I think

Books I read: Apr-May 2011

The kid has her own Kindle, heavens be praised. I get the android to myself finally. The saga of female authors continues.

1. Cleo Coyle: Through the Grinder
After the third book in the Coffeehouse mystery series, what makes you continue to read the series is the curiosity of what happened to the hero(ine) whose love life runs on a parallel track. So, that way, it is not really a mystery series but a romance series with some poor mystery thrown in for variety. It gets irritating after a point. I mean, if it takes one mystery to meet the guy, second mystery to befriend him, third to sleep with him, fourth to break up and fifth to get back together and so on, it is quite the soap opera. The mysteries are pretty banal as well.

2. Isabel Allendale: Kingdom of the Golden Dragon
The golden rule of writing is this - "Write from experience, not hearsay". I am sick of non-Indian writers, associating India with cows, snake charmers and dirt. Writers, aiming to write stories with an Indian context - remember this - Cows are banned from roaming the roads in metropolitan cities (such as Delhi, where Allendale's dead cow stumps traffic), an average Indian has not seen a snake charmer in twenty years and so on. I do not have first hand information on Tibetan monks, so refrain from making statements here, but I suspect Isabel Allendale mish-mashed stuff she found on some third rate, pseudo-nationalistic, pseudo-religious, pseudo-scientific website about Tibet and came up with all the various mystical stuff in her story. Throw into it South American mumbo jumbo of totemic animals, sorceress and People of the Mist, you have a rotten union of James Rollins-J.K. Rowling whatever.

3. Barbara Cleverly: The Last Kashmiri Rose
A refreshing mystery, set in Colonial India. The historic setting is near perfect (not that I would know firsthand; only from information passed down through generations..) and the mystery itself, intelligent and almost practical. The style is engaging, the mystery compelling, romance subtle and no where does the story sag. And NO COWS. Hallelujah !

4. Lyn Hamilton: Archeological Mystery4 - Celtic Riddle
I am sure people interested in Celtic/Irish mythology/history will find this book very interesting. For me, it dragged a bit because I do not know much history/mythology other than Indian and it seemed too much effort to understand the background stuff to understand the book. Nevertheless, I read it skipping pages here and there. So, I can't really comment much.

5.Louise Penny: Still Life

The closest to Agatha Christie. Murder in a small hamlet. And how it is solved. Expected murderer, and good logic. Thankfully, the detective does not fall in love with someone ! Well written. Engaging.

6. Earlene Fowler: Fools Paradise
Good story. A little sagging in the middle, the detective falls in love with the policeman. Is this some kind of the in-thing?

I think I will take a break from books. Forced. I have a big deadline coming up, and a one week trip around which I need to work. The heat is draining, the kid and dude's vacation mood is rubbing off on me and the brain is simply refusing to function.  The panic is growing, hopefully all the adrenalin should help me start.

 

Books I read this year

At one point of time somewhere at the end of last year, it suddenly struck us.  We don't have any more place to keep books. A new room was built in dude's childhood home, to include a wall-to-wall storage space, filled with books.  My childhood home now has every free and built-in cupboard overflowing.  Another full wall-cupboard at our home is choking, not to mention another cupboard for the kid's books, in addition to all the books that lie scattered all over the house (careful, don't step on that book there..).  Although all three of us have a certain share in the crime, the major partners are dude and the kid, who would have been happy to have been born with extra eyes and hands. 

So there were the following options - stop reading, get rid of all books that have been read at least 27 times (which would clear out most of our cupboard)  or try out the ebook reader.

Obvious choice.

Dude got himself a Kindle and now it has become a third appendage - if it is not in his hand, it is in his pant pocket. 

