Book Club
17.10.2013,
Mumbai
It
was a different kind of a book club meeting when one of the members who had
gone away returned to fill fragrance in our life. She left the club when she got married and
wanted to catch up with us when she was passing by in the city. The club
decided that we should meet at a different venue and chat about times gone by,
the changes in all our respective lives and of course books. It was a special
evening and even though the skyline was gloomy and the rains played a dampener,
everybody got together to share lives and ideas.
Gitanjali
was the focus of the evening because she had been away for long, got married
and made home out of America. She had lots to share about marriage, friendship,
romance, relationships, about being an immigrant in a foreign country and
finding a job that she enjoyed. She was no more an active member of our club
but she had many suggestions about what we should be reading.
Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith (J K
Rowling) was on top of her list. She said she started reading it on her flight
to India and was so engrossed that her 15 hour flight passed in the blink of an
eye literally. About a private investigator Cormoran
Strike who has suffered an accident and is down to one client, and creditors
are calling. He is lowly because he has also just broken up with his longtime
girlfriend. That is when John Bristow walks into Strike’s life with an amazing
story: His sister, the legendary supermodel Lula Landry, known to her friends
as the Cuckoo, famously fell to her death a few months earlier. The police
ruled it a suicide, but John refuses to accept that and wants Strike to take it
as a case. What follows is a world of multimillionaire beauties, desperate designers,
seduction and delusion.
Her second option is The
Last Chinese Chef by Nicole Mones travels the
readers inside the hidden world of elite cuisine in modern China through the
story of an American food writer in Beijing. When recently widowed Maggie
McElroy is called to China to settle a claim against her late husband’s estate,
she is blindsided by the discovery that he may have led a double life. Since
work is all that will keep her sane, her magazine editor assigns her to profile
Sam, a half-Chinese American who is the last in a line of gifted chefs tracing
back to the imperial palace. Watching Sam gear up for China’s Olympic culinary
competition, Maggie gets a glimpse into Chinese civilization and learns lessons
of tradition and human connection that may heal her heart yet again.
I’m planning to read both
the books and watching our book club picture on this blog you may be tempted to
do the same.
Bhawana Somaaya / @bhawansaomaaya
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