Like the venerable Joey Tribbiani, I am of the opinion that two good things necessarily make another good thing.

Rice? Good. Potato? Good. Meat? Good. Biriyani? Brilliant;
Chocolate? Good. Toast? Good. Nutella on bread? Brilliant.
Fruits? Good. Winter? Good. Oranges in the winter sunshine? Outstanding.

You get the drift.

This book was no exception. One of my favourite bloggers? Good. One of my favourite movies? Good. Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro the book? Brilliant.

I may be biased because the book helped me overcome the dark valleys of readers block, but Jai Arjun Singh does such a fantastic job of taking us backstage that the reader is not able to come up for a breath before all the chapters have been read. It is only after the epilogue has been picked apart by one's brain that one realizes the stupendous amount of love and research that must have gone into this.

In the world of film-induced metaphors, this book is surely a Switzerland ka cake.

It's been a miserable few months. Scores of books have been started and forgotten. Thousands of words have been glanced at disdainfully and discarded. I've read pujosonkhyas, bits of Steinbeck, a few pages of Lemony Snicket. One whole chapter of Joseph Heller.

It is nightmarishly ridiculous, this reader's block. And it is breathtaking in its loneliness.

Some months are not bookmonths. August, it stunned me by its unbookness. No matter how hard I tried, I could not finish books. I started and abandoned Catch 22 and Grapes of Wrath (which I lovedlovedloved, at least as much as I managed to finish). Heck, I found it difficult to finish this random Jeffrey Archer book. Jeffrey Archer! One should be able to read him half dead! But then, yesterday, I sat down with a bunch of S' old Anandamelas, and what do you know? I raced through them like I was famished. So it turns out that August was not an unbookmonth. It was just a bengalibookmonth. Who would've thunk it?

All monsters are scared
That's why they are monsters

I read this surreptitiously while in the office. Sneaking in a few words before lunch. A few lines after tackling a particularly difficult manuscript. Maybe because of my own sneaky nature of reading, I found this to be perfect as a whodunit. Perfect in pitch, perfect in style, perfect even in building characters that is often the downfall of many a lesser writer.

But the author, dear readers, THE AUTHOR. I demand greatness from her. In my delirious J K Rowling fangirl state, I want inexhaustible supply of literary perfection to pour forth from her blonde head.

And, well, that doesn't happen. It is unputdownable, but doesn't incessantly demand my brainspace like all her other creations did. Maybe it is me, maybe it is her, maybe it is my own lofty Agatha Christie reading expectations, but the sorting hat would probably sort this book to be a Hufflepuff.

But really, is that such a bad thing?

Rushdie is a difficult author to hate. Rushdie is a difficult man to love. But oh, when he writes, how he writes. And the words, like the source of all words in Haroun and the Sea of Stories, flow across, over, on top of one another. Messy and frightening and incredible and flawed, but, above all, above all, incredibly, incredibly beautiful.

Such a beautiful, difficult, annoying book. Such a different book from Rushdie's usual haunting magic realism offerings. Such a living, breathing proof of why, and how, people differ and act and love and live. Such a Hogwartsian glimpse into an extraordinary life lived under extraordinary circumstances.

Many reams, many columns have been written about the self indulgence of this book and this author. About the dismissive hurt of his four marriages. About the drabness of the last hundred pages. About his inexplicable life with the fourth wife, the millennial illusion as he refers to it. I agree with all of these.

But I am, at the end of it all, a plebian, humble Rushdie fangirl. And to me, the words, the utter beauty of this man's writing, make me want to hug this book. Secretly and tightly to my chest.    

It's been a long time since I read. Properly read, I mean. (Glancing at the morning headlines, and occasionally racing through a bestseller don't count.)

My previous job sucked me dry and spit me out so that all I could do at the end of each day was collapse and sleep. My eyes ached from the Excel sheets. My mind was a mush from the inane everyday Honey Singh banter. It wasn't my fault. Or maybe it was, for letting the job take away far more than it gave back.

Enough of the whining, though. The thing is, the job is gone. The mush is gone. The roommate has purchased a new bookshelf, and my life is brilliant again. The colours are brighter. The coffee is stronger. There is a spring in my steps. And I can read again. Oh sweet, blessed, glorious words. How I have missed you.

I am currently in the middle of Joseph Anton, and wondering why this wasn't read before. Such sheer perfection, it is. I wake up every morning, and sit beside the window for a while before going to work. Looking at the sunshine. Reading my book. And generally contemplating life.

My heart, as they say, is happy.

Watch this space.

This blog is not dead. Like the proverbial Arnold Schwarzenegger, it'll be back. As soon as I dropkick my current soul-crushing corporate existence into oblivion and find some time to write about books I am currently reading.

This place is too precious to lose out to a heartless steel-n-glass multinational behemoth.

Overwhelming. Underwhelming.

When the life being described is so extraordinary, the words that describe them seem too mundane for comfort.

Or maybe...just maybe...I have come to expect too much from Jerry Pinto. Too much, too often.

Sigh.

There is a Sunil Ganguly-shaped hole in my heart currently. And I don't even want to talk about or discuss him or do anything else really...because every such session brings with it such absolute absolute heartbreak.

However, even magical authors tend to go muggle-like sometimes. And in the history of magic, this book is a Petunia Dursley.

Would've been great, really, if I hadn't read a Professor Shonku with an annoyingly similar premise. (Without the entire fantasmagoria and other creatures and the resolution, of coure.)

