A God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy - Book Review

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A pair of actors trapped in a recondite play with no hint of a plot or narrative. Stumbling through their parts, nursing someone else's sorry. Grieving some else's grief.
Theater. Actors.
Roles. Fate.
Marionettes.

And here I am, trying to find a meaning in every line when I should rather be feeling every line. Of a book that first slowly, diligently, metaphorically dug a hole and then filled that book-shaped hole by silently creeping in. With soft steps while treading on the Love Laws.
That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.

For me, this book is a beautiful, haunting symphony, composed by people bringing their own instruments, playing their own tunes through all that rigid background noise and making a soulful, sad, arresting, comic, tragic, and vividly evocative music.

Maybe I will read it again. I will read it again. And love it a little more.

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Lone Fox Dancing: My Autobiography by Ruskin Bond - Book Review

Lone Fox Dancing by Ruskin Bond
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Towards the end of Lone Fox Dancing (LFD), Mr. Bond writes about the severe storm that ravages his Ivy Cottage home. How the natural yet merciless powers shake up the house and sweep the roof away, and then the snow falls and freezes the fear. Mr. Bond finds beauty in the midst of this all. It is almost an analogy to his past with events that swept his life and carved his future, and all the while he hung on to the things he loved. The man whose pen rains wonderful words on paper and writes beautifully about the life that he has had, the different people he met and loved, and the immovable mountains that sheltered the writer in him.

I missed being among strangers without feeling like an outsider; I missed everything that made it all right to be sentimental and emotional.

This is only my second book by Mr. Bond. I haven't read any of his fiction, but I feel that when I pick up his other books to read, LFD will help me recall his memory-rich past life that might have triggered a particular anecdote, story, events, or characters in the books. As Mr. Bond himself explains so well:

I suppose most writers, to a greater or lesser extent, base their fictional characters upon real people. Mine come very close to the reality. It is my own response to them that varies. The most fictional of all my characters is myself.

I love his writing. It gave me a warm and cozy feeling. The journey from childhood to adulthood and further was sprinkled with giggles, smiles, a bit of sadness, hope, and continuously moving on to the next phase of life. It is evident in the writing how, as a child, he absorbed the happenings around him, let the most memorable things carry him forth, and recalled the quick flashes of history. Then the mountains took over and then the words became one with nature. Birds sing, trees rustle, raindrops pitter-patter, snowflakes mesmerize, the lone fox dances, and the brave leopard leaves with indigestion.

I was fortunate in that I ventured into the literary world with a certain wide-eyed innocence, and managed to maintain that innocence for most of my life.

On the "evening of Mr. Bond's long and fairly fulfilling life," I certainly think that I will be revisiting Dehra, Delhi, Mussoorie, the mountains and the valleys, the birds and their songs, the people and their stories through your writing, Mr. Bond.

I hope to learn a thing or two about "how much I still needed to learn about contentment."

So here I am, a young boy, an old writer, without regrets.

So long!

It seems strange
How we used to wait for letters to arrive
But what's stranger still
Is how something so small can keep you alive
We used to wait
We used to waste hours just walkin' around
We used to wait
All those wasted lives in the wilderness downtown

We Used To Wait by Arcade Fire.

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Piccadilly Jim by P.G. Wodehouse - Book Review

Piccadilly Jim by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In a recent Reddit post titled What books are worth reading just for the quality of their prose alone?, I was very happy to see P.G. Wodehouse being mentioned. He truly deserves to be mentioned!

With Piccadilly Jim, PGW is probably at his descriptive best and the book contains ample amount of the sunshine-filled (hat tip Stephen Fry) language that is known to flow out of his mind.

Plot-wise I wouldn't say that this book would stand well in a Sumo wrestling match against some of his other champions, but the Wodehousian charm is strong and pervasively permeating in this one.

I loved the characters drawn in this book. Mr. Pett (Sensational Turning Of A Worm!), Miss Trimble, Mr. Crocker, Jimmy, Jerry Mitchell, Ann (with her red hair and the nature which generally goes with red hair), and even Ogden for that matter are beautiful.

He had the plethoric habit of one to whom wholesome exercise is a stranger and the sallow complexion of the confirmed candy-fiend.

(On a slightly unrelated note, the Kindle / Gutenberg version has chapter titles that are missing from the printed book. The titles do add to the fun part!)

