Reading challenge

I love reading.

And that would be an understatement. Let's just say I am a book whore. I love the printed black words, and as long as I can remember, I have been in love with them... Remember hiding my novels between my school books, and reading them late at night, or boiling over quite a few cups of tea, lost in a book, and the tea overflowing onto the stove.

And inspite of this several years old love affair, the sparks aren't even close to dying.
So, I am setting myself a reading challenge. Having picked up this bookmark at the airport bookstore (Yes, I have a Kindle, and yes, I am still fascinated by bookmarks... Something of a romantic old world charm, if you must know.), I've now decided to read at least 10 of these books that apparently are 'Must reads.'

Highly subjective, I find these lists (which miraculously appear all over the net, around Dec 31st) mostly contain a mix of the editor's personal choice and the classics. Anyway, having had already read almost half that list, I am now looking forward to reading 10 (if not more) this year.

For all my curious book worm friends, the list is:

Lord of the Rings series (JRR Tolkien)

1984 (george Orwell)

Pride and prejudice (Jane Austen)

The grapes of wrath (John Steinback)

To kill a mocking bird (Harper Lee)

Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)

Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)

A passage to India (EM Forster)

The Lord of the Flies (William Golding)

Hamlet (Shakespeare)

A bend in the river (VS Naipaul)

The Great Gatsby (Scott Fitzgerald)

Catcher in the Rye (JD Salinger)

The Bell jar (Sylvia Piath) 

Brave new World (Aldous Huxley)

The Diary of Anne Frank (Anne Frank)

Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes)

The Bible 

the Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer) 

Ulysses (James Joyce)

The Quiet American (Graham Greene)

Birdsong (Sebastian Faulke)

Money (Martin Amis)

Harry potter Series (Rowling)

Moby Dick (Herman Melville)

Wing in the Willows (Kenneth Grahams)

His Dark Materials triology (Philip Pullman) 

Anna Kareina ( Leo Tolstoy)

Alice's adventure in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll)

Rebecca (Daphne Du Maurier)

The Curious Incident of the dog in the night time (Marc Haddon) 

On the road (Jack Karousc)

Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad) 

The way we live now (Anthony Troliope)

The outsider (Albert Camus)

The colour purple (Alice Walker) 

The life of Pi (Yann Martel)

Frankestein (Mary Shelly)

The war of the worlds (HG Well)

Men without Women (Ernest hemingway)

Gullivers Travels (Jonathan Swift)

A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens)

Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)

Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Deloe)

One flew over the cuckoo's nest (Ken Kessey)

Catch 22 (joseph Haller)

The count of Monte Christo (Alexandre Dumas)

Memoirs of a geisha (Arthur Golden)

The Divine comedy (Alighieri Dante)

The picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)

Which ones are you gonna polish off?

Shantaram (and others)

You sometimes come across books that make you pause and think, ponder over the bigger questions of life and you find yourself philosophising pain, hurt, joy, love and your very existence. They turn you into an Aristotle. This is the literature that you cherish long after having read them.

I have now added Shantaram to that list. It is profound, without being pretentious. It is clever, without being serious and it is so engaging that I read it in a week straight (might I mention at this point, its over 900 pages thick.) 

Briefly, it is the story of an Australian fugitive on the run. Landing in Bombay after breaking jail, he refuses to leave the city. He's falls in love with the country and soon surrenders to India and its varied charms. From living in the slums, and playing the local doctor, to working for the mafia, he does it all. 

But the book is as much about the story, as it is about the narrator and the characters he writes. The writing is impeccable. Gregory writes beautifully, and that is one of the things that sets this book apart. Gregory takes you on a journey, and you are soon at his mercy riding the roller coaster of his own emotions. His words have the power to make you laugh and cry. They wrench your heart and soar it high, as you join Lin baba in his adventures. 

I've always thought, a great writer is always a great observer of life. And Gregrory proves this better than anybody else I have read. He observes, he thinks and he expresses. He had me hooked from the first sentence " It took me a long time, and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured." … Not once, but several times I found myself pausing and re reading sentences. The book is dog eared beyond repair. 

Also as a brilliant story teller, he tells an engaging tale. The book is fast paced and characters enter and leave the plot with perfect timing. Humour is timely and mostly dry. Characterization is meaty and complete. 

All in all, a brilliant book. A great read suitable for all tastes. It has it all - Drugs, Bollywood, mafia, murders, poverty, love and betrayal - a true 'masala' book as we would say in India! 

Shantaram also happened to be the third good book I read in a row! Recommend all of them. 

As an aside, and ironically all of these were recommendations from friends! So, while I am on book reviews, might be worth mentioning the others. 

- Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams (and Mark Cawardine): Much like Hitchhikers Guide, Adams injects humour into this book as he travels through the world looking for endangered species. Its a fascinating account of some of the most interesting creatures around the world. Telling his experiences through his deadpanned British humour glasses, Adams points out human frailties. This, for example, "The great thing about being the only species that makes a distinction between right and wrong, is that we can make up the rules for ourselves as we go along."

