Reading List - 2013

1. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
2. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
3. The Immortals of Meluha by Amish Tripathi
4. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig - I need to read this book again, in its own time.
5. The Secret of the Nagas by Amish Tripathi
6. The Oath of the Vayuputras by Amish Tripathi

Reading List - 2012

Did not do very well with the book reading last year. Doing only slightly better this time. Will keep you posted.

1. Noon by Aatish Taseer (If every life was a story with a begining, middle and an end; mine wouldn't be one of them. That is how this story is. But a good one)
2. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (Fiction. American classic, an awesome novel)
3. One Hundred years of solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (Fiction. Surreal, interesting and complicated)
4. Letters to a young poet by Rainer Maria Rilke (Collection of letters. Its a must read for everyone)
5. Girl who played with fire by Stieg Larsson (Fiction. Book number two of millennium trilogy, enough said)
6. A walk in the woods by Bill Bryson (Travel. Describing his attempt to walk the Appalachian Trail. I would even read his laundry list)
7. The Peter Principle by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull (Business/Humor. I know, strange. But the principle is in practice everywhere around us.)
8. Where the Heart Is by Billie Letts (Fiction. A nice little heartwarming read)
9. The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson (Comic strips, and well, INDISPENSABLE)
10. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
11. Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India by William Dalrymple
12. Strange Pilgrims by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
13. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
14. The Duel - Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power by Tariq Ali
15. A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar
16. Close Range (Wyoming Stories 1) by Annie Proulx
17. The Smartest Guys in the Room by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind
18. 1491 - New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann
19. Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke

If not numbers, at least I did some variety this year.

Reading List - 2011

This is turning out to be not so great year for reading. Read my last year's Reading list. Here is a list of what I have been able to manage this year

1. Crime and Punishment by  Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Drama, an awesome one)
2. This will change Everything : Ideas That Will Shape the Future by Mr. John Brockman (Ideas from an assortment of people about what they think will change the world. Good, but the ideas have just been touched upon, could have done with some elaboration)
3. Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen (Historical novel and a very good one)
4. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (Sci-fi/romantic and very fascinating)
5. Superfeakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner (Freaky Economics, a book perhaps marred by the expectation from a sequel of its predecessor. Good one in its own right)
6. The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson (A novel. The booker guys know their stuff)
7. 1984 by George Orwell (A novel. Ah! what a novel)
8. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (Super engaging read)
9. The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger (Another must read)

You promised that you will die for me, now please do

When I started this blog, I wrote a couple of posts about Dan Brown and the Lost Symbol. Go ahead and read them if you have nothing better to do (here and here). I promised to write about the latest book once I read it. Since I have read all Dan Brown books, even the ones before Robert Langdon stories, this should have been easy and natural. But the problem is that between then and now, I have read some awesome literature. I have been amazed at how some of them have such intricately woven plots, or how some of them would pull even the most neutral reader into the scene just by sheer power of words. Or even books of essays that starts with an idea and builds on it with such irrefutable arguments that you either agree or are forced to think about it and then agree.

But since I keep my promises, I read the book.

And boy it was a different kind of experience. I am so brain dead that I don’t know what to write. May be it’s the fear of going over the stuff I read in my mind over again. I don't even find it as much fun making fun of it as I did in those old posts.

A book review is going to be too late now. But what I can and will tell you is the most important thing that I take out of this experience. There are two actually.

First thing first. This is an old wine in a new bottle. Just that this time someone forgot to cork the bottle properly.

You can take this idea of symbology only so far. Sooner or later you will exhaust all the words from ancient languages that can have an open interpretation. And once you do, you are going to be repetitive and painful. That is what this book is. A severely watered down version of Da Vinci Code.

The most frightening thing about the book is that at places even the author seems to be not enjoying it. That is the worst feeling that you can give to the reader.

When you refer back to your own old works over and over again, it’s bad. When it’s “the lost word” you are looking for and still title the book lost symbol, it’s bad. When in the end you take the reader down a thousand steps, just to inform that the lost word is a bible which is there somewhere around, its awesomely rotten after about 500 pages. If your story has two set of people, who believe and who don’t, don’t give me a main character (Katherine Solomon) which changes sides over and over again without so much of a warning.

And please, please, please don’t tell me in detail every little thought in the brain of a dying person. It might be fun and thoughtful, it just happens to insult my intelligence. I would rather you give me the taste of cyanide and make it firsthand this time.