Few gems from the book:

An exile from home splendour dazzles in vain.
Oh, give me my lowly thatched cottage again;
The birds singing gaily, that came at my call,
Give me them, and that peace of mind dearer than all.

Mr. Crocker had never lived in a thatched cottage, nor had his relations with the birds of his native land ever reached the stage of intimacy indicated by the poet; but substitute "Lambs Club" for the former and "members" for the latter, and the parallel becomes complete.

"Have you packed everything I shall want?"
"Within the scope of a suitcase, yes, sir."

It is but rarely that any one is found who is not dazzled by the glamour of incivility.

It is one of the effects of a successful hunch that it breeds other hunches.

And this one is particularly romantic!

"To a girl with your ardent nature some one with whom you can quarrel is an absolute necessity of life. You and I are affinities. Ours will be an ideally happy marriage. You would be miserable if you had to go through life with a human doormat with 'Welcome' written on him. You want some one made of sterner stuff. You want, as it were, a sparring-partner, some one with whom you can quarrel happily with the certain knowledge that he will not curl up in a ball for you to kick, but will be there with the return wallop. I may have my faults—" He paused expectantly. Ann remained silent. "No, no!" he went on. "But I am such a man. Brisk give-and-take is the foundation of the happy marriage. Do you remember that beautiful line of Tennyson's—'We fell out, my wife and I'? It always conjures up for me a vision of wonderful domestic happiness. I seem to see us in our old age, you on one side of the radiator, I on the other, warming our old limbs and thinking up snappy stuff to hand to each other—sweethearts still! If I were to go out of your life now, you would be miserable. You would have nobody to quarrel with. You would be in the position of the female jaguar of the Indian jungle, who, as you doubtless know, expresses her affection for her mate by biting him shrewdly in the fleshy part of the leg, if she should snap sideways one day and find nothing there."

I enjoyed reading this book a lot.

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Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami - Book Review

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I don't want to answer "What did you think?" I would prefer "How did you feel?"

Pain is what gives rise to meditation. It has nothing to do with age, let alone beards.

Some parts of the story hit the right notes. Some of it were diffused, hidden somewhere between the noises of the criss-crossing trains intermingled with the noises of the passengers waiting at a train station.

But there are some keys about human emotions that Murakami knows how to pluck, and he plucks them quite a bit once in a while.

No matter how quiet and conformist a person's life seems, there's always a time in the past when they reached an impasse. A time when they went a little crazy.

I would fondly remember him talking about harmony towards the end of the book. The little observations and analogies whenever I see a railway station.

I read the line "Then she paused, as if leaving a space on the page." and the enrapturing power of words and meanings took hold of me.

Eventually, the book echoed some of my feelings, and stayed surprisingly positive!
Not everything was lost in the flow of time.
We truly believed in something back then, and we knew we were the kind of people capable of believing in something - with all our hearts. And that kind of hope will never simply vanish.

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Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut - Book Review

Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I picked up Mother Night after reading Maus. There is one major, dreadful, heartrending thread that binds these two books together:

Auschwitz.

While Maus paints a deeper and detailed picture of what it would have been on those unimaginable, worse-than-hell grounds, Mother Night superficially mentions it. But this outwardly treatment is done by Kurt Vonnegut in his own melancholy-inducing stylish humour. Very few authors can write war humour so well as Kurt Vonnegut does. His humour has the power to make you realize the degree of destruction caused by a war and the effect it has on humans. Both the victor and the vanquished.

Vonnegut’s proud characters, unfolding of events, and the subtle humour stitches together a meaningful tale in the form of Mother Night. Here we listen to or read Howard J. Campbell’s memoir about the way he pretended to pretend during war times and weaved together a complex identity for himself. How things tumble down during and after World War 2 for him and how the seeds he has sown grow into trees that creep towards him and pull him back to tangle him upside down by the hanging roots. I also loved his talk about the little "Nation of two."

As Vonnegut describes very early in the book the moral of this story is: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." The intensity behind this apparent "moral" becomes jarringly obvious as we trod along the story through the little twists and turns.

Compared to his other works like Slaughterhouse-Five, Cats in the Cradle, and Sirens of Titan, Mother Night is more grounded and is without the grandiosity (sometimes interplanetary!) of the other books. It is definitely a lovely little book, if you can describe a WW2-related book as lovely. I will certainly be returning to Vonnegut books again when I become older and maybe a bit more eccentric to enjoy the books even more than I do today.

