Skip to main content

Reading List - September

I am one of those readers who likes to have a balanced diet, unless it is something like Harry Potter, which will have my whole, undivided attention at all times of the day (bad news for my academic endeavours in the past and my professional engagements now). Since I am not very picky about what I read, I have, on an average at least three books in my WIP list. This month, these three are on my bedside:



1.   The Night Watch by Sarah Waters: This was the result of my random browsing through the booklist of the British Council Library, and I was caught by the synopsis… “This is the story of four Londoners – three women and a young man with a past – drawn with absolute truth and intimacy… Their lives and their secrets connect in sometimes startling way.  Wars lead to strange alliances…”. The book is partitioned in three sections and I have just finished the first one. So far it has captivated me well enough.

2. An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth by Chris Hadfield: It has been nearly a year since I bought this book at an airport, and though I read about half of it, I left it mid-way. That’s not an indication of the quality of the book. In fact, it is enormously educative and though the title appears partial to wannabe astronauts, I can assure you, this one goes far deeper. Chris Hadfield gives remarkable perspectives on everything in life and frankly, it is very inspiring. Of course, anyone with an amateurish fixation with space-travel (I guess I am one of them) will find it easier to read, though everything has been broken down in very easy-to-understand, laymanish concepts. It is only that the occasional instructive tone does not always make it a fun read, which is why I need to read the next title alongside. 

3. San Andreas by Alistair MacLean: I picked it out of habit at the bookstore I mentioned in my last post, and am yet to crack open the spine. The summary notes a lot of ships and submarines and sabotage and betrayal. At the risk of sounding morbid, I confess I can already feel the tention building in my stomach !

Time to get my cup of tea. And let the reading commence…

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 '...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Fatal Englishman - Three Short Lives by Sebastian Faulks

Image courtesy: amazon.co.uk Genre: Biography Rating: 4/5 There is something romantic about the English way of living; it has perhaps become more so now. Even the English themselves no longer stay the same way as during the wide span of time of Sebastian Faulks' work. It certainly wasn't romantic back then. The English have had their share of the good and the bad; they have been hated and revered. And through all of this, like in every other civilisation, the society and its principles have ruled the overarching impression we have created of and about them. But really, we are all humans; how different can we be after all ? Not much it seems.  The Fatal Englishman  is set over seven odd decades, and chronicles the prodigy (in more ways , referring to things beyond just talent) of three remarkable British citizens. The common tie is the fact that they all died terribly young, barely having touched the thirties. They all hailed from different aspects of life - C...
Post a Comment
Read more

Does the thickness of books scare you ?

I swear I'm  not  being diplomatic about this, but the answer to that is 'It Depends.  Smiley versus Karla  trilogy   had me in raptures; I nearly cried (with misery) when I got sent the original version of  David Copperfield . Both were bricks; and much as I love Dickens, there is something daunting about a thickset copy with font 8 on a Times New Roman (or something similar). Thick books (strictly excluding text books) are usually fun. Look at  A Suitable Boy ; I bought it five years back and I'm still ploughing through. I haven't had the time to finish it or get bored of it (but then I'm a serial book-shifter*). And then there is  The Old Man and the Sea ; it is a pamphlet of a book, and I haven't (or rather couldn't) finished that either. So  it depends  on the content of the writing. I'm not saying family sagas are more fun or intellectually more stimulating than, well, an old man fishing in the sea, but somehow, the lac...
Post a Comment
Read more