Author: doruk

The Periodic History Reader, Volume 1

Post author By doruk
Post date April 29, 2020

A selection of histories read in the period covering January to April of 2020.

In God’s Path by Robert G. Hoyland [Oxford University Press, 2015]

The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire

The rapid expansion of Islam is one of history’s most fascinating events and the exploration of its causes is just as fascinating. How could a group of nomadic tribes pour out of the desert and remake the map of late antiquity by conquering lands from the Atlantic to the Hindu Kush in a century? Hoyland’s book is an erudite account that attempts to answer that question, beginning by explaining the context of pre-Islamic Arabia and proceeding through to the fall of the Ummayad caliphate. It’s an excellent work – highly readable while expertly synthesizing the complexity of the period. The assumed premise of the question I pose above, that the Arabs came out of nowhere, is punctured by one of the many interesting insights the book provides. The Arab conquerors did not come out of nowhere – they had been fighting with and against the Byzantines and Sasanians for decades. The conquering armies weren’t filled with the fire of holy war but the pursuit of booty. They used the time-honored tradition of leaving the locals in charge after the fighting was done (as long as tributes were paid). And the conquering wasn’t as easy as posterity makes it seems, while Islam itself didn’t gain a widespread foothold for a long time (partly as a deliberate policy of Muslims, who realized that the more people converted the less revenue they made off of taxing non-Muslim populations). By no means is this a popular history: but it is highly readable while maintaining a high degree of scholarship. Highly recommended for those interested in the era. [4/5]

books culture fiction

The Periodic Fiction Reader, Vol 1

Post author By doruk
Post date April 29, 2020

A selection of fictional works read in the period from January-ish through April 2020.

Hyperion by Dan Simmons [4/5, for now]

Hyperion, winner of the Hugo award in 1990, is considered one of modern science fiction’s classics. I recently made my way through the same paperback I first read over twenty years ago to see how it held up (as an aside, my favorite reading medium is surely the mass-market paperback, perhaps a nostalgic reaction to the most common format in my childhood and one that is no longer as prevalent as it should be). This is a complex novel, as much a literary fiction exercise as a popular science fiction, with several plot threads deftly managed across intertwined stories with a common element: the planet Hyperion, home to a mysterious being called the Shrike, which seems to be a vengeful and murderous deity, and the equally mysterious Time Tombs, where time flows backward. The structure of the book is based on the Canterbury Tales: six travelers tell their tales while on a pilgrimage to the Time Tombs. The novel is ambitious and Simmons creates a universe of complex personalities, politics, and science. His prose struck me as somewhat muscular, reflective of the time when it was written, but there was nothing that felt dated about the overall experience and his talent as a writer is obvious. I’m unsure of my final feelings: it should be admired for its accomplishment but whether or not I enjoyed the experience of reading it is still out for verdict. I probably won’t have a final conclusion for some months yet and perhaps that in and of itself validates the reading. It’s a must for serious science fiction readers.

The Subtle Knife/The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman [5/5 and 4/5]

I’d read the full His Dark Materials trilogy not too long ago but my interest in revisiting it was rekindled after recently reading Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage and watching HBO’s serialization of the first novel. Having enough familiarity with its plot and characters, I skipped that first novel – The Golden Compass – and started my re-read with The Subtle Knife. It’s a wonderful book that seamlessly expands the story’s scope to our and other worlds while retaining focus on the journeys and growth of the main characters, Lyra and Will. The third book loses some of that focus as it takes on a full-scale universal conflict, spends more time with other characters, and develops related tangents (such as an imaginative diversion into xenobiology) though ultimately all the threads satisfyingly come back together with Lyra and Will at their center. It’s tempting to classify the trilogy as young adult fiction, given that the protagonists are adolescents, but that is to deny it due justice as a member of fantasy fiction’s pantheon and its wide appeal to readers of all ages. Pullman’s prose is excellent, the action and flow inexorable, and the characters memorable.

Welcome to DorukAkan football

Post author By doruk
Post date December 19, 2019

As of December 18, 2019, the dorukakan.com football site, available at dorukakan.com/football/football.php, is live.

Over the past several years, I have had several aborted attempts at creating a website. I’ve dabbled at creating personal portals, sketching out numerous designs on paper, and built a few simple utilities for activities like tracking book collections and rating whisky. It was never really my ambition to create a finished product. Instead, the process alone was sufficient: a pleasant diversion to maintain basic programming skills and explore a particular topic of interest.

Over those years, I have had several aborted attempts at creating this website. This particular website was first conceived when I pondered what a table of the Istanbul clubs would look like when only including the matches among the three. And so began many years of searching for data, then scraping and parsing, parsing and scraping, with no real end in sight. But, eventually, toward the beginning of the 2018/19 season, I was able to build enough momentum to move from basic prototyping to the goal of a production-ready site. In many ways, I got lucky with finding the data in the particular format I found it in – and that fortuity was just the necessary impetus the complete this initiative.

What then is this website? It is a collection of various statistics and information, metrics that are out of the ordinary, an exploration into the interesting trends of football data. It is, hopefully, a beginning as I plan on exploring more avenues in the data. What other ways can we evaluate goal-scorers? Is there anything predictive about these metrics or do they operate only as gems of curiosity (nothing wrong with that)? The original purpose and, now that the site is live, the enduring one is all about pondering a question and then diving into the data to see if answers are within.

food

Yogurt

Post author By doruk
Post date February 23, 2017

Yogurt is a constant presence in my existence. It is not though the type of presence that is always at the forefront; or the type of subtle but critical presence where you only notice when it is missing. No, I could easily endure weeks without yogurt if necessary. But it is not necessary: yogurt simply is always there.

A lazy way of putting things would be to say yogurt is in my blood. It is perhaps a reflection of my Turkishness, as if the culinary proclivities of generations of Turks before me echo in my blood (and my dietary tract), like the similarly constant presence of tea in my daily diet, or the feeling of world realigning to its proper order when aubergines are in season. Indeed the English word yogurt comes from the Turkish, not as a borrowed word or pass-through but from the old Turkish of the Central Asian steppes. Some Taiwanese claim that they invented shaved ice; I would not be quite so bold as to make such a claim of Turks and yogurt.

I eat plain yogurt. As a child I would eat flavored yogurts but as my palate and mind matured I found the perfection in the austere simplicity of plain yogurt. The allure of plain yogurt is perplexing at times as I would not say yogurt tastes good nor have I ever craved yogurt. Sometimes I think of clear, cold, wind-swept mornings on the open plains when I eat yogurt. There is a raw and realness to yogurt even in its mass-produced form. It invites and welcomes the most natural part of you, that part with the strongest connection to the earth.

Tags yogurt