After two days of watching non-stop news coverage of Hurricane Harvey and feeling more anxious than a person whose home and family were still safe should, I decided to indulge in my favorite pastime and read a book.
BUT it couldn't be a hard or suspenseful book. I had enough of that in my real life as we watched flood waters rise and kept close tabs on family and friends in our greater Houston area. This was our first major storm where all of our children were not in the same home as us. Each morning began with a 'safety check'...first of our children, then of our employees and close friends...followed by a mandatory check in with my sister to let her know that we were all okay.
Once the worst of the storm had passed and we knew that our home, office and family were all safe, I was ready to fill my mind with something other than the 24 hours news cycle. It would be nearly a week before we would even be able to watch network television, yet we were all still trapped due to road closures and continued rainfall. Thank goodness I had added this little gem to my July selection at Book of the Month.
The Windfall: A Novel by Diksha Basu
(Fiction)
A heartfelt comedy of manners, Diksha Basu's debut novel unfolds the story of a family discovering what it means to 'make it' in modern India.
For the past thirty years, Mr. and Mrs. Jha's lives have been defined by cramped spaces, cut corners, gossipy neighbors, and the small dramas of stolen yoga pants and stale marriages. They thought they'd settled comfortably into their golden years, pleased with their son's acceptance into an American business school. But then Mr. Jha comes into an enormous and unexpected sum of money, and moves his wife from their housing complex in East Delhi to the super-rich side of town where he becomes eager to fit in as a man of status; skinny ties, hired guards, shoe-polishing machines, and all.
The move sets off a chain of events that rock their neighbors, their marriage, and their son, who is struggling to keep a lid on his romantic dilemmas and slipping grades, and brings unintended consequences, ultimately forcing the Jha family to reckon with what really matters. Hilarious and wise, The Windfall illuminates with warmth and charm the precariousness of social status, the fragility of pride, and above all, the human drive to build and share a home. Even the rich, it turns out, need to belong somewhere.
I needed the laughs...and the truths...that were waiting for me in these pages.
The Jha's find themselves in the struggle between their former lives as a working class family and their new lives after the family business is sold for twenty million dollars. No matter what they try to do in their old neighborhood, even their oldest friends are often either offended at their new wealth or questioning how honestly it was made. New appliances are seen as a snub to the rest of the neighborhood...and moving away is seen as a betrayal.
Meanwhile, as the new home is being prepared for their arrival, the new neighbors reveal their own prejudices towards wealth and what exactly constitutes being wealthy enough. Mr. Jha and his neighbor even find themselves trying to one-up each other with tales of how 'worthless' their sons future careers will be (one is an aspiring poet, the other makes short films) because they see it as a sign of pride that they will have to provide for not only themselves but the future generation as well.
Once the danger had passed us by, this was a fun little escape for a few hours each afternoon. I did laugh out loud a few times, but I also felt a few pangs of recognition in how we all try to fit in and find our places in our communities. Our motives are not always right, and the outcomes can certainly be embarrassing.
I was reminded of an illustration that I heard a Pastor share once. A group of Pastors were gathered on a panel and the question was asked, 'how big of a house is too big?' After lots of numbers being discussed and passed around the group, one of the participants says, 'Honestly? Anything bigger than my house.'
As a people, we distrust those who financially have more than we do and we find their displays of wealth vulgar. Yet when we are the ones being judged as vulgar and untrustworthy for what we have worked hard for, we are often hurt and offended. We all need to just show a little grace!
Rating: ★★★
On Wednesday I was able to make it into the office for a few hours to run payroll. It was the first of the month and we knew our employees had rent and mortgages due. By Friday I was able to begin commuting to work daily again, so I started listening to an Audible book that I had downloaded a few weeks back.
Ready Player One: A Novel by Ernest Cline
(Fiction)
It’s the year 2044, and the real world is an ugly place.
Like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes his grim surroundings by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia that lets you be anything you want to be, a place where you can live and play and fall in love on any of ten thousand planets.
And like most of humanity, Wade dreams of being the one to discover the ultimate lottery ticket that lies concealed within this virtual world. For somewhere inside this giant networked playground, OASIS creator James Halliday has hidden a series of fiendish puzzles that will yield massive fortune—and remarkable power—to whoever can unlock them.
For years, millions have struggled fruitlessly to attain this prize, knowing only that Halliday’s riddles are based in the pop culture he loved—that of the late twentieth century. And for years, millions have found in this quest another means of escape, retreating into happy, obsessive study of Halliday’s icons. Like many of his contemporaries, Wade is as comfortable debating the finer points of John Hughes’s oeuvre, playing Pac-Man, or reciting Devo lyrics as he is scrounging power to run his OASIS rig.
And then Wade stumbles upon the first puzzle.
Suddenly the whole world is watching, and thousands of competitors join the hunt—among them certain powerful players who are willing to commit very real murder to beat Wade to this prize. Now the only way for Wade to survive and preserve everything he knows is to win. But to do so, he may have to leave behind his oh-so-perfect virtual existence and face up to life—and love—in the real world he’s always been so desperate to escape.
A world at stake.
A quest for the ultimate prize.Are you ready?
What would you think of an America where everyone escaped into a virtual world because the real one was just too depressing and hard?
Fuel is expensive and something devastating has happened. People live twenty trailers high in 'the stacks' where Wade grew up with his aunt and several other families in the same small space. She isn't a motherly type to him but only cares for him so that she can get his ration coupons.
Although this isn't my normal read, I was so swept up in the story that I picked up a paperback copy in Target so that I could continue to read over the weekend. (Can I just say that listening to a dystopian novel that describes the scarcity of a future Oklahoma then walking into a Houston department store during a record breaking weather event with sections of the food aisles empty can be a discomforting experience.)
The '80's trivia alone kept me going in the beginning. Flashbacks to my own life, the movies, the video games, the situation comedies, even song lyrics...it was very engaging. When the arcade game Joust was being described (but not yet named) I could picture it so perfectly as it was one of Jim's favorites to play at the Hamburg Circle K Food Mart. He dropped quarters in that machine almost every time we walked through the door.
As I read the story of Wade and his quest to find the 'Easter Egg' hidden in a virtual world while the whole time avoiding the real world that he inhabited, I felt sorry for him and for all the people described in the book. But then, by the middle of the story, I realized that this was somewhat a tale of our world today. People don't interact face to face, we prefer presenting our 'Online Selves' that are all put together with perfect pictures and perfect lives. We have presented ourselves as being our own avatars while ignoring the people and the world right in front of us. All we see is a screen. We prefer keeping in touch with our Internet 'friends' and don't even speak to the people in the next room of our homes.
And to think that this book was written ten years ago!
It is being made into a movie by Stephen Spielberg to be released in 2018.
Rating: ★★★
As soon as the roadways opened up and life returned to an irregular normal, we reached out to help where we could. But in the evenings when the news coverage became just too much, it was nice to have a book to escape into for at least a hour or two.
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