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Travel Book list

For someone who loves traveling and who loves reading, I read surprisingly few travel books – its sort of like the way I love chocolate and I love ice cream, but I don’t like chocolate ice cream – however, I am always in search of good travel books, in the hope that some day, one great book, which I am yet to find, will convert me into a travel literature aficionado.

Here is an interesting list of 100 books from the Travel site WorldHum (via Nathan Bransford)
1) A Dragon Apparent, by Norman Lewis
2) A House in Bali, by Colin McPhee
3) A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway
4) A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, by Eric Newby
5) A Time of Gifts, by Patrick Leigh Fermo

Read the rest here

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Posted on June 18, 2010 in Books, Travel. Print this post Email this Post

Three ways of writing a short story

R.L.Stevenson says:

There are, so far as I know, three ways and three only of writing a story. You may take a plot and fit characters to it, or you may take a character and choose incidents and situations to develop it, or, lastly, you may take a certain atmosphere and get actions and persons to express and realize it.” When to this clear conception of his limitations and privileges the author adds an imagination that clearly visualizes events and the “verbal magic” by which good style is secured, he produces the short story that is a masterpiece

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Posted on June 15, 2010 in Short Story Month. Print this post Email this Post

The modern audience – have we lost our patience?

I am sitting at the most comfortable spot in our sofa, playing with Bolano’s 2666 in my hands. It was a birthday gift from six months ago and I still haven’t got to it. I want to read it, oh! I have wanted to read it for so long – but I am thinking of all the other smaller books I would be giving up while I tackle this 900 page tome – Almost without thinking, I pick up my laptop and skit over to some book reviews to justify the time I will be spending. I come across this at Amazon:

“Definitely written for a modern audience, as, unlike past authors, Bolano doesn’t stretch anything beyond necessity, doesn’t linger on any side story unless it’s something the reader will inevitably feel to be vital. He keeps up a swift pace.”

My mind digresses. What is a modern audience?

The reviewer hints at impatience; we are people who need swift pace. Have we, the general reading population, collectively lost the ability to appreciate a lyrical, measured book that does not succumb to the pressures of being a page-turner?

I think back to the last “slow” book I read – I can’t really remember any. Goa Xingjian’s Soul Mountain – the book that won him the Nobel Prize in 2000 – comes to mind as the last slow book I attempted. But, as much as I hate to admit it, I didn’t really get through it. Speaking of books we abandon, check out Sonya Chung’s essay over at the Millions. Interesting topic, I will dwell on it another day.

But then, pace is subjective. Many of my favourite authors – Lessing, Hesse, Camus – they are not famous for their scorching pace. I would, any day, pick Jhumpa Lahiri over Dan Brown. But then, I finished Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music not because I couldn’t put it down, but because I resolved not to. I guess I don’t really have as much patience as I would like to believe that I have.

Have we changed? Were the audiences of yore particularly patient? Or was it just a result of lack of alternatives – less books to turn to, less distractions of technology? Or did they truly have a better appreciation for the finer aspects of a well-cooked, well-crafted, albeit slower paced, book? Are we – the modern audience – giving up all other qualities of a book in pursuit of just the dimension of pace?

Is the abundance of choice really a detriment to the overall development of literary quality? I hope not, but I can’t help but wonder.

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Posted on June 3, 2010 in Books, Musings. Print this post Email this Post

Excerpt: The Picture of Dorian Gray

It is not easy to find good travel writing – most of the time, they read like an itinerary of “I did this, and then that, and that” and you are left wondering whether you picked up a brochure rather than a travelogue. Sometimes, the writers go overboard and describe each little stone on the pavement and you feel the same impatience as when your car has a breakdown and you are waiting for the AA folks.

Even while I complain as a reader, I know as a writer, that it is hard to strike the right balance. But once in a while, a writer just gives you the perfect description – enough to make you feel as if you are standing right there with him, yet leaves out enough so that you can add your own flavour to the journey. And then you have to just read it over and over again, lapping up the beauty of the unique path they are leading us on.

