Winter Reading

It's begun to snow again. Old King Winter was teasing us with the warmer weather of 50 and 60 F. The warm sunny evenings with a slight nip in the air made us all feel that spring was here. Even the crocuses and snowdrops reared their green fingers through the ground and seemed to agree with that sentiment.  Yesterday, it rained and temperatures began to drop. The rain turned to sleet, and sleet turned to snow, and it now lays thick in many inches. It's still winter. We were mistaken.

To make most of this weather I have an eclectic mix of books lined up. I'm making a concerted effort of ploughing through them as if they were snow drifts in the driveway. A mountain of books. 

Running, history, science, markets, criticism, self-help, a memoir, and a classic: a fair and balanced diet. I still have a couple more that I made a note of in San Francisco bookstore last month. As usual, my eyes are bigger than my stomach - the voraciousness in my mind is far larger than the appetite time will really allow. I could spend any length of time in a bookstore and one hopes that they still exist and libraries still carry books in the future. A recent move has been to get rid of 'the damned books' and reclaim the space in libraries. I find it amazing to see some homes have no books at all. I believe that they have lots of space now. 

At this point of time, most of us still have books with pages that you can turn and your fingers can still feel the slight bump of the printed word. Perhaps, it's like an early autumn for books. Some leaves have fallen, but not all. Some branches are bare, but not all. 

And outside it is winter. 

A Year of Reading

Still being in my younger and more impressionable years, I came to realization that I wasn't as well-read as I thought. For the past few years, partly inspired by Art Garfunkel, an unlikely bibliophile,  I have been keeping track of the books that I have read. In 2012, I read 53 books -  an average of about a book a week.  Sounds like a lot of reading. Yet, I did not like what I saw - quantity, but not quality. Too much non-fiction, and much of it pop non-fiction consisting of easy-breezy reads. Of all books that I read, only 15 books were what I consider must-read classics. While you may not always get it at first, the classics are classics for a reason. Yet, there is an argument for reading the canon, to remember advice from T.S. Eliot who said this about poems: "the only thing one needs to judge the merit of poems is to read other poems." 
To read better, one needs to read more books.

Where to begin? So, I turned to Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren's excellent "How to Read"; needless to say, 'a classic' itself. Their advice in a nutshell is to read books that expand your mind.  Books that are complex.  Such books change you as a person. They change the way you experience and perceive life. A book that does all that is a 'great' book. The classics are good examples of that. They are hard to read, because they make demands on the reader. Consequently, the rewards are much greater. 

So, in 2013  I tried to change this as consciously is I could.  I looked at lists - Guardian, Modern Library, including the intimidating Adler-Van Doren list.  But, you could really start anywhere, as long as you start. So based on availability and interest, I set off. 

To make no bones about my ambitions, I started with Ulysses and tried to read it in a day. I had begun and attempted to read it since I was about 18 and never made it past the first few pages. In Joycean vein - I "tightened my scrotum" and got to work trying to read the story of a day in a day. Technically in 24 hours, if not in one sitting. Though, according to Adler and Van Doren, you should try to read all books in one sitting. I surprised myself. It took a little over 12 hours to make it to the end. I thought earlier that I would be more ecstatic than Molly Bloom's final "yes".  Yet, surprisingly I was less concerned with being 'that-person-who-has-read-Ulysses-cover-to-cover' than being the person who had a great experience of reading Ulysses. I enjoyed the humor, the wordplay, the virtuosity, and simply the extraordinary story of an ordinary day in Dublin.  It was indeed the toughest read of the year. Intimidating for sure, but it is puzzling that the book isn't more read. Did I get it all? No. Was it worth it? Yes.

It has been a very, rich and rewarding experience. For a whole year, I was in the company of the greats - Joyce, Faulkner, Kafka, Woolf, Proust, Homer, Tolstoy, Flaubert. It made me aware of the considerable gifts of contemporary authors such as Barnes and Coetzee. The advantage of reading them so closely one after another made them stand out more in relief and despite stylistic differences the greatness of the writing always shines through. It wasn't fast reading. It was delightful, and as Harold Bloom says, "you don't read great books, they read you". Nothing could be truer. And again, it was much more than that. Often, I had to stop to take a breath to take in what I had just read. The profound psychological insight, the lovely turn of phrase, the ring of the perfectly metaphor, and above all the creation of an entire world from brief strokes.

