another good book

Congrats to mom for posting! Yay! That cake actually looks good, too!

Here's a post from my blog about a good book that I just read:

In other news, I just finished a book called A Good Indian Wife, by Anne Cherian. It was a fictional novel that delicately explored arranged marriages and the Indian traditions behind them. I found it fascinating for a few reasons:

1) Duke and I witnessed an arranged marriage ceremony when we were in highschool. An Indian friend of my parents, in India, arranged the marriage for their oldest daughter (who was Masters trained, upper 20's), and we were all invited to Madras/Chennai for the wedding. My dad, Duke and I went, and we witnessed the engagement ceremony, and the wedding ceremony, all held in the same day. That had a huge impact on me. How could someone trust their parents enough to let them arrange their marriage? Their future? Fascinating topic. (Duke and I went back to India, years later, just the 2 of us, and we happened to have supper with the parents of the bride, who are my parents' age. They have been married for 35 yrs, and their marriage was arranged. They said that they got married and learned how to love each other later, as opposed to our western way of doing it--fall in love then get married. Like I said, interesting topic.)

2) The other reason why I liked the book is because the American side of the story took place in San Francisco. John and I LOVED San Fransisco, and almost moved there. It was either SF or Dayton, OH... SF or Dayton (picture my hands in the air, weighing the two different cities).. MMmmm, let me see. Dayton!! (Actually, Dayton gave us a job, while SF would have been a harder life for us, I would have been the bread winner, working a lot, we would have just had a baby... We wonder, sometimes, though, what it would have been like had we moved to the Berkely/Bay area.)