Author: Cato the Reader

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Bring Your Own Book (BYOB) Party on May 14, 2016 (Saturday)

RSVP on Meetup OR RSVP on Explara

BYOB May 2016 Invite

RSVP on Meetup OR RSVP on Explara

Have you read a book and are craving to chitchat about it with someone? Have a favorite book that you think everyone would love, if only they knew about it? Want to see what others are reading and have interesting conversations beyond weather, traffic, and real estate?

Then come to the BYOB party and talk away! Try to avoid a bestseller and if you have a copy, bring it along and read us a passage. All languages are welcome.

There will be refreshments and swags courtesy Worth A Read.

FAQs

So, what really happens at a BYOB Party?

Everyone brings a book and talks about it. Conversations follow and they are good. So are the refreshments!

You can take a look at what happened in some of our earlier parties here:

Do I have to be there for the entire duration of four hours?

We aren’t closing doors or locking you in. But the party is best enjoyed if you are there for the entire duration and listen to people talk about a variety of books. Trust us, you won’t know how time flew.

Do I have to bring anything?

Nothing really. But if you have a copy of the book you want to talk about, you might want to bring it in. Other attendees might want to have a look, or you might want to read a paragraph from it.

I am an author. Can I bring a book written by me?

A good writer should be a voracious reader. It would be preferable if you brought a book you really like written by someone else.

Who are the organizers?

Worth a Read

I have more questions. Who do I contact?

Shoot an e-mail to jayajha@instascribe.com.

Okay! I am ready to come. What do I do?

Join our meetup group, RSVP, and come over!

If you are not on meetup, you can also RSVP on Explara.

Short Book Review: Six Thinking Hats by Edward De Bono

Six Thinking HatsSBR: Like many of the popular and best-selling business books, Six Thinking Hats has a meritorious idea, which can be useful. And like its other brethren, it can’t avoid the temptation of overselling that one idea. Six Thinking Hats can’t be the solution to all decision-making problems in organizations as the book touts it to be. The author almost takes it for granted that once the “argument” mode of meetings is replaced with “six thinking hats”, the organizational problems of ego-clashes, of people batting for their self-interest over organizational interest and of genuinely conflicting opinions will vanish.
Once you discount the overselling, this method of thinking or conducting meetings can indeed bring more structure to the process and hence hopefully help you have more productive meetings. But then it is probably one of the many ways available of structuring the thinking process. There is no reason to believe that it is better than others.
The book is not written very well. The ideas are scattered and the attempt to bring structure to them is forced.
To read or not to read: Don’t go out of the way to read it. You won’t miss much. But it is a thin one, and one of the most well-known business books. So if you find it lying somewhere and you have some free time in hands, it won’t bite.

Short Book Review: Salvation of a Saint by Keigo Higashino

Salvation of a SaintSBR: Salvation of a Saint is a murder mystery and it does a good job of it. The prose is readable and the story keeps your interest hooked. There are the standard ingredients of a main detective and a junior and a brilliant scientist. But the junior is not a buffoon, but rather sharp and outsmarts her boss often. Her being a woman is a plus in my book and she is much more qualified for her job than J K Rowling (oops! Robert Galbraith)’s Robin. The brilliant scientist doesn’t get things right in one go. So that is good too.
Any genre novel will have parts that would make a literary fiction reader intent upon reading humdrums of real life cringe. But there isn’t any fun in reading a mystery novel with the lens of literary fiction. So I would not do that either.
To read or not to read: Yes, if you like mystery.

Book Recommendation: The King’s Harvest by Chetan Raj Shreshtha

The King's HarvestThe book contains two novellas An Open-and-Shut Case and the eponymous The King’s Harvest. Don’t look at the hype and the sales numbers and this is easily one of the best English-language books to come out of India. The writing is adroit, literary merit of the text considerable and the juxtaposition of the dark and the criminal with the innocent and the straightforward is hair-raising and heart-tugging at the same time. The vivid elucidation of not just what is picturesque about Sikkim, but also of its towns and villages, police stations and homes, people and their ambiguous characters and moralities is the cherry on the top. While it is unambiguously a “book from Sikkim”, the last one makes it relatable to all, especially those who have grown up in small places.

You can read and understand the stories in many ways. Since that is one of the charms of the books, I am not going to tell you what all I read in the book. I must confess I felt overwhelmed at times. But you must read it and decide for yourself!

The hardcover edition that I read has also been produced beautifully. The cover is bewitchingly beautiful and interiors are well-done too.

