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This review is crossposted from my blog here: daariga.wordpress.com/2017/02/26/lady-chatterleys-lover/

Would you be able to guess what is at the heart of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by looking at its cover or by knowing about the famous obscenity trial that it caused? D. H. Lawrence published this novel in 1928, both the story and its writing being set in the period after the first World War. The writer had to publish it himself since no one back then would print a book which had so much sex and vulgar language. The novel would be freely published only decades later in the 1960s after winning a court battle in England. A similar court trial ensued in India after that for the book.

The lady in question is Connie, a free-thinking woman married off to the Lord of a coal-mining region. The Lord returns injured from the war, unable to physically love or bear his wife any children. Years slowly grind by and the dark grimy coal town surroundings and her monotonous life take a toll on Connie. That is, until a romantic affair slowly takes hold with the gamekeeper of their estate. It seems like they both have similar liberal thinking and he is able to rouse a passion in Connie like she never had before. However, the prudish society they live in and the class divide between them threatens to pry apart their love.

Addressing the elephant in the room, yes, for a novel from before WW2 it is surprisingly free about descriptions of sex, language and reveals quite a lot about the upper class of that generation in England. Like a Merchant Ivory movie, the sensual descriptions and settings are actually pretty nicely done. The real heart of the novel though lies somewhere else. Connie’s love is between a upper class lady and a serving class guy, which was still uncommon for that era. Clifford, her wheelchair-bound husband rails all over the novel against the lower classes rising to be independent and threatening the order of the time. He is quite a bit afraid of the Bolshevist thoughts going around the working classes during that period in England. Mellors, the gamekeeper on the other hand has risen from a collier family through the British army ranks while stationed in India.

Another important actor in the novel is nature. Pages upon pages are devoted to the wooded and flowery beauty of the region that are threatened by the dirty polluting griminess of industry and coal mines. Mellors, living a quiet life in the woods in his cottage represents the face of nature. Clifford is the capitalist, who believes industry and machines are inevitable and that by creating work out of the earth, he is doing good to the working classes. Amidst all this is Connie who floats along like a butterfly, repulsed by the smoke belching buildings and the dreary air they create and loving the flowers and simple life of the countryside.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover might have created quite a sensation in the last century, and beyond its obvious physical lure, I felt that it has quite a bit to offer to the modern reader. Some sections, like Connie’s ride through the coal mining towns are quite an eye opener to the life and times of that period and the effect of bulldozing nature for industry. We witness several cogs in motion in England, with agriculture having given way to industry and industry already giving way to more automation. Many sections seem pertinent even today after a century, which is usually the mark of a good book. We also get a front seat on the divide among the classes and the coming struggle. The book is surprisingly liberal in many aspects that many books even today might hesitate to be. But, what let me down was that the novel is extremely rambling and verbose with the writer going all over the place many times. This is one of those few books where a carefully abridged edition might be a better read.

This review is crossposted from my blog here: daariga.wordpress.com/2017/02/19/the-catcher-in-the-rye/

I had heard so much about The Catcher in the Rye being a classic that I had imagined it as an American version of a Dickens novel. Within the few opening lines, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it was a story narrated by a teenager living in post-WW2 1950s USA! J. D. Salinger’s hero is a certain Holden Caulfield, a rich kid who has just been been kicked out for the umpteenth time from yet another private school. Other than English literature, he has no interest in any other school subject, so flunks causing schools to keep dropping him. His narration in the novel covers a few days of his life before Christmas that year in intimate detail as he struggles to find a direction in his rudderless life.