Now, I am not as voracious a reader as dude, and so I settled for an imitation iPad (local make, assembled, we named it the Android), and use it only as an e-reader ("fb-reader"), in fact, I don't even know what other functionalities it has.  It was decided that the kid and I would share the iPad, since the only time I get to read anyway is when she sleeps (and hence NOT reading).  The sharing system worked excellently for about half-an-hour since we received the blessed instrument.   Now, when dude is not reading his kindle, he is arbitrating  ("appa, amma used the android all of yesterday, I want it now".."Dude, ask her to go and read a paper book, I only have now to read" etc.). 

Disgusted, the dude ordered another kindle, for the kid.  I will be glad to FINALLY have the android to myself.

It seems that I have been reading more (20 + since January) since I got the Android. Strangely, I have only been reading female authors since the start of the year.  It wasn't intentional, but just happened. 

I have a bad (?) habit.  When there is a series of books, I can't move on to another author unitl I finish the series.  And I am a linear reader, unlike dude, who reads up to 10 books at a time (not simultaneously, of course).   Here are some books I read

Rhys Bowen : Royal Spyness Mysteries

1. Her Royal Spyness

2. A Royal Pain

3. Royal flush

I am looking for Royal Blood, but haven't got the book yet.

What I like about the Royal Spyness Mysteries is the setting of the stories - early nineteen hundreds England, with all its snobbery, and laced with a stiff upper lip humour.  The problem though is that the story tends to drag in the middle and somewhere along the way you feel like screaming "Get on with it already..."

Rhys Brown - Molly Murphy Mystery

1. Murphy's law

2. Death of Riley

3. For the Love of Mike

4. In Like Flynn

5. Oh Danny Boy

6. In Dublin's Fair City

7. Tell me pretty Maiden

8. In a gilded cage

9. The last illusion

Have not yet been able to get Bless the bride.

The setting is New York at the turn of last century and the protagonist is an Irish refugee, accidentally turned detective. The setting is charming, the characterization, cute.  But like the Royal books, tends to sag in the middle.

Cleo Coyle: Coffeehouse mysteries

I have started reading the series in random which is a bother because, even though the plots of the main mysteries are independent, the lives of the characters are closely entwined with the main plot. This is true with the earlier Rhys Bowen series as well. This is very different from the Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle genre, where the detective (Ms. Maple, Poirot, Holmes) is not personally involved in the mystery other than im-passionately solving it, so each is a stand alone story not requiring you to read prior books before launching on this one.  So, I read a few random coffeehouse stories, and although it does not really affect the flow of the main plot, the supporting stuff is irritatingly disjoint.

1.Murder most frothy

2. Decaffeinated corpse

3. Espresso Shot

I am drinking more coffee than before since I started reading Cleo Coyle, her descriptions of various types of coffee are very very distracting.   Some books (e.g. Espresso shots) even have a few recipes at the end, that I skip for two reasons (a) I am mageirocophobic and (b) I don't want to read about the frosted, dusted, oozing cookies at the dead of night and end up not being able to sleep because I WANT THAT DARN THING NOW.

Both Rhys Bowen and Cleo Coyle throw in a a lot of romance - a Daniele Steel meets Agatha Christie mess.  Agatha Christie had romance in her books (think Harlequin stories), but in none of them would the protagonist (the detective) be involved.  In both RB and CC books, the detectives have a flaming love life and it becomes distracting to the central plot.  In an effort to be sexually liberated, the books end up being more banal and pretentious than if the romantic escapades had been absent.

Erma Bombeck: 

1. The Grass is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank

2. When You Look Like Your Passport Photo, It's Time to Go Home

3. A Marriage Made in Heaven ... or Too Tired For an Affair

4. At Wit's End

5. Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession

I love Erma's sense of humor.  I love her fighting spirit. I love the way she can take an adversity and laugh it off - like the "Riddikulus" spell in Harry Potter. Her books make me laugh and tug at my heart in a nice way.

But for the first time in life, there was one book by Erma Bombeck that I did not like - Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession.  It was not funny at all.  In fact, it was quite depressing, despite all the attempts to poke fun at many aspects of motherhood.  I don't think I will read this book again.