Till then...

P.S.: One of the other vivid moments I recall from the book is the incident about the corpse-carrier. It still keeps haunting me thinking about how dreadful WW2 must have been for some. Just to think that people survived hell... and oh what a hell that must have been. It's really sad when people used WW2 related jokes when the German team won the football world cup this year (2014), specially the earlier semifinal against Brazil. Indians joking about WW2 and the German war juggernaut? Do you even know what you are talking about?

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Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy - Book Review

Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Is someone in there? the first man said.
The man who was relieving himself did not look up. I wouldnt go in there if I was you, he said.

Is there somebody in there?
I wouldnt go in.

He hitched himself up and buttoned his trousers and stepped past them and went up the walk toward the lights. The first man watched him go and then opened the door of the jakes.
Good God almighty, he said.

What is it?
He didnt answer. He stepped past the other and went back up the walk. The other man stood looking after him. Then he opened the door and looked in.

What he must have seen is a copy of the book "Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West"
--
I had approached the book with a lot of caution, but not only did it shock me and took me off guard (more than) once in a while, it made me cringe like never before. I usually read and watch a lot of violent books and movies. Gore and slash. But nothing ever prepared me for the bone-chilling, heart-squeezing, brain-freezing violence that suddenly pounced and as swiftly went away.

Eventually making me feel lonely. Almost making me miss the violence. Suggesting conversion. Submission to the ultimate.

While he danced around in my thoughts. Picking my nerves and playing notes I've seldom experienced before. Rendering me restless to understand the deeper meaning beyond the depths. I tried to clarify the symbolic ideas that shadowed the harsh yet metaphoric simplicity, where the most fearful activity was swiftly executed. But I failed. I couldn't coagulate the bits of the underlying objectives and reasons and weave them in a string of logical succession.
--
To say I loved the book without understanding it completely yet feeling a lot of it would be accurate. I caught what the author throws at you in the landscape trying to make you understand the vivid yet harsh surroundings that is probably a mirage for the twisted members of the society.

I understood the wonderful symbolic summarization of the transgression of the Kid.

I almost accepted the terrorizing portrayal of the most violent tendencies of humans and the consequences in an unrestrained candour that were told in a matter-of-fact way.

I bowed to the beautiful landscape and it's survivors. The pilgrims of the oldest sect of mankind.
--
My hook in this book was chapter 4. Here is what I had noted after reading it:

Starts on a very slow note. Bulldozing a vivid landscape with beautiful descriptions that were at times beyond comprehension and needed re-reads to get some meaning out of it. But how the tempo shifts, how the hunter becomes the hunted, just flames across the eyes. Just like lighting matchstick in a pitch dark room. Suddenly you see ghosts and monsters inches in front of you and all you have to do is submit. Submit and surrender to the clarion screams and chaotic hooves stamping off the slithering words that deliver a sudden shock.

"Chap prays for rain, blood pours from the skies."
--
So then, "What's he judge of?"
--
While reading this book, I was reminded of Detectives Hart and Cohle from the TV show True Detective. Glanton echoed a bit of Hart's personality and Cohle echoed some of Judge Holden's.
--
You can read proper reviews and evaluations of the book here and here. I wrote what I felt. I need to read it again objectively. But I dare say that I will come out just as foggy.
--
I would also like to drop in this amateurish post "I am You" that I had written in 2011. The book reminded me of this post.

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Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett - Book Review

Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Well, well, well. I wonder if the chance of this review turning out to be all right is a million-to-one. In that case... Oh, who am I kidding!

Did you know that Sir Terry Pratchett has his own cathedral where he summons interesting stories, intriguing characters, slithering plots, and quite a bit of laughs that he can surprisingly control and cage in the form of Discworld books? Then again, Discworld devotees know this already.

If I were given a chance (whatever the odds) to change the title of this book, I'd safely baptise it as "Dragon 101" where the "0" is slightly altered to resemble the shape of the heart symbol. I very well know that "Love is not love. Which alters when it alteration finds...," but come on, Shakespeare rarely infused magic in his equations, didn't he? Look at all the gastronomic difficulties, the best of them, the worst of them people, and the ever-summoning circumstances. Love flames it all. Even the ladiest of them ladies and toughest of them guys.

