Books, Books and more books

To the Castle and back by Vaclav Havel

To castle and back is a boring book. We got warned about it from the start. One can only imagine the book has succeeded, if removing the glamour of being the head of state (of Czechoslovakia and then the Czech republic) was its goal. One gets the impression that the job is and endless treadmill of writing speeches, peppered here and there with responsibilities on preparing events/dinners for foreign diplomats and the occasional political squabble. And yet it also let’s through some of Vaclav personality and his inability to scape it all. As he only knows one way of acting, and this is to appease his always torturing conscience. Dissuade the right people of pursuing office this cannot. As just as Vaclav they will be compelled to oblige. In order to scape the hardest torture … acting against one’s own beliefs.

Spare parts by Joshua Davis

I found their underdog story raising to accomplish a great prowess in engineering inspiring. I could not help but compare their experiences across the different stages in their life’s journey and my own as it relates to robotics. I was drawn to finally read the book by the increase hostility I have seen in the public discussion about undocumented immigrants/ illegal aliens (how the semantics affect the sympathy we feel towards them). I am not sure if it is refreshing to know that the current turn for the worse, is not necessarily a new unprecedented phenomenon but the resurface of long-standing resentment towards “The other”. Knowing that the stigma existed 20 years ago gives some perspective not to be caught by the doom of present moment and work towards flipping the direction of the tide. A nitpick that sometimes bothered me was the way the story was mediated by the author, as I felt that some of his preconceived notions creep in, and in order to construct a narrative he typecast the participants in constrain roles that hinder the ability to hear their stories through their own voices.