Apart from this, I re-read a few Agatha Christie - the word re-read is used loosely, because I can actually commit from memory many of the stories, verbatim - that's how many times I have read it in the past.

I want to read something else, but I suspect that I can't go onto the next author until I have finished all the coffeehouse mysteries in my android - it is a disease really.

I shall update in a month or two, if my read list grows enough to warrant a post.

 

 

Atlas did not shrug. I did.

Scalzi says this about Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged"

That said, it’s a totally ridiculous book which can be summed up as Sociopathic idealized nerds collapse society because they don’t get enough hugs. Indeed, the enduring popularity of Atlas Shrugged lies in the fact that it is nerd revenge porn — if you’re an nerd of an engineering-ish stripe who remembers all too well being slammed into your locker by a bunch of football dickheads, then the idea that people like you could make all those dickheads suffer by “going Galt” has a direct line to the pleasure centers of your brain. I’ll show you! the nerds imagine themselves crying. I’ll show you all! And then they disappear into a crevasse that Google Maps will not show because the Google people are our kind of people, and a year later they come out and everyone who was ever mean to them will have starved. Then these nerds can begin again, presumably with the help of robots, because any child in the post-Atlas Shrugged world who can’t figure out how to run a smelter within ten minutes of being pushed through the birth canal will be left out for the coyotes. Which if nothing else solves the problem of day care.[...] As a pulpy, fun read about an unrealistic world that could never happen, I give Atlas Shrugged a thumbs up. As a foundational document for a philosophy for living in reality with other actual live human beings, I rank it below Jonathan Livingston Seagull and The Secret, both of which also have the added value of being shorter.

Perhaps I should fall on Scalzi's shoulders and shed tears of joy.  No, what would be easier is to fall on Dude's shoulders and s-t-o-j for having directed me to this particular gem of Scalzi.

I was a decent enough, if not voracious reader in school, having grown through Enid Blytons, Hardy Boys, Nancy Drews, Perry Masons, Agatha Christies, Daphne DuMauriers, sometimes even Conrad (really !) and the Bronte Sisters (having struggled through Wuthering Heights and deciding that pathos is not quite my cuppa), and finally graduating with Wodehouse, with whom I developed a lifelong affair.  And then, disaster, in the name of college happened.  Reading dwindled.  By the time I found my ground again, I was in my grad school with supposed intellectuals around me.

During the summer of my postgraduate life, I became friends with an undergrad boy through chance of both of us working on a similar project.  This boy gave me a book called "The Bridge Across Forever" by someone called "Richard Bach".  Wait.  I am getting the sequence wrong.  He gave me a very long and boring lecture  on this most fantastic book that can turn my life upside down and THEN gave me this book.  I was to learn later that he was smitten by me and had given me the book as a symbolic gesture, but being the egg-head that I am, the symbolism was lost. Not that it would have made a difference otherwise, but I digress.  As I read the book, I was confused.  What the heck was this book? A fairy tale?  A fantasy?  Some profound philosophy thing that I couldn't grasp?  For all the talk about "true love", it wasn't even romantic.  Agreed, I don't dig romance, but at least, as a genre, I respect it.  But this one?  It sounded very silly to me.   And my donor of Bach, the so-called "cream" of intellectual society waxes eloquent about it, so there must be something I was missing.  Perhaps I wasn't evolved enough to understand the book. 

And then, this guy gave me ANOTHER book.  This one was fatter and came with the same kind of raving preamble about "an ideal society", "high principles" and so on. The book was called The Fountain Head and was apparently about a brilliant architect, trying to preserve his principles, whatever that may be, in a world where all but he were dregs.   He, however, seemed to me, a highly maladjusted man who needed psychiatric intervention.  I was beginning to wonder if people forced themselves to read and talk about such books to appear "superior" to their peers, or if I was truly a doofus of infinite order to think that such apparently "profound" books were pretentious drivel. By the time I finished half of that book, summer was thankfully over, normal life resumed and I went to bed with Wodehouse again.

