Boking through libraries

How often do you use your public library and how do you use it? Has the coffeehouse/bookstore replaced the library? Did you go to the library as a child? Do you have any particular memories of the library? Do you like sleek, modern, active libraries or the older, darker, quiet, cozy libraries?

I have memberships of two libraries but now I seldom visit those. After I changed my residence, I find both are too far away from my new home. That completely puts me off. Nowadays I love to visit bookstores, where I can browse to my heart's content. I prefer buying books.

When I was in school, I loved my school library. It introduced me to real great books, like the classics and poetry. It was one of my favourite places. When I was not playing Basketball, I was always in the library.

I love old libraries. Wherever I go, I make it a point to visit the older ones. Somehow, the past and present co-exist in such places. The modern, computerised ones have an antiseptic feel which is not conducive for my reading. I wish for the old, cosy ones to be back.

I remembered a while back that I used to run a small library if you can call it that, when I was a kid. We used to pool our resources and buy books, or collect old books, number those and I was in charge of those. Most kids in our block were contributors as well as readers. That way we got to read many books. Now my 13 year-old niece does that. Believe me, I never did mention it to her. Do you think it is in the blood or what?

The Magician's Assistant by Ann Patchett

Parsifal is dead. That is the end of the story.

Title: The Magician's Assistant
Author: Ann Patchett
ISBN: 8790156006217
Publisher: Harcourt Brace/1997
Pages: 357

Give a brief summary of the book:

After the death of Parsifal, a magician, his wife Sabine...who was also his assistant for twenty years..is astounded to learn that the family he always denied having is very much alive. Sabine is devastated by this and triels to unravel the secrets of his life. When Parsifal's family invite her to visit them in Nebraska, she leaves Los Angeles for the cold, bitter planes of Nebraska. And she is somehow sucked into that family, into the love they share

Likes:

Patchett manages to build up a great story. She slowly reveals the secret of Parsifal's deception. Sabine might have married him but he has a steady relationship with someone else. His family takes some time to assimilate this. But they love Sabine for herself, not because she is Parsifal's widow. Sabine is the magician's assistant... a lesser known personality...but she knows about magic as much as any magician. No magician can do without any assistant.

Dislikes:

I felt it got a bit repetitive in the middle. Although I wanted to know Sabine's feelings and emotions but somehow it was diluted by the slow pace. It did pick up in the end though.

Additional Thoughts:

Ann Patchett's prose is good. Her thoughts are lucid. Her characters are very much real. They are endearing too despite foibles and follies. Patchett has added fantasy elements in the dream sequences. I especially liked that. Sabine can interact with those characters in her dreams. Also the fact that Sabine is practical and a realist. On her quest to find the truth, Sabine too finds herself and experiences love in a way, which had been denied to her.

Also reviewed by

Margaret of BooksPlease

Musing about tracking reading

Do you keep track of what and/or how many books you read? How long have you been doing this? What's your favorite tracking method, and why?If you don't keep track, why not?

Since I started book blogging, I do keep track of my reading religiously. Writing reviews help. I started this blog three years back but started posted reviews regularly since June '07. Before that I used to note down the books I read in a journal. No reviews but just the titles.

Now writing reviews keeps me vigilant of what I read. Book blogging is a good way of keeping track of what I read. I also write down the titles I read in a journal. No excel sheets till date!

Short story: The Parade of You by Barth Anderson

Click to read The Parade of You by Barth Anderson. I found it at the Archived fiction of at The Journal of Mythic Arts.

Take a cold, translucent candle from the child in the bulb-eyed fish mask, and pray for your beloved to die. Light the candle from a torch at the woodland path's gate. Say, “Burn.”

This is a dark story with fantasy elements. Mostly deals with Death as one of the characters.

For Death is the doomed hero, a mask of action. He steps forward, and with two mighty hammer blows knocks the corpse backwards. The creature's hands have been cut off so that the actor playing Death may easily defeat it. Protect us, your people, King Death. Bash it just like that. Yes. Rain your hammer down upon the corpse's brow. Crack its yellow mask and reveal the dead man's face so we can see that this was our neighbor, our countryman, before he did not die. Spatter the nearby oak trunk with gore, a starburst of blood upon the ground around you.

The narrator is talking too us telling us what to do. As the title suggests, the parade consists of us, facing many fantasy elements and finally death. Mythical elements exist with concrete images. Scary part exists with rationality. At the end of it, darkness of death gives way to light of death.

Not a figure. Not a mask. Death is seven egret-prowed boats, whose necks double back upon themselves as if in flight.

Those who like unusual stories should give it a chance.

