Three books
On the recent trip north I bought two books to stave off boredom: Robin Sharma's The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari and Jeffrey Archer's False Impression.
Robin Sharma's book is something that I've been aware of for a while and thinking of reading but didn't get around to. Its in the broad self-help literature category. I didn't find it that good (which was more or less what I expected but I wanted to read it anyway). It was pleasant and might have been saying true things and if you took the book seriously and did what it said you would find your life transformed. But it didn't affect me enough to take it seriously, and as literature it kinda sucked. One tidbit: the book is a long 'sermon' by one person being listened to by another person. To break the monotony, the listener every now and then is made to interject with a comment or a question. The interjections are however really lame and the entire effect is quite jarring.
Jeffrey Archer's book also sucked quite badly. It was interesting enough to keep you turning the pages, but only just about, and only if you didn't have much else to do. When I read a book like this I'm surprised at how much I've grown as a reader from the early days (not saying this in a self-congratulatory way, just saying that I'm surprised). Back then authors like Jeffrey Archer could do no wrong, their books were spellbinding and perfect. Now the flaws are so obvious. An alternate possibility is that this particular book is pretty bad, but I've seen the same effect elsewhere, like with re-reading Alistair McLean.
Dan Brown's stuff is much better than this book if you want a simple thriller.
I also read Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide. Now that's a much better book and a lot more challenging to read and review so let me put off writing about it to another day.
Robin Sharma's book is something that I've been aware of for a while and thinking of reading but didn't get around to. Its in the broad self-help literature category. I didn't find it that good (which was more or less what I expected but I wanted to read it anyway). It was pleasant and might have been saying true things and if you took the book seriously and did what it said you would find your life transformed. But it didn't affect me enough to take it seriously, and as literature it kinda sucked. One tidbit: the book is a long 'sermon' by one person being listened to by another person. To break the monotony, the listener every now and then is made to interject with a comment or a question. The interjections are however really lame and the entire effect is quite jarring.
Jeffrey Archer's book also sucked quite badly. It was interesting enough to keep you turning the pages, but only just about, and only if you didn't have much else to do. When I read a book like this I'm surprised at how much I've grown as a reader from the early days (not saying this in a self-congratulatory way, just saying that I'm surprised). Back then authors like Jeffrey Archer could do no wrong, their books were spellbinding and perfect. Now the flaws are so obvious. An alternate possibility is that this particular book is pretty bad, but I've seen the same effect elsewhere, like with re-reading Alistair McLean.
Dan Brown's stuff is much better than this book if you want a simple thriller.
I also read Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide. Now that's a much better book and a lot more challenging to read and review so let me put off writing about it to another day.
posted by VK at 9:36 AM
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