Book

Today, the name Tesla is synonymous with cars and Elon Musk’s company. Older readers may remember all the Tesla coils from video games and cheap sci-fi and horror films. For me, the name Tesla came to me via a rock band from the late 80s of the same name. It’s a long story. I’m old. Recently I wanted to find out a bit more about the real man, so I picked up this work by Marc J. Seifer, on Audible. It refers to itself as a ’life and times’ work so it’s not quite a biography as such, but it does give a decent amount of detail about the man, from humble beginnings in Serbia, through his inquiring mind and work in Europe, to his move to New York, and becoming an American citizen. ...

I’ve always been a bit of a fan of short stories ever since I read Clive Barker’s “Books of Blood” in my teens. It’s an underrated form of fictional literature in my humble opinion. If it was good enough for Hemmingway… I was looking through a few lists of great short story collections and one which regularly came up was this “Labyrinths” by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. I’ll be honest, I’d never heard of him, and now in retrospect I’m a little embarressed as everything I’ve read about him shows how well regarded and influential he’d been. Indeed one version of this collection has a foreword by the great William Gibson. ...