Recent reads

It's a long pending book review, drafted in my mind but has taken a while to pen it down. A few weeks back, I managed to read "The tales of Beedle the Bard" by JK Rowling. Having been a huge fan of Harry Potter, I've been wanting to read this book of short stories ever since it was released. At a price of 600 rupees, I have almost been to the verge of purchasing it whenever I'm in a bookstore but dropped the idea at the last minute. Luckily I got hold of this book in my office library and finished reading on a lazy Sunday evening.

There are 5 short bedtime stories that are popular among the non Muggle kids. Every story is followed by Dumbledore's commentary who gives a background on the story and how it was perceived by the young witches and wizards. You could call it the Cinderella or Snow White of the wizarding world. Out of the 5 stories, I liked two of them - fountain of fair fortune and tale of three brothers.

In the past month, I also happened to read 'The Nordstrom way' as part of my book review assignment. Although it's not really an engrossing book, it paints a good picture of what customer service actually means and how Nordstrom was able to successfully deliver excellent customer service. The book brings together the elements that tie together the strategy and human resource functions of Nordstrom.

After a long time, I read Sudha Murthy's 'Gently falls the bakula' and finished it in 3 hours at a stretch. At the end of it, I felt like I'm returning from watching a Tamil movie. It's a typical story of boy-meets-girl, childhood friends, love and wedding. I admire Sudha's simplistic writing as a story teller and her great admiration for India. She has described many historical places and monuments and interwoven them into the storyplot nicely.

I have started reading RK Narayan's collection of essays that he had written for the Hindu in the 1940s and 50s. I can never get bored of his writings and am glad I have my own copy of his collection. I'm planning to finish this book in the next couple of weeks before my third year of PGSEM officially begins.