tigana and last light of the sun

by Guy Gavriel Kay

Sometimes, I have trouble thinking of Guy Gavriel Kay's work as fantasy. I suppose it is warranted, considering how rich it is in its historical research. 

I read Tigana last month, and was thoroughly impressed by it. Almost every single review I have read makes a mention of its size, but not once through the book did I feel like I was reading a really large book. (It might have something to do with reading it as an ebook). I say this because of how crisp the writing was. I don't think there is a single sentence in the whole book that doesn't have to be there. It's a story that tells itself through how it is structured, adding layer upon layer to every tale told. 

I finished reading Last Light of the Sun today, and while this book isn't as large as Tigana is, it is engaging and thorough as Tigana. Again, not a single sentence out of place, and a story whose structure is made for marveling at. 

The most amazing thing about Kay is how he writes characters you always want to root for. In both books, he tells a story from several opposing points of view, and makes you love every person in the story. It takes real skill to pull something of such complexity off, and Kay does it. 

The other amazing thing about both books is how he tells a story that is set in a context he has researched extensively, but at no point does the story take a backseat to the research itself. One could treat it as an entirely imagined universe, and not miss anything (or if I did, I didn't really feel too bad about it).  

One of the most interesting authors I've read all year, for sure. 

Edit: Forgot to add, Tigana is absolutely completely heart breaking. THAT has to be in every review.

sick reading

I've spent the past six weeks at home, mostly in bed. (Before you ask, I am entirely well now. There was never anything to worry about). This post contains my brief observations about reading while sick.

1. When one is really unwell, reading is better time pass than watching television. This has something to do with the light hurting your constantly sleepy eyes, I think.

2. Contrary to what I used to think, even if one is doing absolutely nothing all day for weeks, it is difficult to spend much of that time productively. For me, this was because all I really wanted to do was sleep. (For the first couple of weeks, even listening to music was tiring. Cue - something profound about how much we take our energy for these things for granted).

3. When one is unwell, one wants to read crap. That's right. I didn't want to focus. I didn't want to think or worry or feel for characters or admire clever writing. I wanted to read crap. So what I appreciated the most is the Philippa Gregory book. And the Mills and Boons book.

3.1 When I felt horrible about what I was reading, I read a LOT of Terry Pratchett. I went through nearly my entire collection. It definitely made me feel better. And then I read every single thing Kate Griffin ever wrote (as Kate Griffin). Which completely erased my guilt while also making me happy.

4. Having access to other people's Kindle accounts feels like being in a candy store where everything is free. (This observation is also applicable to non-sick people).

5. Better than reading is watching Prabhas films. I am entirely serious.

book!

FULL WHOLE BOOK!

whee!

(It took me missing three whole deadlines to give up on looking at my laptop and read the first thing I got my hands on. Give it up for The Hired Man by Aminatta Forna!)

rereading

it's that time of the year again, ladies and gentlemen.

i'm rereading fantasy.

until last year, i spent my rereading fantasy time secretly and guiltily reading wheel of time. now, since that is pointless and patrick rothfuss is only two books long and abercrombie is only three and i'm not exactly sure about jim butcher and i have none of my jasper ffordes with me in delhi (and i'll probably go jump somewhere before i reread game of thrones), i'm looking for new and awesome fantasy things to read.

suggestions are welcome.

xo

a cool dark place/em and the big hoom

(A Cool Dark Place by Supriya Dravid; Em and the Big Hoom by Jerry Pinto)

I just finished reading A Cool Dark Place. I bought it on one end of a flight journey in the airport bookshop, and finished it by the time my taxi pulled into the gate.

What is a book with only beauty? I don't know, really. It may not be a good thing. Because make no mistake, A Cool Dark Place is beautiful. It is made purely of emotion, it seemed to me. How can characters who are supposed to be so empty be people so full of life? She does so many things right: so many characters, so many moments, so much love, so much brokenness. Such poetry in so many places, so flawlessly.

But I have to ask, how much is too much? I ask this as a reader averse to books that carry too much emotion to begin with. (So this might not be the case for a non-loony reader).

For example, this is one of the first couple of sentences in the book that I thought "wow" about  - "For a long time before my father ended his life, he'd hidden himself in the darkness. So my mother had hidden there with him, in the forlorn shadow of his helium heart, in the never-ending nuclear light, under sunken iron beds and love-sewn quilts. I think she hoped her Olympic tolerance would help him may his way back to the living, and destroy the lonely world, the Prozac paradise he had cocooned himself in." But I read it again, rolling the words in my mouth, and I wasn't sure if I knew what I thought of it.

For a long time before my father ended his life, he'd hidden himself in the darkness. So my mother had hidden there with him, in the forlorn shadow of his helium heart, in the never-ending nuclear light, under sunken iron beds and love-sewn quilts. I think she hoped her Olympic tolerance would help him map his way back to the living, and destroy the lonely world, the Prozac paradise he had cocooned himself in.

I'll tell you what this book makes me want to do the most: It makes me want to write a belated review of Em and the Big Hoom. Apart from the fact that both of these books are about broken families trying to grapple with their darknesses, there are two reasons I want to write about Em and the Big Hoom instead. I probably shouldn't compare (so I'm going to try my best not to) but while I was reading, it was all I could do.  

The first is how both of them deal with similarly rebellious, off the path love stories. The second is that when I imagined Gravy, I could only think of him as the Big Hoom: holding the world together with his strength and love.

About halfway through the book, this book made me want to also write a belated review of Em and the Big Hoom.

Apart from the fact that both of these books are about broken families trying to grapple with their darknesses, there are two reasons I want to write about Em and the Big Hoom along with this.