My goal was to read better in 2013. So, did I succeed? Yes, if I was checking off a grocery list of items to be read. But, the funny thing is that books change you, they refine you. The process changed my definition of what 'reading better' was.  The chief one was what it meant to have 'read a book'. I wasn't sure any more. It certainly was not making a collection of feathers to stick in my cap. That was to miss the point, not to mention the waste of all that time.

Over the years, I have been somewhat proud that I never re-read books. I have a good memory. But, I have been again missing the point. A timely correction was provided by a certain V. Nabokov, who, by the prevailing academic wisdom at the time, was not allowed to lecture an American literature because he lacked a PhD, but allowed to lecture on European literature.  He writes in the 'Introduction' to the excellent and bizarrely hard-to-obtain Lectures on Literature that books can never be read, only re-read. Great books are a work of art and have to be approached in the manner of a painting. So, the first reading is only an initial glimpse. It's only in the second, or third reading that one can appreciate the full beauty. It's like the eye darting from aspect of the picture to another after we make our first glance at it. We have to look at it closely and from afar.

So, what's in store for 2014? Not to let go of the ambitious side of me, but one aim would be to finish Proust's In Search of Lost Time. To call it a goal makes it sound like getting through something unpleasant. If you take to it, Proust is very addicting. The Way by Swann's was so delicious and enjoyable that I cannot wait to get started on Vol II. There is no dearth of other classics that I wish to explore - Dostoevsky, Conrad, Beckett, Bellow, James, Ellison. The other would be to simply re-read some books. As Flaubert wrote: "What a scholar one might be if one knew well some half a dozen books."

Complete lists for 2013 and 2012

Books from 2012-2013 to re-read:

2013
Beloved - Toni Morrison
The Way by Swann's - Marcel Proust; Lydia Davis (trans)
A Room of One's Own - Virginia Woolf
Disgrace - J.M. Coetzee
To The Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
Light in August - William Faulkner
Ficciones - Jorge Luis Borges
Anna Karenina / Leo Tolstoy
Stories / Kafka
Lectures On Literature / Vladimir Nabokov
Madame Bovary / Gustave Flaubert
The Periodic Table / Primo Levi
The Odyssey / Homer; Richard Lattimore (trans)
Ulysses / James Joyce

2012
The Story of Art / Ernst Gombrich
The Inferno / Dante Alighieri; John Ciardi (trans)
The Complete Poems / Philip Larkin; Archie Burnett (ed)
Half-Finished Heaven / Tomas Transtromer
Poor Economics : a radical rethinking of the way to fight global poverty / Banerjee, Abhijit V.
Thinking, Fast and Slow / Kahneman, Daniel

On Calvino

Post on Italo Calvino's If On A Winter's Night a Traveler.

On Joseph Anton and Salman Rushdie

The lit blog has been update with a post that took longer and grew longer that expected. An extraordinary life.
Link: lit blog

'Ulysses - Story of a Day' In a Day?

Ulysses takes place over the course of one day - 16th June, in roughly 18 hours. It should be possible to read it in one day, right? One can read faster than people can walk, right?That's going to be my weekend project - does the math add up?

I have had the book since I was 16 and I have not made it past the first few pages after numerous attempts. It has, in one form or the another, been on my reading list, but always for 'next year'. I am sick of doing that. A nice week-long break is coming up and "why put off  for tomorrow what you can today? or do this year, instead of next year, right?" 

Any serious reader, or more correctly in my case, a reader pretending seriousness, cannot claim to be one if he/she has not tackled the eight-thousander Himalayan peaks of: 

• Joyce's Ulysses,
• Proust's In Search of Lost Time (or Remembrance Of Things Past),
• Tolstoy's War and Peace, or
• Eliot's Middlemarch

The above are on any great reading list, and if not included, then the compiler has to justify why not. It must be said that I have read none of the above. Partly, because of their daunting length and difficulty, but mainly because of their fabled complexity and literary weight. There are many in the camp of the Ulysses 'also rans' - those who have wanted to read it, have made numerous attempts and have failed, or have given up.

Mortimer Adler in How To Read a Book writes that most people read books slower than they need to, and that reading too slowly can make you lose the forest for the trees. He writes that the first reading should be quick and "not to worry if you don't understand every word". Get the main idea. My idea in past years was to attack the text in a scholarly and leisurely fashion. Read the Odyssey, then other commentaries, consult the Linati and Gilbert schema, so that I can appreciate what I read. That did not get too far. 