This book is such a splendid specimen, that it makes me wonder why it's just the 2.5th Pratchett book that I've read so far. Then again it's more whole than the remaining 1.5 Pratchetts combined together in a complexly probabilistic equation. I surely will be accompanying Captain Samuel Vimes a lot more when he performs his duties in the streets and citadels of Ankh Morpork. I hope the rest of team allows me to! I'll buy everyone a well-deserved drink for sure!

Quotes! Have you ever had the chance (again?) to highlight sentences in a Kindle book so much that almost all of it appears to be highlighted? Like a long tongue of yellow flame that surpasses the pages? Enough to form a Brotherhood of Kindle-highlighters? Imagine if the highlights enter the L-Space. Imagine... L-Space...

Well, at this point in the review I sincerely echo the strong sentiments felt by Vimes throughout the book. That of needing a drink. On that note I'll leave you with this:

Oook!

(Hah! Million-to-one chance! More like this review had a probability of 0.9 of being good. That means almost nothing at all, isn't it.)

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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson - Book Review

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This little gem is like one of those drugs in the back of the Red Shark. You never know what the good doctor is going to pick up next and garble something.

I guess now I realize why people praise Hunter S. Thompson so much. He has practically introduced a lot of new phrases that have become staple material later on. Such as "Passively hostile" (passive aggressive), "in the general direction of..." (that Monty Python line) and some others.

I loved the commentary on the phasing out of Uppers and the demand of Downers (that happened along with Nixon), the few lines on general drug-life during the late 60s (I remember being amazed by that line where the doctors writes about driving to any place and still being able to find drug-addled crazy people.), and the metaphors used to describe people from under a drug haze.

My favourite line from the book, amongst others, is "In a scene where nobody with any ambition is really what he appears to be, there's not much risk in acting like a king-hell freak."

I wonder if I can say that it is a problem, but Johnny Depp narrated the book most of the time interspersed with shouts from Benicio Del Toro.

Someday, I'll read the book again and write sweat out a book proper review. Someday, I'll also visit Vegas and see if some of it still stands true as described in the book.

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A Cool, Dark Place by Supriya Dravid - Book Review

"All these words turned out to be wretched custodians of memory. They cut me to the core and taught me that absences have a presence too."
-

Don, the Mother, Gravy, Zephyr, Sancho, Robert, the Banker, et al. The characters in this book are as eccentric as they come. Some, specially Don. Scratch that, just Don. Larger than life. Almost like making a peg of whiskey that is too much for the poor glass to handle. The glass is not half-empty or half-full in this case, but overfull.

After a turn of events, Zephyr comes across these poignant cobwebs in her family history that trap her. And guess who the liquor-loving Spiderman is? As the pages turn, new information is revealed to Z and from then on, there is a downward spiral. If there can be further downward movement when one is already down.

She gets to know about her wild grandmother, her effervescent mother, and the other puppets in Don, her grandfather's, kingdom. How he pulls the strings, how he jokes, and how he plays with their memories is A Cool, Dark Place.

Somewhere one doesn't need to go, but is already present, in the recesses of their minds.

The language used in the book is beautiful. There are some phrases that are too much to handle, but I guess there are moments in life that make you think of ghastly atrocities too. Language is just an outreach. I would definitely recommend this book to people I know who'd appreciate the dark poetry that this book is.

It's like drinking a fine, yet eccentric single malt whiskey.
-
“How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but-mainly-to ourselves.” - Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (My review here.)
-
A Cool, Dark Place has these strong flavours that remind me of another story. I know the exact story that the book reminds me of, but putting it as "another story" serves as a temporary respite.
-
A Cool, Dark Place is that intensely flavoured dish that you like from your favourite eating place that one day has been slightly overdone. All the flavours have been magnified such that individual flavours stand out and overpower the other, yet each sustains it's own battle.
-
Don Draper, after being divorced from Megan lost the custody of his boy to Betty. After a lot of convincing and legal power play, he managed to be a custodian and guardian to the effervescent Sally, his daughter.

Don moved to India, Madras to be more specific, started a leather business and resumed his love for the life-saving brown fluids and power. More like dissolving his life in alcohol one peg at a time. Just like the way specimens are preserved in a biological laboratory. It's tough to figure out how Don eventually turns out to be, but that's life.