My Father's Paradise by Ariel Sabar

Title: My Father's Paradise**
Author: Ariel Sabar
ISBN: 9781565124905
Publisher: Algonquin Books/2008
Pages: 325

I had requested for this book from the publicist of the author and he was kind enough to send it to me. When I started to read this book, I couldn't put it down and did it at one go.

It is a memoir but works very well as a novel. It follows three cultures, three countries and four decaded before it concludes. A fascinating account.

Ariel Sabar's father Yona Sabar is a renowned professor at UCLA and is a well known linguist. Ariel thinks his father is weird and wishes to know nothing about him. The turning comes when Ariel gets married and has a son of his own. Then he has a sudden desire to know all about his father, his traditions and the cultural ethos. He and his father undertake a journey backwards, which started some forty years back.

Yona belongs to Zakho in Iraq, where Kurdish Jews lived for more than three thousand years. They lived peacefully alongside Christians and Muslims and spoke Aramaic, which was also spoken by Jesus. With no written script, it had survived by word of mouth. Yona could still speak it and was much sought after because of it.

Most Kurdish Jews had to leave Iraq in the 1950s for the newly created Israel, as many of them were attacked and killed in the post World War II. Yona was one of them, who rich past was wiped out in that exodus. He had belonged to the family of dyers who were rich and well respected. His grand-father used to pray all night in the tiny mud-hut synagoue and was well known for it.

Yona struggles to survive in Israel, studying in night school, working in the day time. He finally decides to live for US to better himself. Uprooted twice from familiar grounds, he retreats into himself, witholding his culture within himself. When father and son venture out, Ariel learns a lot about his father's Kurdish background and is awed by it.

This book takes us into an unknown world of mystic men, rich cultural ethos, the trials of immigration, assmilating it with the present. Love and traditions are at conflict, yet to be a part of such a rich heritage finally makes Ariel understand his father. It is his legacy for his sons too. Ariel Sabar's writing is very beautiful, engrossing and his awe for the Kurdish Jews comes through.

I recommend this for all those who wish to know about ancient cultures, and their struggles for survival in the present world. It also tells us so much about places, we don't know anything about.

Mainline to the heart and other poems by Clive Matson

Title: mainline to the heart and other poems
Author: Clive Matson
ISBN: 9781587901393
Publisher: Regent Press/2009
Pages: 85

I had read this poetry book a while back but got around reviewing it now. I had not heard of Clive Matson before this.

Clive Matson wrote this book of poetry in 1966, that period in which sex, drugs and religion were burning issues. His poetry too pertains to that with an exploding intensity. With raw honesty, those touch our inner core.

On the surface, his poetry might depict celebrating sex and drugs but those also show that true joy has nothing to do with the baser instincts. The poems dwells on the wounded, bruised state of mind. Hitting hard at times. The poetry may border on pornography but are handled with such sensitivity which is very rare to find.

....She's is not good enough for me, oh no!
Besides her breasts are too small.
I give woman a disease.
A woman in love with me:
......................................Trouble.
.............................Man's conceit

~~~Page 19, Talk about love

.......................................Even the peyote/LSD
taste of ecstasy and peace with the world
soured to nausea by a growling stomach
and my aching groin

~~~Page 25, The Jungle

................Opium today.
..................................My Brain is loaded.
.....................Put down
the spike, wipe a red dribble
oozing out the hole in my arm.
The whole arm lit bright by the sun.
......................................................Blink-Blink


~~~Page 27, Psalm


I tried to turning on love when its blush had faded
Pressed her hard for salvation and she burst
in my hand exploding bile that
brought me down to Earth.

~~~Page 73, Love Soured


The poems stay within the mind for a long time after reading those. The emotions ooze from each page. A book worth reading but not for those who like everything nicely tied up.

Sunday Book Coveting

Thanks to Guardian, I covet the following books this Sunday. Posted the snippets from the same source.

What I talk about when I talk about running by Haruki Murakami

When Haruki Murakami starts to talk about running, he could end up talking about almost anything: girls' ponytails, Rolling Stones albums, the clouds in Hawaii; all the novelist's quirks are here in compact form. But mostly this memoir is simply about running itself - Murakami completes at least one marathon every year - and about writing. "Most of what I know about writing fiction," he says, "I learned by running every day." True to form, the book's physique and pace are a long-distance runner's, light and whippety, seldom slowing to anything less than a breezy, pop-existentialist jog: "On cold days, I think about how cold it is. And about heat on the hot days ... but really, I don't think much of anything worth mentioning."

Human Love by Andrei Makine

In a prison hut on the Angola-Zaire border lies a man, almost a corpse. It's the beginning of Angola's long civil war and this is Elias Almeida, Angolan orphan and Soviet agent. Human Love is his story: a tale of hopes and betrayals in a region of Africa torn apart by competing cold war ideologies. It's also a love story, in which the human - and humane - love of the title struggles to overcome the crushing revolutionary zeal of impersonal powers. Makine's writing plays on striking images and uncomfortable contrasts. Africa here is a vast elephant, carved up by hunters; fat African conference delegates represent starving people. Lauded in France, Makine ought to be far better known in this country: Human Love offers a dark, delicate introduction to his work.

