Book Club (Currently reading Kite Runner) - Page 2

I'm interested too.

Can we read - Kiran Desai's Inheritance of loss?

I've read the Kite Runner. Well written story which hooks you. But, it takes a mature reader. Some will not be able to handle the real life horrors depicted in the book.

I would like to read the Inheritance of Loss too, eventually.

This is what I found about Inheritance of Loss.

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. This stunning second novel from Desai (Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard) is set in mid-1980s India, on the cusp of the Nepalese movement for an independent state. Jemubhai Popatlal, a retired Cambridge-educated judge, lives in Kalimpong, at the foot of the Himalayas, with his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, and his cook. The makeshift family's neighbors include a coterie of Anglophiles who might be savvy readers of V.S. Naipaul but who are, perhaps, less aware of how fragile their own social standing is—at least until a surge of unrest disturbs the region. Jemubhai, with his hunting rifles and English biscuits, becomes an obvious target. Besides threatening their very lives, the revolution also stymies the fledgling romance between 16-year-old Sai and her Nepalese tutor, Gyan. The cook's son, Biju, meanwhile, lives miserably as an illegal alien in New York. All of these characters struggle with their cultural identity and the forces of modernization while trying to maintain their emotional connection to one another. In this alternately comical and contemplative novel, Desai deftly shuttles between first and third worlds, illuminating the pain of exile, the ambiguities of post-colonialism and the blinding desire for a "better life," when one person's wealth means another's poverty.
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From The New Yorker
Desai's second novel is set in the nineteen-eighties in the northeast corner of India, where the borders of several Himalayan states—Bhutan and Sikkim, Nepal and Tibet—meet. At the head of the novel's teeming cast is Jemubhai Patel, a Cambridge-educated judge who has retired from serving a country he finds "too messy for justice." He lives in an isolated house with his cook, his orphaned seventeen-year-old granddaughter, and a red setter, whose company Jemubhai prefers to that of human beings. The tranquillity of his existence is contrasted with the life of the cook's son, working in grimy Manhattan restaurants, and with his granddaughter's affair with a Nepali tutor involved in an insurgency that irrevocably alters Jemubhai's life. Briskly paced and sumptuously written, the novel ponders questions of nationhood, modernity, and class, in ways both moving and revelatory.
Copyright 2006 The New Yorker

If you all want we can start w/ this one...what say? i think we should all read one book at a time...i thought thats how book clubs worked. if not tell me how they do work...i havent been a part of one bfore😳

I also heard good reviews for a night at the call center (i think thats the title..) and i wanted to read the namesake whose movie has just come out or will come out. have any of you read these?

Khair, I've read the Namesake and I liked it. 😊

oh thats nice, Natasha! but i guess we can select some other book if u have read that one. :)

so far no one seems to have read: inheritance of loss and no one has replied for a night at the call center. are there any more book suggestions? some book that u are dying to read?

i have lots of studying to do, so i wont be a quick reader...the time frame that i have in mind is about 3 weeks...let me know if all of you agree and we can start reading one book. if u think this isnt the way a book club should work, please give suggestions... :)

I read One night at the call center and honestly I fountd the ending quite stupid ...but Namesake is definately a good book I have read it too but you guys can go for it if others havent....but i think we can go for Inheritance of Loss coz most of us havent read it I guess. 😃

Khair, this is exactly how book clubs work, so you're right. Everyone agrees on reading the same book and we discuss it afterwards 😳

I haven't read Inheritence of Loss either, so we should go on with that one 😛 My city library is closed on Sundays so I will get the book on Monday 😳

I havent read dat book either... 😃

I've read One night at the Call Centre, but not the Namesake.

Yeah, the book club should discuss new releases and bestsellers. That's the only way to pick a book no one has read. Or we could discuss a book everyone has read.

3 weeks - so lets say once a month? I think thats a good way to have a detailed discussion on a book. I think the discussions should be intense on these, so that we really dissect everything - from the plot to the individual characters.

Tee, let's do the Namesake as this month and Feb are really busy for me. As I've read it, I can discuss it. 😳