Magpie Murders, Anthony Horowitz, 2016

Rating: 5/5

“A bottle of wine. A family-sized packet of Nacho Cheese Flavoured Tortilla Chips and a jar of hot salsa dip. A packet of cigarettes on the side (I know, I know). The rain hammering against the windows. And a book.” This is how Magpie Murders begins and this is exactly the way this book needs to be enjoyed (minus the cigarettes, of course)! 

The structure of the novel right at the outset — a book within a book and meta fiction of sorts — clearly signals that this novel is not just another mystery where the murderer will be unveiled in the final act. In the first mystery, which is embedded within the main story, detective Atticus Pünd is exploring a murder or murders in the charming village of Saxby-on-Avon. This seems to have been clearly (and intentionally) inspired by Agatha Christie with the village settings and the multitude of characters — there is even an allusion to a nursery rhyme early into the story. This mystery is written by a writer called Alan Conway and in this universe, this is the ninth book featuring Pünd. And even as a standalone story, this ranks with many of the best Agatha Christie mysteries.

But this is just a part of Horowitz’s book. In the main story, Susan Ryeland is an editor at Cloverleaf Books and is going over Conway’s manuscript (which is the embedded story). As she lays out in the first three pages of the book, the manuscript will upend her life eventually and this main narrative present another mystery.

Horowitz has paid careful attention to both the stories in the book. And his writing style makes this a page-turner and keeps the reader guessing until the end. At its simplest, this book is two interesting mysteries for the price of one. But in reality, it is an extremely clever derivative of the typical whodunnit — well-structured and cleverly plotted! I can’t wait to read the sequel, “Moonflower Murders”.

Pros: Agatha Christie and more, clever plot, page-turner

Cons: None really

Americana, Bhu Srinivasan, 2017

Rating: 5/5

Americana is a fascinating look into the various capitalistic ventures in America’s history, ranging from tobacco, cotton, and gold to slavery and from various industries to the American way of life. And in all of this, there’s a common thread, first voiced  by Adam Smith — despite the risk of total loss, money finds its way to opportunity when the potential rewards are high enough. For a non-American like me, the nuances and origins of many of these were extremely interesting, especially factors such as slavery or anti-completive behaviour, which are clearly to be hated now but have played a role in America’s progress.

In all of this, it is interesting to see how history repeats itself. The formation of “trusts” to overcome laws against pricing collusion and the government’s battles against them in the nineteenth century seems to have its echoes even now. The concept of venture or risk capital used to finance the first shipload of passengers to America came back after 350 years to fund technology companies. Or corporate America’s tendency to latch on to investor fads have remained unchanged from the time pointless trusts were formed to the time when existing companies rechristened themselves as “dotcoms” towards the end of the last century.

Given the vast number of topics covered, there may be an element of superficiality in their coverage but Srinivasan’s focus is more on making it comprehensive rather than detailed. His writing is pacy and interesting which makes the 500+ page length quite easy to read. He makes an attempt at humour as well, as when he sardonically explains the movie Pretty Woman away by saying that it is entirely plausible that a call girl could serve as the moral compass for a financier!

A bonus is the presence of several interesting factoids through the book. For example, slaves formed the single biggest asset class around 1850 with an estimated value of US$2.8 billion at that time. Or the origin of the term, “$300 man” is from the Civil War where rich men could pay that amount for a substitute to take their place. Or that the Remington typewriter is probably what facilitated women into the white-collared working class!

Pros: A comprehensive look into nearly all of America’s capitalistic ventures, pacy and interesting

Cons: Some superficiality in the coverage of topics

The Midnight Library, Matt Haig, 2020

Rating: 4/5

How many times have we wondered with regret, as we grew older, on how life could have been otherwise — what if we had chosen a different career, what if we had loved differently, what if we had held on to some of our broken relationships, or what if we had handled our finances better? This, despite understanding that such regrets can only diminish the quality of our current lives. The Midnight Library cautions us to think more carefully about what we wish for, and gently nudges us to be more comfortable in with what we have.  

This book is a combination of science fiction and human relationships pertaining to the little things that matter. It is not completely new though. I’m aware of at least two movies (Click and the Bollywood movie Baar Baar Dekho) that had similar premises. The main protagonist is the extremely talented 35 year old Nora Seed, who lives in her childhood town of Bedford. She could have been an Olympic swimmer, part of a Coldplay-like band, an academic high-achiever or an oceanographer and a happy wife and mother at the same time. But a combination of misfortune and a “life fright”, as one of the other characters in the story puts it, causes her to disintegrate wanting her nothing more than the absence of pain. And that brings her to The Midnight Library where there are seemingly endless books on how her life would be if she had made some other decision at some point in her life. The starting point is The Book of Regrets which details all that she would have liked to change. And she can choose to change any of that and then step in to live the life that would have ensued.