Holden is the stereotypical angsty US teenager whom I have watched in countless TV series and movies. Father is a corporate lawyer, home is a NYC penthouse and every luxury in life is at hand. However, money does not guarantee happiness. Our hero says goodbye to his dorm roommates and hitches on an unplanned train ride to NYC, checks into a hotel, runs around the city bars and clubs and even orders up a hooker. In the midst of all this pointless roundabout, hints are dropped as to why he might be a bit messed up. A literature-loving older brother who sold out to write for Hollywood. A younger brother lost to blood cancer. Witness to a mindless suicide in one of his private school dorms. And the all-pervading feeling that everyone is phony, except of course himself and his younger sister. In summary, every person’s teenage years vividly put down in print.

I do not remember reading any realistic fiction from the 1950s USA. So, it was quite a shocker to see a teenager travel around alone, checking into expensive hotels, ordering alcoholic drinks at bars, spending on a prostitute, using profanity, all without any adult around batting an eyelid. Was it really this easy back then?! The novel is set in the cigarette age, so another shocker is to witness teenagers smoke like chimneys at all hours freely, teachers, parents, everyone lighting up in every page and also 12-year olds telling their parents they had a puff to calm nerves! I would not be surprised if the tobacco lobby is handing out this book for free to all teenagers!

This book captures our rebellious moping teenage years perfectly. However, it was quite hard for me to sympathize with Holden’s plight. One reason is that throughout the novel he is basically a rich kid, living a rich life with wads of money to splurge. And even after the final pages of his angsty trip, we can see that he will probably end up at an Ivy League institution anyway. Another reason is that the story relies heavily on its 1940s US culture and norms, which are very different from our world today. There is also a sexist, racist and classist slant from that era that is unmistakable in the book. All in all, I felt the book is a bit over-hyped considering all the greatest lists it is on. What it has going for it though is a genuine teen voice and might appeal strongly to that demographic or even myself, had I chanced upon it a decade or more earlier.

This review is crossposted from my blog here: daariga.wordpress.com/2017/02/12/palestine/

I can distinctly remember the time of my childhood from when I started to hear about the part of the world called Palestine. For many years, it was just the image of Yasser Arafat in his distinctive outfit and news about some peace talks and Nobel peace prizes. And when I started to be exposed to more US news channels like CNN and Hollywood movies, I started to hear about Israel and a succession of US presidents wanting to bring peace to the region. Essentially, it looked to me that these folks were unluckily caught in a shitty situation and they were screwed, possibly forever. This weekend, as I turned the pages through Joe Sacco’s highly acclaimed comics about his journey in Palestine, I realized my guess was right.

Palestine cannot be called a graphic novel, cause it is not fiction. It is the journal of 2 months in 1991-92 that Joe Sacco spent in the region, presented as a comic. Sacco, a US journalist, did a whirlwind tour of Jerusalem and the two Occupied Territories of West Bank and the tiny Gaza Strip. He travels around a lot in the region and visits many of the conflicted regions we keep hearing in the news like Ramallah, Gaza town and Rafah. He visits the biggest refugee camps, talks to people affected by the occupying Israeli forces. The comics give us a visual journey, the depraved conditions of the Arabs, the squalor of the refugee camps and the constant presence of the Israeli forces.

As you read through the pitiful tales of the affected people, the depressing tales start to all sound familiar and repeated. It is always goes like this. Sacco shows up in a new town or refugee camp. He befriends a taxi driver or a seller at the market or an educated fellow. He asks around and says he wants to visit the family of someone who was recently affected by Israeli settlers or police. He is taken to one such home. He is surrounded by the male folks of the family and friends and over cups of extremely sweet tea, always tea and more tea, their pour out their story of suffering. A son, a brother, a father, someone gets into a skirmish with a settler or police. Or he is suspected of being aligned with one of the four Arab factions like Fateh and is picked up. He is imprisoned for weeks or months or years without seeing a court in one of the horrid prison camps. Or he is tortured, what Israelis called moderate pressure, and wounded or killed after that. One such torture killing led to the Intifada in 1987 and since then the Israelis have been careful to impose constant curfews and drop off the dead to their families in the middle of the night for a quick and quiet burial under the watch of their Uzis. And on and on it goes, these tales of woe. Young men having grown up under the constant glare of Israeli watch towers and barb wire see no future for themselves other than joining up one of the four Islamic factions that reap the youth for their own benefit. They spend their lives glaring down Israeili forces, throwing stones at their jeeps, an occasional killing of an Israeli settler, followed by retaliation by the Israelis, leading to more bile and on and on. Like I said before, I see no hope.

