’t need to read such books anymore.
  • I really liked books such as Guns Germs and Steel and A Farewell to Alms. Books that are essentially historical but not really history books. Scientific history or economic history or social history or whatever you want to call it. If you know some really good books in these subjects, do let me know
  • I think I’m still up for popular science. I really loved Six Degrees by Duncan Watts (it helped that I really love Graph Theory, which is the foundation of social networks theory), and have bought his other book on social networks (small worlds, i think, it’s called). Despite four odd years after movin away from technology, I’m still up for some physics or math or computer science, as long as it is well written
  • Don’t recommend any books on financial markets unless they are really exceptional. I’m currently reading Mandelbrot’s “The (mis)behaviour of markets” and though it’s a great book, I’m having trouble ploughing through it simply because it feels like work. Every great idea I come across, I start thinking “how can I create a trade based on this idea?”.
  • Remember that the books you recommend need to be available in India. And I’ll be putting only a single visit, and won’t have time to order books.
  • Remember that the Crossword collection is fairly crappy, and so I need recos for at least Rs. 1K that are available in all popular stores. If it’s a slightly specialized book, it won’t be available at Crossword.

The other big question that has come up in my head is about which bookshop to visit first next Saturday. They are situated about a kilometer away from each other. The thing with Premier is that it doesn’t enable easy browsing, so I’ll need to go there with a long list of books. Remember that I’ve to finish off all my coupons next week only.

On the other hand, Crossword is so crappy that most of the books on my list are unlikely to be available there, and so I’d rather put a visit to Premier after I’ve put visit to Crossword. Anyways, this is the least of my worries now. So go ahead and recommend. Write comments here. Create buzz on this post. Even if you have some questions for me regarding these, leave a comment here. I’ll definitely respond.

The difference between Taleb and McKenzie

A few minutes back I finished reading Richard McKenzie’s Why popcorn costs so much at the movies and other pricing puzzles. Since the book is not available in India, I managed to procure an online pirated version through a friend. And since the book isn’t released in India, I didn’t feel guilty about reading the pirated version.

Continue reading “The difference between Taleb and McKenzie”

My Dear Brothers and Sisters of America

I have a proposal to make. If you are visiting Bangalore soon that is. As you might have figured out from reading my blog, a large number of books that I want to read aren’t available in India. I can ask a bookshop here to import it from the US but that would make the books prohibitively expensive, much more than my willingness to pay.

I notice on Amazon that there are “used and new” books also available for sale, at a cheaper price. Something like a second hand market. And I notice that a number of books are priced very reasonably in that. Unfortunately, delivery for these is only within the US. This is where I need your help.

I will order the books and give your address. You will need to ferry these books to India for me. Of course I know that you usually come back with your suitcases loaded, with gifts and chocolates for cousins up to four steps removed. In the middle of that if you can squeeze in two or three books, please let me know.

The ideal case for me would be to burden each of you with exactly one book. However, the free shipping of Amazon kicks in only when I’m buying a few books. Hence, you’ll be saddled with more than one book. Actually, I wonder if we could work out a mechanism where my books and your books can be ordered together, so as to get the free shipping, and then you can ship my books to India.

As for payment, well, I don’t know how well this will work but I have this mechanism. I’ll order the books much before you leave the shores of the US. Even otherwise, you have a long plane journey to endure on the way here. By carrying my book, you will get the opportunity to read it. I don’t know if I’m a good recommender of books. Nevertheless, I think you should find some useful stuff in these books.

If you can’t leave a comment here, mail me at skthewimp [at] yahoo [dot] com

Indian editions

For the last one year or so, I’ve been relying on bloggers such as Tyler Cowen for my books recommendations. Basically I read about a book on a blog, or say Marginal Revolution does a book forum on the book, and I soon get interested in the book, and go out to buy it. And the fact that I’ve been fairly regularly winning book coupons at quizzes provides an easy financing for these books.

Some of the books that I have bought and read through these recommendations include Super Crunchers, The Black Swan and The Long Tail, all books that I have really enjoyed. Apart from this, I’ve bought and read books written by people whose blogs I read – and this includes Discover your inner economist and The Logic of Life. And I’ve noticed that in general, the books recommended in the blogs that I read are more enjoyable than the books writen by the bloggers themselves. Maybe this has to do with the fact that if I’m regularly reading someone’s blog, there isn’t that much value I can get from the book.

Now, my problem is that a large number of books that I want to read don’t have Indian editions. At least with “popular” books such as “Discover your .. ” the Indian edition came out in due course of time, and I was able to read them. Unfortunately, it seems like the market for a number of such books in India is so small that they don’t bother bringing out an Indian edition.

The gentleman at Gangaram’s book store told me that if I wanted, he would be able to procure the US editions of these books. However, the dollar rate, plus the $10 for shipping means that these books would cost me on an average, > Rs. 2000, which is much much higher than my willingness to pay which stands at Rs. 400. Again, given that US editions are typically much more expensive than Indian editions, asking a friend in the US to buy them (or ordering through Amazon) and sending it to me through another friend or something will again be too expensive. So I wonder what I could possibly do to read the books that I want to read.

Here are the books that are on my “want to read” list currently but I’m not able to procure them.