[Oct - Dec 2007] Books read

Commuting to work 3 days a week gives me a lot of reading time on the train.
Here are some of the books I read in the last 3 months:

A Good Year by Peter Mayle
A novel about a guy who give up a career as an investment banker (? or a lawyer can't remember, a stressful profession with money but no life) to pursue a life as a wine maker. Though there were a couple of twists in the book, the plot was somewhat predictable. I was reading this and thinking that this would be the kind of story that Hollywood liked (with food, wine, love, beautiful people etc and later found it was already made into a film starting Russell Crowe). That's not to say that I didn't enjoy this book (was a little disappointed that I guessed the main twist towards the end of the book). The author is a pretty good story teller. Like those crime novels by Patricia Cornwell, it's easy to read and hard to put down. A light but entertaining novel. Somehow the word 'airport novel' comes to mind. It was a good "train novel" for me.

The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
I enjoyed reading this book. Some books you'll only want to read it once, while as others you might read it again. This is a book I feel I could read it again in a couple of years. There are lots of interesting perspectives and phrases that make you think and you will probably enjoy different parts at different stages of life. It's supposedly a autobiography (of 'Dasiy Goodwell'), but the author cleverly uses letters and accounts by other people to tell the story. I was confused at one stage about whether the story was real. It requires patience reading in some parts. I just finished another one of Carol Shield's books (it's called "Unless"), but "the stone diaries" is her most famous book, and a better read I think.

The Nanny Diaries by Emma Mclaughlin and Nicola Kraus
It was an "interesting" book. I finished the first half of the book very quickly but only read probably two thirds of the second half. It was a good read for most parts but some parts of the book aggravated me. I remembered sitting on the train and thinking to myself - I don't need to get annoyed or angry reading a book, it's just a book. So I chose to put the book down and ended up selectively read the rest. In some ways, I dislike this book because I felt it dramatise and stereotype too much. If you are treated by your employer badly again and again but do not do anything about it, and you are not a friend of mine, then I don't really care about it that much. I don't need to be angry at some made-up injustice. I'd rather read a happy book in my spare time than a sad book (unless it's a very good sad book). Maybe the movie is more entertaining and less aggravating?