Slow Man by J.M. Coetzee

This was picked in the same Noble spirit.

This could have been easily called the dead man. I didn't understand the meaning of the phrase "dead slow" till I read about Paul. A man with whose life seems to be changed after an accident and losing a leg. But it sounds more like a 60 year old man who is looking for a reason to live. Love and sex seem to be quite an appealing factors to him but a sense of shame after losing a limb overshadows every other desire.

Life is more complicated after a tragic accident and it is not easy to keep the spirits high specially with a leg less. Paul looked this less as a shrinkage of the world for him which was actually more of a mobility challenge. But then it would have sound like a motivational book.

And in this sorry state you start having those romantic notions. The melancholic life not only becomes amorous but even tries to find some knight like attitude to gloss over the much deeper thoughts and desires.

It was very much a younger sibling of "Disgrace" when it comes to the characters and their life choices. You can easily replace Paul with Lurie and everything will sound the same without a dog.

Maybe it was not the best shot.

Love

Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee

 A self destructive love is what it is.

The sense of disgrace in the characters come from different sources. This sense is so distant that it can only be in the heads. You look closer and it is just a self destructive commotion which has been put into action by some events in life.

You can't see the events which caused it but you just witness the out come of it in the light of eventualities (in front of committee and police). It is very much visible how Luries (father and daughter) act and decide in those moments.

It is not a pleasure to read specially when you're thinking that these characters should behave rationally but that is what makes them what they are.

Love

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

I was reading a lot of serious stuff that I made it a point to read something else just for the heck of reading something light.

I looked at this one and thought of one more movie which is going to be unwatched.

This is a monologue of a successful financial analyst in US. And the uncomfortable part of the narrative is that it moves as a knee jerk reaction. It is less surprising and more annoying to keep reading it this way. They call it metafictional and it sounds like an ornamental title.

It is more like a one sided love story, a lot critical of US foreign policy, psychological derangement, and construed plot of a geographical war. I could've said it has a good pacing but it was regularly interrupted by schoolgirls, chai, snacks, jalebi, kababs, family and the waiter at the hotel who don't add anything to the plot or ambience.

I guess the movie might have been different (which will stay unwatched) given the kind of medium it is but the book can be excused.

Peace

The Grandmothers by Doris Lessing

 The noble-ity continues.

Another master piece. This is a collection of four short novels and "The Grandmothers" is one of them.

All four of them reach out to you in a different way and leaves you with a different emotion.

Can't say anything about the plots and characters but it is worth a read.

Love

Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots by Deborah Feldman

Of course I wanted to read since there was a series on it.

I could have seen it with New York Times bestseller tag but I went with it anyway.

The books touches a sensitive topic but not sure if it does the justice. A lot of passages sound incoherent and out of place.  And rather than developing the characters it sounded more like blaming everyone else around. Looking at all the pictures from childhood to marriage to motherhood it is difficult to connect the narrative to them.

We carry our crosses and some of us come out shining to tell the tale. But this was not the tale.

Peace

Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall by Kazuo Ishiguro

 This is going to be that Nobel laureate time.

This is a compilation of five stories around the music and nightfall. And I must say that these two fits into every story very well.

I was very keen on the music part of it and it was good to see that not all of them are musicians. Few of them were just music lovers but that doesn't falter the momentum of the narrative.

Second thing, it being about music I was looking for something around the cello. I don't know why but cello and piano sound more like music to me than guitar. Glad to find it in the last but the splendid story.

Music is something which is mostly conceptualise as an art form but that sounds like a narrow look from the listener. For a musician it might just be the way of life. Any kind of thought needs a reciprocation or at least a recognition. In case of music it is not required because music is something which can exist without any medium. It will sound abstract as long as the idea is limited only to the music that we listen to irrespective of the genre. Music is beyond existence which is impossible to convey by any material means.

I'll not go into each one of them but it was definitely a great read.

Love

New Selected Stories by Alice Munro

Alice Munro is a Nobel Prize winner for literature. I was not aware of it until I picked this book. And I was not really sure if the Nobel prize was given for the story writers. I don't know why but I thought it was given to the novelists and poets. While looking for more information I saw that it was given to Bob Dylan for poetry and songwriting. This was a breather to know that it is not limited to the larger formats like novels only.

