Mood Reads - June 30, 2020

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 stories, I feel like I wouldn't have to bother with a scriptwriter). You will be hooked, lined and sunk with the first paragraph. You may skip meals, work and bedtimes. The endings are usually thrilling potboilers, so you will generally emerge from a Lee Child as a disheveled fighter, a book wiser.

Bored of Netflixing and chilling: The pandemic surely must have brought down this on so many of us. American Gods by Neil Gaiman is a perfect cure. Pretty much anything by Neil Gaiman is a hundred times as potent than Netflix itself. This book has all the trappings of a 3-season series (it is actually, a 2-season adaptation on Amazon Prime; a third is on the way, it seems). It never bores, and the book, like The Game of Thrones, makes you feel a little appalled and attracted at the same time.

On a rainy day: Shut the windows, get under the covers and pick up 'Shob Bhutude' by Lila Mojumdar. This is a delight for Bengalis world over and its timeless. It is essentially a collection of ghost stories, which can be heart-warming, hilarious and downright scary. They are tautly narrated, although a little archaic, considering our present conditions. If you can't read the script and don't get an English version, hit one of Ruskin Bond's.

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The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

I follow Neil Gaiman on Twitter, though I had read only one book of his ( Coraline ) that my best friend had gifted me on my last birthday. I am quite ashamed to say that my first acquaintance with his work was through an episode of Doctor Who - The Doctor's Wife , that he had scripted, and to this day , it remains one of my most favourite, poignant episodes of the show. All I knew from the veritable literature and almost frenetic online admiration, was that this was a writer with some fairly impactful body of work to follow. Last weekend, I was at the bookstore, and despite the bulky backlog of books and work on hand, I ended up buying The Ocean at the End of the Lane . Having finished it a couple of days back, I am the wiser to have given in to my impulse then. Like Coraline , The Ocean at the End of the Lane was difficult for me to categorise. This was fantasy, but the writing did not suggest it. Not even remotely. The story is narrated through the eyes of a sev

Man-Eaters of Kumaon - Jim Corbett

Genre: Non-fiction Rating: 5/5 This one is decidedly a classic, so there is little point in reviewing this book. It is a beautiful one, without doubt. Personally, I avoid any form of entertainment (books, movies, plays, anything) which features cruelty - either directly or tacitly - towards animals (I have not yet seen any of the Planet of the Apes movies, Ant Man was uncomfortable too). So deciding to read this book took a certain degree of convincing. Much credit goes to the beautiful cover of the book. This one is an Aleph Classics (co-founded by David Davidar of The House of Blue Mangoes fame, and Rupa Publication) edition. In terms of sheer elegance, the cover design is unmatched. The palette concept of jungle green coupled with the late afternoon sun creates an ambiance even before you delve into the pages. I picked out the book from a thin pile on a shelf in the little HigginBothams book-store near Charing Cross in Ooty, one biting winter evening (more

Higginbothams of Ooty

It took us some time to decipher that the name of the crossroad was Charing Cross. After all, it is an unexpected name for an Indian crossroad in Tamil Nadu, and the mildly opinionated chap driving us to our hotel had a heavy accent. Charing Cross turned out to be a triangular enclosure, with an imposing fountain (we later discovered that it was named the Adam's Fountain; it is three-tiered, the second one topped by four very colourful cherubs). Since we had arrived in the middle of the afternoon in the thick of winter, the roads were thronging with people and vehicles. Shops were bustling and business appeared brisk. Our driver skilfully negotiated the traffic as we passed woollens shops, gift houses, eateries, groceries and mobile-phone shops. We returned to the market later in the evening, after having deposited our luggage. Both my husband and I had been fending off a nasty bout of flu and needed to restock our now near-empty medicine pouch. Charing Cross in the eveni

The Pile of Books

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