Day 87-2011 : Back to Fiction

There was a time when I would be borrowing a novel from a circulating library in the morning, finish reading it during the day and exchange it back for another one the next day in the morning.  This was during the summer vacations in my school and college going times.  Life then was a complete joy ride without a worry in the world.

Over the years, with the daily drudgery of earning your grub and tending to the family, the reading habit was put on the back-burner.  I could never find the time nor the inclination to pick up a book to read.  Even if I did so, I would find it very hard to finish reading it!  One of the resolutions that I made at the start of this year was to improve on my reading.  I am happy to report that I have met with reasonable success with it so far.  The kick-off was with Andrew Ross Sorkin's pseudo-fictional plot on the financial turmoil at Wall Street in 2008; Too Big To Fail.  I finished reading it within a month.  What I did however realise, was that, a generous dose of fiction is what might get my reading going again.  The fast paced, the better.  Hence, once I finished this, I read fiction with a vengeance.  I came across a bunch of Agatha Christie murder mysteries / thrillers, which I think was gifted by my colleagues at ACES.  I am now done with two of those titles and thoroughly enjoyed reading them!

I remember the first book that really ignited the interest in me for reading.  It was Jeffrey Archer's Kane and Abel, and of course, its sequels.  Over the years he has been one of my favourite authors.  Hence, I recently read his latest novel, Only Time Will Tell. 

I read this one entirely on the flights to and back from New York.  The impression that I got after reading it was that the author is probably not at his best.  His efforts here seem very laboured.  He painstakingly tries to recreate a plot which is similar to a Kane and Abel, and in my mind, fails to do that.  The characters are not very well fleshed out at all.  Mind you, as a story it is a good read, but I have higher expectations from an author like Jeffrey Archer.

So, here I am now, back to the murder mysteries.  But this time, it is not Poirot but Miss Marple.  Three months down and I am on my fifth book now.  A couple of others are in the queue, including Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol and the more technical, Securities Operations, by Mike Simmons.

As of now, fiction seems to have done the trick!  Take care.