Its an easy read and has some interesting facts that I didn't know. 

Apparently, this was also turned into a BBC series, which I didn't know about, but guess what I am looking to watch now! 

- World War Z by Max Brooks: Nothing you expect it to be! Yes, its zombie fiction, and yes it talks about the apocalyptic world. But the similarities with other 'zombie' books ends there. The visceral gore is missing, for one. WWZ is written as a series of interviews with survivors done by the UN, after the war against zombies is over. There is no central character, but as the interviewees come from a range of cultural and geographic backgrounds, Brooks has had the opportunity to also raise several political issues. The stories of survival by themselves are interesting and entertaining. The idea of WWZ marking the end of a world as we are aware of, is the central theme. 

Again, and easy and interesting read. 

Here's to more reading in 2012! 

2011 in perspective

31st december always finds me reflective. Its not something I plan, but somehow always seems to happen. and its rarely about the past year and what it has brought to me, but always about how I have reacted to those events. How I have changed and grown. 

Which is also why I do not plan. I not like resolutions and goals. And I do not want to have a 365 day challenge. It's not for me. I do not want to be doing things, because I have committed to it. I want to do things because I am enjoying it. And so, while most people think about what they want to be *doing* in the coming year, I think about what I want to *be* in the coming year. 

I have always been a very private person. For all the 29 years of my life. I had one philosophy. I am strong, and I can bear it all, but in a childish naive way. I dreamt dreams I knew would not materialise, taking pleasure in the mere act of dreaming them. I took risks with my heart, knowing it would give me nothing but misery. However, somehow, even when I was close to someone, I never managed to give myself up completely, even though I accepted them and ebbed and flowed with their emotions. My mantra was, "Accept me in your life, and share your troubles, your joys with me. But do not ask me to do the same." It worked well with most people. Everyone thought I was strong and courageous. Almost emotionally unconquerable…A few however, wanted to know the real me. And that scared me. To this date, I do not know why.  

Sometime in 2010, I watched a researcher talk about vulnerability. It talked about how unless we opened ourselves up to hurt, we couldn't live fully. It spoke to me directly. I knew of the concept, and I was already doing that. But I didn't go the entire way, I took others into my life, but never gave myself up. And so I decided that 2010 would be about feeling more intensely. About fighting my natural instinct to give my heart to people and projects. It was a hard time, but I learned. Slowly, consciously at first, and a little more naturally later. 

And so, when 2011 came around it was but obvious that I would take the next step. Not just allow myself to feel intensely, but also express how I feel. This is was the major challenge. I had always felt intensely, but my emotions were often masked by an unreadable face. Someone once had told me, "Your face is always so serene, but your eyes are a treasure trove of emotions. And yet, they need to learn to be read." I knew it was time to put those emotions into words. 

So I always knew it would be an interesting year. What I didn't know that it would be further complicated by a sudden illness that would drag out the entire year. For about 8 months, doctors diagnosed and treated me, and the rest of the 4 months, I convalesced. What that also meant was that I was on medications. Medications that wrecked my emotional stability and had the power to turn me within an hour from a happy content person, to a raging mass, to a teary eyed, blubbering mess. For all of you who have known me long enough, you'd know how calm and collected I generally am. And that is not a facade. I truly believe in the 'This too shall pass,' and that's helps get me past most ups and downs in life. My own sister must have seen me angry about 3 times in my life. But things changed fast and now I needed every ounce of my self determination to fight the emotional demons that were trying to wreck havoc. 

It was tempting, very tempting, to crawl back into my shell. To not tell anyone how I felt. The excuse I used was they loved me and it would worry them. Whilst that was true in part, I knew I was also going back to my usual self defence. Shut down. And so I had to dig deep. I tried to express to the people closest to me, with as much equanimity as I could garner, exactly what I was going through. As I lay, night after night, for weeks, feeling the cloud of depression envelope me, or the cycle of obsession completely take over my mind, I kept reminding myself, This is a phase. this too shall pass. I remember clearly, at one point of time, being able to almost disconnect myself from my thoughts, and was able to tell myself, this is not you. You can fight it.

It's not been an easy fight. And while i'm almost there, it isn't over yet. But I was lucky enough to be surrounded by folks who supported me. My friends' complete unchallenged understanding went a long way in maintaining my sanity on some days. So, thank you, all of you, for all those conversations, all the advice, and more importantly, the spoken and unspoken 'I am here if you ever need me.' Thank you guys, you'll are amazing!  

This blog post is nothing if not a culmination of that. Laying my heart bare. Being vulnerable… And showing it. 

2012 for me is unchartered territory. And I plan to deal with it, by surrendering. 

Here's to 2012.