A Cool, Dark Place could very well be a story of Don Draper's fall and rise just like the bubbles trapped in a champagne bottle falling from the bottle in the champagne flute and escaping from there.
-
“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” - Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
-

For an actual (and good) review of the book, check here.

Joy in the Morning by P.G. Wodehouse - Book Review

Joy in the Morning by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

To summarize the book, "It's a confounding concatenation of comic circumstances."

The unassailable melodic ring of that entire line is rendered ineffective by the fact that someone decided to pronounce circumstances as "sircum" and not "kircum". To summarize my feeling after realizing that, I would gently employ the Puneri word "Shyeah".

Joy in the Morning is one of the best horses from the PGW Turf Club. I strongly suspect that it would win or come second only to the ablest of contenders Right Ho, Jeeves in a royal derby decided by the degrees of concatenating circumstances.

It is also splendid to see all the little digs taken at several authors like Hemingway, Shakespeare, and also that rather humorous chap called Wodehouse.

Truly a joy!

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Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse - Book Review

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Owing to this being a translated book and almost 90 years old, the language was not as smooth as I expected. Or maybe I expected it to be as smooth as some of the concepts and thoughts put across in the book.

This book traces the changes in Siddhartha's life. From a child to a child. Insert child is the father of man in there somewhere and seal it. Oh, but I digress. There are some really wonderful and big thoughts filled in this small book. Specially in the second half of the book when Siddhartha's thoughts flow like (or with) the river.

Specially the last few pages are really worth it. Though, one can always debate on some of the stated philosophies. Like, yes good and evil, truth and lie, and other binary things (are they really binary) are a part of what makes the whole, but then why does Siddhartha suggests that we don't hate, but love the world as is. Aren't love and hate opposites? On the other hand, they might not be opposites.

My only wish was that I should have come across this book and other similar ones when I was a wayward teenager or a twenteenager. Some things would have made a deeper mark than the breezing touch of the book right now. Still, it definitely is a good read!


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The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler - Book Review

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

My first Raymond Chandler! The first of many (at least 2 more) to come! (I will be repeating this line for a lot of books this year. I'll be using a lot of parenthesis as well, I guess.)

Before I begin about Marlowe, let me talk about two things that struck me towards the end of this book.

Firstly, about one of my favorite moments in a book. When the author speaks about the reason (implicitly) behind the title of the book. I just love the way some titles are weaved in at the most heightened moments. I remember it vividly with Crying of Lot 49 and The Sirens of Titan. The Big Sleep has this serene moment described in one of the the most well-written passages in a really well-written book.

Secondly, for those who have read this book, here is a little snippet from Raymond Chandler's history: "Having started in 1922 as a bookkeeper and auditor, Chandler was by 1931 a highly paid vice-president of the Dabney Oil Syndicate but a year later, his alcoholism, absenteeism, promiscuity with female employees and threatened suicides contributed to his being fired." Do you see the connection with The Big Sleep? Even though a very meager one? Or is it just me reading too much into it?

Coming back to the book. Meet (at your own risk!) Mr. Philip Marlow, Shamus-extraordinaire! The quick-talking, hard-hitting, Son of a Gun. He is not Sherlock (No shit!), neither of those inducers-deducers. He fights with his own instincts, winning against the others'. He gets out there, dodges bullets, shoots excellent repartee's, and goes home to a drink or five. Man, he has style. Serious style!

Chandler has put in some really great writing. I don't even want to talk about the amazing lines from the book. I'd rather reproduce them as is!

"She gave me one of those smiles the lips have forgotten before they reach the eyes."
"I been shaking two nickels together for a month, trying to get them to mate."

And if you are from the IT sector, you'd know why I love this one:
"There’s a boy that is tough like some guys think they are tough. He does a job for Eddie Mars when Mars needs him - trouble-shooting."
I am going to be smiling every time someone utters that word!

The compilation that I am reading has 3 books including The Big Sleep. I hope the other two carry on at the speed at which Marlowe drinks his Scotch. Till then, If you ever want to question Marlow's manners, here is what he has to say:

"And I don’t like your manners."
"I’m not crazy about yours," I said. I didn’t ask to see you. You sent for me. I don’t mind your ritzing me or drinking your lunch out of a Scotch bottle. I don’t mind your showing me your legs. They’re very swell legs and it’s a pleasure to make their acquaintance. I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings. But don’t waste your time trying to cross-examine me."

