Off for a week!

Happy Thanksgiving and Hanukkah to all who celebrate it!

I will be away from the blog until next Wednesday as we are heading down to Miami and Key West this weekend. It will be interesting to step into the plane from 30 F weather and step out into 70 F weather. Not that I am looking forward to it. I love winter any day!

Still, it's a vacation, a break from work for 6 days, a chance to relax, enjoy Cuban cuisine, and read some books. These are what I've packed into my bag/kindle and cannot wait to dig into!

As usual, I am taking more books than I usually finish even in a month but who's to say I shouldn't be optimistic? Or overly optimistic. I may well read Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, simply because I've heard way too much about it and it's due back at the library soon. Which one would you choose to read?

What's Reading this Week! (Nov 25, 2013)

This week and reading, not so much. I've been watching some TV but mostly spending lots of meaningless hours on my iPad. I only just discovered the iTunes University and decided to sign up for courses I've always wanted to take (Literature-related) but never could fit into my major (Computer Engineering). One of the courses I started was Fiction for Young Adults and another one which I'm hoping to get started on is Creative Writing.

The other thing I've been doing on my iPad is playing Clumsy Ninja. Seriously, this is one of the best graphics I've seen in games, because you can tickle this ninja of yours, lift him by the leg, give him high five, throw him through a basketball hoop. Man, I got a nice laugh out of it all.

On the book front, I finished only one book since the last update - Tina's Mouth, which I reviewed this week. I'm still listening to Life of Pi in the car (please, don't ever listen to this one as an audiobook - some descriptions have made me want to pull over and puke). Other than that, I started Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl this weekend. Fangirl may well be my favorite Rowell book and it's made me want to start writing fiction of my own.

Next in the list
I went and borrowed the last two books of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. I somehow missed news of their release but I'm now looking forward to a rollicking time with them.

Posted
My thoughts on the Oyster app (the Netflix for books)
Tina's Mouth: An Existential Comic Diary by Keshni Kashyap (Lovely graphics)
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Such a clever book!)
Some of my knitting projects or what I've been doing when I'm not reading
Allegiant by Veronica Roth (Meh!)


Review Backlog
1. The Walking Dead Compendium 1 by Robert Kirkman
2. The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
3. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
4. Chaos Walking trilogy by Patrick Ness
5. Quarantine by Rahul Mehta
6. MetaMaus by Art Speigelman
7. The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
8. Maus by Art Speigelman
9. Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell
10. Can you Keep a Secret? by Sophie Kinsella
11. Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock by Matthew Quick
12. In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson
13. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

The Sunday Salon: An Oyster review (What it's like to have a Netflix for books!)

Good morning, Sunday Saloners! It's crazy cold out here this am and it feels awesome to be in my PJs, curled up over a book or browsing the web. We don't have any major plans for the day but we are planning to visit Miami and Key West over the Thanksgiving holidays. I am so looking forward to the break - I feel like it's been forever since I went on vacation anywhere. The husband's brother stays in Miami so it will be wonderful to have some extended family time. I still haven't figured out what books I'm going to take. If the husband's hints are any indication, then it doesn't sound like I'm going to get any reading time while there. So the flights are going to be the only times I'll get to read something. Still, I may pack any number of books into my Kindle - always good to be prepared! The weather in Miami/Key West is expected to be in the 70s, so different from the sub-40s temperature here. I guess I should wait until later to pack up the summer wardrobe.

One thing I would have liked to have on my vacation is the Oyster app. Usually when I travel, I pack quite a few books in my travel bag and then when I plan to start reading something, I find that none of those books are quite calling me - maybe the airport setting calls for a different kind of book than what I have or I'm looking to laugh but all I have are tearjerkers or somber reads. With a Netflix for books, it's almost like carrying a whole library with you and being able to choose any book from there. Of course, carrying an ereader gives the same feeling, except you need to have a big enough ebook library already, which I don't have. Still being a very paper reader, ebooks haven't quite managed to steal me over.

