Friday Finds -- September 17, 2010

Hosted by MizB at Should be reading, this meme asks you what great books did you hear about/discover this past week?

To liven things up a bit for myself, I'm going to change the way I do Friday Finds. Typically, I put up three finds. I'll still be putting up 3 finds, but with one of them highlighted, which will be the book I would read if I had to choose among the 3.

The Strike by Anand Mahadevan I only just saw this book a while back. But after reading the description and the review by Niranjana @ Brown Paper (whose blog, by the way, is really awesome so you should be checking it out!), I just had to add it to my wishlist. In so many ways, this book reminds me of Climbing the Stairs by Padma Venkatraman that I read in May. Both have protagonists who are rebels in their time and place. And yet what they actually do can be termed as normal. Moreover, this book is set in the very political and volatile Indian environment, where actors are worshipped and their deaths mourned by strikes, protests and violence. Twelve-year-old Hari tries to make sense of his tumultuous and complex world in 1980s India. His experiment at eating fish leads to the accidental death of his grandmother; his preference for Hindi over his mother tongue Tamil leads to slanderous graffiti against his family in Madras; and his friendship with the family maid lands him in trouble with a militant Tamil film fan and political functionary called Vishu. Matters come to a head when MGR, a film star turned politician dies and his supporters led by Vishu declare a strike, trapping Hari and his mother in a train bound for Madras...

---

The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter Would you even pick this book off a shelf by its name? I look at the stack away from anything with finance in it. If Nadia @ A Bookish Way of Life hadn't recommended this one, I may never have considered it! A few years ago, small-time finance journalist Matthew Prior quit his day job to gamble everything on a quixotic notion: a Web site devoted to financial journalism in the form of blank verse. When his big idea—and his wife's eBay resale business— ends with a whimper (and a garage full of unwanted figurines), they borrow and borrow, whistling past the graveyard of their uncertain dreams. One morning Matt wakes up to find himself jobless, hobbled with debt, spying on his wife's online flirtation, and six days away from losing his home. Is this really how things were supposed to end up for me, he wonders: staying up all night worried, driving to 7-Eleven in the middle of the night to get milk for his boys, and falling in with two local degenerates after they offer him a hit of high-grade marijuana? Or, he thinks, could this be the solution to all my problems?

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler I had never heard of this one! But then, thanks to BBAW, I did! Yesterday's topic was about a book you wished received more attention! Heather @ Age 30+... A Lifetime of Books suggested this one. Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned across the years to save him. After this first summons, Dana is drawn back, again and again, to the plantation to protect Rufus and ensure that he will grow to manhood and father the daughter who will become Dana's ancestor. Yet each time Dana's sojourns become longer and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not her life will end, long before it has even begun.

Check out what others discovered here!