Fast forward a decade.  I was now married to this fantastic dude and pregnant with what would become a dream daughter in a few months.  One night, after a rather unimportant, mundane, childish marital-squabble that starts with fireworks and ends with hugs, dude gave me a book and said that it would offer me a better perspective of what life should be.  I saw the name of the author - Ayn Rand, and my heart sank.  Firstly at having to read it, but more importantly, at the hitherto unknown side of my husband - the "intellectual" that reads "Atlas Shrugged" and not only understands it, but actually appreciates it.  With much trepidation, I started that book.

I was in my first trimester of pregnancy then.  Every time I picked up that book and read a page of it, I ran to the sink to throw up and then got teary eyed after that.  I was pretty sure it was all the hormonal mess up. 

I did not read that book fully.  But from the half that I read, I only perceived gloom, contrary to intellectual opinion that this book is about the glory of man's intelligence.  I also perceived  phenomenal arrogance in the author, who, I thought,  saw herself as Galt, the "visionary" who leads "men of mind" away from the rest of the stupid world.   The very fact of dividing society into "men of mind" and "others" repelled me, and at that time, I believed it was because I belong to the "others" and it seemed unfair that I should be inferior to someone blessed with more intelligence than I.

Until dude showed me Scalzi's writeup, I believed that I am one of the "fools" of the world, with not enough brains to understand and appreciate Atlas Shrugged and other such heavy stuff.  But after reading Scalzi, I feel much better.  Even if those of us who don't think much of Ayn Rand ARE fools, I will gladly be in the company of Scalzi. " "Atlas Shrugged [...] is nerd revenge porn" - Touché.

The guy who gave me the Bach and Rand in grad school, later went on to become an AMWAY representative. 

Book Review -Artemis Fowl

Take a cup of fantasy, add a few drops of science fiction, a spoon or two of missile-firing fairies, one piece of a mud-eating/excreting dwarf, one or two trolls, a sprinkling of sentimentalism, a tsp of slam-bam and you get a novel series named after the protagonist (Hero? Antihero? whatever..), Artemus Fowl, a pre-teen prodigy, a whiz of unimaginable intellect, who can figure out fairy-language within a few pages of the novel.  Perhaps we should invite him over to our Indus valley civilization sites to help us figure out what the heck our own human ancestors wrote about in the elusive language of theirs, that archeologists, historians and linguists have not unraveled for decades, nay, centuries.

As you read this book, you wonder who the target audience is.  I am not sure my 6-year old would fall for this pseudo fairy tale that wears a science makeup for oomph value. I am pretty sure my scientist dude would even bother going beyond the second page, having corrupted science (or worse, pseudo science) with fairy tale. And poor me, who is neither here nor there, reads it fully to try and understand what really prompted the author to come up with this vague concoction.  

A 12-year old boy, with Einsteinian brains, a dysfunctional mother, an oversize butler, by name, Butler and an ancestry of crime uses his enormous brains to kidnap a fairy to (successfully) usurp (at least part of) a ransom of gold nuggets. Fantasy, you say?  The story is a lot less dichromatic than fantasy tales are wont to be, with the reader wondering if the protagonist is good or bad.  But life is gray, you'd say.  Is life a fantasy? I ask. 

I am old fashioned enough to believe that fairies don't need guns.  I can accept Rollinsian fantasy of creatures from the subterranean.  Clarkian rendezvous with alien space ships with Indian names is fine. Azimovian homogenized barbie nuns can be swallowed with lots of water. But gun firing, radioactive bombing, time-warping magic dust scattering, healing fairy creatures from the netherworld is a bit of an overkill, I think.  Something like "Pocahontas" taking on the "science" "Avatar".

However, as the net-reivews go, this is apparently hot on the stands.  Parents of kids seem to rave about it more than kids themselves.  The book (and series, I am sure) has all the makings of a major 3-D blockbuster ala Harry Potter with animations. 