When Oyster started showing up in the news, a few months ago, I began to get very excited about it. I didn't however give it a try until last month. I figured I could join the trial membership, see what books they had, if any caught my fancy, spend a month reading off of Oyster, and then deciding if the membership was worth keeping or not. During my browsing over the next few weeks, I found a few things I liked about it and a few that I didn't. After a month of browsing around, I figured I'll share my thoughts on the app with you.

Oyster Home Screen

The most important thing - Content
The very first thing I did as soon as I was done with the membership process was to check out the titles they had on their home page. First glance - I was a little disappointed that they didn't seem to have too many popular books. Scratch that. I was disappointed they didn't have too many books calling my name at that instant. Sure they had a ton of titles, but they weren't exactly something I may read, unless they were sitting on my coffee table. They didn't have many (any?) recent titles. And that was expected - Netflix worked pretty much the same way. I spent some more time looking through their collection and had to come around saying that they did have a lot of popular titles (Water for Elephants, a few of Ken Follett's books, The Hobbit and LOTR, Mudbound, A Reliable Wife, Michael Chabon's few works, Life of Pi, Fast Food Nation and several others). I could see that with time, Oyster will have a rich collection - already when I checked a couple of weeks later, I found that they had added a lot of good books to the list (I saw The Secret Daughter among them).

Oyster Home Screen

Eye Candy - The Looks
Oyster is a very beautiful app. I'm thrilled to bits that they decided UI was as important as the books itself. I have very little patience for clunky and ugly but useful things. Their home page is split into sections much like Netflix's homepage. Some of their sections include a Popular section, Recently Added, This Week is History (History buffs will love this!), Award Winners, Cliffhangers, Similar to <a book you recently read> and several genre books. One of my favorite sections is the Spotlight section, where they have some custom collections or themed books. One collection is called Writers in Writing, where you would see books like Virginia Woolf's A Writer's Diary and David Foster Wallace's The Last Interview. Another wonderful collection I saw was called Trivia Bootcamp with books like The Professor and the Madman, Now I Know and The Intellectual Devotional.

Navigating and Browsing
I did find the app a little clunky to navigate, to start with. But they had changed a few things within a couple of weeks, so I can only imagine that they are improving their app daily. I found that I didn't use their Search feature all that much. With apps like Netflix and Oyster, I like to be surprised. Sometimes, I know what I'm looking for, and more often than not, what I want isn't in their libraries. So, most of the time, I just browse around looking at what they had. Serendipity is a wonderful goddess!

Browsing through Oyster's collection by genre

You can browse their collection by genre. Here's where another favorite feature of mine is: They have a Recommended for You section, which I believe starts off with a default list but adjusts itself based on your ratings. When I navigated to the Literary Fiction genre, which is what I mostly read, I found titles like Blindness and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (both on my wislist), The Color Purple and The Things They Carried (both I loved). Really, most of the books I wanted to read are right here. I could spend all day trying to choose one to read out of countless options.

The Other Important Thing - Reading
After a little digging around, I chose The Reluctant Fundamentalist for my first read. There is a reason I chose that one, other than for the obvious fact that I wanted to read it. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a quick short read. I wanted to start with a small read because I wanted to be sure that I will finish it, no matter what. Also, if I didn't like the experience of reading on the app, I didn't have to stay with it for too long.

Choosing a read

Now here's where I had two troubles. For starters I didn't like the swipe action required to turn pages. In pretty much all reading apps, swiping left to right or right to left turns pages. In Oyster, you had to swipe top to bottom and vice versa. This may seem like a small thing, but it is one of those small thought-out things that take your reading experience one step further. Believe me - I develop UI as my day job and there are times I hear about the smallest things from people that break their enjoyment of something. Really, Oyster should remove their top/bottom swiping and stay with the convention. This is one area where being the same as the rest of the world makes total sense.