Adler believes that books like Ulysses are 'above the heads of most readers' anyways. They are great because they demand a lot of the reader and you will never really understand it in one reading. They need to be read again and again, some parts faster than others. The book will grow with you. Though it will not be possible if you haven't read it even once. 

With that sage advice, I feel well-armed and the plan of reading it so quickly does not seem that hair-brained either.

Personal Rules for reading Ulysses in a Day

1) It has to be done in 24 hours. Not, necessarily in one calendar day, for practical, logistical reasons and so that I don't lose my mind as I wander around Dublin.

2) No reading commentaries, guides or keys such as the Stuart or Linati schema. That would slow things down and affect the pure, naked effect of the text. 

3) Fail as I may, it's still not Finnegan's Wake (Chabon on Finnegan's Wake) and progress has been made  THIS year.

Update:

Made it to the end last night (Jan 10) - all 783 pages from "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan" to Molly Bloom's final  "... yes."
It took a total of 12 hours and 11 mins. Much less total time than I initially thought, but many more total days (There were other digressions, like reading other books). More on the book later. I am currently overwhelmed with the sheer mastery of Mr. Joyce. He is a real Colossus.

----------------------------------

If Marilyn can do it, so can you!

Lit blog revival

Another attempt at reviving the lit blog that has been dormant for a long time. Reviewing Jeet Thayil's Narcopolis.

Andre Kertesz - On Reading

Robert Gurbo in the introduction to Andre Kertesz's book On Reading writes that the famous series is reissued at a time when digital media, ebooks and computers are threatening to eliminate the reader of the printed word.  The timeless image of a person head-down poring over a book is now being replaced with people transfixed in similar ways to their cell phones, laptops, e-readers.

The New York Times ran a photo spread on the impossibility of capturing street images of people without anyone head down checking their devices (Misha Erwitt's: Cellphone pre-occupation). The series of pictures shows people in states of preoccupation talking, texting, checking email. (My favorite is the the woman talking next to the Giacommeti statue). In comparison, as Gurbo notes in the preface, "... Kertesz's timeless images of people transported to another world by the intimate process of opening a book or newspaper ... "

Is there an essential difference? Is there a difference between a person texting on a bench versus a person reading a book? Is it more of a disconnection from reality and your surroundings to be staring into a computer screen into the vastness of the internet versus fingers curled around a folded newspaper?

I went back and forth between the collections and I tried to reach a conclusion - is one better than the other? or is is just a symptom of conditioning?

Sounds like a beaten down trope - "digital bad, analog good"

To me, there is an appropriate choice of words for  Erwitt's series versus Kertesz's.

Preoccupied vs. absorbed
Distracted vs. transported
Disconnected vs. immersed

It's hard for me to believe that anyone can actually read anything on the internet with it's easy-to-navigate HTML links. Add to that the numerous distractions of messages, tweets, and emails. You don't really travel anywhere on the internet, you simply bounce around.

This is one my favorite images from Andre Kertesz's collection of photographs - On Reading.  A boy eating an ice-cream reading the comics section from a scattered bunch of newspapers. Andre Kertesz captures the essence of reading: the solitary, self-absorbed pleasure that transports you to a different place. The only thing that would mar that image would the silhouette of a person talking on the cellphone. Of course, the boy would not notice.

India much after Gandhi: Reading Guha and Mishra

Reading Ramachandra Guha's India after Gandhi and Pankaj Mishra's Temptations of the West. This was rather by accident, but they make good reading side-by-side.

For most historians, Indian history ended with Partition, or with some extension, with the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. The books on India history after Independence, he writes, can be counted on the fingers of one hand, or two if one is more broad-minded. Guha's book was published in 2007, released to presumably coincide with the 60th year of India's Independence, is weighty and 700+ pages long. Only being about third through the book, I oddly felt that it should have been longer. Guha writes with an extraordinary skill: the laborious scholarship and copious footnotes do not disturb the urge to keep turning the pages. As far as I can note, Guha is content, as he should be to, to mostly describe and leave conclusions to the reader. I did somewhat catch some of the legendary debate in press between Ms. Arundhati Roy and him, though I am eager to understand some of his political convictions and motivations. While Ms. Roy did claim in an interview that her views with Mr. Guha's were worlds apart, at least the have an environmental and social conscience. A sort of conscience that I see lacking in many of my local peers, who have seemed to embrace "India Shining" with careless abandon.