Remind me to watch Enchanted instead.

The Clicking of Cuthbert and Other Golf Stories - Book Review

The Britt-understating, stiff-upper-lip, self-deprecating good-natured dig is truly timeless..and priceless. "The Clicking of Cuthbert and a other golf stories" were apparently written, when the Sir Wodehouse was in throes of agony of carefully preserving the handicap at eighteen and not let it slip into the twenties, unlike his other works that were written with a perpetually cheery disposition.  If this were the soul-pourings of a "very nearly desperate man",  one hopes that he were desperate more often.

The Penguin publication that I possess, is a collection of ten stories, not counting the dedication "to the immortal memory of John Henrie and Pat Rogie who at Edinburgh in the year AD 1593 were imprisoned for 'Playing of the Gowff on the link of Leith every sabbath the time of the sermonses' and also of Robert Robertson who got it in the neck AD 1604 for the same reason" and 'fore'word , which themselves are vastly entertaining. In all but the last, the story is narrated by "The Oldest Member" of the golf club, who is well past his prime, most of which was, you perceive, spent golfing.  Now he is an arm-chair golfer and a store house of tales that enthrall.  He has one for every occasion - for souls seared by romance of the fairer kind, for friendships, family.  Each story is wholesome, and gives the reader a feeling of positive glow, at a romance that worked out, at a stroke improved. And while reading it, as with any Wodehouse, you feel not the need to guffaw, but smile constantly so that you reluctantly close the book for a small break to thaw your mandibular muscles.  The exaggerated style makes the setting all the more ridiculous, but in a nice sort of way.  Although you were born way after Wodehouse, and do not know of life in England at the turn of the past century except from reading tedious prose in high school, you can relate to the emotions and a wave of nostalgia sweeps through, like the feeling you get when you think of your grandmother's house you visited every summer vacation as a kid.  For someone who had a crush on Bertie Wooster, the feeling of yearning is intense as she reads the stories, which don't even feature Bertie anyway. My favorite is the last story - The Coming of Gowf, a hilarious fable of how the new religion, Gowf took a kingdom by storm.  You can almost visualize the story taking shape in PGW's mind as he became "piqued, peeved, or -in many cases- chagrined"  while taking an eleven at the third hole.

If I had to choose a country other than the one I live in now, to live in, it would be England.  At least to join the P G Wodehouse Society.





 

Back in the fray

The rather long silence in English in the past few weeks has been due to a variety of reasons -

•  My big publishing assignment - for some reason, when I have my other "writing" deadlines, I blog a lot, maybe to keep my brain active, but this publishing work involves less brain and more hamster-turning-wheel-routine, and so I just let the brain atrophy, I guess
  
• Dude was away on a month long assignment, making me the single caretaker on the home front, particularly responsible for answering a million questions from the six year old, without the usual reply of "ask appa", (although to be truthful, half a million of the replies involved "Ask appa when he comes back"),
  
• General low scores on the self-inflicted, annual self-appraisal and resulting philosophical pondering of "what have I achieved and what is the purpose of my existance" that eventually, as usual, led to the profound truth "cut the crap and get on with life" 
• Mental inertia and inability to come up with something to write about.  Of course, not that this is new. I usually don't know what to write about, even AFTER I have written about it.
• My feeble attempts at blogging in Tamil, which while being enjoyable (only to me, I suspect) drain out much of my energy and what little creativity I have, leaving me a spent force.
  

I have been a bad peep as well, haven't left my footprints on blogs of friends (reasons -see above) in Vox and elsewhere.    Shall make amends, be warned all ye friends out there.

While sparing Vox of my verbal excess, I have been consuming the following:

Marrying Off Mother: And Other Stories

Gerald Durrell

Outliers: The Story of Success

Malcolm Gladwell

The Immortals of Meluha

Amish

The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence

Paul Davies

Now that the hamster deadline is over, my regular brain-frying would begin.  Which means, I'll be here a lot more.