2011: Challenges and how I fared

I signed up for a few challenges in 2011, something I did for the first time. I am glad I got to read new authors and books as part of this challenge, which I would not have otherwise.

• Nordic Challenge
  Challenge: 3-5 books
  Read: 3 books

I took this challenge mainly because I was so ignorant of the books coming from this beautiful region. I discovered a beautiful book (Sophie’s World) and a wonderful author (Henning Mankell).

• Haruki Murakami Reading Challenge
  Challenge: 3
  Read: 3

I am so happy I took up this challenge. I discovered such a great author. I absolutely loved After Dark, but the other two books were a disappointment. I will definitely read more from this author.

• New Authors Reading Challenge
  Challenge: 15
  Read: 15

Read a few new authors, some were great, some were not.

• Seconds Challenge
  Challenge: 3
  Read: 3

I gave Gabriel García Márquez and Amitava Ghosh a second chance as part of this challenge. I could not read Márquez’s A Hundred Years of Solitude, but A News of a Kidnapping was a surprisingly good read. On the other hand, Ghosh disappointed me further with his A Circle of Reason.

• 1001 Books to Read Before You Die
  Challenge: 5
  Read: 1

Disappointing. Both the challenge and the book I read as part of this challenge.

• TBR Challenge
  Challenge: 12
  Read: 3

I finally read 3 books that I had wanted to read from a long time. An interesting thing to note is I did not like any of them. That should say something about my TBR list, huh?
I have decided what challenges I will be taking up in the coming year. Sign up post coming soon.

 

Disappear

Title: Disappear
Writers : Talitha Stevenson
Published: 2010
Genre: Fiction
My Rating: 2 on 5

The only reason I picked up this book is its attractive cover art. There is something about this hardbound book with its colorful tiny dots on a black background that made me grab it from the shelf. I had heard neither of the book nor the author, so I did not know what to expect.

Disappear is about Charlie and Leila who are recently  married, but Leila finds herself asking a divorce from her husband after revealing that she is pregnant. To salvage their marriage, Charlie takes Leila on a trip to his native land, Spain, where Leila catches him kissing another woman. Leila to decides to leave Charlie and ends up at her estranged sister, Kate. The rest of the book is about the sisters relationship and how Leila comes to term with her new life.

With books like these, characters play a very important role of pulling the reader in to become part of the story. The characters should tug at the reader’s heart or bring tears in the eyes or make the reader loathe them. Sadly, none of the characters are strong enough for the reader to grow an attachment with them. Leila is probably the weakest protagonist I have seen. She appears bland. I never got a hang of her personality, so I could not feel what she was feeling. Even Charlie’s intentions are not clear: does he want to live with her or does he want a divorce too? One character which has a bit of life is Kate’s but even that character is complicated enough.

I found the writing style not that engaging. The story moves in a smooth fashion, but the writing could have been better. And the same point applies to the characters too. The ending is intentionally kept inconclusive, which does work. If only Leila had a stronger personality so that I could feel what she was going through.

Next time I am lured by an attractive book cover, I should remind myself of the saying ‘Do not judge a book by its cover’.

The Long Silence

Title: That Long Silence
Writers : Shashi Deshpande
Published: 2008
Genre: Fiction
My Rating: 2 on 5

I picked up this book as a way to allay my guilty feeling for not reading enough Indian authors. Shashi Deshpande ranks high in the list of top Indian authors, so it was natural to pick up one of her books.

That Long Silence is the story of Jaya, a housewife and mother to two teenaged children and is a writer in her free time. Jaya’s life resembles any typical Indian housewife, compromising for family needs, putting family before oneself, suffering silently, until she gets a jolt when her husband is fired from his work with charges of fraud. Her life turns upside down when her husband ‘the tree which gives shelter’ is no longer the bread earner of the family and they have to live with the shame of the charges and move on with their life. Jaya tells us stories about her cousins, parents, aunts and grandparents and we see how Jaya has evolved through her life.

The main problem I had with the book is its narration. The tone is sloppy, weak and not engaging and the writer jumps from past to present to future which makes you go dizzy. For someone who is left with ‘that long silence’, the conversation should have been deeper and more philosophical, but it sounds like Jaya is nervously reciting from a paper in front of a packed audience. The writer failed to evoke any emotions in me for the main protagonist, which was what the book needed the most. The rest was a downhill journey. The convoluted sentences and bad choice of words makes this book a difficult read. Do we Indians try hard to sound like foreign authors or are we so bad with English that we can’t write well? The characters are lifeless and do not deserve the readers’ time.

