Two books

Two recent reading choices. I've been meaning to do this, and now the books are overdue, dang it. I keep the library going single-handedly, I think. But I'm avoiding mowing the lawn, so this is convenient.

One Night at the Call Center, by Chetan Bhagat was a good, light read. Not a great book, but a nice, funny, simple read. It takes place at a call center for an American company in India where the twenty-something employees worry about their low pay, possible layoffs, their relationships, bosses who take credit for their work ... not much different from their American counterparts. But it does give some interesting insight into the cultural difficulties they face, in trying to live in a modern world but also honor their parents' more traditional lifestyles, and how they view Americans.

While the call center is down with some technical problems, they skip out of the office for a while to have some fun at a club, then on the drive back get into a bit of a predicament. While wondering if they're going to die, they get a call ... from God. God is very cheerful, maybe a little too cheerful, really. And he leads them to consider their lives and how to change them for the better. It's amusing, but full of stuff you'd read in dozens of self-help manuals (the author even includes a short self-help style quiz at the beginning), and then the book just gets unbelievable. Well, I mean, God calling on your cell phone is pretty spectacular, but I can suspend my disbelief over something like that. It's the anti-American sentiment that gets a bit hard to take, and makes the climax hard to believe. Add to that a prologue and epilogue to make you gag, and this is only a so-so book.

Scoop by Rene Gutteridge was much better. In fact, I was well into the book before I began to suspect that maybe I'd picked up something in a genre I would otherwise not have thought about -- Christian fiction. Scoop takes place in a last-place TV news station. There's quite a cast of characters here, from Hugo, the stressed-out news producer who's also dealing with a boss who's younger and ethically challenged, and a troubled family life; an aging news anchor who has an unfortunate Botox incident; Ray, the intrepid reporter who gets attacked on live TV; and a whole bunch more.

What attracted me to this book, obviously, was the setting in a newsroom. Yes, I work in print, but a newsroom is a newsroom, and there was a lot here that's true to life: the clashing personalities, the argument of doing "sexy" stories to sell papers/attract viewers vs. more boring but informative stories, and the absurdity that oddly enough comes with the adrenaline of breaking news. Gutteridge captured that really well.

The main character here is Hayden Hazard, Hugo's new assistant. The story starts 5 years before the main action, at the funeral of Hayden's parents, founders of the family clown business. Yes, I said clowns. The Hazards learn that with their parents' deaths, the family business has been sold, and the close-knit, homeschooled, religious clan must now go make their own ways in the world. Rather than seeing the story through her point of view, however, we see it through just about everyone BUT Hayden's eyes. We get to see her, and how she lives and talks about her faith. And you see how it affects the other characters. It's kind of sneaky way of putting religion in a novel, but it works. It's not preachy, it's not in your face. And Gutteridge acknowledges that organized religion isn't perfect in a scene with Ray at his church.

Everything gets wrapped up rather neatly, no one turns out to be truly bad (even the bad guy makes some very valid points about the state of journalism today) and the mystery is kind of predictable. But Gutteridge has a great writing style that is humorous and contains dead-on satire of the news industry. I read this over my lunch breaks, and I was always sorry when I had to put the book down at the end of the hour.

This is actually the first in "The Occupational Hazards" series, each focusing on one of the Hazard clan. The second one, "Snitch," is centered around Hayden's sister Mack, a Las Vegas undercover cop. I'll look for this one, too, and hope the writing (and non-preachyness) stay consistent.