While Guha seems, at least so far, to be quite optimistic of the strength of Indian democracy, reading Pankaj Mishra's Temptations of the West one is left with no illusions about Indian reality of democracy. Mishra is a journalist with a keen eye and a sensibility worthy of a poet. In contrast to the Doon-school,
IIM-educated Bangalorean Guha, Mishra was born in Jhansi, grew up in small-town North India, went to school in Allahabad and spent his youth in Benares. He comes from a different milieu than Guha and correspondingly his views are darker, and I would like to think closer-to-the-ground than the firmly-grounded academic historian. The rest of the book moves on further into the rest of South Asia (more on that later), but the Indian themes, or axes as Guha calls, are pretty much the same - caste-based politics, regionalism, proto-fascist Hindutva, being Muslim in India and others.

I haven't finished reading either book and it would be premature to make a final judgement. One thing is clear that issues raging in the country today were pretty much the same in 1950. While some progress has been made, but much of the tribal population and rest of India lives in a feudal time. This sort of reality is hard to imagine from the eyes of an urban Punekar, now deracinated expat. One hopes that books help us bridge that distance.

I write this at a time when Anna Hazare's strike has just been called off after the government has acceded to his some of Team Anna's demands. The whole affair right or wrong, undoubtably signals the failure of constitutional democracy. Indeed, as Guha's book informs us that Ambedkar, the architect of the constitution, warned that Indians in Free India needed to abjure from Gandhian methods of fasts, hartals, picketing, and the like and use constitutional methods to achieve their ends. Of course, such methods have been mostly ineffective in the last 60 years. It may seem like a Quixotic idea to external observers that citizens need to move heaven and earth just to make elected representatives just accountable: meaning making them do their job.

Meanwhile I seek refuge in books.
Reality melts away.

Lending out Books - Hal Sirowitz

A lesson that I simply fail to learn...

Lending Out Books - Hal Sirowitz

You're always giving, my therapist said.
You have to learn how to take. Whenever
you meet a woman, the first thing you do
is lend her your books. You think she'll
have to see you again in order to return them.
But what happens is, she doesn't have the time
to read them, & she's afraid if she sees you again
you'll expect her to talk about them, & will
want to lend her even more. So she
cancels the date. You end up losing
a lot of books. You should borrow hers.

Review of Vikram Seth's "From Heaven Lake"

Review of Vikram Seth's delightful first book: Lit blog.

Review of Peter Hessler's Country Driving

China is a fascinating country. As Indians we love to compare against it. Peter Hessler lived in China for many years and has written wonderful books on the subject. My review of his latest book 'Country Driving' on the Lit blog.

Shooting an Elephant and other essays

Still reeling from the mastery of Orwell's essays: "Shooting and Elephant and other essays". That book is a masterpiece. The title piece is perhaps the most famous followed by "Politics and the English language", and "The Hanging" . There are what at first glance appear to be rather whimsical pieces such as "In Praise of the Common Toad" and "In Defense of English Cooking", but which are about much larger issues.

This quote by James Wood was particularly insightful:

So Orwell was contradictory: contradictions are what makes writers interesting, consistency is for cooking

James Wood essay on Orwell.

I found the copy gathering dust on one of the shelves at Manney's. Of course, no other bookstore in town had the book.

Half-finished love affair

Reading David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas which is since yesterday overdue at the library. I guess will pay the fines for a few days till I finish it. I was inspired by a quote from the book itself. In the Letters from Zedelghem the musician Robert Frobisher writes:

A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.

Guess I must end the love affair even it means a few days delay for the next person in queue.

Brilliant writing. Masterful in the way Mitchell controls the registers and tone of the different voices. There are many of them. More when I am done...

Judgement

A few years ago, the Ann Arbor District Library (AADL) installed automatic check-out machines that scan the barcode, demagnetize your books, inform you about your holds. They have six of these machines and there is no waiting at the checkout desk. The only reason to go to the desk is to pay fines in cash, or for some other unusual request. For almost all transactions, you don't really have to talk to any librarian.

This system has another benefit other than efficiency and speed, an unintended consequence that I wouldn't have realised until I met this girl at a party. She said,
"I really like the AADL system. Now, I can check out books that I am embarrassed to check out in front of a real person".
"Are these dirty books or something?"
"Oh, no, no! These are just what my brother calls trashy mystery novels. I feel now I can check them out without being judged."

