The books I read and a book I haven’t read yet

A long time ago I would bore my readership (all five people of them, no jokes) telling unwanted stories about whose book I like the most and why. It seems that a good part of ‘my’ authors are taken care of by the modern word [1) it looks like it is an excellent website, so [...]

Dictionary fun

A short, chatty, senseless post: Since a couple of days ago I now enjoy having a decent, up-to-date Persian-Persian dictionary. I’ve just bought فرهنگ سخن and frankly speaking I am quite amazed by my stupidity in assuming previously that nothing has changed on the Iranian dictionary market since 2000 and that I have to rely [...]

An Introduction to Islamic Revolution

One of the books I’m reading at the moment is Sadeq Zibakalam‘s مقدمهائی بر انقلاب اسلامی [moghaddame-i bar enqelāb-e eslāmi]. I can recommend it as a very good read (and good for my Persian, too) and a solid refutation of all kinds of conspiracy theories and popular myths being circulated about the policies of the [...]

Black swans, study trips and predictions

I’ve recently finished yet another book from Schiphol – ‘The Black Swan’ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. A very funny and witty book it is, it makes you think a lot about the world we live in, and, if you’re me – helps you bring to surface and organise some half-conscious intuitions and ideas you’ve had [...]

Mandela vs. Botha

“The State of Africa” by Martin Meredith – a book I bought at the Schiphol airport – is a really enjoyable book. It tries to tell something about the post-independence history of the continent not by being as encyclopaedical and wholesome as possible, but by focusing on a few ‘case studies’, fates of a few [...]

A bookstore found, a bookstore find.

I paid a visit to the Ethnography Museum in Warsaw today. The museum itself was closed, but it turned out that they had kicked out the ridiculous, kooky, New Agey, let-me-heal-your-soul bookstore (alas, it didn’t disappear just moved next door) they used to host and lent the space to a cafe-cum-bookstore thing obviously geared towards [...]

Books. “McMafia”

As a person involved in highly organised criminal activity (I work for the government, if you didn’t know; thus I live off the protection racket you pay ie. taxes), I am deeply interested in how the other, illegal, kind of mafia works. That’s why a while ago I picked up a book “McMafia. Seriously organised crime” by Misha [...]