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Of books read in 2012

Finally, I completed the challenge on Goodreads this year! (Though I cheated a little)

2012 Reading Challenge

Kedar has completed his goal of reading 20 books in 2012!

hide

20 of 20 (100%)

view books

I will make up for the shortcomings from the last year in the coming year.

But, let's keep that aside and talk about books. I read a couple of them. As compared to people who had challenged themselves to read 100/150/200 books, I had a meager 20 books to finish. I cheated my way through. I had to. Why, you ask? Why, I ask! Let's not get into that.

So, here are five of the best ones read this year:

• The Sirens of Titan - So far, probably my favourite Vonnegut. Very, very close to Slaughterhouse-five.
• Snow Crash - Metaphors, Avatars, and the humorous Mr. Stephenson. Our journey just began!
• Perdido Street Station - China, you have redefined the way things can be written and fatansized.
• The Sense of an Ending - A book full of quotes. Those History quotes, I will keep using them.
• Good Omens - I love it when two chaps get together to have some rowdy fun. Specially if they are Gaiman and Sir Pratchett.

That's that. For now.

Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon - Book Review

"...a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding."

My situation. Throughout the book.

Then I went out. Found out that a particular button on my bike was not working. Essentially muted.

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien - Book Review

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a Hobbit." - Aristotle Took.

The Hobbit was a fun read. Without a doubt the fun part of the book was driven by the ghosts from the Took side of Biblo's genealogy. The humour was ticklish at times once I overcame the verbosity of Tolkien's sentence structuring. The adventures were predictable (often foreshadowed with hints laid by JRRT (Does anyone call him that? *cough*GRRM*cough*) himself) but fun.

I got to know how the game of golf was invented!

Bilbo comes across as the hero even through his self-doubts, mistakes, and the dwarvian underestimations. Oh, what with wits, luck, and a magic ring. (cue Gollum's "My Precious"). Gandalf is the best hippie ever! What with smoke rings that chase each other and all that.

"Hey, Boy, do you wanna score?"
And you know how it is;
I really don't know what time it was, woh, oh,
So I asked them if I could stay awhile."
- The lost songs of Gandalf, or Led Zeppelin, as many of us are familiar with.

The Dwarves are fussy, bearded macho-men who eat and drink a lot, and make a lot of noise nonetheless. All they needed were Harleys and Triumphs.

Oh and there are men, goblins, elves, eatables, bears, swords, eatables, trolls, eagles, ravens, and only one Dragon. I came to like the Dragon quite a bit. Oh, Old Smaug, who won't ever be Smug anymore.

And then the story, eventually, is about greed. As Gandhi(Alf) said, "Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's, elf's, dwarve's, goblin's, dragon's greed."

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Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell - Book Review

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Patience’s design flaw became obvious for the first time in my life: the outcome is decided not during the course of play but when the cards are shuffled, before the game even begins. How pointless is that? - Timothy Cavendish

Is this actually a design flaw? Or is it Karma?

-

There are thousands of reviews written on this book that will tell you how good or bad it is.

Loving or hating the book. Was this part decided before too? It is anyway inconsequential.

The hunger for power makes us lose our power over the hunger.

History repeats, mistakes duplicate, learning and unlearning happens.

The cycle of carbon to carbon transformation called as life goes on.

Will we ever learn? We'll never learn? Two sides of the same transparent coin.

-

The first half of the book introduces you to people. The second half (the better half) tells you that circumstances change, people don't.

Feel like my soul has turned into steel
I’ve still got the scars that the sun didn’t heal
There’s not even room enough to be anywhere
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there
...
I can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from
- Not Dark Yet by Bob Dylan

-

Frobisher was a wunderkind, he died just as he got going…

Cloud Atlas Sextet holds my life, is my life, now I’m a spent firework; but at least I’ve been a firework. - Robert Frobisher

Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an’ tho’ a cloud’s shape nor hue nor size don’t stay the same, it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud’s blowed from or who the soul’ll be ’morrow? Only Sonmi the east an’ the west an’the compass an’ the atlas, yay, only the atlas o’ clouds. - Zachary

Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides… I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life’s voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach. Young ruddy fool. What wouldn’t I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds. - Timothy Cavendish

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I loved The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish. I quite liked Sloosha’s Crossin’ An’ Ev’rythin’ After and Letters from Zedelghem. The others were threads that weaved the fabric of time spanning centuries, back and forth.

