Recent Reads

Have read a few books and not blogged about it. So let me get started on that. Read since last Book review: Beach Boy (Ardershir Vakil), Never Let me go (Ishiguro), Namesake (Jhumpa Lahiri), Lord of the Flies (William Golding), The Kite Runner (Hosseini), Getting there (Manjula Padmanabhan), Shadow Lines (Amitav Ghosh), The Hungry Tide (Amitav Ghosh) and One Night @ call center (Chetan Bhagat).

Bought the Beach Boy , Never Let me go and the Kite Runner together at "Akshara" the neighbourhood bookshop. I love browsing for books at Akshara. It is not one of those shops with rows and rows of neatly classified books and the ever - polite staff ready to help you with just the book you want. It is one of those shops with books strewn all around with no apparent order or scheme. One never knows what book one might just come across and I love this element of surprise. Also, it takes me back to my childhood jaunts in Chandigarh during the annual summer holidays. Dad used to take us to big book stores (They did seem BIG those days) in Chd which sold only books and nothing else. Me and my sisters used to go crazy running around the shop while dad looked around for the books that interested him. But slowly these shops closed down or were renovated and most of them became card galleries/coffee shops/stationery shops with a tiny corner for books. Do we have any exclusive book shops left? I guess not if you do not count the weekend second hand book markets which I think almost every city has but then that is mostly study books/study guides, Mills & Boons and Sidney Sheldons. One of favorite fantasies is wandering into these second hand markets and buying great books at throwaway prices (the logic being that the book sellers do not appreciate that kind of books :-))!! Well that certainly has not happened yet.

Anyways back to that boring weekend evening, I picked up these three books based on comments and reviews by ssm and ano. Loved the Beach Boy and Never Let me go. I think the Beach Boy has the one of the most lovable Protaganist ever, the Young connoisuer of food Mr. Cyrus readymoney. The book is about growing up in an affluent Parsi family in Bombay in late seventies. The best thing about the book is it's honesty. Cyrus is what he is. There are no explanations and no excuses. Ishiguro's book is also growing up but it could not be any different from BB. Loved the style of writing and the theme is kinda unique and a little errie. But the book is heat wrenchingly sad in parts and I fell in love with this girl too. If I could write a book, I would write something like this I think. No, I am not talking about the subject here but the way this book mixes up the past, the present, the thots and everything. And this reminds me of "The Shadow Lines" one of the best books I have ever read. I just can not stop raving about this book.

...to be contd.