The Stepmother's Diary by Fay Weldon

Weldon's 28th novel is a humorous dissection of female relations and the perils of adopting a new family in a second marriage. Sappho is married to Gavin, who enjoys a suspiciously over-intimate relationship with his daughter Isobel. To make this female competition all the more stifling, above the marital bed hangs a portrait of Gavin's late wife Isolde. Watching over this Freudian labyrinth is Sappho's mother Emily, a "widowed, sexually active psychoanalyst" to whom Sappho has entrusted her diary to keep it from Isobel. These days, Weldon suggests, it's not the wicked stepmothers you have to watch out for, it's the evil stepdaughters, who "change from little darlings into Winehouse monsters almost overnight".

Weekly Geeks: Linking reviews

Quoting Verbatim from this week's Weekly Geeks post:


When Dewey started Weekly Geeks, one of the first projects she encouraged us to do was link our book reviews to each other. Sadly, I've fallen of the wagon on this one. For people like me who need a refresher and for all the new Weekly Geeks this is a topic that could use repeating.

Let's look at Dewey's original post : Dewey's post.

Here's what we'll do:

1. Write a post encouraging readers to look through your archives (if you have your reviews in a particular place on your blog, point them there), and find the books that they have also written reviews. Tell them to leave a link to their review on your review post. For example, I've written a review for Gods Behaving Badly and Jane Doe leaves a link to her review of Gods Behaving Badly in the comments section of my review.

2. Edit your reviews to include those links in the body of the review post.
3. Visit other Weekly Geeks and go through their reviews. Leave links for them.
4. Leave a note somewhere on your blog to let people know this is your new policy.
5. Write a post later this week letting us know how your project is going!

Now I say my piece here:

1. I do try to link to reviews as much as I can

2. My review links can be found at the top left corner on this blog. Clicking on those will take you to specific reviews.
For easy reference, I post those links here:

2009 Reviews

Short story reviews

Books reviewed in 2009

Books reviewed in 2008

Books reviewed in 2007

Books reviewed in 2006

3. My email id too is on the left sidebar of this blog. Feel free to write to me about linking.

And I have had the following on my blog since Dewey's post:

Review link exchange

In case you have reviewed any book I have reviewed in here, please do leave a link on that post or my last post. You can email me the link too at gautami dot tripathy at gmail dot com, if you wish. I will link it to my review, as soon as possible!


4. As Dewey wished, it is all about building the book blogging community. So let's do it NOW! We must not let her spirit fade away.

YOU CAN LEAVE YOUR REVIEWING URLS HERE, IN THE COMMENTS SECTION OF THIS POST AS WELL.

Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami

Title: Sputnik Sweetheart
Author: Haruki Murakami

ISBN: 0375726055
Publisher: Vintage/2001
Pages: 210

Sputnik Sweetheart is my second book by Murakami. As I had liked Kafka on the Shore, I bought this book. This has been written before that and is entirely different.

The narrator, known as "K" is in love with Sumire, who aspires to be a writer. She is his best friend and she also likes him a lot but she doesn't have any romantic feelings for him. She falls in love with Miu, an older and very sophisticated businesswomen. When Miu offers Sumire a job, she grabs it although K has some misgivings. Sumire disappears in a remote island in Greece and Miu calls K. He leaves everything to go search for Sumire. There he has strange visions reading her writings and is haunted by her thoughts. But his longings for her remain unfulfilled.

With beautiful prose, it is a meditation into the human mind, its deepest desires and longings. Love maybe unrequited but it is very much there and very much real. It gives K pain yet he considers love so beautiful. Same is the case with Sumire. She loves Miu but Miu does not return her feelings. Miu has her own demons to kill. Sputnik Sweetheart is for those who wantto dwell deep into the human psyche. Sumire is there yet not there.In other words, it is a stream of consciousness novel.

Very apt title as all three characters try to connect with each other but cannot. Isn't it true for all of us? We are essentially all alone.

Booking Through Best Bad Books

“What’s the best ‘worst’ book you’ve ever read — the one you like despite some negative reviews or features?”

One author, not book comes instantly in my mind. I find that Gabriel Garcia Marquez is not liked by most readers. However, I like his books. Especially his short story collections. I agree that he has to grow on to the reader. One must not expect his books to be fast paced or easy reads. Going slowly over each word and imagining it, is the best way to read him.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy too has not been liked by many a book lover. They considered the language to sparse and stark. And that is precisely what worked for me. Rather well.