Book Review - Page 3

wow wow.....what a good response, very glad.

SOme of my favorites are
Jeffrey archers
Sydney sheldon
Colin forbes
Erich Segal
Arundati Roy

and the list goes on...

There is this indian novel that i read, dont remember the name of it right now. Its about a english guy coming to india and loving a bengali girl. But the girl gets married to an indian.....and she eventually becomes a great author. She pens a abook about the love she had with the english guy. She wants to see the english guy while she is dying and he comes.
It was kind of a touching love story. Will get the name to u guys soon.

Madhu

Hey madhu..i was thinking of starting this thread myself but congrats to you for doing it first. hmm...lets see..the latest book i have read is KING OF BOLLYWOOD: SHAHRUKH KHAN AND THE SEDUCTIVE WORLD OF INDIAN CINEMA written by ANUPAMA CHOPRA.She is a renowned film critic and the wife of noted filmmaker,vidhu vinod chopra(of 'eklavya' fame).this book is a must-read for all bollywood and of course shahrukh fans.it tells the life of shahrukh thru the eyes of bollywood.A very interesting book..it also tells how globalisation played a major part in changing the trend of indian cinema...it is not only about bollywood..it is also about indian society..i just loved the book right from the beginning till the end...u get this book in all leading bookstores in the united states..hope u all get to read it...(btw,my favourite authors are Dan Brown and R.K.Narayan..i feel harry potter is very over-rated..and i shld say that i became a half-atheist after reading 'angels & denons' by DB.)

Thanks for opening this thread Madhu.

I read a book recently called The Mango Season by Amulya Malladi. It is about a Hyderabadi woman who returns to her hometown after living in the US for seven years. She is 27, and her parents are looking for a groom for her. Little do they know that she has an american boyfriend who she is living with, and is going to marry. How she goes about convincing her whole family is the main part of the story.
Here's an excerpt:

"Even though I was raised in a society where arranged marriages was the norm, I always thought it was barbaric to expect a girl of maybe twenty-one years to marry a man she knew even less than the milkman, who, for the past decade, had been mixing water with the milk he sold the family."

These thoughts on matrimony our heroine kept to herself. On the other hand, her parents sent her to study with a few fears and the following orders:
" - Do not eat beef (the sacred cow is your mother)
- Do not get too friendly with foreign people; you cannot trust them. Remember what the English did to us.
- Cook at home; there is no reason to eat out and waste money.
- Save money.
- Save money.
-Save money.
Last on the list but most important…DO NOT FIND YOURSELF SOME FOREIGN MAN/WOMAN TO MARRY."

I found the book pretty humourous, and even though I think of myself as quite broad-minded, there is an assumption I made throughout the book, that turns out to be wrong in the end. I found that quite clever, and it shows we all have some sort of stereotype/prejudice in our head.

madhu are you talking about the book english august by upamanyu chatterjee???

One of the most compelling books I have ever read was "Defend and Protect" by Richard North Paterson. It was about the right to abort a defective fetus, and is a mixture of politics and Supreme Court proceedings.

Another one of my favorite authors is Tom Clancy - his books with Jack Ryan, like Patriot Games, Hunt for Red October, Clear and Present Danger, Rainbow Six, are some of my favorites. It also helps that Harrison Ford starred in some of them!

I also read Mary Higgins Clark novels, and I am sure many others out there are also fans of hers. The last one I read was the one where the leading character has come back to the house where she lived in as a little girl, and she remembers her mother dying in there, and she herself was accused of murdering her mother. People referred to her as Lizzie Borden, and now she is back and doesn't think people will recognize her because she has changed her name after the murder and she lived with her aunt and uncle. Now she is married and she has children of her own. However, soon after she moves into the new house, somebody paints the word Murderess on her front lawn. Her husband doesn't know about her past and she is terrified that some of it is going to come out. I am not going to tell you the ending, if you haven't read it yet.

Wouldn't that make a better serial than all the silly serials we have on SunTV?

Sorry, folks. I missed this earlier. Kite-Runner by Khaled Hosseini is one of the best books I've read in a long, long time. It is not a political chronicle of developments in contemporary Afghanistan or an indictment of its class structures. Rather, it is a poignant human story, told in elegantly simple prose. The novel looks at the difficult relationship between a father and son and explores human frailties such as jealousy and betrayal.