Bangla sahityo has ruined me.

My relationship with Harry Potter has been an obsessive one. I have pored over pages. I've trawled the internet for every spare nugget of information on the series. I've memorized lines of dialogues. I've watched all the movies. I've cried at the end of the last book. I've fallen in love with more than one character.

               Hogwarts has helped heal heartbreak, ease bereavement, and provide a sanctuary for a bewildered youngster like no one else. Therefore, 'The Casual Vacancy' would have to do very VERY hard work if it had to live up to the previous stalwarts.

And it did, internet, IT DID! It is a beautiful book. It's not suckerpunch-let-me-suck-you-into-my-world like Harry Potter, of course. I don't think anyone is capable of replicating that. Not even Rowling herself. (Also, to give credit to her, Rowling actually went out and wrote something completely different and put herself out there to be criticized and dissected when she ALREADY HAS ELEVENTY TRILLION POUNDS AND HAS WRITTEN HARRY POTTER. If it were me, I would just lounge the rest of my life away. Writing Potter would have guaranteed that much.)

'The Casual Vacancy' was well-written, well-plotted, and some of the scenes are masterfully Rowling. My heart, it kind of broke in the end. The effort of creating a world as far away from Hogwarts as possible is evident. And Rowling, thank god, proves to be deft storyteller even when she restricts herself to one small parish populated by the non-wand people.

The book is not Harry. But it's definitely, at least, a Neville Longbottom. And who can resist his underdog charm?

 

This is a lovely book. A quaint book. A book extremely readable.

The problem, as I see it, lies in the fact that I demand more from my reads. I want them to evoke other words.

Words like 'overwhelming'. Or 'eccentric'. Even, for lack of others, 'unpredictable'. 

Jeebon ta boddo pnechalo jinish, dadabhai. Ei goto du hoptay ekebare haarey haarey ter peyechhi seta. Notun chakri peye, purono chakri chhere, boss er songe jhogra kore...sob miliye ekebare jachchetai byapar. Nawa-khawar somoy chhilo na, boi porar somoy ar thakbe ki kore?

Kintu ta bole ki boi porbo na? Nishchoi porbo. Pnechalo jeebonta niye deerghoshwas phelte phelte majhraatey ghume dhule asha chokh duto ke tene dhore chot kore ektu bhoot, dakat, shonda daroga der khoborakhobor niye ashbo.

Ei boi khana bhai boddo bhalo. Thik chhottobelar anandamelar moto, sheeter sokale roddure pith diye komolalebu khawar moto, half-yearly porikkhar shesh porikkha ta diye bari pherar pothe pujor prothom gondho pawar moto bhalo. Ei pora Dilli te, seta ki ekta kom kotha?

“They didn't know why these things were funny. Sometimes you laugh because you've got no more room for crying. Sometimes you laugh because table manners on a beach are funny. And sometimes you laugh because you're alive, when you really shouldn't be.”


Really? Alzheimer's? You had to choose this guy? 

Translations bother me. I keep thinking that I must be missing out on so much because I'm not reading this in its original version...and then I end up feeling vaguely dissatisfied throughout the reading process.

In fact, translations of works closer home bother me even more. Because then, I know for certain that I'm missing out on a lot.
 
Don't get me wrong. I loved the stories. And the woman stuns me. And now I want to learn Urdu and read Sadat Hussain Manto.

But then, suddenly, as I am reading, in one curious turn of phrase, in one halting sentence, the inadequacy of English strikes me once again.

And I finish the book with a slight sense of discontent.  

One day, when I was throwing a tantrum at J and K's place, demanding books to borrow so that I could read during my impending 28-hour train journey, K handed me this book. I was assured that I would enjoy it.

And...it is not that I didn't.

I've never read any Argentinian author before, and so this was completely uncharted territory. Also, De Santis did amuse by all the tongue-in-cheek references to ALL the genres of detective fiction. But I demand a surprise at the end of my whodunits, and I could see this resolution coming from miles away.

I guess my philistine detective story-loving mind is forever expecting the unexpected.
Agatha Christie has ruined me.

Pattanaik never disappoints, does he? He might not always exhilarate, but he never does the opposite either.

This book is nowhere close to 'Jaya' in it's scope, efficiency, and language. What it is, is a delightful read with one of the best endings I've seen in recent times.

Recommended, pretty much.

First up, I have no idea why the images are all going berserk on this page right now. My beloved Argentinian whodunit on the sidebar has assumed humongous proportions, while Rushdie's bird-fairytale assumes a tiny form. Oh, the drawbacks of being a tech retard.

Anyways, so I took a much-needed week long vacation to the Western coast of India. The sea soothed my soul and filled my belly with a large number of fish fries, and I fell asleep on the beach more than once. (Waking up to the sea in front of you is something one should definitely do once in a lifetime.) However, taking a vacation includes much ingestion of questionable substances, and reading had taken a backseat. Therefore, all of this is to tell people that I finished 'Grimus' last week, taking almost fourteen days more than it deserved.

I've always had a love-hate relationship with Salman Rushdie, but this book kind of tilted the odds in favour of 'love'.This is definitely not my favourite Rushdie. But even a mediocre Rushdie can sometimes blow your mind.

 I read somewhere that Rushdie himself had spoken ill of this first, nascent attempt at magic realism. I will just assume that he was suffering from addlebrain syndrome from dabbling with so much awesomeness.

Haunting.

Haunting.