Owner: What Am I Reading URL:http://whatamireading.wordpress.com Join Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2007 10:15:28 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: Quality book reviews, critiques and insights into the world of literature, both classic and contemporary. Site statistics:Click here
A distant world, Part III : Siliguri 2008-03-06 09:35:08 Read Part II
I am at last headed for Bengal. North Bengal, where I was born. Where I spent my growing up years. In Delhi, the plane sits on the runway, delaying our departure for almost an hour. Who cares about the North East? Backward, dilapidated, a laggard in the economic growth seizing the whole [...] Read more:distant
A distant world, Part II : Delhi 2008-03-04 09:51:58 Read Part I
I travel up north, to Delhi. Crowded city bursting at its seams. An excess of traffic and humans jostling for space in roads frequently interrupted with construction work. New roads, wider roads, flyovers, hotels. To accommodate more and more. People, motors, business. To claim more and more. Open spaces, green vistas to gray. [...] Read more:distant
A distant world - Part I : Mumbai, Pune 2008-03-01 05:03:42 More than four years later. Closer to five than four. The very words I use to describe the gap after which I return to India, for a vacation.
It is a long journey, from where I reside, nestled in the temperate forests of the Pacific Northwest of America, to the subcontinent. How many thousand miles? I [...] Read more:distant
, Mumbai
The God Of Small Things by Arundhati Roy 2008-02-17 17:38:10 After plodding through the last few books, “The God of Small
Things” was a refreshing change. It drew me in, into the lives of Estha and Rahel, into Kerala, Ayemenem, onto love and its fragile boundaries, easily crushed by blind traditions, by selfish, hypocritical motives.
What Arundhati Roy achieves in her debut novel, her only [...]
The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai 2008-02-09 16:58:52 It is not a badly written book. But not one that well written to deserve an award, and least of all one as prestigious as the Booker. So why did The Inheritance
of Loss win the Booker award?
Answer:
a) The rest of the books in running were no better
b) The judges made a blunder
c) My perceptions [...] Read more:Kiran
The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru 2008-01-03 23:18:08 Hari Kunzru makes a fair impression with his debut novel, which begins in the early twentieth century.Young Pran Nath Razdan, suddenly realizes that he is no longer the pampered son of a wealthy household, which upon the discovery of his dubious origins casts him out. The timing coincides with the death of Amar Nath Razdan, [...]
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle 2007-12-22 19:47:20 Paddy Clarke
is not a funny story. The overwhelming feeling is one of palpable sadness, despite several humourous episodes, especially towards the earlier parts of the book. Ten year old Paddy, the eldest son of a large Irish family in fictitious(?) Barrytown of the sixties, thoroughly enjoys the company of his friends – Kevin, Liam, [...] Read more:Paddy
A Beneficiary by Nadine Gordimer 2007-12-18 13:48:14 Charlotte, an attractive twenty something woman, is confronted by a secret upon her mother’s death. In unraveling what is and what is not, the mystery surrounding her own origin, her doubts are resolved in the clarity of a father’s love.
Gordimer’s style is succinct and incisive, frequently interrogative in this piece, probing inwards for answers. [...] Read more:Nadine
Book Awards Reading Challenge 2007-12-12 23:25:51 Here’s motivation for the coming days.
The ones finished have links to review pages.
Commonwealth Writers’
1992 - Rohinton Mistry, Such a Long Journey
1994 - Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy
1996 - Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance
Booker
1974 The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer
1981 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
1989 The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
1993 [...] Read more:Awards
, Challenge
, Reading
Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee 2008-06-05 00:51:13 J.M Coetzee’s Disgrace is a relatively short work. It is also quite unputdownable. This was my second reading of it, having first read it about four years ago. And it was a far more vivid experience this time.
Professor David Lurie is a University English professor with a penchant for Romantics, whose “disgraceful” sexual liaison with [...]
