Book Review: One Indian Girl by Chetan Bhagat

A large number of Chetan Bhagat's books are free with Amazon Prime Reading. It is for this reason and this reason alone that I read "One Indian Girl". Also because "All the money in the world" was proving to be a little long winded after starting briskly. (I kept losing track of the Getty offspring in "All the money...").

With One Indian Girl, Chetan writes from a girl's point of view for the first time. I was happy to note Chetan's grammar, ability to spell, punctuate is so much better vs 2 states, which I read for free again. (Please note the trend here - clearly, I believe subliminally that the intrinsic value of a CB book is Rs. 0.) The plot as with every CB book is wafer thin - the story of a random girl's relationships. But CB is trying to deliver a message here, I think. CB wants to be seen as a feminist. CB wants to be a politician eventually, or maybe just taken seriously.

Even so, though CB is CB, his plots are thinner than hair, and his plots are mostly purloined from his working life/ vacations, he does manage to keep you engrossed in the girl's tale: like a bad TV serial you started watching years ago and can't give up, just because you must know what happens in the end. For that and for CB learning better grammar and punctuation, I am willing to give this book 2 out of 5. 

The Great War of Hind - free Audiobook

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The Great War of Hind - now free with Amazon Prime

The Great War of Hind (Legend of Ramm #1) is now part of Prime Reading. If you are an Amazon Prime member, you can read the ebook for absolutely free!

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Book Review: Molly's Game by Molly Bloom

I caught Molly's Game on a 14 hour long flight in which I also watched a lot of other good movies I had been saving up for the flight. Of American Made, Get Out, Game Night, Shubh Mangal Savdhan (borderline good) and The Titan (absolute dud Netflix original), Molly's Game stood out as probably the best movie I saw on the flight.

I usually do not buy books I have seen movies of (reverse is almost always true - I will almost always watch the movie rendition of books I have read). I believe mostly in the fact that an author with mere words and ink can not possibly compare with the magic a skilled movie-maker can conjure (Notable exceptions: Munich - based on Vengeance, Anna Karenina). I bought this book largely because it names Tobey Maguire and Ben Affleck, and because I wanted something to read (on the return leg of the long flight).

The book standalone is good enough; however, the movie is rather splendid. Characters like Houston Curtis, bad Brad and the Doug who speaks in riddles are just so much more fleshed out and colorful on screen than they were in the book. A notable exception is Tobey - who the book does more justice to than the movie did.

A decent read just for the incremental scoop on Tobey - but by and large, if you have seen the movie and the splendid Jessica Chastain as Molly on screen, no need to buy the book.

Book Review: Serious Men by Manu Joseph

I picked up 'Serious Men' almost 4 years after 'The Illicit Happiness of Other People'. 'Illicit' was perhaps the book of the year for me in 2013 and 'Serious Men' was purchased in a post 'Illicit' fugue. Reading Joseph is as sublime as watching Tendulkar bat or any of the 2 Ronaldo's play soccer. There isn't a man who was more ordained to be an author than Joseph and 'Serious Men' - his first book - is the reading equivalent of watching Tendulkar bat at 16 or a young Cristiano amaze Old Trafford on a goalless debut; a time when the joy of doing the job overtook the job itself.

Surely, 'Illicit' is a much surer book, funnier and a more tangy plot but 'Serious Men' is a serious masterpiece, darkly comic in parts, poignant in others. The characters are so real, that you could almost touch them in Joseph's pages.

There are a handful of authors whose every book I shall read and pick up (Zaidi, Higashino, Levy/ Scott Clarke, Rutherford) and Joseph is one of them - so poetic that his writing might as well be music.

Unmissable.

Book Review: Redeployment by Phil Klay

Redeployment by Phil Klay is a collection of short stories about US armymen fighting or recovering from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I picked this book up on an Afghan war buying binge and Klay entertained me enough not to regret the purchase. The stories are heartfelt and breezy reads; however, most of them do not really give you a twist/ pang at the end like classic short stories do. Neither is Klay at the level of say a Jhumpa Lahiri to get away with a meandering story that ends without really ending.

Even so, this is an important book for depicting the lives of men caught in a war they did not start. I particularly liked the story about the water treatment plant in Iraq and of a US bureaucrat trying to fix it battling Iraqi culture and Sunni-Shia rivarlries.

Not a must-read, but a can-be-read.

Book Review: The Name of the Game is a Kidnapping by Keigo Higashino

'The Name of the Game is Kidnapping' is another one of Higashino's upturned-plot crime thrillers, told from the view of the criminal. All the other Higashinos I have read were about murders (including 3 unread ones in my Kindle shelf), so I decided to try this book for a change of pace.

The book is true to Higashino's form - a slow burning thriller wherein a set of regular everyday people indulge in crime. However, for the man who set the bar for crime thrillers with 'Salvation of a Saint' (arguably his best book) and 'Suspect X', 'The Name of the Game is Kidnapping' is a lukewarm read. It is in about the same class as the author's 'Malice', which again was a good but far from great read.