Haig has had his own issues with depression and nearly killed himself once. In that light, the book is one of the struggles of a depressed person and redemption. The book begins with a lot of promise. The setup is  interesting and provokes thought. However, despite a short length of under 300 pages, the book starts feeling repetitive fairly soon, feels episodic and seems a tad too glib.  It’s almost as if Haig came up with a brilliant idea but didn’t really know how to stretch it to a decent-sized novel. This book was somewhere between a 3-star and a 4-star for me. What swung it towards the latter is that it can help readers minimise the regrets that they have and leaves them with an important message, as voiced by Mrs. Elm, The Librarian: “Never underestimate the big importance of small things”.

Pros: Interesting plot, helps readers minimise the regrets that they have

Cons: Becomes repetitive

A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson, 2003

Rating: 4/5

This is a book that discusses the formation of the universe, the determination of earth’s size and age, the role of physics and chemistry in enhancing our knowledge of the universe, volcanoes and glaciers, genetics and anthropology — in short, as Bryson puts it, “how we went from there being nothing at all to there being something, and then how a little of that something turned into us.

This book addresses an amazing range of scientific topics and is a sort of cheat sheet on them. As Bryson puts it, “we live in a universe whose age we can’t compute, surrounded by stars whose distances from us and each other we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand” — in this book, he attempts to address some of this ignorance.  And incredibly, he does it with some humour along the way!

As with any Bryson book, there are several interesting tidbits strewn on the way. For example, if the diagram of our solar system in our school geography books were drawn to scale, and if Earth was pea-sized in that diagram, Pluto would have been two and a half kilometres away! Or when we sit on a chair, we are actually levitating (albeit at a height of only one hundred millionth of a cm. Or that the origin of the phrase “cloud nine” comes from an old classification of clouds into ten types in which the ninth type was the fluffiest cloud. The book is filled with large numbers and Bryson finds interesting ways of presenting them. For example, the earth is 4,500 billion years old, or put another way, if the entire history of the Earth was a day, humans emerge only one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. On a lighter note, I managed to deduce that the movements of Harry Potter’s Knight Bus may have been an application of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity!

As to be expected in a book of this genre, there are parts that drag. And given the 500+page length of the book, it may make sense to skim over a few parts. Also, Bryson often dumbs down the science for us. This may be a good thing or a bad one — it could irritate more knowledgeable readers but then, this book is probably not meant for them.

This book helped me revisit parts of the physics, biology and chemistry that I had learnt in high school. Ultimately, It’s a book that makes readers marvel anew at the size of the universe and allows them to look at things around them in a new way — Bryson’s senses of wonder is contagious. And for that, it’s worth a read!

Interesting factoid: Mary Anning used to gather fossils (including the ichthysorausus) and sell them and is most likely the source of the tongue twister “she sells sea-shells on the seashore)!

Pros: Wide range of scientific stories, interesting tidbits and analogies

Cons: Drags at times

A Man Called Ove, Fredrik Backman, 2012

Rating: 5/5

There are several things to like about this book. To start off with, the chapter titles. Titles such as “A Man Called Ove Buys a Computer That is Not a Computer” cannot but fail to bring a smile to the reader’s lips. Two, the writing style. Backman writes simply (despite the fact that flashbacks are interspersed with the present narrative) and humorously. While I read the English translation of the original Swedish book, the reading pleasure was not diminished one bit. And finally, the bitter-sweet and heart-warming aspect of the book. The main characters are well fleshed out and despite their shortcomings, one tends to root for them.

The book is the story of, of course, a man called Ove. He’s 59, extremely grumpy, hates change, has lost his job because of age, and is uncomfortable with modern technology, bureaucrats, and even coffee machines. He hates people who trade their Swedish cars for an Audi or a BMW. But Ove has several redeeming characteristics too. He is honest as when he returns a lost wallet at the age of 9, he has high principles and sticks to them, and has abiding love for his wife, Sonja. Mainly, while he will never admit it, he has a soft heart as shown by his interactions with his Iranian neighbour Parveneh and her children, with his friend turned foe Rune, with some local youth, and with a cat that he has been made to adopt.

This book is somewhat similar to The Rosie Project (which was published a year later) – it’s about a slightly dysfunctional man and his wife who are poles apart, and the gradual changes brought about in him. The one issue I had about the book though was that it was a bit too trite. Backman tries to tick a lot of boxes for Ove including his acceptance of foreigners and homosexuality and the ending is a bit too glib with all the pieces falling neatly in place. And like The Rosie Project, it does get soppy at times.