The Leopard by Ruskin Bond 2008-07-26 19:40:53 I am presently perusing a collection of short stories titled “Best Indian Short Stories - Volume I, selected (not edited?) by Khushwant Singh. Many of the stories are translations. So it is not necessarily a collection of best Indian stories written in English, but claiming to encompass the entire literary gamut of the subcontinent. This [...] Read more:Leopard
Love In the time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez 2008-08-12 08:53:48 Love in the time of Cholera did not impress me. It is, of course, a translation. Thus, I do not know how much of its original essence was lost. But surely, the story would be the same, which, I found quite uninspiring, even boring and inane at times. There is very little dialog in the [...] Read more:Gabriel
, Garcia
, Marquez
Train To Pakistan by Khushwant Singh 2008-08-23 22:34:23 After the prolix of Love in the Time of Cholera, Train
to Pakistan
was a refreshing change. Not merely for its brevity and directness, but also for a context with which I could very much relate.
Although fiction, the background events are real. Thousands of refugees perished during the exodus, when a Pakistan was split from [...] Read more:Singh
The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh 2008-09-29 00:46:11 In his essay on the anti Sikh riots of Delhi (The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi), this is what Amitav Ghosh
has to say about “The ShadowLines
”:
a book that led me backward in time to earlier memories of riots, ones witnessed in childhood. It became a book not about any one event but about [...]
Incendiary Circumstances by Amitav Ghosh 2008-09-21 18:17:01 Incendiary Circumstances is a collection of seventeen essays, written over two decades, on the many social and political crises besotting our world. Here, our world is mostly confined to South Asia, parts of South East Asia (Burma/Myanmar and Cambodia), and Middle East(Egypt, Kuwait), “Half-made worlds”, in the words of V.S. Naipaul, which Ghosh
refers to [...]
Fury by Salman Rushdie 2008-09-16 00:53:41 Professor Malik Solanka, a man in his mid fifties, scholar and dollmaker extraordinaire, is having a rather belated mid life crisis. “Fury”, which he sees around him, in the rage of destruction, or the fire of creation, overwhelms him suddenly, when he leaves his wife and three year old son in London. He travels to [...] Read more:Rushdie
, Salman
, Salman Rushdie
Adiga wins the Booker 2008-10-14 20:56:53 It is probably news no longer, but I am happy with the choice, though it might sound strange when I haven’t read the other books in contention. On reading The White Tiger, I did get the feeling that it might actually win, no matter the competition. Congratulations to Aravind Adiga!
Link to BBC Interview.
[...] Read more:Booker
The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga 2008-10-05 22:38:11 What becomes apparent soon into The White
Tiger is its anger. This is the voice of the post liberal India, the generation after Rushdie and Mistry. While the principals of Mistry’s Fine Balance are crushed in subhuman surroundings, the one here rises in protest using the very system which keeps countless others like him in [...]
Literary potshots 2008-10-31 22:15:57 In Fury, a Salman Rushdie character (Prof. Solanka) flays Hemingway, calling him the “most effeminate” of novelists, or something to that effect. It suits Rushdie, his writing leaning towards the opposite spectrum of literary style.
A few years down the line, Rohinton Mistry writes in Family Matters -
“…Yezad felt that Punjabi migrants of a certain age [...] Read more:Literary
From Heaven Lake by Vikram Seth 2008-10-27 23:58:11 When Vikram
Seth traveled through China almost twenty five years ago, the country was much less fashionable in popular parlance than it is today. Sinkiang and Tibet are likely to be far more accessible to the tourist today, possibly even to the hitch hiker, which is what was Seth’s choice incarnate - an interesting albeit [...] Read more:Heaven
Behind the words 2008-11-19 19:48:58 I have just begun reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Unaccustomed Earth”. The back cover caught my eye. It is not that I haven’t seen her picture before, and was caught unaware by the fact that she is good looking (quite photogenic too). But the way photograph has been rendered, she could pass for a model, or a [...]
Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh 2008-11-16 10:06:27 To read an Amitav Ghosh
novel is not merely to get a glimpse of the best of contemporary Indian writing, but also a snapshot of an oft-ignored episode of history. The “Sea of Poppies” is no exception. After a somewhat lukewarm tryst with Sunderbans and the Gangetic Dolphin (Hungry Tide), the first novel of the [...]
Recommend Site To A Friend
