My first guest post

My first guest post on another blog -

http://pustakam.net/?p=1021

It's a popular blog about books and bibliophiles - mostly written in Telugu, but sometimes in English also.

Tagged

It has been almost a month since my friend Arvind Mishra, an sf writer, tagged me in this post.

The meme is to choose ten sf books of your choice and just scribble down the fifth sentence on page 56 of all of them and then invite your friends in turn to guess the books where these extracts are selected from. And then declare the answers. (You can choose non-sf books also, but I have chosen only sf - these are among my most well-liked sf works of all time).

Warning : Answers are just below the list.

Here goes (some of the sentences are really vague!)

1. With a little skill and care there were few items that could not be tackled safely; the only things banned were hot soups and excessively crumbly pastries.

2. "If this is true, then the Straumers may have a chance."

3. The nervousness that Stormgren had first felt had long since passed away.

4. "I do not quite follow you."

5. "What?", Lvov tried to focus."

6. Their clothes were not particularly revealing, he noted regretfully, and not one had any sign of décolleté, although some dresses seemed to designed to emphasize the buttocks.

7. A quick punch was all it took.

8. "I helped to do it, even."

9. "This way is much better," Leroux said, touching her skin delicately, poking under her cheeks and chin, pulling back her hair to feel her temples.

10. "But that's the point: it's not right, Captain," Renner protested.

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Answers:

1. 2001 A Space Odyssey - Arthur C. Clarke
2. A Fire upon the Deep - Vernor Vinge
3. Childhood's End - Arthur C. Clarke
4. Lord of Light - Roger Zelazny
5. Vacuum Diagrams - Stephen Baxter (Short story - Gossamer)
6. Prelude to Foundation - Isaac Asimov
7. Grass - Sherri S. Tepper
8. Distraction - Bruce Sterling
9. The Collected Stories of Greg Bear - Greg Bear (Short story - Sisters)
10. The Mote in God's Eye - Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

Mindmapping Books

Mind Mapping is a visual modelling concept where related ideas and tasks are arranged around a central idea.

I often come across people talking about using mindmaps for the books they read. It makes more sense for non fiction books of course, and is a great way to summarize the book. The summarization can be done to any level of detail - the more fine grained you are, the more nodes your mind map will have.

I tried it on a book I read recently - Edward Luce's In Spite of the Gods. I did not have the patience to go to a very fine level of detail, so it's very very brief. Nevertheless, creating one is a good way to keep the central ideas of the book in focus.