I am disappointed that my first attempt at reading more local authors was such a failure. I don’t want to be deterred by this, so I am going to read other authors or other recommended books of the same author. If you have read a good book by any Indian author, do suggest some.

Just One Look

Title: Just One Look
Writers : Harlan Coben
Published: 2003
Genre: Fiction, Mystery
My Rating: 3 on 5

I read my share of non-fiction and literary fiction, but what got me started as a serious book reader was murder mystery or thrillers. No matter how heavy a book I am reading, give me a thriller any day and I am happy. I can’t read them too many in a row, but they are great as fillers and act as brain bleach when you are done with a heavy read and don’t have the energy to pick another similar book. They go fast, you don’t need to think too much about them and they satisfy your curiosity of ‘what next’.

Just One Look is one such book. It is about Grace Lawson who finds a strange, old photograph of her husband along with her recently developed vacation photos. She is puzzled how such an old photo got into her pile and on confronting her husband, gets an extreme reaction from him which ends with her husband leaving the house in the middle of the night. When he does not return for some days, she suspects something is fishy and launches a full fledged search for her husband. What starts off as an innocent search turns messy and she discovers many buried secrets, some related to her husband, and some of her own.

Coben creates a very strong plot and the suspense is set in from the word go. He creates an interesting protagonist in Grace and creates a tale for her which becomes entangled with the main track and we readers know nothing is as innocent as it looks. Eric Wu comes across as a devil and just reading about him gave me shivers some times.

The best part about the book is it is a page-turner, what every mystery novel should be. You don’t want to put the book down until you know why things are they way they are. Easy language, not many distractions from the main plot and fast pace makes this book one quick read.

The plot gets thicker as we read and somewhere Coben loses the grip and the story appears muddled. The main motive behind the crime remains unjustified or not satisfactorily enough. When the built-up suspense is so high and many questions are raised, the climax needs to be dramatic, but the book ends somewhat abruptly and leaves you with a bitter taste, making you wish the author had tied the ends in a better way. It is a good read nevertheless. If you need a filler, this is a good one.

 

 

 

India in Slow Motion

Title: India in Slow Motion
Writers : Mark Tully and Gillian Wright
Published: 2003
Genre: Non-Fiction
My Rating: 4 on 5

Mark Tully is a name that is often taken in my circle of readers. Considering how much I knew about the author, it was a shame I had never read his books. To set that right, I picked up the most easily available book and that turned out to be India in Slow Motion.

Tully is a British journalist who treats India his second home. This book is a collection of his essays and stories when he was in India and covers diverse topics like farmer suicides in Maharashtra to child labour in the north. The story I liked the most is the Tehelka scam that rocked the NDA government. Tully gives us detailed insight into the world of investigative journalism. It is easy for us audience to watch the Tehelka scam unfold and the recorded footage on TV. What goes on behind the scenes is an interesting story in itself. Tully interviews the key man behind the Tehelka scam and reveals us the background story behind the scam. I never realized journalists are risking their lives in earning a breaking news. The story on Indira Gandhi and the making of V.P. Singh was an engaging one for me. I had never known V.P. Singh this close! The story on child labour and farmer suicides tugged at my heart.  The theme that runs across the book is that India lacks good governance. Tully picks up many stories to bring across this issue.

It is interesting to see India through Tully’s eyes. What I love about this man is his unbiased view of the country. He is not prejudiced, unlike some foreigners I know, about the pathetic public transport system or the dirty toilets. It does not mean that Tully doesn’t complain. He does complain and rants about the conditions in India, but when he does that, he comes across as one of our own people. You don’t hear a foreigner’s tone, but an Indian’s, which makes all the difference.

 

 

The Age of Shiva

Title: The Age of Shiva
Author: Manil Suri
Published In:  2009
Genre: Fiction
My Rating: 2 on 5

I am guilty of not reading enough books by Indian authors. I am ignorant of the new authors entering the world and the new books released by veteran authors and I would feel a pang of guilt for not making an attempt to keep in touch with my own country’s literary world. To rectify this, I picked up The Age of Shiva. I had read interesting reviews of Suri’s debut book The Death of Vishnu and since this book was not available, I picked up the next available option.