I leave you with such a description of London’s Covent Garden from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, observed from Dorian’s perspective as he walks listlessly after being disappointed in his first love:

As the dawn was just breaking he found himself close to Covent Garden. The darkness lifted, and, flushed with faint fires, the sky hollowed itself into a perfect pearl. Huge carts filled with nodding lilies rumbled slowly down the polished empty street. The air was heavy with the perfume of the flowers, and their beauty seemed to bring him an anodyne for his pain.

He followed into the market, and watched the men unloading their waggons. A white-smocked carter offered him some cherries. He thanked him, and wondered why he refused to accept any money for them, and began to eat them listlessly. They had been plucked at midnight, and the coldness of the moon had entered into them. A long line of boys carrying crates of striped tulips, and of yellow and red roses, defiled in front of him, threading their way through the huge jade-green piles of vegetables.

Under the portico, with its grey sun-bleached pillars, loitered a troop of draggled bareheaded girls, waiting for the auction to be over. Others crowded round the swinging doors of the coffee-house in the Piazza. The heavy cart-horses slipped and stamped upon the rough stones, shaking their bells and trappings. Some of the drivers were lying asleep on a pile of sacks. Iris-necked, and pink-footed, the pigeons ran about picking up seeds

Are there any good travel books or blogs you recommend?

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Posted on May 26, 2010 in Books, Writing. Print this post Email this Post

Review: The Very Thought of You by Rosie Alison

The Orange Prize Short List had been announced, Waterstones screamed a 40% off with free postage, and I had the irresistible urge to buy a book. I mulled over which book to pick – I don’t have the time to read all the six books on the short list, but wouldn’t it be awesome if I read just one and that turned out to be the winner?

With the undying optimism we all reserve for the underdog, I decided on Rosie Alison’s The Very Thought of You. Aferall, it is not every year that a book makes it into a major award’s short list without even a single major paper reviewing it. Book Image

I want to say Rosie Alison’s The Very Thought of You is the story of a young girl who finds herself evacuated to a country house during the war. But it is more than that – it is a book of many love stories – some lost, some found, some forbidden, some lifelong. The book jacket puts it thus:

England, 31st August 1939: the world is on the brink of war. As Hitler prepares to invade Poland, thousands of children are evacuated from London to escape the impending Blitz. Torn from her mother, eight-year-old Anna Sands is relocated with other children to a large Yorkshire estate which has been opened up to evacuees by Thomas and Elizabeth Ashton, an enigmatic childless couple. Soon Anna gets drawn into their unravelling relationship, seeing things that are not meant for her eyes – and finding herself part-witness and part-accomplice to a love affair, with unforeseen consequences.

It is an engaging read – the narrative is tight, the language is beautiful and the characters are interesting. I finished the book in three days, which given the current state of my mind – constantly distracted by baby antics – speaks volumes of how much I enjoyed this story.

The sure sign of a book I love is that it makes me want to put it down and write – the first part of the book definitely did that for me. Told from an eight year old’s perspective, the scenes where she leaves her home and enters a new place is so vividly portrayed that you can almost smell the English country air, marvel at the grand old country house and be the girl vacillating between fear and excitement. That is the beauty of a coming-of-age tale, isn’t it? When beautifully written, it almost always lets us relive our own rites of passage. Here, you see young Anna leaving her mother and then starting out on the journey:

She yawned in the heat; there wasn’t much air. She felt odd – excited and suspended in a strange new world, where anything might happen. She did not miss her mother yet, because she was still so firmly rooted inside her – her face, her voice, her touch.
[...]
She longed for the seaside.
A great clock hung over the sea of bewildered children, ticking away the morning. Gradually, Anna’s excitement began to dwindle, and the magic of the steel cathedral faded as they queued along the platform, waiting for something to happen. They stood, they sat on the ground.

But did I pick the winner? I doubt it. A couple of things bothered me. The book is told from so many perspectives, it is difficult to be emotionally attached to any character. Anna comes closest to being the central character, but then the book is not just about her. An omniscient POV works wonderfully in some books, but this just isn’t one of them. So many characters in this book are unhappy in their marriages and seek gratification elsewhere – it just gets repetitive. I would have like to see some variety in the way the different couples’ relationships play out.

Minor gripes aside, I did like this book. I may not bet my money on it, but it is a good read.