This book has a moving introduction by Edward Said that should not be missed. The comic itself is beautifully drawn. Especially the sad faces of the men, mothers and children will stick in my mind for a long time. We get to vividly experience what people in the West Bank and Gaza are or were enduring in 1991 on a daily basis. We get to hear the Israeli side of the argument in the last of the 8 chapters. Interspersed in between the stories of the Palestine victims we also get to learn small bits about the history of Israel and Palestine and how this land ended up in so much contention. While I have no doubt in saying this is a good book, it again falls victim to a crime I repeatedly witness US authors commit: giving the reader every last numbing bit of his or her experience in a foreign country. Instead of using a few representative refugee stories and experiences, Sacco hammers us with every single person and every single story and every single experience he had in 2 months. While this might have been digestible in the 8 separate volumes this was initially published as, it is unbearable in the combined book it is published now as. Other than this one nitpick, Palestine is a good book about the plight of a people under the longest military occupation in modern history.

(This review is crossposted from my blog here: daariga.wordpress.com/2017/01/22/the-spy-who-came-in-from-the-cold/)

Western literature and movies of the 20th century are obsessed with the Second World War and its fallout The Cold War. An unjustly large proportion of the works deal with these subjects and I intentionally avoid them. But even I could not avoid finally picking up a John le Carre novel. I had liked what I saw in the movie adaptation of his Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and I picked up The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.

This slim novel is part of a George Smiley series and is centered around a burnt out British spy named Alec Leamas. All the spies under the command of Leamas in East Germany are methodically killed by a ruthless new Communist spy head named Mundt. Leamas is pulled back to England, loses his job in disgrace and ends up working at a library. Turns out that this is all a front by MI6 to make him an enticing defector for the East German side, a great chess game to take down Mundt.

I had not read a le Carre novel before and I can see that his high praise is well deserved. Since he was an actual spy during the Cold War, his writing is supposedly very real, and it seemed so to me. The plot in this one is quite an intriguing puzzle and kept me up on the edge. To his credit le Carre never lets go of the moral implications of the loss of life in this secret war. When Leamas defects, he is pulled deep inside East Germany, with not a single British or American spy to help him. Finding out if and how he succeeds is a thrill not to be missed.

This review is crossposted from my blog here: daariga.wordpress.com/2016/12/31/the-color-of-magic/

For many years, I had been hearing the name Terry Pratchett and about his fantasy novels. I had never bothered tasting any of his books since I am not really a fan of fantasy and I assumed his books were for folks who play Dungeons and Dragons and so on. You get the picture. An Economist obituary after his demise in 2015 piqued my interest so much that I picked up The Color of Magic, his first book in the Discworld series. Within the first few pages itself I was hitting myself for waiting this long and was well and truly hooked.

You see Pratchett has nailed a genre that I had never previously imagined: fantasy parody! Drawing from Hindu mythology, the world of the book rests on four elephants which are standing on an ancient turtle. Our so-called hero is a cowardly wizard who is paid to be a tour guide for a good-hearted rich guy who wants him to show the badlands of this world. Together they bumble along on some fantastic, ridiculous journeys meeting and escaping death at every turn.

Pratchett turned out to be the best new discovery for me this year. Like the first time I listened to Michael Jackson, it is an amazing experience to feel something entirely new. Color of Magic was incredibly funny, I was literally rolling on the bed laughing my heart out throughout this book. Do not be misled that this is one of those fantasy tomes with hundreds of characters and details you need to remember to be able to follow and enjoy. This is an extremely light and raucous read and a great way to perk up your mood!

