The Books I Read

The vacations have slowly but surely, inched closer to the finish point. All I have done, rather guiltily do I admit, is, to have a good time. After the nice 3 weeks in Kerala, a kind of stupor has set in. It is expected, since I am sitting all day at home, doing nothing. The only thing worth mentioning is the books I am reading.





I started off with Ian McEwan's Atonement. I hadn't read any of McEwan's earlier works. Atonement begins off slowly, and takes a lot of time to build up the characters and the setting, perhaps a tad too long for someone with my patience level. Also, the ramifications of small events that are described during that fateful day at the Tallis household are brought to the understanding much much later in the story. So, the first 100 or so pages trudge on, with small events taking on detailed accounts. However, the story gains speed once the effects of the little events start to emerge. And it is only then that the story becomes enjoyable. By the end of the book, I found it a good read, and I found McEwan's style of writing: of etching out strong characters, and focussing on the little things that set the mood of the story quite interesting and admirable.

And then I read Amsterdam.



McEwan does a far better job in Amsterdam, which also won him the Booker Prize. Here the characters are equally well developed and the small instances equally important; but the story doesn't languish as it does in Atonement. It moves with good pace, making it a thoroughly enjoyable book.



I also went through old classic Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. This was another book I relished, not due to any great literary flavor I found in it, but for the dilemmas it forces upon the reader. Throughout, the book, it seems that Huxley is asking the reader's the question of what they want their future to be- A place where there is no imbalance arising from the free will of human beings or one which champions the independence of the human mind. And he doesn't leave any definite answer. And neither could I come up with one.




Then, I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Another great book, this is one is. After Atonement, the non-stop pace of One Hundred Years... is almost like Shankar Mahadevan's Breathless compared to some slow, melodious ghazal. The literary style was again, catchy- what with a third person narrative and rather frank assessment of the rather colorful members of the Buendia family, which was at times, irresistibly humorous. The story is amazing, though sometimes I got weary of the pace with the novel moved.[I almost wished I could get to spend more time, or pages, with the patriarch Jose Arcadio Buendia, and so too with the ever mysterious Melquiades, or for that matter, any of the other characters]. But still, the novel remains a unique feat, and Marquez, an amazing storyteller.



And last, but not the least, came Anurag Mathur's The Inscrutable Americans. A good book, the main humor comes from Gopal's letters back home, where he explains to them the America he comprehends. Apart from that, the story does get a bit serious in between, and the humor isn't as well panned out as in One Hundred Years... , but nevertheless a very good read.

I am now starting off with John Banville's The Sea. Let's see what that has to offer.