Afghan (Frederick Forsyth)

In fiction Frederick Forsyth is simply superb. The first i read was Dogs of War. And since then, most of the other works. Further when it comes to short story collection, Veteran is simply too good.
Lately i have been reading Ram Gopal Verma's blog. His blogs are funny with a taste of like it or not here it comes. Sometimes i wonder if RGV and Amitabh really do have such free time to write blogs, or are they simply outsourcing this work to some junior intern? Call me a skeptic. Anyways in one of the RGV's blog he had praised this novel Afghan. Now i had to read it.
I will say that this is a good peice of work. Research done by author is always good. It looks like he has been to mountains of Tora bora and seen the place himself. So vivid are the description. Story plot was a little weak for me. Or maybe my expectations are too high. I found it unconvincing that CIA and MI5 can simply put their man in a mission critical of AQ at the last moment. Otherwise it is a good entertaining book.

Christmas 2009

I love christmas songs. So i have been playing them from Youtube. Last year when my in-laws were here, we went to Fremont Church near Fremont and Central. I haven't been to a church in long time. It was fun. Then we went to see christmas decoration in a nearby neighborhood. It was simply awesome.
So this year, me and my wife decided to check out decorations again. And we were also looking for some pastry to eat. Most of the shops were closed. Luckily there is one indian restaurant near our house (Peacock Restaurant), which was open. This place also has its own bakery. First we roamed around the places to see lights. Some neighborhoods were very decorated compared to others. It looks like decoration is also contagious. If my neighbor does it, then i will do it too. We went to Peacock for pastry afterwards. After pastry we decided to have chicken biryani too.
So overall we had a very fun christmas.

Book Reading Update 1 (Tipping Point)

I was so excited to find so many books. But it looks like i have put more in mouth than i can chew. Library has a deadline of 3 weeks. In one week i have only been able to finish "Diary of wimpy kid". Ofcourse that is easy, as it is a fun book. Not something for which i have to motivate myself. Now moving onto "Tipping point". I am at page 60 or 70. So far i have found that this book is about special people, who are very outgoing and connect to many people. So basically if an idea is sponsored by those people, the idea is successful. It is not as if we don't know it already. But with the exaples of successful people from real life, it becomes more important. Futher it talks about knowledgeable persons (Mavens). Now i know why the famous build tool in Java is called Maven (sorry if you don't understand what i wrote in this line. Don't worry it is just a software tool for my work). More on the book reading later. Meanwhile Merry Xmas.

Reading Great books

These days i feel very happy. From somewhere i heard about book "Outliers". Got the audiobook from library. After reading it i am so impressed with the author (Malcom Gladwell) that i went to his website and found out about his other works. Just finished reading "Blink" and now i am going to move to "Tipping Point". Meanwhile i went to shelfari to see what other readers like me are reading. From there got the great list of other books. Alas my library allows me only to put 10 items in hold at a time. Today several of my holds were cleared and have got "How the mighty fall", "Diary of a wimpy kid, the last straw.", "Microtrends", "Catch-22" and "Story of Pi". This list will keep me occupied for sometime. So which one to start. "Story of Pi" is audiobook, that i will read while driving in car. So my best bet for today is "Diary of wimpy kid" :-)