The other trouble I had was much more major and a deal-breaker. The ending of every chapter was missing! I would reach the last line on a page and swipe over to find that I am staring at a new chapter. Then I would go back, thinking that maybe I had double-swiped but nope, I'm back to the previous page with the unfinished sentence. I found a roundabout way to access the missing pages though. I had to shut down the app a few times, restart it and now, viola, the missing pages reappeared. I thought this may be the book's fault. So I tried another book to see the same thing happen there. Imagine if you had 20 chapters - you would be doing that 20 times. 40 chapters? 40 times!

That more than anything is the reason I figured Oyster wasn't ready for me.

The Mother of all Dealbreakers- Cost
At almost $10 a month, Oyster isn't cheap. For the voracious reader, Oyster is a great idea. They would be able to get through a ton of books for just 10 bucks a month. But for someone like me, who reads 8 books on the rare good month but mostly averages between 4 and 6, Oyster is expensive. And besides, my book sources wouldn't be limited to one app. There are the new book releases which I usually get from the library or my hard-earned money, the galleys, either print or ebook, and some books I chose to read for any reason but which aren't there in Oyster yet. I only read one book this month on Oyster. I am pretty sure that I will be more willing to try it if there was an Android app - I find the need for a quick fix when I am at work, during breaks. Right now, Oyster supports only iPads and iPhones.

Almost $10 a month

I wondered if tiered plans would be a good thing for Oyster, keeping readers like me in mind. But the whole selling point of Netflix and Oyster is to be able to read any number of books at a time. Limiting that count wouldn't work well for that business model. Bringing the cost down by a couple of bucks could make a lot more difference, so I'll be looking forward to seeing if they do get cheaper. The other thing I would be curious to see is if I would have access to their collections, to see what titles they have, without a membership. Based on that, I may be willing to take membership on a month-to-month basis.

Have you given Oyster a try yet? If you have an iPhone or iPad, you probably should. They give a free trial month that you can use to browse and sample around. If you have tried it, I would be curious to know what you think of it.

Light Reading: Tina's Mouth: An Existential Comic Diary by Keshni Kashyap

(Photo credit)

Last week, while browsing through the teen graphic novel section (Why are graphic novels always shelved in the teen section?), I came across this lovely blue-cover title that I remember hearing about from somewhere sometime but didn't know anything about. Books like that usually rate higher with me - maybe the serendipity of picking a random book and not knowing anything about it always keeps me guessing through the end of the book, since I never know what to expect.

When I opened the book for the first time, a few days later, it turned out to a very different kind of graphic book from what I had grown accustomed to. This one doesn't have the panels that populate most comic books. Mostly, it has a lot of free uncluttered and very clean drawing. It was almost like calligraphy but in pictures. In addition to being a very beautiful book, there was some prose straddling the pictures. Tina's Mouth is basically Tina's diary. One of her professors gives her class several projects to do - Tina's was to write a diary to discover more about herself. Her diary was a search for answers to questions such as "Who am I?", "What am I?" and many other such questions of an existential nature. Pretty deep for a high school student. In fact, Tina does appear to be a very philosophical person, whether as a result of writing this diary or by nature, I don't know, though she says that she never cared for such questions until she started writing the diary.

Tina's life has been going pretty good, what with an inseparable best friend and no worries. But then a little over a year ago, things start to change. After her parents split, her best friend began to get interested in boys and sexy clothes. She abandoned Tina, saying she was too childish. Tina's more-than-friendly-interest in a boy was also turning out to be an opportunity for her, though by the end of the year, she learns a great deal about boys as well.