This review is crossposted from my blog here: daariga.wordpress.com/2016/12/26/dave-barry-does-japan/

A year that has been mentally and physically demanding, having to learn to live with a tiny human, is drawing to a close. Not surprisingly, I turned to humor to lighten my mind by picking up Dave Barry Does Japan.

Barry visited Japan with his wife and son for a few weeks way back in 1991, the Bush Senior years, if that helps jog your memory. This book is an observation of the differences between American and Japanese cultures from his point of view. Almost everything imaginable is covered from language to food to sports to society. I was snickering and laughing on every page, with the chapter on Kabuki theater having me in the biggest splits.

Barry is the funniest contemporary writer I have come across and this book does not disappoint. I am amazed how he can see what we see and yet give that examination such a fun innovative spin and generate such excellent wordplay that leaves one chuckling and laughing. In my book, that is just as impressive a skill as the serious writing that wins those serious literature awards. I can easily recommend this book to lighten your spirits anytime. If there is one complaint, it is that this book is way too short compared to his other books and he could have covered way more Japanese idiosyncrasies in far more detail. If this year is any indicator of how 2017 will be, I will surely be hitting the humor shelves more often in the coming months.

This review is crossposted from my blog here: daariga.wordpress.com/2016/11/06/the-no-1-ladies-detective-agency/

It is hard not to fall in love with Mma Ramotswe, the detective behind The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. I cannot remember the last time I had so much fun as reading her adventures in solving the domestic problems of the citizens of Botswana. I was hooked from the very first page and totally fell in love with Ramotswe, the people she works with and whole African environment the story is set in. I had only read books that either peddle the poverty or war porn or romanticize the tribal life of the continent. So, it was heartwarming to see semi-urban lives of Africans dealing with everyday problems like theft, cheating and infidelity.

Author Alexander McCall Smith has created a popular series around Ramotswe and it is not hard to see why. This lady detective has a heart of gold, but also a strong will and a sharp wit. Her investigations of quaint cases takes her driving across the Kalahari in her rickety white van meeting people of various classes and colors. These petty problems and the people are incredibly multi-faceted, often humorous and reminded me of an innocent time and place years ago.

This book is easy, fast and pleasing to read. I was reminded of the people and settings of RK Narayan and the inquisitive eye of Sherlock Holmes now and then. A good book like this wraps around you and carries you up and away to its world. I look forward to reading more of the idyllic quests of Mma Ramotswe and to getting my hands on some of the redbush tea she seems to drink all the time!

This review is crossposted from my blog here: daariga.wordpress.com/2016/10/30/the-first-bad-man/

There is a certain joy in seeing all the pieces come together in harmony. It is that feeling I ended up with as I crested the middle of The First Bad Man and the bits started to slowly fall into place. The narrator Cheryl is a middle-aged unmarried working woman who lives alone and day dreams about an older colleague who she has been working with for decades. Into her spic-n-span sunny home enters a sulking and voluptuous teenager who she initially hates. But they soon discover a strangely funny relationship based on the self-defense videos that Cheryl’s firm peddles. When the lazy teenager turns out to be pregnant, what follows is a ride that Cheryl could not have imagined in her million dreams, but one that turns out to smoothly sate all her unfulfilled desires.

Some books are great, but a slog to get through, but others like this one by Miranda July are effortless. From the very opening lines, I was hooked. There is a pleasant self-deprecation in the protagonist and a constant humor that runs through the book keeping it light. The writing is top notch, effused with enormous sensitivity and a great eye for detail. When you finally close the book, you really feel like you lived an year with Cheryl in her sunny California home. I was not surprised to learn that the author is also a filmmaker and a screenwriter. The book is very visual, the experience akin to watching a good afternoon movie by Koreeda. I barely noticed it, but the author had laid all her clever traps from the beginning and in the latter half of the book she expertly reels them all in a super satisfying manner. It is so heartwarming to witness good tides finally getting to the protagonist you are so invested in. The First Bad Man is a well written funny and sunny read that is full of surprises.

