Books etc...

Last weekend I read Q&A on the flight to Singapore. Here is a synopsis of the story:

When Ram Mohammad Thomas, an orphaned, uneducated waiter from Mumbai, wins a billion rupees on a quiz show, he finds himself thrown in jail. (Unable to pay out the prize, the program's producers bribed local authorities to declare Ram a cheater.) Enter attractive lawyer Smita Shah, to get Ram out of prison and listen to him explain, via flashbacks, how he knew the answers to all the show's questions. Indian diplomat Swarup's fanciful debut is based on a sound premise: you learn a lot about the world by living in it (Ram has survived abandonment, child abuse, murder). And just as the quiz show format is meant to distill his life story (each question prompts a separate flashback), Ram's life seems intended to distill the predicament of India's underclass in general. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Although it had been recommended highly by a colleague, I did not think it a truly great story. I thought it was quite clever and innovative, especially using the format of a quiz show like 'KBC' to frame different short stories, but my principal objection to the book is that I found it very 'filmy' (to use a very Indian word - I'm sure this word does not exist outside of India).

Indeed, I have three principal criteria to judge how good a book is. One is how the book changes me as a person after I have read it. The other is how interesting the book is while reading. The third is how much of the book I remember a long time after I have read it. Some books that meet my criteria include:

1. Of Human Bondage - Somerset Maugham
2. The Great Gatsby - Scott Fitzgerald
3. Catcher in the Rye - J D Salinger
4. The Money Game (non fiction) - Adam Smith
5. Fooled by randomness (non fiction) - Nissim Nicholas Taleb
6. Notes from the Himalayas (non fiction) - Ruskin Bond
7. Papillon - Henri Charriere
8. The Dilbert Principle (there is a chapter on Affirmations at the end of the book which is quite intriguing) - Scott Adams
9. Candide - George Bernard Shaw (this is actually only a short story)

Some books that meet only criteria two and three are:

1. A perfect spy - Le Carre
2. The little drummer girl - Le Carre
3. Tinker Tailor Sailor Spy - Le Carre
4. A book of short stories by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (forgotten the name)
5. Barbarians at the gate
6. When genius failed - the rise and fall of LTCM
7. The Odessa File - Frederick Forsythe
8. A study in scarlet - Conan Doyle

Would be quite interesting to hear about what books others read and find inspiring! These are only the books that came to mind - perhaps I will update this list as I think of more books that i have read and liked.