What Makes me Love a Book

BEAUTY OF PROSE.

There are many authors who tell a good story,but simply don't have a way with words.Take Dan Brown for example.I remember not being able to put down 'Da Vinci Code' .I enjoyed it enormously at the time.The facts!I had me opening up dusty old art books from the top shelf to take a close look at 'The Last Dinner'.It is only later that I actually thought about how it was written.Was there a beautiful flow to the sentences? Did I stop and re-read a sentence simply because it gave me pleasure? I didn't. I gulped it down.

One book,while reading which I clearly remember constantly stopping and re-reading a sentence here,re-reading a sentence there was Arundhati Roy's 'The God of Small Things'.Many sentences gave me goosebumps because of their sheer beauty.There is poetry in her prose.The characters she describes conjure up detailed images in my head.

Another author I love who, to put it mildly, has a knack of stringing words words together,of creating the weirdest characters,whose appearance and idiosyncrasies she describes in delightfully intricate detail is Zadie Smith.She Owns the genre of hysterical realism so to speak.

I'll confess there are times when one feels like reading what is popularly known as 'chick-lit' (chick literature! really? but let me not go off on a tangent here).Reading them is just plain entertaining,in a mindless sort of way.Like watching television.

...To be continued...

The Indian metro ( a fellow blogger's story)

Do I write?: In her own words

A film,Facebook and the beginning of a project.

I saw this delicious animated film, 'Mary and Max'.It's a story about an unlikely friendship between an eight year old Australian girl and an obese American man,who become pen pals.Both are odd individuals.Both have no friends.What is striking about the film is it's unlikely poignancy,which i would not expect from an animated film.

What else is striking about the film is that it is about two lonely people.It is made in 2009,the Facebook age, although it is set in the seventies(which explains the pen pals part). Almost everyone I know has more than a hundred friends on Facebook ,many have more than five hundred and a few have more than a thousand friends! What does this mean? Does everyone really have so many friends? Is everyone curious about what happens in the life of their acquaintances? Is it mass psychology? Of'course ,I appreciate how useful Facebook can be at times,in terms of networking,getting to know old friends again,and spreading-the-word.But a lot of the time it seems to be a space where narcissistic teenagers fish for compliments.It is a sort of unorganized, untapped common ground.It has the potential to be so powerful because of the sheer number of people on it.

Speaking of facebook, someone I know started something called Project 365 which involves posting a photo a day for a year.I really like the idea of chronicling the year in photographs.And so,I rather bluntly asked if I can steal the idea.I want to see if I can keep at it for a year.I want to test my consistency.I shall call it The Stolen Project 365.

'Snobs' by Julian Fellowes -An unfinished review

'Snobs' is about the English upper crust.The fake-fox hunting,tweed wearing,posh butler employing kind of people who say "I say!" at very short intervals(obviously, this comes from someone who has read far too many P.G Wodehouse novels,and never been to the U.K,and therefore erronously imagines the British aristocracy to be Woosterish) .

It is about how those at the periphery try to climb aboard , and if they stumble unelegantly while they're at it,then so be it.

It was Edith Lavery's mother, more than Edith herself,who wanted her to marry 'well'.And this she did soon after being introduced to the soporific Charles by her wanna-be aristocrat friends.
(Charles reminds me of Abhinav Bindra, the Olympic shooter,who has been described by the media as having a 'comatose personality'.He also reminds me of Anna karenina's husband).He is pretty bland,definitely not metrosexual and is terrified of anything overtly feminine.

And I shall stop at that.

Julian Fellowes, ze missing link

So animal-saviour friend arrived.This was obviously followed by a lot of cafe hopping, caffeine laden conversations,alcohol laden conversations,far too much food-laden conversations.Much conversation.(Think Disney version of chattering women).Anyway,so  one of these  involved 'Downton Abbey'.This was triggered by the sight of the book 'Snobs' by Julian Fellowes,peeking out of my bag.I had never heard of 'Downton Abbey' before,perhaps because it isn't airing on Indian television yet.Said friend is big fan of it.'Tis a period drama,set in around 1912,and is about the goings on in the family of Lord Grantham and the many servants of the house.
Turns out,the script writer of ' Downton Abbey' is Julian Fellowes.
Now, cat LOVES these sort of coincidences,they make me all excited for just a little while (friend did not know a thing about the script writer of 'Downton Abbey')