2. READING IS THE MOST SOLITARY , CONTEMPLATIVE AND LONG LASTING OF ALL THE AESTHETIC PLEASURES
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8. Sources : Where to find books/magazines ? From Library to Cybrary E- book ( Kindle – Amazon. COM) Flip kart And of course – bookshops Amazon.com
9. How to find good books? Reviews (Don’t believe all of them ) Friends References Skimming & scanning in Libraries / Lending Libraries Book shops H
10. A Private Library - Antilibrary Umberto Eco belongs the small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful and non-dull. He is the owner of a large personal library more than 30,000 books A private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool
11. “ You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older. The more you know the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call the collection of unread books as “antilibrary”
12. Reading skills: Scanning : a useful first step before reading more deeply Skimming: handy when you are looking for particular things in a text
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14. Engineers are in general not good readers is a fact. Their knowledge on non technical subjects tends to near zero. Why? So far I am yet to find a definite answer ( The only exception I know is Anand the famous Malayalam novelist /short story writer, a product of CET )
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16. Film songs Innle neeyouru sundara ragamayen ponnodakkuzhalil vannolichu………. P. Bhaskaran
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19. Poetry How to start reading and enjoying poetry? Vallattholl Browning
20. Of course don’t forget dictionaries Advanced learner’s Dictionary - School level Longman’ Active English Collins Co-build Mac Millan’s book of Phrases Longman’s Activator Dictionary
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22. American dictionaries Webster Random House Thesaurus Modern English usage Michael Swan “ Origin of words” “ How to build Vocabulary” series
23. English news papers Editorials, Central page article, Opp. Ed page Prasannarajan Rajakrishnan M P Narayana Pillai Prof M. Krishnan Nair
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25. History Toynbee Second world war Third Reich, Auschwitz, Stalingrad Nuremberg Jawaharlal Nehru Autobiographies My experiments with truth The Report to Greco, Words Kannirum Kinavum
26. Classics Upanishads Ramayana Mahabharata Thirukural Iliad Odysseus Les Miserables Crime and Punishment Jean Christofe
27. Short stories The fate of a man : Solokov Best 10 short stories in Malayalam Novels Garcia Marcus, Kazantzakis Sartre, Camus, Kafka Arogyaniketanam, Yayati Sundarikalum sundaranmarum The inimitable Basheer M T Vasudevan Nair,Anand O V Vijayan
28. Non fiction Future Shock and other books – Alvin Toffler The end of history and the last man The Clash of Civilization The world is flat The Lexus and the Olive tree
29. Humor Catch -22 ... MAD (now Extinct) Cartoon magazine Thrillers and Pulp fiction Sydney Sheldon, Jeffrey Archer Frederick Forsyth, Chetan Bhagat And the immortal Sherlock Homes series
32. And finally your subject - ENGINEERING Example “Digital Communication” Read at least three of four books on the same Subject. Note how different authors approach the same topic. It gives you a better insight. And Read half a dozen papers also on selective topics Say “spread spectrum”
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34. Quotations “ The London bridge is falling down...falling down...falling down...” a nursery rhyme This forms one line in the famous poem “The waste Land” by T S Eliot showing the degradation of culture
35. The famous Beginnings..... It was love at first sight” Joseph Heller Catch -22 “ It was best of the times.... “ Dickens “ Many years later as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice” ... GarciaMarquez
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37. Jot down sentences and ideas you like from what you read “ In my younger days I wanted to play cricket badly. Finally I got an opportunity to play and I did it. I played badly” Shashi Tharoor
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39. “ ... Some created history by arriving at the scene like MahatmaGandhi from South Africa, Lenin in a train to Finland station; some created history by refusing to leave the scene like Rosa Parks from a Montgomery city bus in the state of Alabama” Time Millennium issue
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41. “ We fought a military war; our opponents a political one; we sought physical attrition; our opponents psychological extinction ; In the process we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla warfare: The guerrilla wins if he does not lose; a conventional army loses if it does not win...” Henry Kissinger
43. Vaclav Havel : Czech Independence day – from Presidential speech “ My dear fellow citizens , for 40 years you heard from my predecessors on this day different variations of the same theme; how our country was flourishing, how many millions of steel we produced, how happy we were all ,how we trusted our government and what bright prospects were unfolding in front of us. I assume you did not propose me for the office so that I too would lie to you. Our country is not flourishing... The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated environment; we feel morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. Concepts such as friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension.....”
44. During the sixty plus years of my existence(?), I came across bureaucracy , bad , worst , cruel and many times , - inhuman and criminal It may be so for so many others Why?