(This review is crossposted from my blog here: daariga.wordpress.com/2016/10/02/the-good-earth/)

My favorite textbooks in middle and high school were those of the English and Kannada languages. Many of the chapters were abridged excerpts from the best literature on the planet. And what a rich bunch of stories and poems those were! One chapter from my English textbook was so evocative that I had tears in my eyes when it was studied and whenever I read it later. It had been an excerpt from The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. That chapter, the book title and the author all came rolling back from childhood memories recently and I simply had to give the book a shot.

The protagonist is Wang Lung, a honest and hard working illiterate farmer living in the North of China in the decades before the Communist Revolution. His is a hard life spent struggling against poverty, famine, floods and conniving relatives. He weds a slave girl, a marriage of convenience to bear children and to help in farming. His hand-to-mouth existence is severely tested due to famine and he is forced to migrate to a big Southern city with his family and to beg and steal to survive. Being a man of the earth, hence the title of the book, he eventually returns back to his village. With hard work and a bit of luck, things finally turn around for our hero as he becomes a rich land owner.

Pearl has great sway with her words and just a few pages in I was already deeply invested in the character of Wang Lung. Some of the hardships that he and his villagers endure is gut-wrenchingly hard, beware there is cannibalism during famine, and I just wished he would come through. The other character who stands out from this book is O-Lan, his hardy wife. Together they are one of the most memorable characters I have ever come across in a book.

What stood out clearly as I read Good Earth was that this was a Biblical tale in its telling. I would not surprised if that is due to Pearl being brought up by Christian missionary parents in China. The tale is essentially that of the cycle of life. Good people are tested by bad experiences. If they remain true to their heart, they emerge out to a sunnier life. Religious texts hold some of our greatest tales and the story of Wang Lung here is in that vein. The culture, customs, religions and village and town life in China at the turn of the 20th century are exceptionally well described in this book. The Good Earth is an epic tale of the human spirit, filled with all of its glory and ugliness.

(This review is crossposted from my blog here: daariga.wordpress.com/2016/09/25/age-of-ambition/)

The lifting of hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty is undoubtedly the greatest achievement of the last few decades. In merely a generation, China abandoned the disastrous ideology of Chairman Mao, became the factory of the planet and the world’s second largest economy. The Communist Party continues a complicated game of chess to balance the aspirations of its people while stifling any hints of dissent, disruption to social order or debate about democracy. What are the dreams, hopes, achievements and failures of the generation of Chinese who have only lived in this new age? How are Chinese citizens and their leaders coping with the tectonic changes their nation is going through? Evan Osnos tries to show these points of view of the people in his book Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China.

The book is based off his 8-year stint in China as a staff reporter for The New Yorker. It is a collection of short essays roughly divided into the three aspects of fortune, truth and faith mentioned in the title. Each essay uses the life, dreams or travails of a leader, activist or a citizen that Evan met in China. In the fortune section, we see a new generation of Chinese who dream of riches and many who achieve it. The tales of people in press and law who are constantly censored and tormented by The Party for crossing lines are in the truth aisle. In the final section are the Chinese looking for meaning in this new way of life and many returning to the folds of religion.

Though Chinese no longer have to worry about poverty, health or education, there is increasing inequality. Corruption in business and politics are at astronomic levels. Though the party relentlessly censors all signs of trouble both online and in the press, hundreds of protests occur every day across the nation. China has moved ahead at rocket speed and the signs of wear are showing through in incidents like the baby milk poisoning, the Sichuan earthquake rescue or the disastrously handled coverup of a high-speed rail accident. We see these and other major incidents of the last few years in China through the eyes of the people in these essays.

