The Stolen Project 365 -A photo everyday for a year #1

I have finally decided to start the stolen project.The one I talked about earlier.



Durrell's 'Corfu trilogy' which I'm currently reading and a dainty, empty cup licked clean of butterscotch ice-cream.Here I must add that the weather is getting ridiculous as it usually does at this time of year and the ice-cream supply seems to be forever dwindling, despite it being procured in copious amounts at regular intervals.

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...

'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.