Book Description

Below is the book description from the publisher’s website.

Just before midnight on New Year’s Eve, in a village above the Rangeet river in Sikkim, a woman called Kamala hacks her husband, Police Constable Puran, into forty-seven pieces, then walks to the nearby police station and turns herself in. At first, the murder seems an open-and-shut case to Dechen, the tough, foul-mouthed, prickly lady cop in-charge of the investigation. But as she begins to delve into the lives of Kamala and Puran, she discovers a world of lies, deceit and love gone wrong, where nothing is as it seems, and the guilt of murderers is difficult to establish.

On a day of endless rain, a man emerges from thirty-two years of isolation to meet his king, whom he owes a share of the harvest from his fields. Journeying across leech-infested forests and forbidding valleys, he tells his children the story of his life one that has been full of drama and magic. But the biggest miracle of all awaits him in Gangtok…

These two novellas, united by their strong sense of place, showcase Chetan Raj Shresthas enormous gifts as a storyteller. Magical, gritty, nerve-wracking and stylish in equal measure, this is an exceptional debut.

Purchase Links

Short Book Review: My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult

My Sister's KeeperSBR: My Sister’s Keeper has a very interesting premise in the life a child conceived to be a genetic donor to her sibling. It doesn’t deal with it well. The conflicts are unbelievable, they undermine the real conflict one would face in situations like these, the medical issues misrepresented, the twists are too contrived and some of the most important characters do not make sense. The side dose of romance makes it worse. As an Amazon reviewer rightly pointed out, in real circumstances, it is more likely that a minor will have to go to the court to allow her to donate her organ, rather than to stop it from being done against her wishes because the parents want so!
It does manage to be a good tear-jerker once in a while. But it is not a good book dealing with a difficult issue.
To read or not to read: Yes, if a light tear-jerker reading is what you are looking for. Not for the subject it pretends to address.

Interesting Deal on Kindle: MSD: The Man, The Leader for Rs. 39

My guess is that it is a book written to capitalize on M S Dhoni’s fandom. His fandom is great indeed – in numbers. So that works for the book.

But if you are indeed a fan, why be apologetic about it? Go ahead and buy here (the price might change, check the price before buying):

If Kindle is not your thing, or you need to display the book in your book-case or on your desk, then there is the paperback too. Not too expensive either.

Interesting Deal on Kindle: My Days in the Underworld – Rise of the Bangalore Mafia by Agni Sreedhar for Rs. 79

An aspiring civil servant turns into a criminal, spends few decades with underworld, then gets reformed and writes a book! The story of the book is interesting enough. I don’t know about the book itself yet, but the eBook (English translation) is available for a bargain price of Rs. 79 on Kindle right now.

Buy here (the price might change, check the price before buying):

Short Book Review: The First Firangis by Jonathan Gil Harris

The First FirangisSBR: Through the life stories of finragis who came to India before the British supremacy was established in the subcontinent, often to escape religious persecution, legal embroilments or economic misery, The First Firangis is one of those books that help us see the history of the regular people, not exclusively that of the rulers and the elites. However, the author’s attempt to define ‘biography’ as a story of bodily transformations, and using this as an excuse to fill up the chapters where the actual information is scarce with speculations about what happened to those firangi bodies, gets annoying after a while. The biological changes, and the philosophical question of whether a ‘body’ is something unchangeable and constant that defines a person is interesting. But I wish the author was not obsessed with making that the unifying arch in his stories of various firangis becoming Indians. They stand quite well on their own. Where the information was scarce, smaller chapters or combined chapters would have been fine.
To read or not to read: Anyone interested in the nuances of history should read this book. But the book seems to use the White Mughals by William Dalrymple (as an inspiration, but also) as a standard for what it is NOT about. So, you would appreciate it better if you read White Mughals before this.

Short Book Review: 1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell

1984Animal FarmSBR: How do you review iconic books like these, and that too in short? All I will say is that the world of 1984 has not come to pass (thankfully!) for most part. I can’t speak for North Korea. But Animal Farm can be seen everywhere in our democratic society, where all are supposed to be equal. But some are more equal than the others. You don’t need a communist revolution to see the dark joke of Animal Farm in action.
To read or not to read: These are the kind of books you must read to be able to intelligently talk about reading and books. However if you are pressed for time and want to skip the longer read 1984, you should still read Animal Farm because it is relevant irrespective of the form of government we have. It is shorter and easier to read too!