If you regularly read about China in The Economist or The New York Times, you will be familiar with many of the faces and stories in this book. That might bias me a bit when I talk about this book. The first section I found to be the weakest, where Evan drops names a lot and mixes many characters across his essays. It gets better as the book progresses with focus on a single person or event in each essay. The writings on the high speed rail incident and on religion are very interesting. I especially loved the tidbits where Evan talks about his daily life and neighbors during his stay in China. Probably my biggest peeve with this good book is its verbiage. I have seen this with many Western folks who write about Asia or Africa, they try to describe every single dialog or experience they had. With some heavy editing, this book could have been a great insight into New China.

(This review is crossposted from my blog here: daariga.wordpress.com/2016/09/12/the-martian/)

One sure aspect about The Martian is that it is gripping. Edge-of-the-seat gripping. I started reading it while waiting for the bus. I was hooked! Pages kept turning briskly on the way home in the bus, through dinner, all the way through the night until dawn. Took a few hours of sleep and then soldiered on until its happy and predictable ending.

Written by Andy Weir, a programmer by profession, this book got popular quickly and was made into a movie starring Matt Damon last year. Like pulp thrillers, it is very easy to read and the pace is fast. The year is 2035 and humans have walked on Mars thanks to a couple of Ares missions by NASA. Things go wrong during the Ares 3 mission and the crew aborts its stay on the red planet and escapes. Astronaut Mark Watney is presumed dead and left behind, but he is not. He makes his way safely back to their dome called Hab. There is ample food, air and power for him to stay inside the Hab for a year. Turns out he is a smart ass botanist and engineer and he figures out how to grow potatoes and make water and survive longer. However, the next Ares mission is 4 years away and Mars starts throwing a spanner into his plans mere days into his stay there.

Weir packs his pages full of ingenious solutions and techniques for his astronaut to survive. Every other page is littered with calculations resembling those statement problems we had in school with Mark computing his chances with this or that solution. All of this lends a strong aura of believability to the preposterous plot. It is quite mind boggling how much of basic math and science can be used when in crisis to fix problems. This book is essentially Apollo 13, but on a gigantic scale and with the mind of a brilliant engineer at work. It is hard not to root for this tiny human unflaggingly taking on the problems thrown by an entire planet at him. He has to literally make air, water and food to survive for years on a planet that offers none of them. How can you resist this yarn?

The biggest letdown of this engaging book however was its writing, which is sadly just mediocre. An American teen vibe pervades all the conversations. I can guess that Hollywood screenwriters had very little work converting this into a blockbuster script. Man has reached Mars and these adult astronauts talk about jocks and geeks and wedgies! You get the idea. Make no mistake, the science chops are very strong in this book, every ludicrous plan is meticulously backed by reasoning and the book is quite unputdownable. However, one does feel that a simple writing workshop for the author could have vaulted the book further into greatness.

(Crossposted from my blog: daariga.wordpress.com/2016/04/23/the-inimitable-jeeves/)

With little energy left for serious reading at home, I have been picking books that are easy and fun. The Inimitable Jeeves is the third book to feature Jeeves and Wooster in 11 loosely connected short stories. This is the first Wodehouse book, in chronological order, where I actually see a full story emerge from the serially arranged stories.

The book centers around a chap named Bingo, a friend of Bertie, the type of friend who is worse than an enemy. He is living off a stipend from his uncle and is falling left and right at every woman he sees. And it takes all the energy of Jeeves and Wooster to pull him out of the capers he keeps falling into.

This book was very funny and was a joy to ride along. I felt that the betting story, The Great Sermon Handicap, stuck out like a sore thumb by being extremely boring and pointless. Minus that story, this Wodehouse is a great stressbuster.

(Crossposted from my blog: daariga.wordpress.com/2016/03/20/math-science-and-unix-underpants/)

FoxTrot is a fun comic strip that I have been reading for years in the random newspaper or website. Being a family-centric heavily-syndicated comic strip, I had no idea it had geek credentials. Imagine my surprise when I ran into a Foxtrot collection of strips titled Math, Science, and Unix Underpants! I simply had to read it!

