Skip to main content

... Sweet Return !

Ahoy there ! Its been long enough ! I have so missed scratching at this blog; but then both time and opportunity were in marked abeyance in the last month. It took a toll on my reading habits, and February was full of me making frenzied stabs at reading a few pages and abandoning them within the hour to attend to some other chore. 

Things are slowly getting back to the grind, and I have managed to sneak some time for my reading again. I cannot begin to tell how good that feels ! I am beginning to empathise with the agony of going cold turkey ! So, befitting a starving man at a buffet, I have reached out to anything within my grasp, which at this point in time, is a lot. So in addition to my existing work-in-progress, I have also picked up Eragon. I am actually glad that I did away with the reading challenges every month, because this pile of books will take some considerable time and patience, given that they all belong to widely disparate genres. But its a great feeling nonetheless  - the thought of so much to read and so little time !

Eragon is not turning out to be as good as I had expected though. Of course, the plot is yet to thicken and I have barely crossed the fence of the story. For a fresh start, I am not sure if it will qualify as a captivating read, but one must try. 

Comments

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 '...

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...

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...