The book opens with a vivid description of a mother breastfeeding her baby which can be easily misunderstood to be a love making scene. You don’t realize until you are almost through that the author is in fact describing breastfeeding and not some erotic incident. I have to admit, this totally put me off. I am not sure if other women (or mothers should I say) would find it offending, but the very fact that the author even dared to compare a breastfeeding act with an erotic scene was offensive to me.

The book is about  Meera who is brought up under the shadows of her more beautiful and attractive elder sister. In a stupid attempt to take revenge for the indifference shown by her family, she decides to marry her sister’s lover. It is Meera’s story of getting along with a new family with drastically different financial condition and social views, her strange relationship with her husband and more importantly the birth of her son. Meera’s relationship with her son is the essence of the book and is supposed to draw parallels to Parvati and Ganesha. Parvati creates Ganesha using sandalwood paste (or the muck on her body, there are different versions of the story), thus eliminating the need for a guy to create a new being. This in a way excludes Shiva from the isolated mother and son world. Meera is in a struggle to keep her son for herself and shows a reluctance to share him with her husband. There are subplots in the book which I thought act more as distraction than add meat to the plot.

I was utterly confused with Meera’s character. I could not interpret her words and actions. She appears so unsure of her marital relationship and what to expect from her husband. When she is stuck in a one bedroom house and is desperate to get out of that hell and move to Bombay, her father offers her the golden opportunity. Instead of snatching it up, she trashes it and it left me wondering why she did that. Her on-now-off-now relationship with her brother-in-law was another problem area for me. The incidents that happen between the two and the way they ‘patch up’ left a bitter taste in my mouth.

As suspected, Meera and her son grow close in their relationship as Avinash grows up, and in more ways than one. I was again disgusted by these parts and wondered if this really happens and if this was required in the book at all. Is this Suri’s way of showing what happens in a family which does not have a father figure? The ending was even more confusing. I will not elaborate much here because it could be termed as a spoiler.

I did enjoy certain parts of the book, but in the end, it left me wondering what was the point of it all. The subtext about drawing parallel to one of the most popular stories in the Hindu mythology is all fine, but what is the conclusion the reader is supposed to draw? In the end, all I remember about the book is the deep disgust I felt while reading the physical closeness between mother and son. I am not sure if I should give Suri another chance by reading The Death of Vishnu! Any suggestions?

The Sense of an Ending

Title: The Sense of an Ending
Author: Julian Barnes
Published In:  2011
Genre: Fiction
My Rating: 4.5 on 5

The blurb of this book caught my eye when I was reading about the books that made into the Man Booker 2011 shortlist. I was lucky enough to get hold of a copy and I devoured it in one sitting. Devoured is the word for it because I loved every word, every punctuation and the white spaces too.

The Sense of an Ending is Tony Webster’s nostalgic recollection of his childhood and manhood days spent with his friends, one special friend, Adrian Finn, and his girlfriend, Veronica. The book’s introduction says it accurately ‘The book is the story of one man coming to terms with the mutable past.’

Tony grows up like any other boy with a close-knit group of two friends, dreaming about girls and questioning the system and its rules. Adrian Finn enters into their group and gathers a lot of interest and respect because of his different tastes and opinions. Later on in life, Tony dates Veronica and visits her parents which we keep revisiting all through the book. Tony and Veronica break up and later on Adrian dates Veronika. Tony marries another woman and has children, gets divorced, and is living a life of a retired, old man, when a letter arrives informing him of Veronika’s mother’s demise and that she has left Adrian’s diary and some money for Tony. Tony realizes the diary is with Veronika and she refuses to part with it and thus starts Tony’s attempts at getting the diary back. In the process, he revisits his memories of spending time with Veronika, Adrian and his other friends. The book ends with an interesting twist which is the icing on the cake. It binds everything together: memories, assumptions and death.

The book pulls you in from the very first word. It has a philosophical tone which it maintains through out. Tony’s soliloquies, philosophical meanderings make a very interesting read. The story is gripping, of course, but these in-between chats are what I loved the most. All through the book, we read the author’s thoughts and opinions on memories and death. You pause and think and brood and wonder how true they are. Read some of my favorite excerpts:

…but what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.

