Reading List - October

Well, October began 12 days back, and I have to admit to some lack of discipline in my reading challenge for September. I finished The Night Watch and San Andreas in time, though An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth is still very much a work-in-progress. Besides, a week-long trip to home culminated in further digression, as I picked up some other works too (which I shall report on in due time). So, I'll be rolling forward the last month's dues and fix my targets for October, some of which I have already embarked on.

1. The Bartimaeus Trilogy, Book 2: The Golem's Eye by Jonathan Stroud: The trilogy came highly recommended to me by a colleague and Book 1: The Amulet of Samarkand did manage to hold my attention rather well. Given that everything magical pales in comparison to Harry Potter, I was wary of embarking on The Amulet, reminding myself of how I had been disappointed in Artemis Fowl. But its been quite some time since Harry saw off his sons on the Hogwarts Express, and my appetite for the other-worldly has recovered. At least, that's how I felt when I finished The Amulet. Bartimaeus himself is an absolute pleasure, and so it is with much eagerness, that I have plunged into The Golem's Eye and though I am barely a few chapters in, its already becoming difficult to tear myself off it.

2. HMS Ulysses by Alistair MacLean: This one, I am supposed to start reading for so many reasons; the primary of which is that it happens to be the seminal book of Alistair MacLean, and as a rabid fan of his works, I am almost ashamed to have not tackled it. I did make a stab at it many years back, but I was overwhelmed by the technicalities. There's more to MacLean's stories than just the ship's hull and anchor and the transmitters and receivers and the men and women of MacLean's stories stoke my imaginations about the dangerous yet noble (nobler?) times of the past. It might take me more than a month to do justice to the book, especially given that twenty four hours is all that I have to do everything in a day.

The third is of course, An Astronaut's Guide, which, since it is nearing completion, should allow me additional time on HMS Ulysses. Needless to say, I cannot strictly restrict myself to these three works alone (as was evident in last month's progress), but it is certainly panning out to be a month filled with action, albeit on paper.

Comments

Side Reads - A Book of English Essays - Edited by W.E. Williams

Remember our school days? Remember those dreary passages we had to read and read again - between the lines and over and under them? Remember wondering how could the study of language be so dry? Well, it turns out, what we were served was high in protein, but pretty much devoid of spice and juice. Let me set the record straight. Essays are fun. Read A Book of English Essays to see if I'm right. As the name says, it is a collection of small essays on a multitude of topics by the who's-who of English literature - Francis Bacon, Joseph Addison, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, A.A. Milne, R.L. Stevenson - honestly the list is quite scary. But once you pull your head out of the table of contents, it's a treasure mine. Most essays are short, possibly the length of a newspaper article (which is how they must have been originally published I think). What is interesting though, is the topics they are on. So there are absolutely gorgeous ones like 'Getting Up on Cold Morni...

The Long and Short of It

Call it stuffy, but there'a a charm about long-winded sentences. People my age - and by that I mean the early-to-mid thirties - have had a disgusting time with school texts, which were expressly chosen for their remarkable abstruseness. Most of us were put off with the language, given the endless probing into seemingly harmless pieces of text and losing marks to our seemingly erroneous interpretations (at this age, I am told that I am never wrong, I can decipher things the way I want; evidently an adult's imagination holds more value than a teenager's). Abstruse works were seldom long-winded, but vice-versa always held true, and does so - to some extent - even now. Excerpts from classics (I remember Shakespeare's pieces - abridged, they said but that didn't make a spot of difference at that age) lacked any modern adherence to placements and abounded in queer, archaic phrases jumbled in a sentence spanning three lines; we were taught conjunctions like '...

How are rugs and books related

As a child, I was pretty indifferent to rugs or carpets. Back at home, they always existed. They were scrubbed and vacuumed and dirtied and dribbled upon and I didn't quite imagine life without it. Till I moved out. Basic amenities do not cover rugs, far less, carpets. The first few days I didn't mind, basking in my new-fangled independence, traipsing over bare floors with un-socked feet. Eventually though, the irremovable stains on the bathroom floors made it clear that, in the absence of carpetting, a near-permanent use of slippers is a must. Then came the winters. It brought the chill from all possible directions, including and especially, the floor. The soles of my feet must have been frostbitten on a regular basis and I yearned for the luxury of a nice woolly carpet to sink my feet in. As a conscientious student out making her life (not very successfully), I chose to brave the chilblains (they were not, really). It wasn't until I was married that ...

The Pile of Books

Search This Blog