So that was it people, about the book.

Here are my take-away from the experience. Sometimes staring blankly in the void can be the most awesome idea.

And I need to learn to make promises carefully.

Reading List - 2010

Last year has not been the best ever in my life. I would want to forget it in a hurry. Except that I managed to read 26 books in a very tumultuous year.
Coming up with this count took me some time. So I thought why not create a list and keep adding to it. Here is the list.

1. Heaven's Command : An Imperial Progress by Jan Morris (History)
2. The Life and Times of The Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson (Memoir)
3. If God Was a Banker by 'I dont care, really' (Me too an MBA) (Pratyush says: Dont touch it even with a pole)
4. I Too Had a Love Story by Ravinder Singh (Love Story)
5. Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama (Memoir)
6. The Argumentative Indian by Amartya Sen (Economics/Philosophy/History)
7. BPO Sutra by Sudhindra Mokhasi (compilation of Indian BPO stories)
8. Love Story by Erich Segal (Romance)
9. The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama (Politics)
10. Not Without My Daughter by Betty Mahmoody with William Hoffer (Memoir)
11. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (Adventure Classic)
12. Six Suspects by Vikas Swarup (Whodunnit)
13. India Unbound by Gurcharan Das (Political/economic)
14. The Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy by Douglas Adams (Sci-fi/comedy)
15. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams (Sci-fi/comedy)
16. Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert (Memoir of soul searching through 3 countries. A good one)
17. Life, the Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams (Sci-fi/comedy)
18. Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier (Awesome)
19. So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish by Douglas Adams (Sci-fi/comedy)
20. Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams (Sci-fi/comedy)
21. The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown (Something or the other)
22. Pappilon by Henri Charriere (Autobiography/Prison Break)
23. An Unfinished Biography by Indira Goswami (Autobiography- marred by bad translation)
24. The Calcutta Chromosome by Amitav Ghosh (History-Mystery, not as good as his other works)
25. Siddhartha by Hermmann Hesse (Historical Fiction-Very nice)
26. Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert (Drama Classic)
27. Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (Drama Classic)
28. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas (Historical Fiction, Adventure)
29. Gunaho Ka Devta by Dr. Dharamvir Bharati (Hindi, Social)
30. Rag Darbari by Sri Lal Sukla (Hindi, Social)
31. Mujhe Chand Chahiye by Surendra Verma (Hindi, Social, Just about OK)
32. The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories by Agatha Christie (Mystery, good as always)

How Starbucks Saved My Life

What’s the big deal? It saved my life too, many times. That’s what I thought when I first heard the title of this book. Lately I came across this title here . I have been meaning to read this book ever since. Sometimes it so happens that you want something and it presents itself. It’s been happening so with a lot of things for me, except of course that truck load of money that just doesn’t arrive. So a friend of mine sees this in discount section gets the book and I get to read it.

Now coming back to point, this book is not about Starbucks coffee saving lives the way we know it. You see, we have been guests. This book is about how Starbucks gave a second chance to Michael Gates Gill. He, by the way, happens to be a barista at Starbucks.

So what is so special about this Mr. Gill? Well, there is something. Michael Gates Gill is son of a celebrated New Yorker writer Brendon Gill, lived in a huge brownstone as a kid. He studied in Yale and was a successful advertising professional at JWT. He worked there for 25 years and rose up to executive vice president and that is when he was fired. He was fired by one of his mentees whom he helped rise in her career. He tells you that he was fired for being an oddity in a company which wanted to be young and sleek. At the age of 53 he starts his own consulting business, which doesn’t click.

He spends next 10 years doing various things. Hoping that his old customers will find him useful, going to gym, having an affair, fathering a son out of marriage, getting a divorce and giving his big house to his former wife. He also manages to bore the woman he had affair with and grow a tumour in his brain which is non-terminal but is making him lose hearing in one ear. Oh, I almost forgot, he spends all his money, has no insurance for him and kids and is almost broke. Apart from all this he mainly spends time visiting Starbucks stores and being too rigid to accept for a long time that he has screwed his life up and good. Only good thing, spending time with the youngest son, makes him realize what he missed out on with his other 4 kids.

