Archive for the ‘Books and Literature’ Category
The God Delusion
Picked it up at Crossword last weekend. A couple of days back a colleague noticed the book in my hand and out of that intestine-wobbling curiosity that lies bundled inside every avid reader, he grabbed it and read the title. ‘Oh Man, how can you call it like this. This is ridiculous, this terming it […]
Filed under: Books and Literature | 13 Comments
The monsoon rain is dashing outside in this late night hour, as I sit beside a thick volume of The Shadow of the Wind turned to page 143 and gazing at the line I just finished reading. Everything on that page spoke of another time: the strokes that depended on the ink-pot, the words scratched […]
Filed under: Books and Literature, Thoughts | 6 Comments
How would you feel if all the natural sights and sounds of your external world become mysterious and overloaded for your little mind to decipher? Or your skin feels a pang of irritation when a loved one tries to hug you? Or you are not sure if you have to feel happy or sad when […]
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Booked…
Over there at IndieQuill, Amrita tags me and I have to come up with a list of Indian authors/books I’ve read or want to read. This list is by no means exhaustive and scares me when I look back – there’s too much to read and too little time (even completing one book per week is […]
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Michael Crichton’s Next
When you realize that a Chimpanzee differs from the humans by only around 500 genes and is not very different from the genetic composition of a severely autistic child, it is rather scary to realize how close Science has come to understanding the building blocks of life. Scary, because from what we know of our […]
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Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch
Time and again there have been unknown faces that go unnoticed lost amidst the larger chaos of life. The simple emotions and passions of those common individuals, their fears and longings in such extraordinary times as a World War, remain concealed under the scars of a wartime. In this year’s Booker prize finalist, The Night […]
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Books have a metaphorical life of their own. They speak of another time and another space, forming such mental imageries as if you were being transported through time into that world. What if one day those metaphors were to actually engulf your life such that you dedicate yourself to excavate the bizarre truths and probably […]
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Virginia Woolf
She was born this day 125 years ago. Happy Birthday, Ms. Woolf! And not very long ago I read her absolutely wonderful novel Mrs. Dalloway. Written in the stream of consciousness style – where the novel is narrated as the written equivalent of the character’s thought process – it’s one of such books which will […]
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The Handmaid’s Tale
Not that I’m a big fan of Margaret Atwood, but there’s something about her writing that makes me skip a beat every time I read her. She has a way about unbottling innermost thoughts that they sometimes startle you. And it so turns out that, in hindsight, they are nothing but your own thoughts at […]
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Ben Okri’s The Famished Road
Just finished reading this absolutely lovely book. Thanks to Prat for lending me her copy and making me read it. If there is one thing in life that continues to leave us puzzled beyond all our acquired wisdom – it is Life itself. Humans are born to, eventually, die. But despite this awareness and the […]
Filed under: Books and Literature | 46 Comments
All in a day\'s work! 