Oh, and a tiny trivia: Rosie Alison is really Mrs.Waterstones – yes, the Waterstones of the bookshop Waterstones. How cool is that!!

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Posted on May 3, 2010 in Books. Print this post Email this Post

Short Story: Edgemont Drive by E.L.Doctorow

Have you read a short story written entirely in dialog? The latest issue of New Yorker has one such story by E.L.Doctorow. No quotation marks, no ‘he-said/she-said’s, no explanations or descriptions – just lines and lines of dialog. Stylistically very chic, don’t you think?

So he’s there. What—hitting on your wife?
No, that won’t happen. It’s not what he’s about. I’m pretty sure.
So what’s the problem?
He comes on like some prissy fuss-pot poet, doesn’t have it together, drives a junk heap, claims to have quit his teaching job but was probably fired. And, with all of that, you know he’s a player.
Yeah, I know people like that.
His difficulties work in his favor. He gets what he wants.

It’s about a man and his wife and their home and a weird old guy who just shows up in their driveway and sits in his car staring at their house. Feels like your kind of story? Check it out here.

Its not a story I would shout from the roof tops about, but it has inspired a writing prompt I am excited to try out: Write a short story entirely in dialog.

Anyone else wants to give it a try?

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Posted on April 24, 2010 in Short Story Month. Print this post Email this Post

Short Story: The Truth and All Its Ugly by Kylie Minor

If you had told me yesterday that I would be recommending a short story set in 2024 with impossible science-fictionesque assumptions and which features a father who encourages his son on his first experience with drugs, I would have laughed at the improbability.

But today is different. The Truth and All Its Ugly by Kylie Minor, published at Fifty-Two Stories is a wonderful wonderful read. The full text is available online here.

An excerpt to pique your interest:

It was pure joy, watching him lift that axe and drive it into that piano. Up until then his head was always in books or that damn computer. Dead trees, I’d tell him, got not one thing on milkweed and sumac, horsemint and sweet William. But now I wasn’t so sure, and now he’d caught on. “It’s what you do with the dead trees,” he said, like he was reading my mind.

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Posted on April 12, 2010 in Short Story Month. Print this post Email this Post

Distance makes the heart grow fonder

In the recent issue of P&W, Michelle Wildgen writes this:

“After years of thinking setting didn’t inspire me at all, I have come to realize that it does—but only after I’m gone. I’ve learned not to try to write about a place until I’ve left it, whether I was traveling or living there. For instance, I have written two books set in Madison, Wisconsin, but I didn’t feel an urge to set anything there until I had moved to Westchester, New York, to get an MFA. Once I was gone, Madison leapt into focus, and instead of looking out my window and going nuts trying to capture every little thing before me, distance let me edit and reimagine.”

So true, so very true!

Check out the rest of “Writers Recommend” here. Another one I liked is from January Gill O’Neil:

“There are some favorite phrases currently rolling around in my head: universal joint, hounds will hunt forever without any reward, silent as stars, boxed lunch, white athletic socks around hairy calves.”

“Part of the fun of poetry is making sense out of ordinary randomness, thereby making everyday experiences extraordinary.”

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Posted on March 16, 2010 in Writing. Print this post Email this Post

Singapore, the misunderstood child

A mail from a friend who has just moved to Singapore reminded me of this post – I had published it on another blog that I no longer maintain and was in danger of being forgotten forever. So this might be the first in the series of reposts from my almost-dead-other-blog, as relevant today as they were five years ago. I have preserved the old comments at the bottom of the post. First published on 1 December 2005

Singapore

Nguyen Tuong Van will be hanged tomorrow. In Singapore. Because he was trafficking heroin. It makes me sad – this is in a world where terrorists go scot-free. Even people who had run concentration camps have had lesser sentences. I am against capital punishment, except perhaps in cases of the most heinous crimes. And in my books, drug trafficking just isn’t one of them. Much has been talked about Nguyen Tuong Van’s death sentence. I have nothing new to add, so I will just say “Peace be to all”.

But the incident has made me of think of Singapore today and put me in a melancholic mood. Its probably not the best time to talk well of Singapore. Yet, I feel like writing about Singapore, as I knew it.