We live with such easy assumptions, don’t we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time.

Who was it said that memory is what we thought we’d forgotten?

It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.

Tony’s character comes across as so real and affable, you can’t help take pity on him at certain times. His relationship with Veronika is intriguing and evokes just a wee bit hatred towards Veronika for treating Tony like rubbish. Tony’s wife is another interesting character. Veronika is one enigma – I just couldn’t understand her character, which I guess was the author’s intent.

The book lingers on in my memory long after I finished reading it. Beautiful writing, memorable characters, engaging tone make this book a wonderful read and a memorable one. I have not read any other Booker shortlisted book, but I will not be surprised if this book wins the Booker this time. Julius Barnes has been shortlisted for Booker 3 times, so he might get fourth time lucky!

Random Acts of Heroic Love

Title: Random Acts of Heroic Love
Author: Danny Scheinmann
Published In:  2008
Genre: Semi-Fiction (Read the review to know why)
My Rating: 4 on 5

Random Acts of Heroic Love, Danny Scheinmann’s debut novel, follows the journey of two men, separated by time and space and yet have a strong, unknown connection with each other. Moritz Daniecki is a Austro-Hungarian soldier who is captured as a Prisoner of War in the First World War and sentenced to prison. He breaks free and walks for years to reach his childhood love. Leo Dankin loses the love of his life in a bus accident and struggles hard to continue with his life without his sweetheart.

The book starts with Leo waking up in a hospital room to realize his girlfriend Eleni’s death in the bus crash while he survived. This incident in his life continues to haunt him and leaves a strong impact where Leo finds himself unable to continue with his life. He is constantly reminded of his girlfriend’s memories and he finds himself blaming for her death. He escapes into a world of his own where he finds Eleni at every walk of life. He meets a physics lecturer, Roberto Panconesi, who tries to explain the connection between our feelings and the physics around. He suggests Leo keep a note of anything that catches his interest. These notes, a hand drawn sketch and a scribbled note underneath, form a very interesting part of the book. Here are some on the author’s website.

Moritz is head over heels in love with Lotte. He is forced to fight in the First World War and is captured bu Russians and is sent to a prisoner camp. He spends two years of his life in the filthy camp and escapes with the determination to meet Lotte and ask her hand in marriage. The journey back home is filled with the dread of being caught and the hope of meeting his love. He fights enemies and makes friends on the way. There are a few things in Moritz’s journey which touched my heart. The one in which his comrade Frantz takes away others’ blankets and shoes thinking they are dead, but Moritz discovers that one of his comrades is not dead after all. The conversation that follows is touching. Similarly, when enemies ask Moritz to kill a man to save his own life – the dilemma that goes on in Moritz’s head makes one think about moral issues.

Leo and Moritz are connected through an unknown strand and this is revealed to the reader only in the end. The book was a wonderful read until we get to this point. After this, I found it to be too melodramatic. The book had a great start with Leo’s beautifully etched tragic incident and Moritz’s crazy love for Lotte. I wish the author had handled the connection a bit more maturely and not let it become cheesy.

The characters are so well formed and memorable. The vivacious Eleni, the eccentric Robert, the always brooding Leo, the epitome of hope Moritz – every character is well thought of and given enough meat to evoke deep emotions in the reader’s heart. The language is beautiful and draws the reader in.

I have labeled this book as semi-fiction (my own term) because it is based on the true story of Danny who lost his girlfriend in a bus crash and his grandfather Moshe, who was a prisoner of war. While the book’s story is drawn from real life, there are some fictional parts too and hence the label of semi-fiction.

The author’s website says the book will be made into a movie soon. I am not too keen on watching movies adapted from books, but I am eager to watch this one. If not movie, I will definitely revisit the novel sometime later in my life.

Even though the book lost its charm in the later chapters, I still had a great time reading this book. The initial part of the book was too good to be shadowed and let down by the latter part.  This book was a gift from my friend. JoV, thanks so much for the book. If not for you, I would have never found this insightful book.