Well I read this, and was amazed how beautiful these stories are. I read these stories and felt that every single one of them has the potential to be a novel but that doesn't diminish the affect of the story. It only enhances the art of narration in brevity.

The best part that all the characters in these stories sound so real. It is possible that you might not have heard of any such real person around you but reading about them creates that sense of familiarity which can be attributed to the brilliance of the author.

One thing which I encountered was a claim that a she is a feminist writer, and I saw one of her interviews where she says "I never think about being a feminist writer, but of course I wouldn’t know." I understand that this is as good as a writer can say about her/his style of choosing the story they want to tell. If they choose to pick a protagonist of a different gender than it would have been equally strong in the stories.

I definitely loved this one, and would be looking out for more or her works.

Love

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

 I saw this in a corner and kind of looked cute with an off-white cover and title printed in Golden colour.

There was not much information about the author or the content of the book, and in the first look it looked like a self motivation kind of a book given the words printed on back of the cover "Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it end."

I am a bit biased against self help books but this one looked good given the above line and I just picked it up. A 200+ pages don't take much time.

I read the first five pages and I realised what I picked. It was a memoir recording the death of a husband and a daughter on the death bed. It had the death written all over and there were thoughts of not continuing further. Not because it is a sensitive topic but it sounded a bit intrusive as a reader.

As a rule I don't search for author or the book online if I already don't know it and when I finished it the first thing I did was to search the author. A wife couldn't do much for her husband in his last moments and a mother who was helpless in front of her comatose daughter who was in and out of ICUs.

Death is a strange event in life. The departed don't have much of a say afterwards (given a chance they wouldn't have agreed to it) but the survivors have their lives turned upside down. This is a situation for which nothing can prepare you not even witnessing multiple deaths of loved ones. Every death is a road closed in the journey of life. A road that you never believed to be closed. You expected turns, obstacles and what not but never a closure.

It was specially strange when in the last one I was reading was about someone who just wanted to let go of life and in this one they can't let go of dead. And yes they are totally different letting go. In one you are a participant and in the other you're just the observer.

Peace

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

 Never say no to a recommended book specially if it is recommended by strangers.

This one was recommended by two different people and I just looked it up in the local library and found it. It was a bit strange to go to the library with a knowledge of what you're going to pick.

This was a light read for sure. It is a story of a bad day leading to an out-worldly experiences for Nora Seed.

It was going well until the author did the Christopher Nolan hat and jumped into explaining multiverse and quantum physics. And later morphed into a lot of quotations for good life.

Positivity is never a problem and specially in a story revolving around depression and personal loss it is even better until a fictional work starts sounding like a self help book. But you can never question the author because it was not written for you.

Choice is a small word with lifelong consequences. But nobody knows the future, and we all are good at making bad choices. And it is not about choosing the education, friends, jobs, partners which play a big part but even things like what we choose as a hobby, ideas we perceive and why not even the civic duties. But the more important aspect is how we react to any outcomes of all the action/inaction in our lives.

Decent read but if you don't then you'll not miss much.

Love

Medusa’s Ankles: Selected Stories by A.S. Byatt

 I couldn't finish this. I just couldn't go beyond 350 out of 430 pages. And this is the one in a real long time that I couldn't see till the end.

This is the second book from A S Byatt that I picked (first was Ragnarok) and the idea was that the short stories would be good from such an imaginary writer. I don't know how I reached that conclusion but that was the first thought.

However, it was too much of the abstract narrations. I really enjoy a writer painting a picture with the words but than I was not looking for a palette. There were too much of colors which kind of led to the edge.  Ornamentation is an integral part of any narration but what if there are just ornaments and nothing else.

I can't really say if I liked any of the stories and the introduction was full of praises, even claiming that there are multiple styles of writing which some of the great writers had shown in their genius works. It sounded like an oversell and yes it was. An average reader like me don't read for the style of the writers but because their work speak to you. A reader can't connect with everything but a good book is a sign that writer was saying something which resonates with you. Also, a writer is free to write whatever s/he wants to write but so are the choices of a reader.

I never cared about the style. I actually don't understand when they say lyrical prose, magical realism, complex structures and what not. The complexities doesn't make things beautiful but it is the simplicity which brings the true beauty in any work irrespective of the style or medium.

I'm not sure if I'll be picking up anything again from her work but this was a really difficult one.

Love