Number 6's Blog

I am not sure when the thought lodged itself in my head but for many a fortnight I considering reading War and Peace on my iPhone.  I finally started a few months ago but I quickly lost passion for the project.  Why?  To put it bluntly, War and Peace is boring.  I struggled on for a few weeks but finally gave up somewhere in Austria with Napoleon’s Army hounding the Russian horde.

Somewhat later I read a Scientific American article concerning how reading sharpens the mind.  Also, that reading fiction helps understand people because fiction is about people (duh).  The article mentioned 10 fiction books the worth reading:

1. The Sorrows of Young Werther (1787) by Johann von Goethe
2. Pride And Prejudice (1813) by Jane Austen
3. The Scarlet Letter (1850) by Nathaniel Hawthorne
4. Madame Bovary (1856) by Gustave Flaubert
5. Middlemarch (1870) by George Eliot
6. Anna Karenina (1877) by Leo Tolstoy
7. Mrs Dalloway (1925) Virginia Woolf
8. Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison
9. Disgrace (1999) by J.M. Coetzee
10. The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) by Mohsin Hamid

I’ve only read one of the books – The Scarlet Letter – and that was a long time ago in another place and time (Alexis High School).  So, I decided to try and experiment, read the 10 books, and ascertain if they sharpened my mind (I wonder how you measure that). The obvious choice was to read Anna Karenina first since I had just given up on another Leo Tolstoy novel.  To my pleasant surprise Anna was quite interesting even though there was no action to speak of (I am a science fiction lover which is normally rife with action).

I have always loved Fyodor Dostoevsky, the greatest of all Russian novelists, whose books consists of dozens of characters with many plots inverleaving amongst themselves.  In contrast Anna has two main characters – Anna and Levin.  There are several other significant supporting characters with significant roles – Count Vronsky, Anna’s lover –  Alexei, Anna’s husband –  Kitty, Levin’s wife – Dolly, Kitty’s sister – Stephan, Dolly’s husband

The novel begins with one of the most often quoted beginning lines of all times: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”  This line summarized the entire novel.  However go ahead and read the novel because it is quite spell binding.

The story is woven around two main themes: 1) Anna’s husband to lover transition and then her life with the lover (Count Vronsky) proving that sometimes love does not conquer all and 2) Levin’s life and times from his courtship of Kitty to marriage with lots of time in between working on his estate and attempting to figure out the true meaning of life.

There was no action in the book at all.  Well there was a horse race or two and a suicide  but no action narrative, only the voices in the minds of the participants.  Even though the book was quite long, 1170 pages according to my iPhone, it was a quick read and never boring.  The author kept the story interesting with the conversation between the players and the meanderings within their minds.

Oh, to the iPhone part, I read about 1/2 of the book on the iPhone and the other 1/2 on the Kindle proving at least to myself the iPhone can be a good but not great reading device.

n summary, Anna Karenina is a good read that is amazingly never boring.  I recommend it to anyone.  Now I wonder if my mind is sharper.

Wikipedia has a more in depth and less subjective review of Anna Karenina at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina

Steve Jobs by Walter isaacson is a Must read for 60 some year old computer nerds like me.

People who are crazy enough to think they can change the World are the ones who do – Apple commercial 1997.  Steve was one of those crazy people.

I lived the Apple II, Apple III, Lisa, MacIntosh,… progression while working as a software engineer.  The first computer I ever used was an IBM 1601.  It’s perfieral devices were a card reader/punch and a printer.  To execute a program I had to write the program on a coding pad, then key punch it into a card deck, then run the card deck through the computer, then the computer would punch out a binary program on a card deck, then I fed the binary program card deck in and my program executed.  Naturally, I was blown away by micro computers small enough to sit on your desk with a CRT and a keyboard that you could use to just enter the program.  Then came Viscalc, the predecessor to Excel, and the the PC market exploded.  The Apple II was everyone’s favorite because the competition was the IBM PC and IBM was a huge computer company (David versus Goliath).

As far as we were concerned the Apple II and later the Mac were revolutionary at the time.  The others were junk.

Then Apple fired Steve.  We could not believe it.  First Woz fades away and then Steve gets fired.  Well, as it turns out that was probably one of the best things that could have happened to Steve.

He started NeXT, and the NeXT computer was ahead of it’s time.  Ross Perot invested a chunk in NeXT.  I did not know that before reading the book.  NeXT was ahead of its time in some ways but it was not a business success. They did do some really cool software however which helped Apple rebound after Apple bought NeXT.

Steve also bought Pixar from George Lucas.  Another long story but Pixar ended up hooking up with Disney and  cranked out successful after successful animated movies with unbelievable imagery starting with my favorite, Toy Story.

Meanwhile the plot thickens.  Apple buys NeXT shortly after Toy Story is release and Steve winds up back at Apple as an unpaid adviser.

Meanwhile Steve’s health deteriorates and he has several bouts with cancer.  Of course the big C finally wins and he “passed” in October 5 ,2011.

The author also explores in depth his early years, his family and friends, and his personality.  Speaking of his personality most of us would call him a jerk!  The book starts starts before Steve was born giving a brief introduction into his parents and his adopted parents early lives.  Then it covers Steve’s early life.  His life really begins to get interesting when he meets and becomes friends with Woz and they tinker with electronics.  The rest of his business life is history.  However the book covers his aborted attempt at Reed College, the apple orchard, the pilgrimage to India, his daughter out of wedlock and his refusal to admit the daughter was his for years, the girl friends, his marriage, and settling down, having kids, living in a PaloAlto regular neighborhood.

His quirks are also covered including his reality distortion capability, his strange eating habits like living on nothing but carrots for a few weeks, and his belief that he did not smell and subsequently did not have to wash because of his diet.

All in all a great book. The epitaph on his grave could truly be “He was busy being born”