An enjoyable sidenote is the blog that catapulted Backman to fame well before his books did. It’s a humorous and wry complaint and is a poignant take on parenting. You can find it here: https://community.babycentre.co.uk/post/a14203785/i_loved_this_piece_of_writing_from_a_dad_blog

Pros: Funny and well-written, heart-warming, lovely chapter titles

Cons: A bit trite and soppy

The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett, 2020

Rating: 5/5

The Vanishing Half starts off in the fictional town of Mallard, which was built in 1848 by a person with mixed parentage for “men like him, who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated as blacks”. Even as his black mother keeps him in the sun to darken his skin, he eventually marries a woman with lighter skin than even his own, hoping that future generations get lighter and lighter, “like a cup of coffee being steadily diluted with cream”, as Bennett puts it. This – the tussle between wanting to pass as white, for that meant to pass as free, and the fierce need to own and protect one’s racial identity – then forms the core of this novel.

Desiree and Stella are twin sisters and descendants of Mallard’s founder, physically identical but as different as chalk and cheese. Desiree is the more adventurous and rebellious of the two while Stella is the staider, and they run away from home at the age of sixteen – Desiree because she hates the pretentious town where people are “colorstruck” and Stella simply because she wants a better life. And as fate would have it, and due to individual choices that the sisters make, Desiree returns home while Stella passes as white and leads a life filled with lies.

The story spans about 40 years and touches upon three generations, with intertwining stories, and is filled with an interesting and well-fleshed out supporting cast – Early Jones, who had a childhood crush on Desiree but could not express it due to his color and who eventually becomes her main pillar of support, Desiree’s dark-skinned daughter Jude, who like her mother, is unforgiving of people who refuse to recognize their heritage, her boyfriend Reese who has been grappling with issues related to his sexuality and Stella’s daughter Kennedy, a Californian blonde, with a  chequered relationship with her mother.

The contrast between Desiree and Stella is one of the most interesting aspects of the book, and also likely to be one of the most debated topics for any reading club. Ostensibly, the portrayal of Desiree seems more sympathetic and that of Stella seems somewhat cruel. But the story gradually reveals several layers to their characters. For example, it is unclear whether Desiree’s marriage to dark-skinned Sam is driven purely by love or to an extent by her hatred of what Mallard stood for and Stella’s behavior is partly explained by the racial and sexual violence witness by her during her childhood and teen years.

Finally, Bennett’s writing is top-notch – simple yet evocative. At one point, Stella, who spends nearly her entire life hiding things from everyone around her, notices her husband’s arousal and feels embarrassed for him as “she could think of nothing more horrifying than not being able to hide what she wanted” and metaphors such as these add to the reading pleasure!

Pros: Interesting plot, well-defined characters, beautiful writing

Cons: None really, unless this genre does not appeal to one

The Anarchy, William Dalrymple, 2019

Rating: 5/5

As an Indian, I had learnt a fair amount about the East India Company (EIC) in my school history lessons but after reading Anarchy, I have come to realise that the study was largely superficial — we were fed some broad knowledge of this organisation and the fact that it had looted India systematically over decades. Dalrymple’s book details the nuances extremely well, distinguishing EIC from the British government, and pointing out to the fact that it was the world’s first private multinational and possibly the most ruthless to date.

The book covers the 275-year history of EIC, starting from a meeting of a motley group in London in 1599 to its eventual demise in 1874 – it covers all the significant events during this period as related to India ranging from the roles played by Robert Clive, Warren Hastings and Richard Wellesley and by the French to the fall of the Mughal empire and the rise and fall of the Marathas and of Tipu Sultan, and takes about a fifth of the book to lay the background to EIC’s first military manoeuvres. 

Dalrymple’s detailing throughout the book has been excellent and he quotes liberally from texts and letters of those times – the research that he has put in clearly shows. An added bonus is the list of the “dramatis personae” that he lists -- a few of the Indian rulers, EIC’s officials and the British administrators. Despite having been schooled in the Indian education system, I was unaware of quite a few of them. India has been his adopted home for the past few decades and his fondness for the country clearly shows through as well.

There are parts of the book that do tend to get tiring, especially the second quarter of the book, and some of the descriptions of the political manoeuvres do get repetitive. However, while this is a book on history, his writing is pacy at most times, lending the book a story-telling note that makes it more interesting.

While this book essentially is one about history, the analogy with modern corporates and the perils of their uncontrolled behaviour and the necessity for governments to bail them out cannot be missed. And this makes the book that much more interesting!

Pros: Well-detailed, informative, well-written

Cons: Drags a bit sometimes