 One fine day, he is sipping coffee in Starbucks store and pondering over how messed up his life really is, he is offered a job. He grabs the offer, thinking of the great health benefits. Thus he becomes a partner at Starbucks (a barista for us).

Rest of it is how Michael, now Mike, copes up with his new job, realizing everyday that JWT never made him feel so respected and satisfied.

That is what the story is for the most part. But if you can, for a moment, forget that the narrator is telling his own ‘riches to rags story’, there is something more that comes out. Most glaring is the contrast between the old corporate in America ruled by ‘white middle aged men’ and the corporate today that is more diversified and inclusive in terms of color, age and sex. Now and again Mike can’t help but compare the small everyday things with the way things were. Comparing how his young African-American female boss supports and guides him with how he ruined the advertising career for an African-American girl for committing a mistake that he didn’t warn her against.

And that at times, makes you think that from being served to be one who serves probably serves him right.

The book has a great catchy title, something you would expect from an ad veteran. It is also full of information and details that, at least I would not care about. I mean, I can live without knowing which Starbucks store Crystal manages. The narrative is easy going and sometimes manipulative and at times makes you genuinely feel for him. Most importantly, without any serious sermon, book makes you realize and think about a few things which are so important and so neglected by us in life. After I turned the last page, I looked for when it was printed and could not help but wonder what this guy is doing today. That is when I knew I have read a good story.

This book doesn’t cost much to read, both in terms of time and money. Read it by all means if you lay your hands on it. If you miss it, there is a movie all ready in the making. Read here on IMDB.

Good job Michael Gates Gill. I hope that you are truly happy in life and you don’t have to think anymore about how low you have fallen in life. By the way, though Starbucks might have saved your life, for me you would have redeemed your soul too if only you had not omitted Tawana’s name from the acknowledgements.

The Lost Symbol – The Book

The title I wanted for this was “The Lost Symbol – Robert Langdon, New Girl, Stupid Law Enforcers and a Secret/Mysterious/Bizarre Brotherhood/Sisterhood/Fellowship/Society”. But I didn’t actually use it because
1. This is too long for a title.
2. I think most of us (including me) don’t know how to read out words with ‘/’ in between.

I will make do with the current title only and talk about the book that I have not read yet and later about the movie that has not been made yet.

The Book
The book is out and there are thousand reviews on internet. Here is the summary. “This is one pathetic piece of literature rife with factual blunders which you cannot put down, if you are not rational or if you know the art of suppressing your rationale. If you don’t know this subtle art, you can’t go beyond ten pages.” I for one believe in dying to go to heaven (probably hell in this case).

Apparently planes flutter their wings like a big bird before they take a heave and get lost in the misty skies while at some other place CIA is given an amputated hand as a souvenir from a crime scene where they have no business being present at and have no jurisdiction by law. See the beauty?

Many are of the opinion that Dan Brown’s books stick firmly to the formula. This is where I can happily contradict everyone. In my opinion there cannot be a formula for mass consumption which does not have big dose of sex and a very big dose of gory violence involved. Watch any Hindi movie from Bollywood that was made in late 80s and early 90s to know what I mean.

If you are more of a reader then read Sidney Sheldon. He is the king of formula and he was done passing off his genes to new generation before he started writing his 'best sellers' after he turned 50 (that is when his genes mutated). Well, I just made the gene thing up. That the only hope that my kids won’t have to read the works of any ‘legal heir of Sheldon’s legacy’ (as they would write in the reviews). I wouldn't mind more of I Dream of Jeannie though.

I do think that Dan Brown has found a new formula. Find some mystery or a conspiracy theory which is unresolved. Collect generally prevalent information (that is not easily verifiable) from Wikipedia and try to connect the dots in a super fast paced narrative that leaves people breathless. Throw in a few paragraphs of moral sermons now and then, just to give those half illiterate readers a feeling of reading something more profound than what they are actually reading (I have personally collected data to prove this). Voila! Now run to the bank.

As for the book, I will wait for the paperback to come. Will read it with absolutely no expectations and would love to be surprised. Here is a little disclaimer: I reserve all rights to go back on anything I have said before, if I find something different than what everyone else has found and what I should expect based on the two other Langdon books.

We should give credit to Dan Brown to find a formula that is ingenious and takes considerable talent, not necessarily of literary kind. We should give him credit for creating a formula which is extremely difficult to follow and will probably die with him.

Raise hands all ye who want it so.