I picked this book yesterday because I was reading a blog post (which I don't recall now) and it had a reference to the book.

To quote from the blurb of the book

How can an 11-year old boy hear a Mozart fantasy for the first time and play it back note-for-note perfectly-but struggle to navigate the familiar surroundings of his own home? Cathleen Lewis says her son Rex's laugh of total abandon is the single most joyous sound anyone could hear, but his tortured aversion to touch and sound breaks her heart and makes her wonder what God could have had in mind. In this book she shares the mystery of Rex and the highs, lows, hopes, dreams, joy, sorrows, and faith she has journeyed through with him.

That, in short, sums up what the book is about. The length made it absolutely perfect for reading within the day. The prose isn't the best possible one. At places it does tend to repeat itself. However, the path of discovery, faith and hopes that it weaves is difficult to miss. It is, as mostly they are, an inspirational and uplifting story. A story of triumph, strength, faith and belief. And, that's why it is a recommended read.

• It appears that today marks 3 years, 3 months and 3 days that I've been on Twitter !
• It also appears that from the beginning of 2011 and till today I've read 16163 pages (or, 55 books)
• It is additionally calculated that starting from 2008 I've spent 382 USD (or, 17,208 INR) at The Pragmatic Bookshelf

Instead of the sporadic "@Flipkart I don't like this or, that" on twitter, I decided to write down what exactly I would like to see happening to the site over a period of time.

When I buy books I usually know which specific book I am looking for. If that is the case, then either the book is found through a search or, it is a recent book and hence it will be visible via the Recently Sold, New Release or, Pre-Orders sections.

Sometimes there are books that are in a series and, I want to buy either the set of books in the series or, a specific book in the series. Two examples come to mind - if I want to purchase the Kurt Wallander novels. I can either pick a specific book in the series or, desire to buy the entire series through a single click. The common data point in this example is the author and that it is a set in the Kurt Wallander series. Unfortunately, currently they don't make themselves available as the boxed deals etc.

Or, take another example - O'Reilly has a set of books with the title "Beautiful ..." these include Beautiful Testing, Beautiful Architecture, Beautiful Visualization etc. All these books have different author/author pairs. The commonality is that it is published by O'Reilly/SPD. In other words, I need to be able to use this piece of information as a data item and select the books. As of now, I don't think the site allows this to happen.

Another item is around the display of books/covers in either list or, grid form. The current upper limit is 20 items. When looking through books by Category (which, by the way, requires some bit of fixing), it is perhaps a better option to let more covers come up in either an infinte scroll or, something around 70 per page. That allows a quicker visual comprehension of the books and, less click-through to the next pages.

I have a request for the cart as well. I buy books for myself as well as send them as gifts to others. I am sure others do so as well. What is a little bit annoying is that the cart (and this isn't just a problem with Flipkart's cart only, but the usage pattern impacts it the most) doesn't allow me to save a transaction and open up a new transaction for someone else. I guess what I am asking for is the ability to save the state of a transaction while opening up and completing a new one. Currently I maintain two accounts to get this usage pattern going :)