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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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