a poem for a monday

Reading this made me laugh. I love when poetry does that. :)  

Sarajevo to Dubrovnik

by Eileen Carney Hulme

Unintentionally we captured

a rainbow, the sky half dark

and the sun full of energy, mischievous

in an affectionate way. Perhaps

we had too many coffees or

the narrow roads and mountain

passes had raised our heartbeats

but here we are like go-betweens

carrying love letters or breathless

sighs from country to country

and this rainbow sneaking in

hitching a lift with no word

to the wind.

**

From Ink, Sweat and Tears. 

illicit happiness

This isn't really a post about the book. Having so disclaimed, I will write on. 

I just read my third* book this year in which a person commits suicide: The Illicit Happiness of Other People, by Manu Joseph.

The other two are Sense of an Ending (Julian Barnes) and Foreigner (Arun Joshi). I think  Arun Joshi and Julian Barnes are absolute geniuses. No question about it. I'm yet to make my mind up about Manu Joseph, although I must say I am veering towards pretty good. 

I started reading this book at my grandmother's funeral. I sat in a corner while everybody else did their own thing and read. It was slow progress. I got through about 100 pages over that week. I did more staring at the book than actual reading, but I was glad to have something to hold. When I picked it up, I didn't know it was a book about a dead person. It was only on the flight home when I pulled it out of my bag, my cousin told me with a wrong-choice sort of tone, "it's pretty intense book". She, herself, bought a book called 'Punjabi Parmesan' which also turned out to be a wrong choice. (It turned out to be non-fiction and nothing like the name suggests. Go on. Google it.) I don't think the being-about-death bothered me though. In the general state of mind I was in, any book would have taken me this long to finish. 

Immediately after the week I spent at home with my entire family doing our own thing and only reading about 100 pages, I was on a flight to Patna. I spent a whole week in Bihar at field work, mostly alone, living in okay hotel rooms in Gaya and really crappy hotel rooms in Muzaffarpur. During this time, I tried to read. Instead, I watched Homeland. (The first season. The second and third seasons I reserved for Muzaffarpur).  

I ended up reading more of this book when I was waiting for my train to Patna at the Gaya station. My suitcase, my backpack and I, we sat there for a whole couple of hours again making very slow progress at the whole reading thing. A man who was sitting next to me (whose efforts at putting his hand on my thigh I kept thwarting) eventually tried to make conversation with me: "Aankhein kharab ho jayenge. Idhar mat padho." I shot him my angriest look and turned up my headphones. Again, the book became something I only pretended to read till the train came while I listened to that week's All Songs Considered and seethed. 

The book has remained in my handbag since.

I only picked it up today because I wanted to do something that wouldn't involve my laptop (and as is evidenced by this blogpost, that didn't last very long), and didn't want to read something new because all the books I am in the middle of are making me very guilty. (There are a couple more on Kindle. Kindle is the worst, because I don't even remember which books I have started reading. Today, I clicked on a book called 'Thief's Magic by Trudi Caravan, and as I started to read it I realised I had actually finished reading the damn thing! I really need to go back to updating that list.)

And I finished it.

And I must say that it's quite good, this book.

Okay goodnight.





*I'm fairly sure there is a fourth. I just can't remember which.

diary of a bad year

j m coetze.

uff. still reeling from it. might not stop reeling from it. 

khakras and sanderson

i understand my 'i'mtoobusytoreadwhine' posts are getting boring.

instead, i give you a picture of where i woke up this morning. :) (it's a village called gajapura, about 80 kms from godhra, gujarat. i noticed only later that my finger got in the way.)

anyway, since i've been travelling, trains are reading conducive. but since i'm constantly exhausted, i've gone back to reading stock fantasy, and as a refreshing change (kill me later for using the term), chick lit.

so in the first half of the past ten days, i finished the books from stormlight archive by brandon sanderson (2 nos.) it was quite belatedly that i realized that this wasn't, in fact, the series that he has managed to finish just yet. which was quite a bummer because now i have to wait till spring 2016. suxx. it read like standard fantasy, and it was just what i needed because it wasn't too involving. the plot isn't going anywhere anytime soon, so it's easy to put it down and go to sleep. i understand that neither of those things is a compliment.

