Blog/News

Authors to Read

Miminality3 Comments
  • Tariq Ali
  • Margaret Atwood
  • Italo Calvino
  • Arthur C. Clarke
  • Umberto Eco
  • Cornelia Funke
  • Ursula K. Le Guin
  • Mohammed Hanif
  • Kazuo Ishiguro
  • George R. R. Martin
  • China Mieville
  • George Orwell
  • Rick Riordan
  • Arundhati Roy
  • Gore Vidal
  • Jeanette Winterson

Books to Read (by Previously Read Authors)

  • 1Q84, Haruki Murakami
  • Divisadero, Michael Ondaatje
  • The Golden Gate, Vikram Seth
  • The Golem’s Eye and Ptolemy’s Gate, Jonathan Stroud
  • Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
  • The Magic Toyshop, Angela Carter
  • Nights at the Circus, Angela Carter
  • Solo, Rana Dasgupta
  • A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
  • Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
  • The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, Jose Saramago

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Of late, I’ve been reading The Immortals of Meluha, which I picked up from the NDLS railway station while waiting for Ma.  I’ve a sneaking suspicion that soon this will become the most-searched keyword for this blog, finally replacing Ruskin Bond and The Room on the Roof.  No wonder I have been feeling a little ill over the last few days. I don’t remember having such a violent reaction while reading Five Point Someone last year — a book which I had found poorly expressed but well-plotted and absorbing. Waiting on my reading list are Ashwin Sanghi and Ravinder Singh, but I’m having second thoughts about this entire project now.

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Miminality2 Comments

Five days into the Other City, including three days of office, I don’t yet have an ID card but I have an official email address. I’ve updated my Facebook work info, been congratulated by people and asked the usual questions, so that’s all said and done.

I haven’t read a single word in a book ever since I landed up here. (The last book I was reading of my own free will was The Fountainhead on the train. It was a nice and luxurious journey, with plenty of time to read. I haven’t gone back to the book. This has nothing to do with my opinion of it.) This is in greater part because, instead, I’ve had to finely comb through about 20,000 words of a manuscript at work in the last three days. This is just as I had feared would happen.

I hope I can start reading again by the next week. I’m trying to pass off this turning-away as a temporary effect of the change in surroundings and routine. In the meantime, I have managed to watch one episode of Avatar: The Legend of Korra (the latest) and three episodes of Game of Thrones (not the latest). I wonder how long it will take me to get back to writing as well.

119

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One of the finest fantasy novels I haven’t yet finished reading is Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. (The reason why I haven’t is that the book is going with me to the Other City, and so very few books are.) I wonder why there isn’t more conversation/fannishness about this novel among the circles I access. Of course, it’s a story that is painfully slow to unveil its core. There are few stereotypes. The narrative reads like a history text — thorough and unforeseeable. And did I mention ‘thorough’? The construction of the early nineteenth century is so delicious! At the end of Part One I am still sighing with some fondness over Childermass, even though Childermass may not turn out to be the expected Byronic hero or even a character of any consequence at all in the entirety of the narrative.

In other news, today I cleansed my toenails of the remnants of nail-polish that had been chipping away gently for the last two months. The charm of tinting one’s nails continues to evade me. To watch it dissolve and the natural translucence of nail emerge from underneath was an exercise in deep happiness. Now I shall go offline and re-watch the second book of Avatar: The Last Airbender.