We just flew on the magic carpet ride.

-

Mr. David Mitchell, I thank you for a lovely book that I will remember, every once in a while...

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The Stopover by Ram Prakash and Deepa Pinto - Book Review

The Stopover by Ram Prakash


I got a few sample pages from this book for a review. The following words, voice, opinions are my own.

My rating (for the pages I read): 3 stars

I won’t call myself as the clichéd “amateur photographer”, but, yes, I do love photography. In addition, I don’t believe that you have to have an SLR camera to be a photographer (although the quality is impeccable!). A capturing lens, an eye for beauty (or horror, irony, joy) in anything around you can help create lovely art. Add to that absorbing lines about the picture and things mystify further.

With The Stopover, the author manages to go several steps farther and weaves stories around stunning photographs. “4 stories, in 4 locations, brought alive with over 100 photos,” is the way this book is described.

I read the story "The Tibetan Wheel of Wisdom," revolving around Varun and his trip to Leh, Ladakh. The photographs are beautiful and the story is engrossing. At times, the pictures and story blend well (look for a picture of the ever calm Buddha, the source that strengthens the anguished and its positioning); at times one overshadows the other, while at times one orphans the other.

I wonder if this book is a gamble. After looking at an image, you perceive things very subjectively, individually. There could be a large overlap of these perceptions when two people see the same picture, but several factors add to the beauty of an image. In this case, we see the pictures and try to feel what the protagonist must be feeling. This works with some pictures, but for some you keep looking for a picture that matches the poetry created by the words and your imagination.

I would like to read the remaining stories and see how they blend with other scenic pictures and how the stories are concluded.


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Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman - Book Review

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Terry Pratchett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

For almost 2 years Good Omens, bought in an online shopping frenzy, was lying on the bookshelf waiting to be devoured. I recently picked it up because I wanted a fun, light book.

Fun it totally is! Lightness is ineffably subjective. I mean, look at these lines:

"It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people."
OR
"Heaven and Hell aren't running things any more, it's like the whole planet is a Third World country that's finally got the Bomb."
Makes you think?

I must confess that the story does seem to be disjointed at times. But eventually everything falls into place as you keep reading, and chuckling. It’s got the Pratchett stamp all over it. I bet Gaiman loved emulating, improvising, and challenging Sir Pterry more and more! And Mr. Terry P answered the challenge in style! They filled the book with funny lines, characters, and references that crack you up beyond chuckling, at times! There are references to Queen, Baskin Robbins, 1984, Star Wars, and BBC. I am sure there could be some more gems that escaped me. There were two such moments that made me think about the awesomeness of ideas in this book:
- The line "Bureaucrats from hell" reminded me of Perdido Street Station
- You know the movie where they travel through phone lines, don’t you? Some characters in this book do the same and there is another funny twist after this travelling business.

While I liked all these amazing moments, I absolutely loved the involvement of Dog the Hellhound (and his metamorphosis!), The Angels (and their bromance!), Grievous Bodily Harm, Embarrassing Personal Problems Things Not Working Properly Even After You've Thumped Them No Alcohol Lager, and Really Cool People (Super!). Even the other human characters are enjoyable in their crazy roles.

It was amazing to read Pratchett and Gaiman writing about each other and their experiences while writing this book. These guys had fun writing this book, shouting about it across to each other, and produced one of the funniest books that I have read.

If you loved the following line, you sure will have a good time reading this book:
"It'd be a funny old world, he reflected, if demons went round trusting one another."
OR
"You start thinking: it can't be a great cosmic game of chess, it has to be just very complicated Solitaire."

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The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes - Book Review

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Losing all hope was freedom. - Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
...

Normally, I tend to form the review of a book halfway through the book and then it gets a finer shape as I complete the book. Sometimes the review that I have in mind suddenly metamorphoses into a completely different set of words. But with this book, I just am not able to collect my thoughts to pen them down.

I really liked the book. After completing it I decided that someday, when I grow older than what I am right now, I will read this book again. I will look back at how I felt while reading the book for the first time. I will see if I have aged with time or I have just amassed some more memories and modified some other.