The first is how both of them deal with similarly rebellious, off the path love stories.The second is that when I imagined Gravy, I could only think of him as the Big Hoom: holding the world together with his strength and love.

Both of them write of a disparate world in which they fit and don't with at the same time. In both their worlds, we constantly make obscure references to poets and literary geniuses in our daily lives, find pasts and futures that we can only imagine. 

What Pinto managed to do for me is this: He was convincing of a universe in which a boy lives with a mother who's not all there. He's convincing of their triumphs and their depression, he makes us believe in the times in between. I guess what I am trying to say is this - he gives us context. He gives us quirks of language, he gives us cultures, he gives us conflict.

Dravid, on the other hand, who writes mad characters with booming laughter, doesn't quite cut that. 

She gives us tiny hints about where these people are coming from, of course - the bobbing up and down of a priest conducting a funeral, the book of Marathi short stories, names of places: Madras, Delhi, Gokarna. 

She does little else to moor her characters in any sort of context. Not a time or a place, not a reference I can place. This would not have been disconcerting to me if not for all the other that I could. (For example, a "part-Gatsby, part-Hemingway" man who runs away regularly to Europe for business; him throwing regular Lurhmann-like Gatsby-ian parties in the middle of Madras - I can imagine it, but I'm not convinced by this madness or this alcoholic, opiate, (Prozaic?) universe.)

But the real question, I suppose, is whether she means for us to be at all. These details are meant to be lost in the cobwebs of old chandeliers and jenga-like three storeyed houses with plastic life-size Ambassadors. And while I see what she is trying to do, I don't know if it works for me completely. 

So I have to ask again: how much beauty is too much? Because there may be such a thing as too much.


**

Is there Prozac in India? I always thought of it as an American thing till now.

oops

just went a month without finishing a book.

good time for a vacation!

bleh

rumi is the best poetry to read when writing anything.

rumi is the best poetry to read when agonizing over every line of poetry one is editing from a year ago.

rumi is the best poetry to read to get into the writing mood.

rumi is the best poetry to read when one is thinking about melancholy, myth and language. 

rumi is the worst poetry to read as an ebook.

so tell me, who the fuck took my fat rumi book and didn't give it back?

the book thief

by markus zusak

when i finished reading this book, i decided i wouldn't write about it. or read it again. i just don't want to revisit the memory of the book in any way, unless i want to give myself another good cry. because i was actually sobbing by the end of it. actual sobs. 

there is an undefined moment while you are reading something in which what you are reading stops being words and sentences. from that moment onwards, the book is an experience: sights, sounds, smells, voices in your head. 

in a book as intense and emotionally overwhelming as zusak's book thief, the whole book becomes feeling. from the very beginning, you are feeling colours, beasts of skies, cold cold death. so i look at it now in my bookshelf, and i can only see a room full of bookshelves in nazi germany. i see the book thief, and i know exactly what she went through. and it is for this reason that i don't want it again. it's a great book, but the kind of greatness that i don't have space for in my own tangled emotions. it's the kind of greatness i'd rather stow away, like parts of your childhood you don't know happened because they are too cruel for you to remember.

so instead of writing about the content of the book (which i actually just did, but we'll pretend i didn't) i just want to register two points of surprise: one, that i've had this book on hold for so long. it's not so surprising considering i've been putting off anything but fantasy all this while, but it's surprising considering the (deceptive) simplicity of the narration and the fact that it was on the nyt bestsellers list for some years. two, that it's been listed as young adult fiction. i can see why, but i really sort of can't.

cross posted - ocean at the end of the lane

crossposted from here: c. pindimiriyam

by Neil Gaiman

My least favorite thing about this book is that it has turned Neil Gaiman into a pop star. In my mind, he went from being indie and poor to a stadium-concert-level rockstar and it's annoying the hell out of me. </snob> (I know perfectly well that he was pretty famous even before this book. Psh.) My most favorite thing about this book is that it deals with one of the most interesting contradictions; of the magicness of magic.

Most good fantasy deals with it in one way or the other: that it exists, and people who don't know this are just not cool enough to be in on it; or that it is so in your face that it's not really magic anymore. Neil Gaiman takes a third route with his latest.

He sets it up by telling his story as a flashback. An adult is visiting the town he grew up in, walks to the end of the lane where his best friend used to live, meets her mother and gets talking. As he is talking, he is allowed to remember what really/"really" happened to them as children. By the middle of the book, you know why it's a Neil Gaiman book.

You know it because he has expertly managed to trick you into assuming that he is telling the first kind of fantasy story (in which you only know about magic because you're that cool) and then suddenly makes the switch into the second kind of fantasy story (in which everything is so magical anyway that it's not really magic anymore).

About three quarters in, you have no idea what you're dealing with. You don't know what sort of world this is set in, you don't know if you're meant to know, you don't know if it's just the delirium of a man at a funeral (although, if we're guessing, somebody's surely on something.) But the truth is, you're so into the magic of the book itself that you don't want to think of it in any other way. At least, that's the way it was for me.

He lays out this first contradiction alongside the adult/child contradiction in the flashback. What the adult assumes, a child questions. What the child knows, the adult is undecided. This is important in this context, because most of us have it all the time. You are taught to demagick yourself as you grow up. You start to see the world differently. The way you saw it as a child is either forgotten or dismissed. You never once think like that again. (I'm not even slightly comparing, but the best set of books that brings out this contradiction is Pullman's His Dark Materials.)

So read it, and tell me what you think!

THIS.

A Softer World's 1000th comic, and HOW.

Oh Joey Comeau and Emily Horne, how you sing to me.
How one day if I write like this, I'd be happy.
How.

"I miss something I have never known."

Sigh. *purrs*