on the sixth day, i finished saba imtiaz's 'karachi, you're killing me'. like i kept telling everyone who asked - it was fun! i don't think it was meant to accomplish anything serious. and it was hugely predictable. but also cute! and fun! yay!

the next few days have been spent reading brandon sanderson's mistborn series (2 nos.) suffice to say, stormlight archive is way nicer. this is... okay, i guess. it keeps losing its sense of narrative often. but i look forward to starting on the third book nevertheless.

i also have a copy of nam le's 'the boat' that i'm lugging around everywhere. what can i say, reading sanderson off kindle on my phone is more convenient?

anyway, more khakras just arrived. and work, i'm not mentioning work. 

pfft

time, ladies. i keep cribbing about it because i genuinely ain't got none. 

on the other hand, someone tell me what to read? i miss reading.

predictable fantasy

is the most amazing thing. it's my go-to filler reading, okay?

(also, I can't wait for May! when I can start reading normal things again! and possibly writing! Yay!)

I've been saying this too much - but Mr. Eliot was right. April is the cruellest month, even if not for the reasons he gives.

Anyway, case in point - The Fionavar Tapestry trilogy by Guy Gavriel Kay.

It's like he wrote it because he wanted to write a Wheel of Time + Other Generic Swords and Sorcery Fantasy mashup. Without any real originality, either. And with high levels of predictability. It's not like he even has an excuse, okay? He wrote it in 2001, by which time Wheel of Time was pretty cult. He couldn't have been catering to those fantasy nerds with limited fantasy worlds without having read Wheel of Time. So what's with the good v. evil story with the tapestry weaving as the tapestry will? I mean, did you forget that you also wrote Tigana? Which is crazy awesome?

But because I'll take a (good) 14000 page series with a Dark One anyday, I think it was imperative for me to invest time and energy into a similar series by an author I love.

I'm basically saying that because he's awesome (yes he is) I just hadta read it alllllllll. So sue me.

this year thus far

1. um, without realizing it, i seem to have read almost everything guy gavriel kay has written. this is pretty cool, except i haven't made any notes about any of his books. i only have the fionavar tapestry left, i think. slow and steady?

2. books i started but haven't finished: the luminaries (it's long and difficult to carry around okay?)
moons of jupiter - alice munro and
insects are like you and me - kuzhali manickavel (short stories are difficult to do in one go)
vasudeva's family - vaidehi (i forgot it in a friend's house. too lazy to retrieve it)
once upon a time in scandinavistan - zac o yeah (it offended too many of my sensibilities to go forward with it).

3. books i read very slowly: we need new names - noviolet bulawayo (too much emotion, but beautiful)
hired man - aminatta forna (took me a while to get involved in it)

4. books i swallowed:
a tale for the time being, ruth ozeki (book of the year, yet)
god in every stone, kamila shamsie (need to read more by her to make up my mind)
the foreigner, arun joshi (a love letter to arun joshi is forthcoming)
everything by guy gavriel kay (sigh)

it's been a slow quarter-of-a-year fiction-wise, but only because i've been too busy to do any reading. any reading i have done has been largely guilt-inducing, and this is never good. come may, i promise to turn into a book monster. :) 

a god in every stone

by Kamila Shamsie

I don't have the time to write something longer, but I have to note these down or I'll forget.

1. The anticipation of love: The whole book is full of it. It is always standing around at the edges, teasing you, testing you, seeing if you'll fall for it. I did, convincingly, every time. I fell for every character meant for love, whether or not anyone in the book actually did. I fell for Qayyum Gul (with his hands behind his head alone on a berth in a train; one eyed Qayyum, sure yet so very unsure of himself.) And I kept hoping she would too. I kept looking for it - Now it will happen, oh, now she will recognize him, wait this is the moment. A moment. I can't say if I loved the book for the anticipation of love, or for the love there actually is.