There are people who don't read and those who do. Any two non-readers are more alike, than any two readers. There is the John Grisham reader and a reader of Kafka and Murakami. High-brow, low-brow and a sometimes a mix of both. I (like others) always sneak a peak at people in the queue and their book choices and attempt to form some sort of opinion of them. "Oh! so you are the kind of person who reads ABC and hence you must XYZ". And yes, it is true librarians DO look at your book choices. I have many an interesting discussion at the checkout desk. I guess they are polite enough to keep their mouths shut in case they disagree with your choice of reading material.

"I just checked out a whole bunch of books" the girl said with a huge smile on her face.

Now she could read what she wanted to, the judgement of others is suspended. Anonymity allows us sometimes to be what we are not, and sometimes it helps us be who we really are.

Outliers - Old Wine in a New Bottle

Malcolm Gladwell has a gift for sticky phraselogy, and why not? he wrote an entire book on it. His first book The Tipping Point made 'stickiness' a new buzzword. If his first book was about how things/ideas manage to cross a threshold after which there is no looking back, his latest book Outliers is about success itself. He looks at the fundamental reasons for success.

If you don't have time to read through the 300 pages of the book, don't be alarmed. It has chiefly four points. To be successful you need:

1) To work hard (>10,000 hours at something).
2) To be at the right place at the right time.
3) To be only above average smart, but not a genius.
4) To leverage or adjust your cultural advantage/ disadvantages.

None of the above are anything but conventional wisdom. Yet, the book is an interesting read only because Gladwell is so incredibly gifted at paraphrasing the obvious and coming up with interesting examples.

The 10,000 hour rule at first seemed a very good quantification of expertise, but then you realise that it's fairly obvious. A PhD takes about 10,000 hours of work (5 years x 50 weeks/year x 40 hrs/week), and about the same amount of time if you combined an undergrad + master's degree.

Once armed with the right stuff, we all know we have to also be located at correct spot in space and time to even have a chance to grab the opportunity when it comes knocking. It's an interesting observation that being born around 1955 was a good thing for Jobs, Gates, and others as it enabled them to jump into the PC revolution. Ultimately, is this really useful? We are simply unaware what skills will be valuable in 20 years that we can prepare. It's mostly just dumb luck to a large extent that some people come out on top.

We all know that to simply be smart is not enough. This reminds me of Richard Feynman, reported to have an IQ of 124 (just above average), who joked that winning a Nobel prize was no big deal, but to do that with an average IQ of 124, now that was genius!

There is no need to waste any more ink on cultural environment and the important role that it plays in eventual success. Sometimes it makes me guilty to think about my own accident of birth. There was at least one kid running around begging for a meal, who if he had half my advantages while growing up, would have done twice as much.

Most of Gladwell's work is good journalism, but he often falls short of good science. The most astounding leap that he makes is to draw the conclusion that rice farming teaches patience that makes Asians better at math since it teaches persistence and attention to detail. There is something to be said about language and how Asian languages are more calculation-friendly in terms of syntax. But, mathematics is not just merely arithmetic. Even if we consider calculation efficiency as an indicator of math skills, it would be interesting to show that American-born Asians who don't speak their mother tongues are somehow worse at math than their Asian counterparts who do. Indian languages are perhaps syntactically worse as we have more unique words for numbers than English, yet we are pretty good calculators. Why? A quick reason is that we have large families and children have to learn to add and count fast. I dislike these 'gee-whiz' sort of explanations.

Not much love

The local independent bookstore in Ann Arbor - Shaman Drum is closing down and is selling everything at a 35% discount (really 35%, not just 'up to 35%'!). I went there last week and it was a like a a garden that was picked clean of the most beautiful flowers. I know of people who have been camping out there for days.

However, after some searching I did get a few books that I have always wanted at a nice knocked-down price and I wondered how they ever escaped the notice of the thousands of other book lovers in the City of Ann Arbor.

Shaman Drum has(d) the best and most knowledgeable staff and a great selection of books. It was a bookstore's bookstore. It's always great to have people around who can not just show you around, but also make great suggestions and tell you that your choice is excellent. Of course, good service is appreciated, but not everybody would like to pay extra for it. For a college town, it did not have such great discounts compared to Borders across the street. Perhaps, there is something fundamentally wrong in having a book-lover or music lover run a bookstore. I have yet to see them make money on a consistent basis. Either you are a lover or a seller.

