The Pile of Books

There are potboilers. And then there are potboilers. Personal is a potboiler. Lee Child's leading alpha male (minus the toxicity) Jack Reacher has always been a source of intense, vicarious adventure. Stories starring Reacher are by habit, captivating from the first paragraph, down to the last page. There is rarely anything cerebral about him or his settings, but that is the allure of a Jack Reacher story. If you are a serious reader, this is your detox.  Personal  starts with a suspicious summons of our man. He ends up in pursuit of a suspected deadly, unfailing sniper, who might just tip the world balance in favour of the worst. He has for company and assistance a smart, young Casey Nice (a very Bond Girl-ish surname, which is, more or less, a giveaway). The two sift through clues and dodgy elements to a fitting, action-packed climax. Jack Reacher benefits from being a recurring character, which means, he comes with the baggage of an unapologetic aura. It is unde

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 st

The innocence of childhood is one of the spoils of war; perhaps even the most tragic of them all. As a race, we still see no end to strife of such unimaginable proportions all around us. With each strife, we blindly go on adding more and more youth robbed of something precious and irreplaceable. As wartime stories go, All The Light You Cannot See  is a gem. This is not the first book to focus on children growing amidst a battle. Nor is it a pioneer in shining a light on survival during times of extreme duress. But, somewhere, along those well-trodden lines, the story just lights up with hope. The title is ambiguous, and at first glance, appears to pertain to a particular aspect only. Actually, it is a wider epiphany.  All The Light chronicles the parallel lives of two young children from warring factions. Both are deprived of a perfect life in a way (aren't we all, really?) and get sucked into the maelstrom of the Second World War. As they push their way through the d

We always leave ourselves behind. If not all of it, definitely some parts. It's not that that bit was messy, but mostly because something better or worse demanded more attention. In the end, it boils down to the power of the dramatic. Admittedly, reading - for the fun of it, that is, is one of those less dramatic, quiet parts of our lives that we flit in and out of. Till a few years back, this used to bother me a bit. After all, reading is what makes us; that, and our childhood. And what am I, if not an avid reader? Turns out, I'm just fine.  I may not have created world records in books consumed, but I haven't turned to dust either! Rather, I'm here, a slightly newer version of me, that bit different (because let's accept it, the old world is - perhaps, fortunately - no more) and an appetite built over the last three months of somehow being very worried and very relaxed at the same time. Mind, it wasn't easy, plugging back in. And again, it to

Books are handy weapons to stave off blues - be it the dregs of the Sunday evening or a nasty bout of flu. When you are depressed, it takes herculean efforts to shake off the feeling. And I'm not even talking about the more severe, clinical form of depression. I can't get myself to pour myself a glass of water the day after Diwali; on Fridays on the other hand, I am the epitome of eternal sunshine. For such moody, dull days, these top 10 books are the surest way to dust a little sparkle in your life. 1) Three Men In A Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) : This is Jerome K. Jerome at his absolute best. It was published some 130 years back and is still capable of eliciting raucous laughter. It is the honest journal of three young, bumbling flatmates and their dog on a river cruise. Look out for some meandering, pedantic pages, but they offer some relief from the relentless humour.  2) James Herriot's   Dog Stories : If you love animals (and dogs, in particular), t

Genre: Fiction Sub-genre: Spy-thriller Rating: 4.5/5 Sometimes, I really do feel that an intelligence organisation must be very much like any other workplace. What is at balance is certainly much more valuable and capable of altering the course of history. All the same, it is a workplace, an office with employees and clients.  John Le Carre's Circus is thus a workplace. It behaves as drudgingly as one, and there lies the connect that every single book about this agency elicits in its readers. A Legacy of Spies is fittingly another installment in the legacy of the Circus. The murky past catches up with my beloved Peter Guillam in his retirement years; it unlocks suppressed corners of his heart and makes him revisit the morality of his life's work. I say his, but I really do mean in the plural.  Le Carre's stories have always been remarkably steeped in cynicism, and part of me believes that we still love them because, in some dark way, they resonate with our

It took us some time to decipher that the name of the crossroad was Charing Cross. After all, it is an unexpected name for an Indian crossroad in Tamil Nadu, and the mildly opinionated chap driving us to our hotel had a heavy accent. Charing Cross turned out to be a triangular enclosure, with an imposing fountain (we later discovered that it was named the Adam's Fountain; it is three-tiered, the second one topped by four very colourful cherubs). Since we had arrived in the middle of the afternoon in the thick of winter, the roads were thronging with people and vehicles. Shops were bustling and business appeared brisk. Our driver skilfully negotiated the traffic as we passed woollens shops, gift houses, eateries, groceries and mobile-phone shops.  We returned to the market later in the evening, after having deposited our luggage. Both my husband and I had been fending off a nasty bout of flu and needed to restock our now near-empty medicine pouch. Charing Cross in the eveni

Genre: Fiction Sub-genre: Autobiographical narration/mystery Rating: 4.5/5 It won the Man Booker in 2011 for good reason. As I have mentioned in this post of mine, the number of pages is hardly the yardstick of the intensity of a story. I can safely club The Sense of An Ending with the likes of Of Mice and Men or Animal Farm ; their slender spines pack a whopping punch.  Middle-aged Antony 'Tony' Webster mirrors the common folk. His demeanour and personality are not uncommon. The story centres on a particular episode in his life, described in his own self-flattering, borderline-pitying tone. What began as a perplexing letter, ends in the unlidding of the Pandora's box.  The genius of the story rests on the author's ability to turn the tide - not once,  but repeatedly - for and against the narrator. This is like an extended diary entry not meant for anyone's eyes. save the author himself. The recordings are true, but then truth is so qualitative,

Genre: Non-fiction Rating: 5/5 This one is decidedly a classic, so there is little point in reviewing this book. It is a beautiful one, without doubt.  Personally, I avoid any form of entertainment (books, movies, plays, anything) which features cruelty - either directly or tacitly - towards animals (I have not yet seen any of the Planet of the Apes movies, Ant Man  was uncomfortable too). So deciding to read this book took a certain degree of convincing.  Much credit goes to the beautiful cover of the book. This one is an Aleph Classics  (co-founded by David Davidar of The House of Blue Mangoes fame, and Rupa Publication) edition. In terms of sheer elegance, the cover design is unmatched. The palette concept of jungle green coupled with the late afternoon sun creates an ambiance even before you delve into the pages. I picked out the book from a thin pile on a shelf in the little HigginBothams book-store near Charing Cross in Ooty, one biting winter evening (more