Billionaire's Apprentice

By Anita Raghvan

This is a good documentation of the insider trading in late nineties and early 2000's where Rajat Gupta, Raj Rajratnam and Anil Kumar were involved. It is interesting from many angles, it is about the rise of Indians in America, it is about how India was when the first generation migrated to the US, it is also about the rise (and fall) of the wall street and how it was played by many. If you are interested in Indians, in finance, and how a crime like insider trading is investigated, this book is for you. It has the human side with its generous spirit and greed, about families, love, and loss. Though it is written in neutral tone, you can not help but feel warm towards people like Rajat Gupta and wonder how even a grown man can be influenced by strong peers, inner insecurities despite worldly success, and slippery slope of the world of finance.  

The Girl On the Train

This is a thriller and yet it was hard to put down. But somehow the characters were never felt real. They - all the three women - were drinking, flirting, and meddling with others lives really. Especially Rachel, the protagonist was hard for me to understand. She was clearly getting into problems as if by choice and looks like she would rather borrow money from her old mother than really look for work though she has been unemployed for such a long time. All the three women, it felt, were lost morally and otherwise in their lives. May be I am making too much of a moral judgment here but for me to feel their pain, or their struggle, I needed to understand where they were coming from. I just felt like smacking them out of their self-important role and get real through out the book.

On the positive side, it is a page-turner and has an interesting ending. I still have hard time figuring out why a book like this would be on best seller list though.