Thursday, May 24, 2007

White Man Falling - Mike Stocks


LibraryThing has these fun stats where it displays books that you share with only one other person and thats how I stumbled on Mike Stocks. He and I are the only ones who own Kalki's selected short stories.
White man falling is a story of how sometimes 'suddenly out of the blue' or 'out of nowhere' incidents end up making such a drastic impact on our lives. Its a rather humorous take of how when a white man falls over one Retired Inspector Swami (who by the way is famous for having tried to commit suicide with just a cycle tube) leads to such bizarre events in life that he ends up as Guru Swamiji.
It based in a long forgotten town in Tamil Nadu and its hearting to see someone based in Edinburgh write such a nice little novel about something like this.

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Blind Faith - Sagarika Ghosh

Well... Why did I pick this book? Mainly because it was written by Sagarika Ghosh of the IBN fame and she does have some decent posts up her blog.
So... was I disappointed.. not entirely. It didn't start off well.. it jerked between a novel and a news report.. but it did pick itself up somewhere in between.. but then again the end was a bit of a damper.
Although the characters are pretty intruiging, there are a lot of unnecessary explanations given to certain events whereas certain interesting ones just breeze through. It comes out more like a first time novel.. although I think she has already published atleast one that I know of.
But I must add that the Indi is one of the best character sketches I have read so far.
A decent one...but could have been a lot better.