But for now, I am at a loss for the right words. The book is unlike any other book I have read so far. In a slim package of 150 pages, Julian Barnes presents an intense, thought provoking book. It makes you think and recollect the fond memories that you had. It prods you further in the direction of the scenarios that worked in your favour and others, probably the ones you desired more, that didn't work out in your favour. It gives you some time and teaches you tricks to play around with the what-ifs and whether-thats... and suddenly takes you tumbling down the rabbit hole along with Tony Webster.

Maybe I shouldn't be drawing parallels just because I read these novels in succession, but I felt that there was a characterial overlap between Gatsby's Nick Carraway and Sense of an Ending's Tony Webster. Both of them are observers. Both of them are the metaphorical hubs of the story's wheel. Whereas in Nick's case external forces turn the wheel, Tony makes the wheel move by himself and yet feels that there are external forces acting on him. In Veronica's well-iterated words, Tony just doesn't get it! Nevertheless, Tony does get it, eventually...

Ok, back to the book... Sense of an Ending speaks in terms of logic as applied to human behaviour, common sense as humans try to apply to their behaviour, abstract behavioral mathematics, and ever questioned rationality, but the book leaves you with a feeling that is nowhere as straightforward. It's as misty as a mountain top during monsoon and leaves you in an intoxicated state to find your way through all that haze.

Relationships. Complexities. Reactions. Consequences.

We keep moving back and forth through past and present (metaphorically), try to perceive time and memories linked to a time, understand the dynamics of our behaviour as opposed to what might have happened and just play along. Tony Webster does the same. He looks back at himself, he reminisces, he wonders; he tries to change the mistakes of the past and realizes that the seeds of his previous actions have grown into fierce, road-blocking trees, unknowingly shadowing his motives and hopes. He tries to understand the consequences of his actions. He tries in vain to rekindle the fire. He tries to split remorse in chunks of guilt to tackle them individually, while searching for a stamp of forgiveness. He senses the end and begins the search for corroboration that affirms his memories, life, and the way everything happened. Eventually, Tony gives up his quest.

Adrian's Diary was just a time machine that forced Tony to look back. Veronica was just a force that kept Tony thinking and making modifications to his actions. Veronica's Mom represented the very human nature of unpredictableness. Margaret was the laugh that we need, the smiles that carry us through. Adrian, a mathematical anomaly. Tony, all the while, a hub in the wheel of something called as life. Life, as it happens to some, and as some make it happen.

I loved the book for what it was. The lovely poetic, poignant lines, the melancholy trip through memories, and the wry humour that brought a smile or two at the needed times. I will definitely read this book again and will recommend it to anyone who has thought about the past, not just to change it, but to really think if that change would have been worthwhile as compared to the present. Because who can really predict happenings?

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It is the same!--For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free:
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutability.
- P.B. Shelley, Mutability

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The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald - Book Review

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Who is John Galt Jay Gatsby?
What is Great about Gatsby?
---
...I wear this crown of thorns,
Upon my liars chair,
Full of broken thoughts,
I cannot repair,

Beneath the stains of time,
The feelings disappear,
You are someone else,
I am still right here...

- Hurt, Nine Inch Nails and more poignantly by Johnny Cash.
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This story belongs to a long gone era. An era where opulence was regarded supreme, where identities were hushed behind a veil of grandiose, material happiness. A part of the book belongs to that era... A part has trickled down. Leading to confusion. Just like the confused Nick Carraway. Unsure about things to believe and things to ignore.

Is Gatsby that part of Nick who is in love with Daisy, but has to be buried eventually because things have changed and past cannot be undone? Is it Gatsby or Nick who stunningly describes the beautiful Daisy and her enchanting, alluring voice?

It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened—then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.

Nick, who slowly paints the characters, the surroundings, the sub-textual philosophies, and weaves the story that moved him so much. Nick, caught in the ever-shifting world of sudden changes brought by a man's strong, undying love for a woman. Nick, caught in a contradiction of beliefs, of trust.

Everything is melancholy, and then the emotions are rapidly flattened out... hinting at the things to come. A haziness brought just before the music fades, the alcohol is drunk, and the people go home, before words are scattered along like used tissues... Papers with words and distended feelings that are eventually broken into pieces. Love is put to test. Love loses against fate. Love loses against the past. Too much contention.

Love is mostly on the losing side.

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