Idea Architect

Imagining a future where personal satellites are available for people to launch. This is AI generated art (Bing Image Creator) of an imaginary coffee shop sign in such a world which reads "Take your taste buds to new heights with our out-of-this-world brews, while your personal satellites keep you connected to the cosmos. Charge up your satellite docking station, chat with fellow 'sat-neighbors' and share celestial snapshots of your favorite latte art."

November 1, 2016

Book 1 - The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly

This is the first book in the Twitter list that I started in November 2016. What a wonderful book. I picked this up in the local library in the apartment complex I live in Singapore. I have picked up many books in the list there. 

This book got me addicted (again) to crime, detective and lawyer books after the amazing Perry Mason books I used to read in high school.

Michael Connelly is an amazing writer. The characters he has created, both Mickey Haller, who is the protagonist of this book and Harry Bosch are just amazing.

I loved how Mickey’s and Harry’s characters are related, but then not too close either. 

An ongoing theme in Connelly’s books are his character’s back stories which are slowly revealed and while they might not be part of the main story in each book plot, they form an overall meta arc of the storytelling. In Bosch’s case it is his history with finding and solving cold cases, particularly his own mother’s murder.

In Mickey’s case it is his working environments in the Lincoln automobile and his connections for example to the biker club, Hell’s Angels, who he helps in one case, but also becomes indebted to in later situations.

Both are set in Los Angeles and reading a few of them gives you a visceral feel of the city. One I have not visited, but have heard so much of.

Anyway, I was absolutely blown away by this book, my introduction to Michael Connelly’s work and you will find in the list many more books by him.

Some interesting trivia:

After reading this book, I watched Matthew McConaughey starring movie based on the book. It was good and enjoyable

In 2019, I started playing LA Noire, an addictively compulsive police detective game set in Los Angeles of the 1940s. The the game is a cult icon in its own right and amazing, but I particularly enjoyed it more because of the visual sense of Los Angeles that I had got from reading the Michael Connelly books. Its remarkable how realistic the game’s city was, and how it has remained same half a century and more later as portrayed in the books, movies and TV shows.

I have always been an avid reader. In 2016, I started to read and keep track of the books I am reading. So, I started a Twitter list. Every book I read, I would post the name and the author with a hashtag like #AlwaysReadingABook. I would also keep a book count.

I wanted to read a book a week, so I tried that for a few weeks. It was not feasible. But, I continued reading almost everyday and keeping a list of what I read on Twitter. I was not very sophisticated about it. I may not have known about Twitter’s thread features at that time, so I was only replying to my own previous tweet for the next book.

I was also not posting the photos of the book covers. I was not @at-ing the authors even if there were around on Twitter.

I was not writing my thoughts about the books. It was just a list.

Slowly, as the Twitter app got slightly better, I started posting the photos of the book covers, but still it was the same old reply thread. Sometimes I included the @ handle of the author. But I was not consistent.

Over the years, Instagram became the place to curate such posts. Visually appealing to have book covers. I experimented with that, but somehow I never caught onto Instagram. It seemed too vain to me. The Twitter list continued. It continues to this day and will continue, as long as I am active on Twitter and if Elon keeps Twitter alive.

Also, Twitter was only a list keeping space. It was not feasible to write short notes about what I thought about the book. Or share notes about what I learned from the books. Including those would somehow break the flow.

So, as my note taking interests grew, I found myself exploring how to combine these. A place to keep track of the books I am reading, but also to post thoughts and learnings about them.

That is how I have landed at this Tumblr. I realized that I had a wonderful Tumblr page, which was creative and not so vanity filled as Instagram. A perfect mix of Twitter/blog and Instagram like environment. And I could host it as a link on my website. Hence this was born.

I will be going back to 2016, and start posting the books from the Twitter list in chronological order. I won’t have pics of the books for initial few, so I will find the covers from the internet. But I will post them with my summary about the book. I am not going to read them again now. I have many new exciting books on my tsundoku list. But, I believe it should be possible to remember a bit about the books and write my impressions and learning about it.

The Fool at Stratford-upon-Avon