What I've been up to

Now that I’ve started working from home, I’ve started reading voraciously and I love the anticipation of deciding which book to read next, thinking about the books, and then occasionally, blogging about them. So my next few blogs are some book reviews.

Kitchen Confidential - Anthony Bourdain

I love "No Reservations", a show hosted by Anthony Bourdain, a no-nonsense, bad-ass guy who also happens to be a chef. He's brutal about the restaurant business, absolutely detests vegetarians and spares no bones (no pun intended) with anyone in the food industry. I see him as the "ultimate cool guy"; raw, unapologetic, gritty, creative and adventurous.

His memoir does not disappoint; I didn't really get all the French and Italian words related to cuisine, but learnt some new ones. A fast-paced, very well-written read.

Rant – Chuck Palahniuk

Chuck Palahniuk is at it again with another of his bizarre novels. His protagonist is as usual, a bored-out-of-his-mind suburban kid who likes to contract and spread rabies. He then joins a club where people bang into each-other’s cars to achieve immortality. It gets weirder, but I’ll spare you the details. Two words should suffice here – “skip it”; watch/read the “Fight Club” instead.

The Language Instinct - Steven Pinker

My favorite of the lot. It talks about how language is “hard-wired” into all humans, and gives explanations about how language evolves over time; why kids exposed to more than one language pick up languages much better than adults; and (surprisingly) how deaf-dumb people pick up the sign language. Of course, the best part about it was that it was scientific enough for me to appreciate it; while at the same time explained in lay terms.

In the Miso soup - Ryu Murakami

Fast moving thriller. I liked the intimate look at Japan’s sex industry, and the seemingly orthogonal view of Japanese culture and the woman’s place in the work force in their society. It seems to be a very male dominated society; teens are extremely fashion-conscious, and lonely, while adult women seem to be very regressive and following in the men’s heels. I might be making some really untrue statements here, but that’s what I thought after reading the book, and from scenes from Babel.

The New Life - Orhan Pamuk

“The New Life” – a little too esoteric and out there for my taste, I picked up this book because I thought I’d try something different. I was a little disappointed that I didn’t quite enjoy the book. I love the way time-space seems to collide and intersect in movies, but I just didn’t feel it in the book.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Read this book in literally a day. It's a wonderful book with a view from the other side of the fence. Whoever is tired of the jingoism in American politics, and the paranoia surrounding terror, will not only relate; but also empathize with the protagonist Changez. It's a narrative storyline of a disillusioned Pakistani Princeton graduate, as he relates it to an American interviewer.

It's very easy to think that this story is autobiographical. This is how Mohsin Hamid (the author) answered this Q in his interview: "People often ask me if I am the book’s Pakistani protagonist. I wonder why they never ask if I am his American listener. After all, a novel can often be a divided man’s conversation with himself."

Local Library raided!

Aah...the smell of books! We raided the Towson Libary today; and here's the loot:

1. Grimus
2. Satanic Verses
3. Freakonomics
4. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
5. Confessions of an Economic Hit-Man

The picture on the left is slightly unrelated; but if I were to justify why it's there, I'll say that it's because it reminds me of books lined on a shelf.

bombay meri jaan!

I just finished reading "The Moor's Last Sigh" by Salman Rushdie. The book's so beautifully written...he's really a class act. I copied a paragraph about the way he describes our beloved city. Few people can write such a wonderful statement as him. Even after I finished the book, these words kept coming back to me. Here goes:

"Bombay is central, has been so from the moment of its creation; the bastard child of a Portuguese-English wedding, and yet the most Indian of Indian cities. In Bombay all Indias meet and merge. In Bombay, too, all-India meets what-is-not-India, what comes across the black water to flow into our veins. Everything north of Bombay is North India, everything south of it is the South. To the east lies India's East and to the west, the world's West. Bombay is central; all rivers flow into its human sea. It is an ocean of stories; we are all its narrators, and everybody talks at once."

- The Moor's Last Sigh.