The broker - John Grisham

Although this is a fairly old book of Grisham's, I got around to reading it only now. The broker is the story of a cunning Washington lawyer and lobbyist, who amasses money and power by hook and crook. One of his crooked deals gets him between a rock and a hard place. With multiple foreign secret services after his life, he cuts a deal, pleads guilty and gets into federal prison.

The twists begin when the CIA lets him loose with a presidential pardon, so that he can be bait. The CIA wants to know who will come after / kill him. They throw him in Italy in a totally foreign environment and leak his presence.

The real fun begins when the FBI and the CBI get into loggerheads, trying to one-up each other. Backman's cunningness comes to the fore, when he escapes multiple assassins, comes back to Washington and plays the political establishment to clean his life.

An engrossing read, left me on a high. I found it funny though, how Grisham calls it 'hacking', when a user uses an internet cafe to send email. The other references to technology like the smart phones, encrypted email etc all sound quite realistic though.

Would recommend this.
ps: cross posted on crack a book.

What do you want to read today ?

Since moving to Palo Alto, I have picked up my long forgotten interest reading. Reading books, newspapers and comics. Last week, I finished reading two books on Oracle and Larry Ellison: Softwar and The difference between God and Larry Ellison. Both were well written, and were exciting to me particularly. So many incidents, references and rumors that I had heard of were in the books. A nice insight into Oracle's growth, Larry's personality, strategies and tactics, the different people who contributed to making Oracle as big as it is today.

And today, I went and got a few more books. Tintin comics, Pervez Musharaf's memoirs, a couple of novels, Carly Fiorina's book and a book by an Islam convert. A good potpouri, it appears... Can't wait to get my hands on them now.

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The DaVinci Code

Just finished reading The DaVinci code. It was good to read... great story, so many famous names, so many twists, so much history and religion...

Almost every puzzle that they solved made sense, only in hindsight. Except for one. Towards the end, I guessed the password about the missing orb on Newton's tomb correctly - Apple! (yay, pat on back).

Good read. Thanks to Sunnyvale public library. If you have not read the book, you should.

Library encounter

So, two days ago in the evening, I set off on the bike to Sunnyvale public library. The weather was good, and it was awesome to ride with the wind in my face. I reached in quick time and went to find the famous DaVinci Code. It has been a while since I read books of any kind; the last was in ASU in Dr Ye's lab..

Anyway, while in the fiction section, I happened to pass by this pretty Portugese girl, while innocently ( ya, right! ) searching for the famous Da Vinci Code. She was sitting in the neighboring quiet area, apparently studying hard. Let's say I passed back and forth. ;)

She called me over apologetically and asked if I could spend 10 minutes with her. Seems she had a survey to do for a class project, and could I please be one of her bakras ? I said sure and sat down.

The survey itself was very simple. She read out a series of words and I had to quickly write down how many syllables each had on a sheet of paper. There were 30 words or so. When we finished, she asked me to turn around the sheet and now write down how many ever words I remembered from the list. Not fair, I said, I was not concentrating on the words at all! Anyway, turned out that was the plan, they wanted to see how people remember words depending on how much time they spend thinking about it...

I think I got about 10 words or so. What was most fun though, was how she was leaning forward and whispering each word, as if she were telling me a secret. And no, I did not get her name or number. Like they say, I am a simple, shy, south Indian boy!