Vernon God Little

Written by DBC Pierre

Published in 2003.

AMazingly hilarious. Had me laughing so hard that I was crying. Based in small town America where some unhinged kid shoots everyone in his highschool except his best friend Vernon. The entire town, looking for blood, tries to pin the blame on him. It satirizes everything from the media to small town life to America itself. I am having such great luck with books these days. They've all been fabulous! What are you reading???

The White Tiger

Written by Aravind Adiga

Published in 2008

This book really deserved the Man Booker. Adiga looked unflinchingly at the underbelly of India. No that's not entirely true. Adiga looked unflinchingly at modern "prosperous" India through the eyes of those at the bottom of the country. This book probably pissed off a whole lot of Indians since it trashes India's economic progress and democracy, everything Indians and the rest of the world have been enthusiastically chirruping about. The book makes India sound exactly like Pakistan: rampant inequality, almost no social mobility and a near unbridgeable divide between those from the "Darkness" (the stagnant villages) and the "Light" (the modern cities). Through all the awful Paki fiction I've read, I've wondered whether it is possible for upper class English-medium novelists to really represent the lower class of our nation. I think Adiga does a stand up job at it. Satire and ruthlessly dark humour make the book only sharper and more damning. You must read it Ali.

Hot, Flat, and Crowded

Written by Thomas Friedman

Published in 2008.

This book was a great read. Friedman defines a very urgent global problem, the huge energy shortage in the face of overpopulation, global warming and an expanding global middle class. He proposes a paradigm shift from dirty fuels to clean fuels using technology to integrate the energy market. It is a visionary book and his picture of the post-clean-energy-revolution world is really quite stunning.

The Bubble

Directed by Eytan Fox

Released in 2006.

Gay Israel-Palestinian love story. It has its moments but quite predictably it exploits the love story as a political symbol and I was not very convinced by the development of their romance. But as I said, it had its moments and the end did leave me a bit teary-eyed.

Tropic Thunder

Directed by Ben Stiller

Released in 2008

Hilarious! Amazing satire of Hollywood. This is what Om Shanti Om should have done for Bollywood. Tom Cruise was especially fantastic as balding studio mogul.

Blindness

Directed by Fernando Meirelles

Released in 2008

Another disappointing movie. Very kitsch. The idea was doomed from the start I guess. How does one make a book about the very visceral experience of blindness into a movie where people watch things from the outside...

The Secret Life of Bees

Directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood

Released in 2008.

Badly directed and shoddily written. Dakota Fanning has turned into a very gangly and unattrative teenager and a not-so-impressive actor. Very disappointing.

The House of the Spirits

Written by Isabel Allende
Published in 1985.

The best book I have read in a very long time. Allende knows how to tell a story: her eye for detail and her powerful imagination shine through in this masterpiece of magic realism.

A story about three generations of a family, which much like Marquez's family in One Hundred Years of Solitude, lives in a nameless South American country. But Allende's family saga begins somewhere in the early 1900s and traces the lineage of conservative and patriarchal feudal lord, Esteban Garcia.

The book made me marvel at how similar the histories of Pakistan and a lot of South American countries are. They bounce between illusory democracies through which the traditional elite consolidate their power and brutal military dictatorships.

We follow the slow but steady transformation of society and the Garcia family which open up to liberal, socialist and communist ideas. The gradual shift in political power is suddenly stopped and the prevailing system of government overthrown towards the end of the novel by a barbaric coup. The atrocities described in the book chilled me to the bone. They made me realize how tenuous our position in these societies is; how quickly decades of progress can be wiped out; and how brutally people fight for ideologies.

But don't be put off by the political tenor of the last fifty pages, which I dwelt on for so long. The first four hundred and fifty are full of enthralling stories about people, some very enchanting people, might I add. While reading this book, I thought that your own novel would maybe look very much like this one.

Three Cups of Tea

Written by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin

Published in 2006

Finally read the book. Remember how big a deal they made out of it at Harvard? Both the authors were there for talks and such. This Mortenson fellow built over 50 schools in Pakistan's Karakoram. I wonder how many are still standing after all that has been happening in the North.

It is an OK book. The story is great, inspirational, but the writing is uninspiring. Relin basically wrote the book. He is a journalist or something, but he really has not done his research. The book was filled with factual errors. NWFP was repeatedly called Northwest Frontier Provinces and the azan was called hazzan... Those are just two things that I remember.

But it is a book that attempts to fill the knowledge gap that Americans have about Pakistan. Effort appreciated.