I liked this book for several reasons. Other than the graphics being very magnetic, Tina is the daughter of Indian immigrants, and that's a whole category of books I enjoy reading and identify with a lot. There are several experiences she shares that sometimes made me sympathetic and other times made me very amused. How having to "hang out" with friends of her parent's friends' kids made her feel, how she had to go to Indian parties dressed in strange-fitting Indian clothes that she rarely wore, how she and her siblings all had their share of identity issues. Tina also talks about the many problems she faces in high school - friendship issues, dating, etc. This isn't one of the best graphic books I've read but it was certainly enjoyable in its own way. It's a breezy read and to any graphic novel lover, I would certainly recommend this. If you are just starting out with reading graphic books, or haven't read any yet, there are several others that I would recommend.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

It seems an obvious thing to say, but you should not imagine that we Pakistanis are all potential terrorists, just as we should not imagine that you Americans are all undercover assassins.

Ever since the Oyster iPad app was released, it has been on my mind as something I would love to try. Who doesn't like a Netflix for books? The idea of being able to browse through a vast library and choosing any number of books to read at a time was enticing. So I signed up for their free trial and chose The Reluctant Fundamentalist as my first read. (I'll be sharing my views on the Oyster app itself this weekend, so I'll try not to bring it up much here.)

At a tea/coffee shop in Lahore, a Pakistani man has managed to invite a lost-looking American tourist to have tea and later dinner with him. Amidst all the atmospheric sights and sounds and flavors of Pakistan, the host talks about his past as an aspiring and promising student at Princeton and later at a job that is earned only by the best and how he came to be drinking tea that day at a Lahore cafe. At the time, he had everything - job, money, respect, even a girl that he was very interested in. And then came 9/11, which changed his life completely in ways he never imagined.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a very interesting read. It is written entirely as a dialogue, or rather as one side of a dialogue. Changez, the former successful Pakistani Princeton graduate, has found a sometimes interested, sometimes cautious audience in the American tourist. We never hear the tourist's voice directly - Changez occasionally reiterates the questions asked or statements made by the tourist, but barring that, it is Changez's voice from start to end. It's not a writing style that I could enjoy reading all the time, but for occasional books, it makes for a wonderful literary device. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is my first book in that writing style and I enjoyed it all the way to the last page.

There are several themes that recur through this book. At the core of it is about identity. Changez had everything going for him. He was even fairly confident about his chances with the woman of his dreams, who was still mourning the death of her boyfriend. But when 9/11 comes and the neighbor of his native country is implicated in it, he begins to get severely distressed by how close to home America's war on terror is happening. He becomes unable to separate his professional life from his tremulous inner life. The frequent disappearances of his love interest exacerbates his emotional tensions. He begins to feel almost rebellious, growing a beard and wearing his religion with excess pride.

In the course of his story, Changez also reveals some unpleasant aspects of his beliefs - some of which upset the American, and others which make him a tad bit nervous. There is a reason he is the reluctant fundamentalist. You begin to like this very human character and feel for him when he suffers, and right at that moment, he makes a comment that makes you bristle. I like how the author balanced that. The ending was very ambiguous, and to me the strength of this novel. Depending on how this book spoke to you, you would sketch your own ending. It also made the inner message of the book clear. Fundamentalist or not, every person had certain beliefs based on where his home is and how he grew up. It isn't easy for anyone to not side with his country, no matter why a war is happening. The absence of an ending did make me slightly annoyed - I got very invested in Changez's story and wanted to believe that he is happy but that's what the book was about - to know more about me as a person and how I approached other people like him. Would I outright brand him a potential terrorist or just a person very worried for his countrymen? I admit I fell in the middle - Changez made me uncomfortable occasionally but he also seemed like a reasonable person.

There are some aspects of the book that didn't quite make sense to me, such as what inspired Changez to spill out his story to the tourist. Also, not hearing the other side of the dialogue brings with it the occasional frustrations of not seeing the full picture. But they were minor complaints. The lyrical writing, the atmospheric descriptions, the intriguing story of Changez, who went from being successful to losing it all, the fast pacing, the clever narrative - all helped in keeping me very interested in this book. I loved The Reluctant Fundamentalist for the most part and it did leave me thinking for a long time about what makes a person willing to conduct terrorist crimes, and most importantly, what sort of person I was for making certain assumptions of Changez.

 I read this ebook on Oyster.