I am about halfway through Gary Burton's 'Jazz Improv' on Coursera offered in partnership with the Berklee School of Music. Even in a short few weeks, my mind has been expanded musically more that anything that I have done in the last few years. MOOCs are here to stay. It's not really like a classroom, but it has its advantages. The unquestionable advantage is the ease-of-access, especially  for those who, like me, are temporally and geographically challenged. Besides, they are kind of addicting and the conversations with others taking the course is often more illuminating that the material itself.
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A much shorter post, after the carpal-tunnel-syndrome inducing post on Joseph Anton. Another reason to be brief is that saying too much about Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night A Traveler  would be to spoil the book for those who have not read it. It’s unlike any book you have read, or at the very least very few books read like this book.

As is evident from the starting few pages, this book is unusual. First, Calvino discusses how you will be reading the book.
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A few years ago in the summer of 2003, I smuggled a copy of the Satanic Verses on a trip to India. It added an air of adventure and the secret, sweet pleasure of doing something forbidden in defiance of orders. For the first time, I had some ‘contraband’ that I was trying to sneak through the ‘green channel’ at the Mumbai airport.
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Mortality - Christopher Hitchens

Dying is serious business and writers, like all other people, die too. Some live long enough to write about their experience of ‘living dying-ly’ as Christopher Hitchens does here in his last book  Mortality before he succumbed to esophageal cancer in 2011. In terms of categories, to find this book you need to look under ‘memoir/essays’ >> ‘sickness’ >> ‘cancer’ and it’s still a crowded space - this genre of ‘cancer-lit’.

Jeet Thayil, a published poet and sometime musician, had enough time to bask in the attention in the heady few weeks after making it to the Booker shortlist for 2012. By the time I managed to obtain a copy of the book, Hilary Mantel had already won the Booker for Bring up the Bodies, the sequel to Wolf Hall.

Lately, I have fallen off the New Yorker Book Club bandwagon (which I was never fully on, I must admit). The latest offering of Diane Spiotta's "Stone Arabia" sounds great. From: Spiotta has captured one of the ironies of using the Internet: the language of the Web is all action verbs—looking, opening, closing, searching, hell, surfing—but a computer-user is normally sitting quite still. The dream of the Internet is one of unfettered movement, but its reality is stasis.

Ariel Levy writes about sexual revolutions before the sexual revolutions. In other words, there is nothing new under the sun.

In "India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation's Remaking", Anand Giridharadas takes a different tack from Thomas Friedman and others who have described the now familiar call centers and globalization that have turned India into an economic powerhouse. Instead Giridharadas decides to focus on the country's most important assets- its people and their changing attitudes towards the world, their families and themselves.
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In 1981, Vikram Seth was 29 years old and at Nanjing University. In the summer while traveling on a 'guided tour' in Turfan, he was seized with the idea to return home to Delhi overland from China via Tibet. Based on a journal he kept, this would be his first book. This was before he embarked on that remarkable novel in Onegin stanzas - Golden Gate and a decade before the Suitable Boy catapulted him to his rightful place as a lyrical master of the modern novel.
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It was snowing rather heavily and not the best of all days during a Michigan winter to be driving around. This past Sunday would a good day to meet Death on the highway, but instead I survived to hear Garrison Keillor introduce Billy Collins on the radio in Segment 2 of the Prairie Home Companion (interesting aside on Emily Dickinson's 180th bday). Use this link to navigate the audio (Dec 11 show index).
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