Strictly an airport read.

Book Review: The Radium Girls by Kate Moore

Ever since I was very young, I have been fascinated by radioactivity. Moore's "Radium Girls" takes one back to the time Radium was just discovered (early 20th century) and there was little known about the deleterious radioactive impact of Radium. In fact, doctors often prescribed Radium for 'good health', there were Radium foods and knick-knacks sold and it was thought of as a wonder-chemical.

'Radium Girls' is the story of women working in two particular radium-dial painting (watch dial) factories/ studios in the US who later suffered the ill-effects of radium-poisoning. Knowing what we know of radioactivity today, it was hard not to wince when I read parts of the book where the women employees played with Radium, took it home to paint their houses or other items in it or dipped the brushes they used to paint the dials in their mouths to 'point' them for more defined results while painting. The book takes one through the wonder-years of Radium to the women inevitably falling extremely sick to their judicial battle (some from deathbeds) against the companies that employed them.

This is a harrowing read and not for the faint of heart. 'Radium Girls' is an essential warning about the embrace of new technology/ chemicals without substantial research. I have no doubt that more than a hundred years on from the discovery of Radium, there are undiscovered Radiums that poison the human race (plastics, cola drinks, telecommunication airwaves) and in that, the book is a doubly chilling read, especially when one reads of the machinations of the businesses to deny allegations of harm.

What irked me was that the book seemed to end somewhat abruptly though Moore does provide an Epilogue that ties up loose ends. Even so, Radium Girls was an enjoyable if somewhat bone-chilling read.

Book Review: NDTV Frauds by Sree Iyer

While in many ways an eye-opener about the machinations of the men behind the massive scams at NDTV, 'NDTV Frauds' is a nerve-grating read. Iyer descends often into repetition and offers very little actual proof for the government/ ministerial backing of the channel, except for strong circumstantial evidence. The premise itself is strong and perhaps required a much better author than Iyer's ilk to write a book on. In the hands of a better author/ journalist (think 'Gujarat Files'), this book would have been an excellent read. In Iyer's hands, it is a shadow of a book, even though it does have eye-opening revelations about the workings of the Lutyens Delhi journalist-bureaucrat-politician nexus that benefited the Roys so much.

Book Review: The Accused (Modern Plays) by Jeffrey Archer

'The Accused' is a play authored by Archer, and in that, I believe it is a disservice to read it. Even so, considering I am highly unlikely to encounter it being performed in my lifetime, I purchased the somewhat overpriced Kindle edition, coming off a highly enjoyable 'Tell Tale' from the same author. The premise of a play that allowed the audience to decide the fate of the protagonist as a jury, also seemed interesting enough to read at least once. The book/ play ends with two potential endings depending on whether the audience/ jury finds him guilty or innocent.

I happened to find a couple of narrative plot holes which bugged me a lot. Archer excels in the interplay of strongly etched characters and the play format where the narrative is carried forward more by dialogue and less by, well, narrative, isn't something Archer is best suited for.

Even so, I didn't mind the faults of the book much. 'The Accused' is enjoyable enough, though it stops short of being an Archer masterpiece.

Book Review: Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

'Exit West' was another book I was uncomfortable about picking up, given that I didn't enjoy Hamid's 'Reluctant Fundamentalist' much. Even while the book itself had a very interesting story to tell (Reluctant Fundamentalist, that is), I found the narrative device Hamid used to be extremely amateurish.

In 'Exit West', Hamid uses another narrative device - this time, using a narrative style that mirrors the randomness of the lives of migrants running from war and yet often, running into violence and hate. I was floored by 'Exit West' and quite simply, hadn't expected to enjoy the read so much. Poetic yet pacy, Hamid manages to keep you invested in the lives and the love story of his protagonists from start to finish even as their canvas keeps changing.

'Exit West' is a moving ode to every refugee from every war, ever.

Essential reading.

Book Review: The Dirty Dozen: Hitmen of the Mumbai Underworld by Gabriel Khan

I was skeptical about Gabriel Khan's second book considering the first one from the author was the highly dubious Mumbai Avengers (converted into a far more dubious movie later - Phantom). However, Zaidi remains my weakness and having read the preface which alluded to Khan's work with Zaidi, I bought the full book hoping some of Zaidi's skill would have rubbed off on "Khan" ("Khan" is apparently a pseudonym).

I needn't have worried. 'The Dirty Dozen' is a pacy thriller about the lives of the henchmen we don't often read about or remember. Khan's narrative style is similar to Zaidi's - often written in a fly-on-the-wall style. In many ways, this book tied up a lot of loose narrative ends for me in my head across all of Zaidi's works and also helped me understand where the fact for the fiction on which movies such as Daddy, Company, the Shootout series, the Sarkar series, etc. originated; needless to say, the real stories were far more interesting.

In places, Khan jumps the gun, revealing sometimes too soon the eventual fate of the hitman/ henchman, even while his story is in the midst of unfolding. Even so, 'The Dirty Dozen' was a great read to end 2017!