Reading List - December

Last month of the year ! The weather is near perfect and the prospect of snuggling up with a book and a steaming cup of tea is increasingly taking the shape of the carrot dangling before me every day. I had a spell of slightly frenzied reading in November, what with The Caine Mutiny and The Golem's Eye, so this month I decided to keep things light and fun.

1. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells: I had heard of it as a kid, and tucked it away as one of the innumerable stories I swore I would read some day. All these years later, as I was browsing through my Kindle store, I came across it again. I started the book a couple of days back and am quite delighted to find that the story is very much on its way right from the first page. Considering that the novel was penned in 1897, the language is not in the least stuffy and the descriptions are remarkably cinematic. There has been very little exchange of dialogues yet, and the Martians have already arrived on the scene, though their described appearance reminded me of Independence Day ! The book comes very highly rated wherever I look, so here's hoping that I wouldn't be let down. Something tells me though, that I would have to wrap my head round the conceptual obsolescence that comes with something written more than a century ago.

2. Charlotte's Web by E.B. White: How much farther can I get from plundering, tentacled Martians ?! E. B. White's little pig Wilbur is already such heart-melting character ! This is perhaps not the age or the setting to read Charlotte's Web, but the book had been popping up in several references lately, until it became almost impossible to avoid it any more. But more importantly, the book is such a ray of sunshine; I have barely ploughed through three chapters and the warmth it fills me with is amazing.

The third is of course, James Herriot's Dog Stories, which got somewhat neglected in the heat of Bartimaeus and Willie Keith. On and off, as usual, I have also been picking up material like Jule Verne's In the Year 2889 and The Pastures of Heaven by John Steinbeck. The former is a slight book - by length, that is; there can be nothing slight about Jules Verne - while the latter is to be taken a little more seriously, and so obviously will have to be completed at leisure and with full justice.

So that's the haul planned for December. Lets see how the year ends !

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