I ended my last post with a note on how I was going to read
Doris Lessing’s Going Home.
It was not to be.
Doris Lessing is probably a very good author but this book was
not for me. I could not quite get her descriptions on moving back to her native
Zimbabwe after a brief stint in Britain. So I had to abandon her.
I moved onto John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, a book that has been in my bookshelf since 2006 (as per
the inscription from the thoughtful and better- read friend who had gifted this
to me on my birthday that year). Somehow I was finally ready to read it and
once I got into the book, it was unputdownable. It was just as well that I had
the holiday in Penang and a work trip to Jakarta to finish the 500+ pages.
During holidays, I can read in the time I would normally be at work. During
work trips, I can read in the time that I would normally spend with Bobo. All travel
is good for solid bouts of reading.
East of Eden tells
the saga of the Trask and the Hamilton families. It is set in the early part of
the Twentieth century and starts off in the East before moving to Salinas Valley
in California. Samuel Hamilton is a jack of all trades, blessed with a large
family but not much money. He leads a life rich in friends. Adam Trask starts
off with hard beginnings and despite the good things that happen to him he also
takes quite a few falls. The book is based on real life families that Steinbeck
had heard about while growing up. The story takes its time to trace the life of
its principal characters, following their ups and downs, all of which are
ordinary, human and yet so interestingly described. A really rich account of
human foibles and follies.
Since I had still not made another trip to the library
despite the mounting concerns about mounting fines, it was back to reading from
my own collection. I had bought Tina Fey’s Bossy
Pants and Mohsin Hamid’s How to be
filthy rich in rising Asia in the Jakarta airport under the mistaken impression
that books are cheap in Jakarta. They are not. Using my brains to work out the exchange rate would have helped.
Tina Fey is funny. She is also hardworking, dedicated,
professionally focussed and sometimes, cutthroat and self centered. Fey gives a
good idea of how comedy works. She is also unabashedly feminist and makes a
great case for female comedy writers, a species that is very rare and
encourages the myth that men are funnier.
Mohsin Hamid’s book is styled as a self-help book. It traces
the meteoric rise of a poor village boy, ostensibly in a big city in Pakistan
but could have been equally located in India, and presumably in other parts of
Asia as well. It is a story of enterprise to capture a slice of the growing
Asia pie. Enterprise does not mean merely hard work, intelligence and luck. In
Asia it is also knowing how corruption works, how hired goons are a necessary
business expense, how political influence is necessary when businesses reach a
certain scale and other such tricks that are described in a matter-of-fact manner.
A quick read and one that had me nodding along in agreement most of the times.
By this point, I had finally managed to find the time to go
to the library and was relieved to find that D had thoughtfully renewed my
books and hence I was not stuck with a large fine. I borrowed another arm load
of books.
I returned to an old favourite, P.D.James and was quite
looking forward to reading a slow-murder mystery. I carried Death of an Expert Witness alongwith me
on an office team-bonding trip to Macau.
Unfortunately I found myself sitting next to a top level person from my office.
She was friendly and we chatted for a while and then she entertained herself
with word games on her phone. I turned to my book but part of my mind was
wondering ‘Should I be networking harder? If I talked to her, would she be
disturbed? Anyway, is a 9 p.m. ferry to Macau the best time to keep up a
constant chatter with someone jetlagged from a transatlantic flight? Oh god, I am
going to throw up if this ferry does not stop shaking soon’. In the end, I read
the first few chapters in a half-distracted manner and ended up not fully
enjoying a perfectly good book. I am going to give it a few years and reread
the book again and hope I don’t remember the ending any more. All travel is not
necessarily good for solid bouts of reading.
My next book was Nora Ephron’s I feel bad about my neck and other thoughts on being a woman. The
title was not something that quite enamoured me. It sounded a lot like some
shallow, aging person cribbing about their aging in a shallow manner. However I
had read very good reviews of the book and in the end, it turned out to be a
great read, with several ‘yes, I get it’ and ‘that is so funny’ moments. Ephron
has lead quite an exciting life with a journalism and writing career and having
been married three times (the last one successful). Hers is the kind of
effortless-looking, wry humour that makes you think that you could probably be
a bestselling writer too if you just tried a bit. She is smart, funny, honest
and eminently likable and I guess coming across as all of this is a tougher
than it seems at first sight. I particularly enjoyed her chapter on how much
she loves reading and how it felt when she read a good book. It was as if she
had peered into my head and put down the thoughts on paper. A nice collection
of essays.
The collection of essays that has been disappointing on the
other hand is PJ O’Rourke’s Holidays in
Heck. I think I had read a long ago essay of his in an old Reader’s Digest
and the name had stayed with me. I remember that essay being quite funny. And
PJ O’Rourke has lived the life of a frontier journalist, so he should probably
have many interesting observations to make. Unfortunately this book is from his
post-retirement avatar where he writes about fairly benign activities like
skiing in Ohio. I am not sure if he himself feels the lack of excitement in
this activity compared to say, finding his way around Baghdad. In any case, the
humour feels a bit forced at times. I have still not gotten through all the
essays and I may end up liking the book in the end. So far though, it has not
been a great find.