Dreams Unleashed

Title: Dreams Unleashed
Author: Linda Hawley
Published In:  2011
Genre: Science Fiction
My Rating: 3 on 5

I am not a big fan of fantasy or sci-fi, so when I was requested to review ‘Dreams Unleashed’, I tried to read with no prejudice. I was not sure I would be able to do a good review of this book since I don’t read sci-fi. I took this up as a challenge for me as a reader and in the end, I am very glad I did.

Dreams Unleashed is the first book in The Prophecies Trilogy. We have Anne as the main protagonist who is no less than a superwoman. She is an ex-CIA agent who was born with the amazing skill of moving between the dream world and the real one. She is part of the team which does ‘remote viewing’ – transporting yourself to a place to spy on others, but all this in your dream which is almost like real. Confused? Read the book to clear that confusion.

The action in the book starts from the word go and does not end till the book is over. We see Anne as a trainee in the defence and in the CIA’s secret team and her relatively boring job as a technical writer in an organization. We also get a glimpse of her personal life – her lovely relationship with her dad, her husband’s untimely demise and her daughter’s upbringing. Anne comes across as a woman of strength and amazing self-confidence. The other characters are not that drawn out to my taste, but I guess characterization is not that important in a sci-fi book. The structure of the book is quite interesting. It does not flow a chronological order and we keep skipping back and forth in time and also into and out of Anne’s dreams and her real world.

The language is easy and flows smoothly. The one part which I had trouble with were the dialogues. Almost all dialogues end with the name which I found a bit artifical and irritating. Again, the focus of sci-fi books is on the plot rather than the literature, so I guess this is acceptable.

The book is interesting and engaging. For a novice sci-fi reader, this book was very enojoyable. There is an element of suspense that runs through the entire thread which keeps the reader yearning for more.

After Dark

Title: After Dark
Original Writer (Japanese) : Haruki Murakami
Translated to English by: Jay Rubin
Originally Published in Japanese:  2004
Translated to English: 2007
Genre: Fiction
My Rating: 4 on 5

There are very few writers who can convey their inner thoughts and feelings and transport the reader to the world that exists only in the writer’s mind. Haruki Murakami is one such writer for whom this comes naturally. After Dark was my first Murakami book and I am kicking myself why I didn’t read this author earlier. I wouldn’t have tried Murakami if not for The Haruki Murakami Reading Challenge. I do not have anything against him, but never felt the urge to read his books. I ignored him as one of the Dan-Brown-type-hyped-up authors who doesn’t really have anything to offer. How wrong I was!

After Dark, as the title suggests, is set in Tokyo in the dark hours of midnight. The book spans over 7 hours in a cold night where we see interesting characters. We meet Mari, who is killing the night in Denny’s by reading a book where she bumps into Takahashi, a trombone player who is practising in a building nearby. He claims he has met her and her sister, Eri, at a summer date a few years back. The night proceeds and we see Mari’s help being sought by a female wrestler who runs a love hotel where one of her clients is injured and can only speak Chinese, which Mari is fluent in. One thing leads to another and many characters enter the scene only to realize they are all tightly bound together through one string or the other. Meanwhile, Eri – Mari’s sister, is deep asleep in a quasi-coma state and finds herself being transported to another world inside her television and back to her original room. We see a character’s image being reflected in the mirror even after the character has long gone. These scenes add to the already established surreality of the book.

Some of my favorite quotes from the book:

In this world, there are things you can only do alone, and things you can only do with somebody else. It’s important to combine the two in just the right amount

People’s memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn’t matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They’re all just fuel.

Nothingness means there’s absolutely nothing, so maybe there’s no need to understand it or imagine it

Time moves in its own special way in the middle of the night. You can’t fight it

From the first word, Murakami’s surreal tone casts a spell on you. As soon as you open the book, you are transported to that cold night in Tokyo where you see Mari and Takahashi and still feel as if you are floating on air, watching the happenings beneath. The characters come out so beautifully that you can feel their pain and the loneliness. The book is divided into small chapters based on the time of the event and a clock at the beginning of every chapter keeps reminding us of the time.

Even after I finished reading the book, it still lingers over in my mind. I am constantly reminded about a dialogue or a scene or an action and I keep going back to that book. I can’t wait to start reading my next Murakami book. I am thinking of picking up his popular book Norwegian Wood. Any other suggestions?

This book qualifies for Haruki Murakami Reading Challenge 2011 and The New Author Challenge 2011.