Geek Sublime, Vikram Chandra
Geek Sublime, Vikram Chandra
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Geek Sublime
The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty

Author: Vikram Chandra

Narrator: Neil Shah

Unabridged: 6 hr 45 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 02/10/2015

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included


Synopsis

Vikram Chandra has been a computer programmer for almost as long as he has been a novelist. In this extraordinary new book, his first work of nonfiction, he searches for the connections between the worlds of art and technology. Coders are obsessed with elegance and style, just as writers are, but do the words mean the same thing to both? Can we ascribe beauty to the craft of writing code?

Exploring such varied topics as logic gates and literary modernism, the machismo of tech geeks, the omnipresence of an "Indian Mafia" in Silicon Valley, and the writings of the eleventh-century Kashmiri thinker Abhinavagupta, Geek Sublime is both an idiosyncratic history of coding and a fascinating meditation on the writer's art. Part literary essay, part technology story, and part memoir, it is an engrossing, original, and heady book of sweeping ideas.

About Vikram Chandra

Vikram Chandra is the award-winning and bestselling author of numerous works, including Red Earth and Pouring Rain, Love and Longing in Bombay, and Sacred Games. He has won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book, the David Higham Prize for Fiction, the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book, the Hutch Crossword Award for English Fiction, and a Salon Book Award, as well as being short-listed for the Guardian Fiction Prize. He cowrote Mission Kashmir, an Indian feature film starring Sanjay Dutt, Hrithik Roshan, Preity Zinta, and Jackie Shroff, that was released internationally in 2000. He currently divides his time between Mumbai and Berkeley, California, where he teaches creative writing at the University of California. Vikram lives with his wife Melanie Abrams, who is also a novelist.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Aseem

It hurts me to say this because I've always enjoyed his fiction, but Vikram Chandra's latest book is a mess. Inchoate, rambling and superficial, Geek Sublime reads like a vanity project--like being cornered by some middle-aged Uncle at a family gathering and being subjected to hours of him prattling......more

Also reviewed on [URL not allowed] Back when I listed the books on my reading pile, I mentioned "Geek Sublime..." right at the top and said "...Vikram Chandra intrigues me as a writer. I cannot pin him down to any genre..." He continues that thread of intrigue through this lates......more

Goodreads review by Keith

This book was a bit schizophrenic, moving between two different books with little success in making a connection between them. And while I truly enjoyed the chapters regarding coding as design, the parallel story was rather impossible to read.......more