Quickie!

No...this is not what you think!

I've been meaning to write and somehow it just did not happen. There are four auto-saved drafts and I can't seem to remember why and where I stopped and what I meant to write. I just hope that this does not become the fifth!

There are a couple of tags, one old and one really old, to which I was put up by Macadamiathenut and Silverine respectively, that I will sometime in the near future complete.

In the meanwhile, here's a bunch of reviews of books that I read over the past couple of months.

First off, Chowringhee. I picked this up at the Crossword outlet-let(meaning small outlet) at Shopper's stop after having been dragged there by a friend. I was and still am in this weird phase of reading books by Indian authors. The blurb to this one by Shankar seemed fairly interesting. And honestly, it was an awesome read. I later found out that, this book was originally written much before Haley wrote 'Hotel'. Having read 'Hotel', I couldn't help but imagine that Haley probably pinched the basic idea of the plot. The English one, is of course a translation, but a very good translation. I'd definitely recommend it.




I'd heard a lot about Amitav Ghosh, especially about his 'Calcutta Chromosome' that a friend had once read. I couldn't find that one, but I found the 'Glass Palace' instead. I was a little apprehensive about finishing this one considering that the copy of 'One hundred years of Solitude' by Gabriel Garcia Marquez that I purchased some eight months ago, I have yet to start. And, the 'Glass Palace' is quite a fat book. It started off nicely enough and is descriptive throughout. Somewhere in the middle it get a little a slowly, but you assume that it will become better and it does. It starts in the pre-independence days and then ends not long ago - in our times. At the end of it all, there is a slight nagging doubt - something does not seem to have fallen into place. Surely worth a read though.


The last one is the 'Silent Raga' - Ameen Merchant's first. I generally find most of the book reviews in 'The Hindu' pretentious and boring - stuff that I read when I have finished reading everything else that is worth a glance. It so happened that I chance upon this one, the same day I read a review in the Hindu. The review was not so great, but it wasn't bad either, so I decided to pick up the book despite the lousy blurb (What do Tamil Brahmin girls do when the turn eighteen...? or something like that) which I thought was damn silly. The story follows the life of a girl brought up in a conservative Tam-Bram family in a small town when her mother dies in an accident . The story jumps back and forth from the past into the present. The story is a little too slow and becomes boring, but when you do finish it and then think about it, is when you begin to see what the author was trying to get at. If you can understand Tamil, then there's a lot of Tam lingo that you will find in the book. All in all - above average - maybe worth a read.

And that bring us all to a very arbit and possibly (no...definitely) lousy bunch of reviews by a sleep-deprived 'saaftwear yenginyer'. Have a nice weekend, folks!

P.S : I swear I've been a good boy!