2. Reading Shamsie is like reading a non-fantasy Guy Gavriel Kay. It feels like you're really reading a book on history in story form. It's well-researched and a terrific pleasure. Makes you want to read up on little things. (May be I'm drawing this comparison because I've been reading Kay like a beast. But if you read Kay and Shamsie in succession, I dare you not to make it too). I loved her account of wartime Britain for its little details, the politics, the opinions. I loved how Vivian grows through the book: I love her idea of service to a nation in wartime, and how it changes as she becomes her own person. I love the tension in the book when the man from the government comes to meet her. You know she can't be that silly, you want her to not be that silly. When she is, you're immediately heart-broken. You know what is coming, it's an inevitability. But you hope because she hopes.

3. I really really want to go to Turkey.

4. My southern school education somehow missed out on the immediacy and intimacy of the history of partition, and I think this is true of many of my South Indian friends. A lot of North Indian friends of mine have a romantic notion of Pakistan - they have roots there (a grandparent who left, lands, families, that sort of thing). To me, it has always been a different culture, a different people. When I found out that they have a Punjab too, somehow Pakistani butter chicken became something I had to try. (I was 11. Not much has changed). So when I read Pakistani writers, I read them as I would read any other writer. Suddenly little unexpected things pop out at me and I think aha, there's something I didn't expect you to be like. With Mohammed Hanif's Alice Bhatti, I kept thinking that way about caste. About how I understood its perpetuation without really thinking about it as different/Pakistani. 

It happened with Shamsie too, but not in the same way: With her, it was about the cultural references. The train stations, the quaint streets, the clubs. (In my head, they look like old Hyderabad, and I can say with some certainty that the clubs are the same everywhere. I've been to Gymkhanas all over the country, and if they haven't changed between Hyderabad, Bangalore, Calcutta and Delhi, I doubt they're largely different or the sandwiches are much better in Pakistan).

2013

10 Books of the Year, off the Top of My Head.

1. Cronopios and Famas, Julio Cortazar
One of the most amazing books and authors I have ever read, possibly. I will write about him when I can. If I can. Ever.

2. Adi Parva, Amruta Patil
Wrote about it already, but it is the questions that stay with me. A book whose writing is better than (if possible) the art. What a beautiful, beautiful book. 

3. Tender is the Night, F Scott Fitzgerald
I read this a few months before I watched The Great Gatsby. It made me cry, which only one other book in recent memory did. But also, it made me marvel at sentence after sentence; re-read chapters, paragraphs, and the whole book. Because Fitzgerald makes reading prose seem easy and light. After I watched the film, I was able to see this book in a new light. I saw what he was saying about wealth and the middle-class, why it was important for him to write it the way he did (in the order he did, I mean), and about loving (not outside the context of wealth).

4. My Tender Matador, Pedro Lemebel
Dance with it. See its beauty. Let it tear you apart.
It will.

5. Numbers in the Dark, Italo Calvino
There's a reason this is one of the best compilations of short stories ever. Or several.

6. Book Thief, Markus Zusak
I cried a lot. That's what this book is about. In a good way? 

7. (Much as I'd hate to admit it) Towers of Midnight, Sanderson and Jordan
Over! Yay. (Okay, in all fairness, it was a decent book. Obviously Mat and Tuon were my favorites. It was a little too cut and dry, but if it was anything else, there would have been no point to it. It ties up every single loose end in the way you expected it to end about six books ago. So if, like me, you like your fantasy to be happy and predictable, you'll probably like this book. But if you have to read thirteen other books to get here, you probably won't get this far. So um.)

8. Ka, Roberto Calasso
I've never seen Indian mythology in this way. Roberto Calasso is almost academic in so many places, that this book is sometimes tedious to get through. It is definitely not one of those things you can read in one go. But it is also one of the most rewarding reads of the year. 

9. Mezzanine, Nicholson Baker
Oh! The! Footnotes! Just that. If not the whole damn book.

10. Em and the Big Hoom, Jerry Pinto
Also wrote about it already, sort of.

I might cheat later, but this is it for now.

I forgot! 11. Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz!! (Also see - http://www.salon.com/2012/07/02/the_search_for_decolonial_love/)
12. Shadow Lines, Amitav Ghosh (Which I've been saving up for ten years and finally fell in love with.)