Sunday, February 1, 2009

What I Just Read: The White Tiger


This book is, as my manager at Borders put it today, "sneaky good". You do not realize how well written and entertaining until you are 100+ pages in and your realize you are over 100 pages in and you hadn't realized it. For myself a quality of a good book is if I am not constantly looking at the page numbers counting down until I am done. Most books I read I read for what I want to call a "Conquest". I read them because I feel as if I need to read them, be it because I bought them with the intent of reading them for pleasure and now I just have to read the book because I own it or because I want to know whats in them (i.e. John Lennon) or because it appears to be a book everyone should read (any Shakespeare). The White Tiger may have started that way but it finished as an overall enjoyable book.

In more detail, The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga was the perfect book to follow my reading of The Post-American World. It was a narrative on what India is like for the lower castes of society and how regardless of Globalization and the "Rise of the Rest" it takes a serious and dedicated individual to advance themselves in society. The White Tiger touches on everything in Indian society, from poverty to pollution to forced prostitution to government corruption to outsourcing to the emergence of a modern India. All of this through the lens of resourceful and determined young Indian named Balram in his writing to the Premier of China.

A thoroughly enjoyable and well written book.

Next up will be Women by Bukowski but I am forcing myself to read my Captone book before I read Women but it just does not look appetizing at all. We shall see. Expect a post on Women before weeks end.

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