Review: Bones of the Hills

Posted by lemiffe in Literature on Dec 4th, 2009 | 0 comments

I just finished reading Bones of the Hills by Conn Iggulden. It is the 3rd book in the Conqueror Series of Genghis Khan. I would like to share my thought on the book.

The hardback version is 518 pages long, so it proves to be a lengthy good read. It is mostly fiction, however, many dates, army sizes, names, and events are based on actual facts and tales written throughout history.

The book is very vivid and descriptive. While I am a fan of 1st person writing, this book was colourful and used a wealthy amount of grammar. It is fast paced, and I consider it the least boring book I’ve read in about a year. The most intense and emotional part (in my opinion) is towards the end, at four fifths of the book.

If you are looking for a historical novel to read through I can highly recommend this book.

The continuous learning process…

Posted by lemiffe in Life on Dec 4th, 2009 | 2 comments

So, you’ve finished school, you’re working, you probably have been doing so for a few (or too many) years. Then one day you stumble on a math equation you saw at High School (Tertiary School if you are British) and you can’t remember where to start solving it. Then someone mentions something about Genghis Khan and you barely remember he was a Mongol that took over many lands.

It’s only natural, you know, to forget things over a period of time. Specially when we don’t use and practice them constantly. How can you avoid losing all that information your teachers took so much pride and effort in stuffing into your brain in the first place?

I came up with an interesting game I am going to start. Every Saturday (or so) I will pick a topic on random, it might be about the British Empire, or about the Chin, or about finding the area under a curve, or parsing XML through the Python programming language, or how to hack the firmware for my digital camera, or maybe how to bake French bread. Then I am going to blog about my findings.

Why? Well… maybe many of you already know some of these things. Then again, maybe many of you don’t. Information is vital in our society: He who knows is he who perseveres. The point of me posting random topics to my Blog is not to brag about how much I know, or what I learned throughout the day, but to share my opinion on a topic I randomly thought about which may be of interest to you.

In the end, it may be a handy read, or it may be irrelevant information, but the point is doing what you feel is right in the end… I feel we all must keep our memories and knowledge alive, and this is might be a good practice to start with.

What do you think? Do you consider you have a better way of keeping knowledge alive in your memory?