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This fortnight at Fabmall
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Maximum City
Bombay Lost and Found
Suketu Mehta
Penguin, Rs. 595
A terrific read. The writing is gripping. Absorbing, deep, intelligent. Suketu Mehta's book on Bombay is serious without being pedantic, or unnecessarily "thoughtful", and works wonderfully as a book on a city that continues to frighten and fascinate all of us.
Mehta writes about all aspects of Bombay. Starting with "Personal Geography", he goes on to write about the film world, about the gangs, about the police, the bar girls, the bomb blasts. Whatever you identify with Bombay, it's here in Mehta's book. And it's here in depth, from several angles and in the voices of several people.
Maximum City took seven years to complete and in those seven years Mehta seems to have travelled every inch of Bombay and met so many thousands of people.
Mehta lives in New York and is a journalist and also writes fiction for which he has won a number of awards. He co-wrote the Hindi film Mission Kashmir.
Great reading, absorbing writing. Don't not buy this.
The Asterix Collection
Goscinny &Uderzo
Orion, Rs. 8,827.25
For the first time, all 31 Asterix comics available, and at one stop. To buy the set, log onto www.fabmall.com and go to "Books". You get a 15 per cent discount if you buy the entire set.
For many years, some of the comics in this series were not available due to copyright problems. But now all 31 are available. You can also buy them separately in five different sets. If you are an Asterix fan, what are you waiting for? Get online and order the whole lot.
3rd Degree
James Patterson
With Andrew Gross
Headline, Rs.200
One of the Women's Murder Club series, this begins well enough but turns out to be quite insipid. Perhaps it's the scale of the whole thing — it seems too much like real-life terrorism or sabotage to read well. One might as well just read a newspaper!
The four women — a detective, a district attorney, a coroner and a reporter — seem more than a bit tired and dreary and when one of them dies it seems almost a relief.
Neither the plot nor the narrative is interesting after the first quarter of the book. Not worth the effort of reading.
The Beatles
Edited by Paul Trynka
Dorling Kendersley, £15
Very nice. Lots of stuff here about the Beatles, from their music to the stormy landscape of their temperamental and creative adventures, the writers go over a lot of ground in this hardback subtitled Ten Years That Shook the World. Paul Trynka of Mojo, the music magazine, is the book's editor-in-chief.
The writing is by different people and is in separate bits so that makes the whole thing convenient — you can read just a particular section from beginning to end.
The lives are fascinating — the group dynamics, the frenzy of the actual writing process, how the music created the first discords, the struggle to stay together all come through nicely.
Lots of pictures and other things, trivia and gossip and news items.
If you can afford it, buy it. It's worth the effort.
Kala Krishnan Ramesh
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