Have you read Parts 1 and 2 yet? This time I noticed that the books diverged a great deal and so finding a common thread was difficult.

J Vignesh,  journalist from The Economic Times,  held a precious book of a genre we have so far never come across in our BYOB Parties or Talking Terrace Book Club meets– A History of Indian Cricket by Mihir Bose. The very enunciation of the word ‘cricket’ enunciated a collective gasp from our readers. The book, which he got for a steal from a flea market in Chennai talks about the pre-Sachin Tendulkar cricketing era. It starts at the very beginning in one of the first recorded games in India in 1721. A must read for any die-hard cricket enthusiast.
Shruti Garodia, a content writer, spoke about Khaled Hosseini’s books- The Kite Runner and And the Mountains echoed.  “There is a simplicity about Hosseini’s writing that remains imprinted on your memory. Take this line: Children aren’t coloring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favorite colors. This is such a simple idea but it remains with me. This is one writer who keeps getting better and better with each book.”

Writers also seem to keep writing the same books over and over again. Hosseini deals with the theme of exile. The Kite Runner interestingly deals with the migration of a father and son from war torn Afghanistan. “Taken in the backdrop of what is happening today, the book deals with a very important theme. The problem with Hosseini’s work would be that his books are more about the migration as it is about to happen and the story after the migration. Today this interim gap is what we are witnessing; he never talks about the trauma a refugee goes through to reach the promised land.”

Sudharshan Narayanan from Vantage Circle delved into the mystery genre this time and he enjoyed The Menagerie and other Byomkesh Bakshi Mysteries by Saradindu Bandyopadhyay, translated by Sreejata Guha. “The protagonist of this book, Byomkesh Bakshi, is far better than Sherlock Holmes, at least to me. I can relate to the characters better as the stories are set in India and also because Byomkesh the detective is flawed and he’s married. Not many married detectives in this genre. The female characters are unforgettable and very strong. Byomkesh’s motto is Satya ki Khoj or the search for truth- an ideal motto for any detective.”

More books from the BYOB Party coming up soon!

Tangential talk is the best part about sharing books- one writer leads to a story to another writer to another story. There’s a randomness that happens when each person in a group talks about a book that has affected him.

We saw in Part 1 that expert advice could go wrong. In fact data interpretation is the challenge of the hour. Something as elusive as an observation can affect the outcome. “That’s kind of like science fiction.” Sudharshan from Vantage Circle opined.

Which brings us to the science fiction read of the party.

He came upon a book called The Martian, a 2011 science fiction novel by Andy Weir, also adapted as a movie starring Matt Damon. “It’s pure science fiction, but what I couldn’t understand is how the protagonist handled loneliness. There’s no mention of this challenge in the book at all.”

Loneliness is not to be taken lightly. Ralph talked about how there were so many nonagenrians who were too healthy to die but wanted to nonetheless. Umakant mentioned that this would be the next biggest challenge of growing life expectancy. Machines would be the new solace- science fiction is already posed to become a part of the everyday life of the old and the ignored.

Harris Ibrahim K.V, Python Tamer at Eventifier, delighted in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl. He found the poetry in the book delightful and quite a departure from the sombre horror of Dahl’s short stories. Dahl’s reputation is colorful to say the least. He served in the Royal Air Force during World War and even worked as a spy. You might want to have a look at this.

Unfortunately the movie failed to move him,as movies often fail their book counterparts. “If there is a movie that does justice to the books, it must be The Lord of the Rings.” But here again, some readers debated over the genuineness of Aragon being lost on the silver screen.

“Not to mention how deeply hurt I was by Voldemort of the Harry Potter series. The sense of doom about him was absent- he was almost (dare I say it?) comic,” Abhaya said.

Harris Ibrahim was not the only one who read Dahl. A young reader, Eshwar, spoke about James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl that he considered the best book he had ever read. The story line is so tempting- a boy loses his idylllic existence and escapes from the tyranny of his evil aunts with fruitly intervention-  you want to read it straight away.

More books were shared. We’ll talk about these in Part 3.

This time, the BYOB party welcomed an overwhelmingly large number of individuals who work in the software space.

Nilesh Trivedi the engineer who has made it to all our BYOB Parties so far, talked about Zen Pencils, a departure from the usual heavy stuff he reads like philosophy. He showed me a couple of panels that reflect the writer’s conundrum. Gavin Aung Than, the creator of this comic strip, used to read biographies of of people whom he thought had more interesting lives than he did; this inspired him to use his flair for cartooning to illustrate quotes from the greats. His story is very interesting. Read it here.

Ralph A decided to skip the self-help and talk about a very tech book called The Apple Revolution: Steve Jobs, the counterculture and how the crazy ones took over the world by Luke Dormehl. It’s a non-ficional account of how the hipster hackers of the 1970s generation in California mastered capitalism. Ralph reads extensively and he felt lucky that he fell upon this little known book, a relatively new one at that, published in 2012. A movie Abhaya watched called Pirates of the Silicon Valley explains the Microsoft and Apple story too, in case you are interested.

I talked about Dorothea Brande’s book Becoming a Writer, which I reviewed for our Review and a Half Segment(Parts 1 and 2 here). It seemed like a good choice considering it was NaNoWriMo month. Is a book that does not advocate MFAs and rather helps the writer deconstuct herself close to self-help? The question arose. Brande mentions many interesting tips like writing every day at a prescribed time, completing a short story, meditating on the character and plot (it helps!). I agreed with her assertions- a writer must learn when to be an uncensored writer and when to be a very ruthless critic of her own work. But does this book help with the malaise of the age that a writer faces the most? No, distraction is a recent issue and no book has yet been written that can distract the writer from social media entirely.

Jaseem Abid, a platform engineer at Fybr, talked about his taste for more simple books. He read the Lord of the Rings in a month dedicated exclusively to fantasy bingeing. He finds the classics impossible to read, though he is reading Lolita. Inevitably, he arrived at a book he really liked, a self-help book called The Last Lecture, which is more the wisdom of one’s last moments than a self-help book though it is a work that teaches you to value the small things with immense effect. He is not a fan of self-help books and was unhappy that Steve Jobs recommended a book such as Autobiography of a Yogi, an autobiography of Paramahansa Yogananda, a spiritual book with an element of the self-help quotient.

To end the debate, Abhaya mentioned a book called Wrong: Why experts keep failing us–and how to know when not to trust them. In a world where the flow of information is dictated by gurus of all kinds from the science, finance and health sectors, there is still immense lack of perfection and even fraudulence. Self-help books written in the dozen can not help people; even experts fail us. Solutions are the need of the hour but these elude as constantly.

In a world where self-help is looked upon with increasing skepticism, this was an illuminating session.