The Pile of Books

Remember our school days? Remember those dreary passages we had to read and read again - between the lines and over and under them? Remember wondering how could the study of language be so dry? Well, it turns out, what we were served was high in protein, but pretty much devoid of spice and juice. Let me set the record straight. Essays are fun. Read A Book of English Essays to see if I'm right.  As the name says, it is a collection of small essays on a multitude of topics by the who's-who of English literature - Francis Bacon, Joseph Addison, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, A.A. Milne, R.L. Stevenson - honestly the list is quite scary. But once you pull your head out of the table of contents, it's a treasure mine. Most essays are short, possibly the length of a newspaper article (which is how they must have been originally published I think). What is interesting though, is the topics they are on. So there are absolutely gorgeous ones like 'Getting Up on Cold Morni...

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...

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 ...

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...