Going by the strips in this collection, Bill Amend does not water down the nerd quotient of Jason Fox and his geeky adventures in the strip. There is no holding back, it is full of math formulae, trivia and lots of computer references. The author has a degree in physics and it really shows in the physics strips. I had a great time with this book. If you are looking for an excellent way to relax, do not miss this one. Also, if you are looking for some great math/science/computer strips to share with school students or fellow geeks, this book is a goldmine.

PS: Switch off the lights and you have a surprise waiting for you on the book cover in the darkness! ;-)

(Crossposted from my blog: daariga.wordpress.com/2016/02/14/family-life/)

Ajay’s timeline in Family Life precedes my own by almost a decade. And yet the retelling of his early years in Delhi felt surprisingly similar to my own in Bangalore. The simplicity of his revelations belies the effectiveness with which Akhil Sharma is able to give voice to the observations of a child and snatch the attention of his reader. I ended up finishing this novella in two sittings.

This is the tale of a middle class Indian family that immigrates to USA. It seems like every Indian-American author has to write one of these, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake comes to mind. Ajay, the younger of two brothers, is the narrator. His father finds a government job in NYC and the two brothers and their mother move across to join him. The shining star of the family is the first son Birju, who tragically goes into a coma after a swimming accident.

What follows is the travails of this leaking ship of a family on stormy seas. The parents are initially strong minded in their care of Birju, who has essentially turned into a vegetable. But as the years wear on and with no signs of their prodigious son waking up, the dad ends up turning alcoholic. Ajay on the other hand slowly walks out of the shadow of his genius brother to stand on his own. Though Birju’s fate never turns rosy, the story of the family ends on a good note with their other worries getting solved.

This is a short novel and the prose is very easy to read. Though it follows in a long string of similar FOB tales, it does stand its ground. The experiences of a desi family settling into US society is good. But, what the book excels in is what its title promises. It is full of those intimate and minute details in the behavior and interactions of our parents, siblings, relatives and visitors that we witness while growing up. The author could have easily cut out the numerous instances of desi folks visiting Birju to try to cure him. And the ending is too hurried, which is something I keep seeing in many good books. You feel like there is a part two of this story and bam, it is over! Still those are minor quibbles in a book that is sure to provide numerous trips to that sunny backyard of our childhood.

(Crossposted from my blog: daariga.wordpress.com/2015/12/07/dave-barry-talks-back/)

One of the gems that I discovered when I first started surfing the Internet was Dave Barry. Countless hours of my life have been spent reading the archives of his hilarious Florida articles written for the Miami Herald. Considering the amount of pure happiness (and tummy ache) his writing has given me, those were probably the most well-spent hours of my life. When I recently discovered that he has many books to his credit I had to get started on it!

Dave Barry Talks Back is a collection of 63 old articles, from before 1992. I was pleased to discover that I had not previously read any of these. They sample all the zaniness on this planet, ranging from relationships to family to pets to government to politics. Since these were written for a newspaper with a strict word limit, each of them is just 3 pages long. You can get shots of the funnies all through the day by picking up this book!

Dave Barry is the real deal because the observations he makes about us are genuine. Something else clearly stood out: the world of 1980s was just as insane as our world today. The same ineptness and bungling by government departments, the same weaselly politicians and most importantly, the same crazy real-life events involving the common man that keep happening around the world!

Except for a couple of dull pieces at the beginning and at the end, it is hard to find fault in this collection. As an icing, each article has a pertinent cartoon, drawn by Jeff MacNelly, another of my favorites. Much like Calvin and Hobbes or Seinfeld, to me Dave Barry’s writings are epic. Beware of where you read this book cause you will not be able to control your snickering and giggling. This is a fantastic mood lifter from probably the funniest writer in USA.