books – Page 12 – Mimi Mondal

Day 2: A Book You’ve Read More Than Three Times

When one is a literature student, three is a rather small number to make a book special. Even an entirely unappetizing book — once it turns up on the syllabus — has to be gone through in class, for an internal test and for the end-semester exams, and there goes three. So instead, here goes book that I feel like I have always read, even though the copy currently in my possession was a gift from the Cheshire Cat and the Cyber Monkey about two years ago.

That would be the edition, although I’ve been through the story and sub-stories at different places and over years, beginning from regular children’s illustrated books and Disney movie editions to the original play and the novels and about five or six films. I’ve written at least two term papers on it, and referred to it in several more. A favourite that will never grow old. :)

Day 1: The Best Book You Read Last Year

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I am duly concerned about the judiciousness of filling two challenges at the same time, especially considering the regularity of my updates (and also considering that I have two exams still left to write), but this is the beginning of the 30 Day Book Challenge inspired by the Cheshire Cat.

FlowersForAlgernon — Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

2010 wasn’t a year I read too many books, unfortunately. There were some books I enjoyed a lot and wrote about extensively (elsewhere, of course). There were books read long ago that I re-read in a bid to recapture the essence of the days that seemed to be slipping through my fingers. I think about the year gone by and remember this book vividly, although at the time of reading I had written little about it. A book to go back to one of these days.

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It is not the hour I should’ve been awake, having gone to bed nearly at 5, having only half-finished the book I was speed-reading through (being Thief of Time, with all the force of irony that can hit you at one go). Today is not the day I should’ve kept for going to the Bookfair, considering that my back aches, the insides of my eyes are a little woozy and I have no idea what to buy (this third being possibly a good thing). I have SMSes to reply from yesterday, which is a truly sad state of being. I don’t have a paper idea for the Students’ Seminar. I haven’t even began to visualise a website I should ideally finish designing by next week because all I can feel inside the cranial cavity is something that puts to mind half-boiled eggs. And I’ll go out in (less than) an hour and won’t be home before night. I hope at least the evening is fun.

But who’d say this forceful overwhelming is worse than not having anything to do!

Nerdjoys are:

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– Doctor Who Season 4. Boy, is David Tennant (first encountered in a Harry Potter film, eugh; Harry Potter has scarred our lives for eternity and a day) the cutest Doctor ever.

– Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

– Faerie Queene (*sigh* No, really).

– Being paid to travel and present a paper. (Now if only we could finish writing the paper! Now if only we could start writing the paper.)

– Jolchhara coffee with cigarette and Hide and Seek biscuits in the morning, along with interesting conversation. (This makes me suddenly miss A, who I know is always on campus but the last time we chatted was more than a week ago. I must look him up more often, hmm.)

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Studying implies five solid nighttime hours of Foucault, or maybe A Room of One’s Own, Carlyle’s crappy tract or Being and Time, which one hopes is not as depressing as that. The term may also be extended to include literary texts one would not be inclined to peruse if they weren’t on syllabus, Bleak House being the prime specimen in this category.

NOT, as it were, hours spent reading I Shall Wear Midnight. (It’s not even such a great book, honestly. Bit of a nostalgic trip. PTerry these days seems to only aim to keep up with his old work. The repetitions in plot and pattern are nearly deliberate and have a comforting quality to them, almost: you know what to expect from a Discworld book, and Pratchett faithfully delivers it. But the last time he made us gasp a little at something utterly brilliant and unexpected was Going Postal. We feel almost threatened at the prospect of the upcoming Moist von Lipwig book: with each book we like him a little less, and we had been so mindblown by Moist when he had first arrived, by god.)

Anyway, the point of this post is to not be a book review, even surreptitiously behind the excuse of parentheses. This summarises our affinity for studying quite succinctly, however.