The story in a nutshell. Amir, the privileged son of a wealthy businessman in Kabul, and Hassan, the son of the family servant from the lowly Shi'a Hazara tribe, were playmates. Amir, craving for the respect of his father, was always secretly envious of the illiterate Hassan towards whom his father seemed to be partial. The story is told in flashback mode. Amir has managed to move to California and has become a successful novelist. But he remains wracked by a guilty conscience over a childhood incident in which jealousy and fear prevented him from rescuing the ever-loyal Hassan from a group of bullies. Finally, he seeks redemption by making a treacherous return journey to his war-ravaged homeland to rescue the son of Hassan after the boy's parents are shot during the Taliban takeover in the mid 1990s.

If you folks haven't got the time to read the book, watch out for the movie. I assume the producers will somehow manage to release it eventually. The family of the child who plays Hassan didn't realise there'd be a rape scene albeit not an explicit one. They are calling for it to be edited out or they'll back out of the film.

My other recent favourites are "The Life of Pi" by Yann Martel (he won the Booker for it); "In the country of men" by Hisham Mattar (was nominated for the Booker last year but didn't make it). "Disgrace" by J. M. Coetzee, who won a Booker and Nobel, was another powerful story. Oh, by the way, Doris Lessing's (this year's Nobel winner) short stories are a delight to read; haven't read any lately. I also enjoyed "Da Vinci" code for its ability to capture a historical and theological controversy in novel form. But the bloke's writing has hardly any literary merit.

I started reading Hosseini's second novel "A Thousand Splendid Suns", which is also very promising, but haven't had the time to complete it. In fact, these days, I hardly have the time for reading any novels; so much to read in the course of work ... sigh ...

Oh, another book worth reading is "Does my head look big in this?" by Randa Abdel-Fattah. I think she is a Palestinian-Australian, who writes about the identity crisis of a teenaged Muslim girl in Australia. It's actually quite a hillarious book even if it deals with a delicate subject. The protagonist has made a decision to wear a headscarf to school as a badge of her religiosity and identity but she still loves watching Sex and the City and has a crush on a boy at school!

My nephew in Australia made me read the book as it was one of the texts in his English class.

Madhu, I read a couple fo Jeffrey Archers eons ago ... no memory of what they were. Who mentioned RK Narayan? Caryn? Always a delight to read.

Novels by Indians

I must confess I never finished Arundhathi Roy's book. As for Salman Rushdie, I find his novels too pretentious. I started reading Midnight's Children and simply hated it. Ditto for Fury and Shalimar's Clown. RKNarayan I love. I've also enjoyed Chitra Bannerji's "Arranged Marriages" and "Mistress of Spices". Hated Jhumpa Lahari's "Namesake"; very lightweight. One good work I've read is "Death of Vishnu" by Manil Suri. Not much of a story but powerful writing style for a first novel. Used to read Shoba De.

Anyone has other Indian writers to recommend? I'm curious to get hold of that Bollywood and Sharukh Khan book. Caryn, will take note of the book you mentioned. Will read someday ...

Bon,I just finished The Hindi-Bindi Club by Monica Pradhan.It is written in a similar style to Joy Luck Club and I loved it!! Bonus was the recipes at the end of each chapter. 3 daughters and their mothers. Highly recommended.

I love Chitra Devakaruni - all her books are excellent. I think she is Joanne Harris of the East! LOL, although strictly speaking she lives in the US. Queen of Dreams, Sister of My Heart are two very good novels, the balance tilted slightly in favour of SOMH.

Khalid Hosseini's Kite Runner has to be one of the most riveting books I have read but I have not read his latest.

Right now I am into chicklit. Just finished The Undomestic Goddess and The Nanny Diaries. Enjoyed them tremendously.

Don't like Grisham now. Loved A Time to Kill but after that, it's become predictable for me.

Thanks Madhu for starting this thread.:)

Forgot to add - sorry, I dislike Shoba De - very shallow and badly-written-was nearly enough to put me off reading - thank God I had an RK Narayan with me!