Ok, so I am not doing so great on the “post more” resolution. But I am
working on it, I promise.

I’ve also read a bunch lately. I wanted to start with something easy so
I grabbed
Good
Grief which has been sitting on my shelf for several months. It was
as chick-litty as it looks but at least not superficial like some of the
other stuff out there so it was a good combination of easy reading but
not too unlikeable.

Then I moved on to The
Lovely Bones which I have purposely been putting off for years. I
hadn’t been prepared for the raw horror of it. And I knew it was a great
book but didn’t think I wanted to read it. So I finally did and it was
horrible. The book was very well written and I read it in one gulp.
However the story itself was as bone-chilling as I worried it would be
and I got as affected as I thought I would be. So much so that I had to
watch some really silly TV before I’d sleep at night so as to not go to
bed with the book in my mind. I know Alice Sebold has another great book
but until she stops writing about rape, I am not reading another one of
her stories.

Then I moved to my very trusted source of AskMe and as usual, they
didn’t let me down. I started with the recommendation of Christoper
Moore and the Palo Alto library had
A
Dirty Job
available immediately so I started with that. And I loved it. I
swallowed the whole book in a day! I loved the subject matter. I loved
his writing style. It was hilarious and I generally am not known for my
sense of humor! I have since checked out another Moore book and let’s
see if he’s consistent.



I have also checked out 32 other books that I am supposedly going to
read in the next three weeks. I figure if I read another three that will
be major progress.

So there are a few drafts I had left in my inbox before I started working at Google. I am going to try to post those (all have to do with books) first. I found out about Not Fade Away in someone’s blog and decided to pick it up. I read the whole book in one day and enjoyed it very much. Here are a few quotes that really spoke to me:

And this, unfortunately, brings me to one of the most excruciating incidents of my childhood – one of those awful moments, totally trivial in itself, that you literally spent your whole life getting over. I tell this story as a plea to parents, coaches, teachers: For God’s sake, be careful what you say when a child messes up!

This is one of my biggest pet-peeves. Parents who speak without thinking, parents who think their children have the same sensitivity level they have. Parents who scar you forever.

It would have been easy to finish that degree – easier than bolting. With the degree in hand, it would have been easier for me to land a job with one of the status quo watchdogs that with anybody else. Once I had the job, it would have been easier to amend my own beliefs that to change the organization.

Thus, by increments so exquisitely gradual that they might have just passed unnoticed, I could have ended up being totally untrue to myself and living a life I hated. Twenty years later, I might have had a closet full of suits, a passport full of visas, and and irreparable feeling that I’d really blown it.


Another beautifully poignant point. It’s sad and amazing how quickly and quietly we lose control of our lives. How we wake up suddenly, years later, and we can’t remember why we are where we are and how we got there. How easy it is to take the next easy step without thinking why and whether it’s still a step on your eventual destination (assuming you still remember your eventual destination.)

It’s funny, in a way – our society warns us about the temptations of wealth and power, about the slender chances of a rich man getting into Heaven. But poverty has its pitfalls, too. Too little dough can erode a person’s ethics and values just as easily as too much.

After having read 100 Years of Solitude in one
day, I was looking forward to reading Love in the Time of Cholera. A good
friend of mine had said that, of the two, this was her favorite and I
enjoyed 100 Years so much that I couldn’t imagine how much better it
could get. Maybe that’s why, it took me a few years to get the book and
finally start reading it.

I started it in Turkey but I was so tired and sick that I kept having to
put it down. When we got home, I took a break to get over jet lag and I
finally managed to sit and read a large chunk of it in one sitting,
which is when the book got good. Despite its beautiful story,
interesting characters and fantastic writing, I didn’t enjoy this nearly
as much as 100 Years of Solitude. When I finished the book, I did have a
wonderful, satisfied feeling, but I wasn’t as blown away with this story
and I had been with the previous. It wasn’t as epic and magical.

Still, it was a beautiful story and a beautiful book.

Now that I am on a
Haruki Murakami kick, I thought I should read Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of
the World. I started the book on the plane to Istanbul and didn’t
feel like I got into it as quickly as the other two I read. That might
have been because it also took me the longest to read (or maybe it took
me the longest to read because I didn’t get into it as quickly as the
other two, who knows?) I felt like this was the most resolved of the
three I’ve read so far and I really liked it a lot by the end. For
reasons I can’t really put into words, Kafka is still my favorite one. I
have three more Murakami books on my shelf and look forward to reading
every single one.

I truly owe a big thank you to the AskMe crowd for introducing me to
this great author.

Since Google has a reputation
for having harrowing interviews, I thought it best to prepare as much
as possible. Even though I wasn’t sure if The Search would be
helpful, I figured it couldn’t hurt. It turned out to be a
fascinating read and gave me a lot to think about and a lot to talk
about. If you don’t know a lot about the history of search and if it
does interest you, I would highly recommend this read. Despite the
cover design, the book is not solely about Google and explores the
full history of search engines.

I also read The Google Story,
again, hoping that it might give me some insight or clever
conversation pieces. I’ll be fully honest that I haven’t finished
this one. Partly because I only had ten days between the phone
interview and the on-site one and I read non-fiction much more
slowly. This is much more specific to Google and it’s more personal
and less about search. It’s more about the people behind the story
and about how the company got started. At least so far. More
interesting if you’re into the company story. Also, well-written.



I think these might fill the non-fiction quota of this and last month.

There are a few writers whose
books I anxiously await. As soon as they hit the shelf, I buy and
devour them instantly. Anne Tyler is one of those. Digging to
America is about two families who each adopt babies from Korea.
One family is “typical” American and the other is an immigrant family
from Iran. The parents of the adopted child are American (or
Americanized at least) whereas the grandmother, who is one of the
integral characters, is the one who came to the US from Iran. The
novel explores many of the complicated issues around what it means to
be American.

As always, it’s a fantastic read and a wonderful snippet of the
ordinary and yet incredibly complicated lives of people who live in
the United States. It made me think a lot about the life my son’s
going to have. How he will forever be half-Turkish. How that might be
interesting/exotic for him or it might be alienating/weird. How the
way he feels about himself and his place in the world/country will
say so much about what his place ends up being. That goes for all of
us: we’re so much of what we say we are. The way we see ourselves,
defines the way we become. Defines the way others see us. Defines
many of our shortcomings and strengths. The image you exude is the
image others start getting to know you with.

Before I get too off topic, Anne Tyler has written another terrific
novel and made me wish she was much more prolific.