Mood Reads - June 30, 2020

Stressed: Who isn't these days ?! For the mind weighed down by washing face masks, schooling children at home, and also earning a living, I give you The Tales of Beedle The Bard. A go-to for nearly every millennial, most of J.K. Rowling's works (with the exception of Casual Vacancy and the Cormoran series), seem to have been designed like sweets with pills hidden in them; you consume them in rapture and feel quite nice actually, and only later realise that the pill was there and is beginning to take action. The Tales are snugly ensconced in the magical realm and narrated crisply so as to sound like the Aesop's Fables, only more fun. And of course, there is always the famous story of the Deathly Hallows to look out for!

Attention span of a sneeze: Anything by Lee Child. Really, nearly anything will do. His work, for all means and purposes, is a movie script (I haven't read any movie scripts, but if someone told me to make a screen adaptation of one of his stories, I feel like I wouldn't have to bother with a scriptwriter). You will be hooked, lined and sunk with the first paragraph. You may skip meals, work and bedtimes. The endings are usually thrilling potboilers, so you will generally emerge from a Lee Child as a disheveled fighter, a book wiser.

Bored of Netflixing and chilling: The pandemic surely must have brought down this on so many of us. American Gods by Neil Gaiman is a perfect cure. Pretty much anything by Neil Gaiman is a hundred times as potent than Netflix itself. This book has all the trappings of a 3-season series (it is actually, a 2-season adaptation on Amazon Prime; a third is on the way, it seems). It never bores, and the book, like The Game of Thrones, makes you feel a little appalled and attracted at the same time.

On a rainy day: Shut the windows, get under the covers and pick up 'Shob Bhutude' by Lila Mojumdar. This is a delight for Bengalis world over and its timeless. It is essentially a collection of ghost stories, which can be heart-warming, hilarious and downright scary. They are tautly narrated, although a little archaic, considering our present conditions. If you can't read the script and don't get an English version, hit one of Ruskin Bond's.

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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

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