When I checked out the lady at the counter packed my books in a Shaman Drum paper bag that read: "Shaman Drum Bookshop (www.shamandrum.com)" on side, and "Love your Local" on the other. Apparently, not much love for the local and independent. Like the paperbag this local, independent bookstore is going to get recycled too.

The math behind galli cricket teams, and other interesting diversions

Group Theory in the Bedroom and Other Mathematical Diversions is Brian Hayes's set of collected essays from the American Scientist.

Full marks for the slightly risque title that will pique anyone's interest, but the book has nothing to with mathematics of partner swapping. The subject of the investigation is to find the golden rule for mattress flipping. Mattresses should be flipped periodically to ensure that all sides of the mattress get equal wear. It's easy enough to see that there are 4 possible configurations: (Side A, Side B) x (Top, Bottom). The goal is to find one rule, or a set or rules, that you can apply each time to perform a set of operations that ensures that you end up cycling through all 4 configurations.

If you only flip (along the long or short axis) you cycle through only two sides - A and B. If you only rotate in a plane then you cycle through - Top and Bottom. Using group theory, Hayes shows why there is no golden rule. You cannot perform the same set of operations again and again because the mattress is a Klein-4 group . A rotate and a flip along the short axis is the same as a flip on the long axis. Any set of two operations are equivalent to one operation. This proves to be the undoing of any rule, as we know that any ONE set of operations is not enough to cycle through all 4 configurations. So, you either need a fixed schedule, or a set of markers to ensure you do an opposite set of operations.

Being a kinda random fellow, I best liked Hayes's analysis of the effects of random flipping. If you randomly performed any one operation on a quarterly-basis then, on average, one side will get 31% of the wear instead of ideal 25%. A rather tolerable discrepancy of 6%. Then he goes on to discuss tire rotation and shows why that is completely different beast since it is a cyclic-4 group and hence there is a golden rule - "quarter turn clockwise (or anti-clockwise)".

What is most interesting about the book is that all these mathematical diversions start as anecdotes and rather innocuously. Consider the problem of partitioning a set of players into two teams: a problem that is encountered and solved on thousands of galli cricket and football 'fields' every day. The usual practice is to select two captains who then toss to decide who picks first. Then they go turn-by-turn to pick the rest of the players. Naturally, the players are chosen in order of ability. In general, this rule results in fairly balanced teams. Hayes calls this the Greedy Algorithm, because at each step the largest number (if you assigned numerical values to the strengths of the players) is chosen in each partition. In reality, of course this partitioning problem is quite a hard one, more technically, it's an NP complete problem and there are number of other algorithms, including the Karmarkar-Karp difference algorithm, but no optimal one. Then Hayes goes on to show why this does not matter on the playing field because on a log scale, abilities don't differ that much between strongest and weakest players and the simple 'greedy' partitions are reasonable without the need for fancy partitioning.

I greatly enjoyed reading the other chapters on namespaces, gear train ratios, and finding the continental divide. If only, mathematics was taught this way in schools.

Murakami on Running

Murakami's memoir on running: On the lit blog. A great rambling, read on running and writing, and living.

New review on lit blog: James Wood's How Fiction Works

My lovefest with books continues this week with a review of
James Wood's: How Fiction Works.

I am off to read some more...

Top ten books on Gutenberg

#1 The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) by J. Arthur Thomson (21431)
#2 Manners, Customs, and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period by P. L. Jacob (16654)
#3 Illustrated History of Furniture by Frederick Litchfield (11252)
#4 The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana by Vatsyayana (10522)
#5 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (9269)
#6 Searchlights on Health by B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols (9007)
#7 History of the United States by Charles A. Beard and Mary Ritter Beard (8348)
#8 Our Day by William Ambrose Spicer (8004)
#9 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (7354)
#10 The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English by Ray Vaughn Pierce (6712)

I stumbled across this while searching for some other texts. Only #4, #5 and #9 are the well-known ones. It seems rather bizarre that people are downloading the History of Furniture, the Dress from the Middle Ages more often than the Kamasutra or Pride and Prejudice (No need for a gender-based query, we all know!). Good to know that Science is trumping them all, or is the web full of only dweebs?

I am really perplexed. Any ideas?