The Pile of Books

Finally I have started on Murakami. Its been long overdue. So that day I picked Kafka on the Shore from Crosswords. I put my library services on hold and forbade my colleagues from tempting me into new books. I've got to say its a funny sort of book, and I hope I do not offend anyone by saying that. The best time when I read it is in the early morning with my cup of tea, just before the rush of the day takes over; it lasts barely 20 minutes I guess, but its a good 20 minutes. I am only 100 pages in, and the plot is still all woolly to me, but somehow its quite captivating. Maybe it is the simplicity of the language. And then there are cats ! Besides cats, there are some excellent lines I came across and have earmarked the pages, but this one bit hard... "I fumble around in the bushes, but all I touch are branches, hard and twisted like the hearts of bullied little animals " Also, there is a marvellous description of a personal library, that simply lift...

Read it. Just read it.  Despite his plots being aimed at the YA category, the books are amazingly appealing. I shall be honest upfront and let you know that I haven't read The Screaming Staircase , but I managed to lay my hands on this beauty and its been worth every penny I spent on it.  The plot and its flow is pretty much along the same lines as all his books (I'm assuming Ptolemy's Gate and The Screaming Staircase  are along similar lines as the other books): there is a mystery doing the rounds in a parallel London setting, which in this series is, is replete with ghosts, as numerous in variety and as well-studied as types of butterflies in the current day. The Detection Agencies (along the same lines as the Ghostbusters or the Supernatural duo of Sam and Dean) try to rid sites of the ghost infestation through their agents, who are predominantly kids and youngsters. Antony Lockwood's agency is a trio consisting of, besides himself, Lucy Carlyle and Ge...

So I stumbled across this blog The Broke and the Bookish  quite by chance (actually I was going through another brilliant blog  Fourth Street Review , which led me to TBB). They have an interesting section for Top Tens, and this time it was The Top Ten Authors I've Read The Most Books From . I'm not sure if I can name ten, but let's see here... Alistair MacLean: Give me a warm-hearted, yet cold-demeanoured, taciturn, multifaceted gentleman, who is also a juggler with words, and a plot set in a crippled ship in hostile waters or a ice-floe or on ragged mountains, and the only other thing I'll ask for is a cup of tea to read it with. James Herriot: I love animals. Enough said. No, but really, Herriot is the reason I took Library as my preferred choice of 'activity' at school. John le Carre: God, its depressing to read a le Carre. But its right up there with MacLean. There's something hypnotic about his work and there have been phases when I'...

When I'm by myself - that is when there's no one within earshot, I often read aloud dialogues from a novel. Its a bit tiring after a couple of pages, and I find myself concentrating more on the modulation bit rather than the story. And I always voice the good characters, or if there are none in the scene, the snarkiest ones. Needless to say, my level of snark is blunted by my daily rigours, though in my head, I make up all sorts of highly inflammatory responses that could have been employed in a given situation. Never saying them out loud has helped me being tolerable for human companionship.  Nobody does snark better than Alistair MacLean. He is the king of snark. P.G. Wodehouse also dabbles in it, but the application is wrapped in such florid English, that it takes the snide to a whole new level of art. And then there are the modern antiheroes - the kind like Constantine; they are cynical and brooding and being impertinent is just a way of life. I'm yet to gather ta...