Hyperactve

A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Well, I should've read the book several months ago. But I was lazy as well as busy. Well the book is really good. A bunch of dead souls trapped in practically infinite Library of Babel to find their life-story... This one line is needed for a person to become interested in this book.
Overall it seemed God's way of "I want to play a game....". Trapping people in a library where zillions of books. Story comprises of several things: people coming closer to each other, sharing how they died; some delusional people who thought that they had to make it a hell; couple staying billions of years together(!).. and it ended with some sort of tragedy.
I would like to quote something, "Then came centuries of agonizing thought. I knew I had not even fallen a light-year yet. I had googols and googols of of light-years to go. There is a despair that goes deeper than existence."
To be honest, first I thought it would not be a bad hell as there were tons of books to read. Then the first surprise came to me as how the books were! Also, I had pretty much an estimation how many books are there after I knew how the books were written. Turns out that this is as bad as a lot of other hells I knew about.
Although I wonder how Wand and our Hero made love two time while they were falling. -_-"
Finally, a pleasant story.
:)



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OK. I have been very frustrated with the GMP for the past couple of hours. It seems that there is no default support for GMP library for Windows as they tend to target for Unix based systems. And also the tutorials that are found on the net are somewhat outdated, wasn't written keeping the noobs, like me, in mind or the newer tutorials are not on the first page of Google. -_-"
That said, I've finally been able to prepare it for windows. And I'm writing this just to help the others like me that may be searching solution to this problem and also for a future reference to myself for such other libraries as well. Let's do it ,shall we?

While many writers spend pages after pages describing what is happening inside a person's brain, what turmoil has made some to do something; the specialty of Humayun Ahmed is, he actually tells nothing. Absolutely nothing. He just sews events one after another. The rights to judge a character is all upon the readers.
This 1995 novel is a remarkable example of that. Personally, I like his old novels than the recent ones.
It tells the story of a little girl Natasha (নাতাশা) who is suffering from Meningioma a variant of brain tumor. And she needs to be taken to America to get any treatment started.
Her father, Sajjad (সাজ্জাদ) is vagabond who has given away his prestigious career, became some kind of drunken weseal and went to live in a jungle prior to the events of the story. And the mother Dilshad (দিলশাদ)is a women who is alone struggling collecting 11 lac Taka that is required for the treatment.
The story revolves around two section. One describes Natasha's day to day experience as a patient. The other describes Dilshad's quest for money leaving no stones unturned.
Very small novel, but really good.

The best thing about the book is it takes you right into behind the scenes of Horse Racing. Although, I don't know much about horse racing I enjoyed every bit of it.
The main problem about the story is its predictable. It can be said I knew Nottingham's Nightmare Lucifera will be tamed by Nicole; there will be an accident which will either make the mother & daughter come closer or it will take them far apart. Personally I like tragedies more.
Nevertheless, this is really well written, one should not feel any mental fatigue while reading this.
The story is about mother-daughter conflict between Rachel and Nicole, love/hate between two top trainers Rachel and Reno. The previous is the main plot. But these don't make the story progress. It is the horse racing, wins, losses; the racetrack. The writer being an ex-jockey has handful experience to make such story believable. And I think she has done a wonderful job. As a debut novel, it's solid.

Just installed LaTex in my Blog.
Those who already know about it (not that a lot of people reads my blog), may find it funny that what would I be doing with such scripts. Well, I don't know either. May be some math posts are coming or may be not. But I just wanted to play a little with it.
Those who don't know what LaTex is, it is a document markup language; in traditional formatted document editor such as Microsoft Word, Open Office the user doesn't need to know mark up process that was used in it as there is a very good GUI support. LaTex is mainly used for writing mathematical equations.
Here Goes:


Well seems okay. I couldn't work the

\mathbi{}

though. :(

There are two stories.
Kafka's story and Nakata's story

I pretty much enjoyed Nakata's story. Nakata was an interesting old guy. And also, Hoshino. I can guess Nakata and Hoshino were like comic characters with complexities of their own. But This storyline was interesting and made me read the book.

On the other hand, Kafka's story was full of sheer stupidity. I heard the idea was to tell a story of an adolescent boy. But such boys just don't always think about sex you know! Kafka was trying to find his mother and sister just to fulfill the prophecy his father made? Or just to be with his family again? Even the prophecy was an utter nonsense! There were several times I thought the story would get better it that just didn't happen! Kafka's storyline was pretty much disappointing.

And also, there were lots of hopping here and there from actual story in the Kafka's storyline. Big talks about Arts, Literature, Music bla bla bla..... That doesn't help the story. I don't mean they shouldn't be in a story, that'd make a story pretty much dull; but these things should be short. Not in epic size.

Though it's a single book, I rated it thus:
Nakata: 3/5
Kafka: 1/5

Cécile Corbel

Well, this is Anam's 2nd book. And I was really eager to read the book since I liked A Golden Age so much.

The whole story is actually seen in the eye of Maya, the protagonist, and occasionally hopping into other minor character. Among them we also have Rehana, the protagonist of the first book and Sohail, mainly in flashbacks, the mukti who has become religious after the war.