Every once in a while friends and acquaintances, often those who haven’t stepped outside of Changi airport, decide to tell me their views on Singapore. Sometimes, they tell me it is such a beautiful efficiently run city. Some others just can’t believe how people can live in a place that has such a stifling government and care about nothing else, but their materialistic needs.

I don’t usually bother to argue. At the end of the day, its not my home country and my feelings of loyalty are, at best, stretched. But I can’t help but feel that Singapore is misunderstood. Singapore is the quiet girl in the class who gets straight As in the exams, but is never really popular in school because she is such a prude. Yet she tries really really hard to be the cool-kid. Her parents tell her that she should “seriously” have fun! Yet, they tell her that grades are all that really matters. The poor prude girl is really confused. Could anyone have known that beneath the pristine doll-like image, there is a silently troubled child, with a complicated and sullied inside, every bit as human as anyone can be.

People don’t see the real Singapore – the real Singapore doesn’t exist in the tall financial centers or the huge malls or the parliament buildings, where they make us believe democracy has some role to play. Singapore is not limited to the yuppies who aspire to buy the latest Porsche or the Armani-aspiring corporate mogul-wanna-be who couldn’t care less about what happens around them, as long as they get their 5 (or is it more now? )Cs. Thats just what is presented to the outside world. In fact, even many Singaporeans see themselves through those tinted shades.

If you want to see the heart and soul of Singapore, wander not through Millenia walk or Suntec city, but through the narrow roads of China Town or Little India or Arab street, or even the little parks around Bishan or Ang Mo Kio. The fat lady who sells you the Char Kway Teow or the little girl who brings you the ice kacang at the hawker centers, has a story to tell, if only if you had the time to listen. Singapore is not a land of boring, law-abiding people who don’t think and who work and walk like machines – its a place with as much life and emotion as any other, if only you would look beyond the surface.

If the heart of India is in her villages, the heart of Singapore is in her HDB flats. Thats where the dreams are dreamt and tears are wept. If the Singapore government doesn’t hear the collective sigh of the heartlands, they would miss out on reaching out to the real Singapore. And if they don’t let us see the real Singapore, we will all go back with our own false images. If Singapore seems to you like a land straight out of Pleasantville, its only because someone has put a thick filter which blocks out all the colours, somewhere between your eyes and the reality. And you know who that someone is. It is often one’s flaws that makes us human, and thus beautiful. As you desperately try to hide your flaws, you also hide yourself. Singapore, isn’t it about time that you let us see the real you?

The next time someone talks to me about Singapore, I just wish they would talk about not just the concrete buildings or the super clean streets or the democracy that doesn’t seem to be, but something less superficial. Lets talk about the heart of Singapore, shall we?

 

 

Comments (In the spirit of free speech, the comment moderation was off. But please note that the comments below are not my opinions)

  1. Singapore, the  misunderstood child

    "Singapore is the quiet girl in the class who gets straight As in the exams, but is never really popular in school because she is such a prude."
    S beautifully introduces us to the real Singapore behind the glitz and glamor of a fishing vi…

    Trackback by DesiPundit — December 1, 2005 @ 6:56 am

  2. Most Beautiful post I have seen in a along time, excellent post. Yes, every country has its hells kitchens and madhobani or as you said HDB flats. You or anyone couldn’t have presented it in a better way.

    Comment by tony — December 1, 2005 @ 8:41 am

    3. Continued…

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Posted on March 12, 2010 in Travel. Print this post Email this Post

The Smell of Rice

image

A heart-rending story  (via Bloomer) -

“ […]Her family was hungry, but her neighbors had rice; the smell of it was tormenting her. So her mother hugged and comforted her, which made her realize that her mother’s smell was so much more important to her than that of the rice. Then her mother died, but before she did, she asked her husband to take some of the little money they had, to buy her daughter some rice. She wanted her daughter to have that comfort.[…] ”

The original story is at the Afghan Women’s Writing Project website.

There is no worse fear for a mother than the fear of not being able to feed her child. It’s been only fifteen days, but I know.

Someday, I should re-write this tale from the mother’s POV.

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Posted on January 5, 2010 in Writing. Print this post Email this Post