About books

This has been another spring of books.  This time fiction.

If you ever doubted that racism existed in the West, forgot what living in a colonial regime or being treated as sub human because of your religion or gender identity feels like, then I have a few to recommend that are excellent reminders.  I believe it is important to remember so we can viscerally relate even better to untold atrocities being perpetuated today against colonised peoples living in apartheid states and know that our own privileges are being rolled back even as we speak.  We are being socially engineered to be in a perpetual state of distraction so we don’t meaningfully comprehend that the distribution of wealth is a zero sum game.  There cannot be rich people if the majority are not poor. My book recommendations include

Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Says to Me and The Ministry of Utmost Unhappiness

Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

EM Forster’s Passage to India

A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

Even PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves books, two of which I read are replete with the privilege of the feudal class – though I read them for their levity

Tan Twe Eng’s – The Garden of the Evening Mists and The Gift of Rain (in progress)

These are books written by extraordinary writers so you don’t have to read them to feel virtuous but to be enthralled by the magical wordsmanship and the deep thoughts and emotions they provoke.

No I don't have a Kindle.  I dont have the luxury of time, with my work, managing finances and other such admin, cooking, cleaning, eating and sleeping, to sit with a book.  I love walking.  And I listen to audiobooks at 1.5 speed, as I walk.  I do like to support independent book stores.  On the next street over, in London, we have one called Broadway Market Book Store run by two young men and that's where I order and buy books.   I like reading a physical book in the morning with my coffee.  After that, I turn on my Audiobooks. I borrow them on my Canada library card, which is such an awesome privilege.  I can download upto 50 books (I think) on my card.  I usually have 3 or 4 since I am consuming them quite fast right now.  After Inheritance of Loss, I was in the mood for some light reading and I read 3 PG Wodehouse last week alone.  After that I read Albert Camus' Stranger and I just finished re-reading Arvind Adiga's The White Tiger (re-read).  I was in a rut re reading (fiction) until last year when I discovered Murakami.  Now, I cannot seem to get enough.  I am preoccupied with solitude.  I love my aloneness and love reliving passages from the books I read.  

I actually love the themes/genres of all manner of books. However, with audio books you cannot get too picky.  So I download all the award winners and classics to get a peak into the minds of great writers. In the last two weeks, I read another book by EM Forster "Where Angels Fear to Tread", then Kiran Desai's "Inheritance of Loss", then the PG, then Camus and now Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger.  I am reading the physical book "The Gift of Rain" by Tan Twang Eng.  I have downloaded Ondaatje, Rushdie (I dont know if I can stomach his writing) and another book of short stories by Canadian authors covering its entire wide landscape.  It is called Across Canada by Stories.  I like books with geographic opulence that are atmospheric.  Eng's books have that quality.   - descriptive of mountains, misty views, Japanese gardens.  

Not exactly on that theme, I read this poem that I liked very much in Eng's above book today.  It is by Solomon Bloomgarden translated from Hebrew

IN the blossom-land JapanSomewhere thus an old song ran.

Said a warrior to a smith

Hammer me a sword forthwith.

Make the blade

Light as wind on water laid.

Make it long

As the wheat at harvest song.

Supple, swiftAs a snake, without rift,

Full of lightnings, thousand-eyed!

Smooth as silken cloth and thinAs the web that spiders spin.

And merciless as pain, and cold.""

On the hilt what shall be told?""

On the sword's hilt, my good man

"Said the warrior of Japan,"Trace for me

A running lake, a flock of sheepAnd one who sings her child to sleep."

When I re-read books I find I have remembered them quite differently from how they are!  Either my memory is awful or I have evolved to understand their essence better.  

As for the books I read before these, Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth was one such. I remember that this book came out almost 30 years ago.  It is set in the early 1950s where the colonial vestige still pervaded middle class lives in Calcutta, Benares and mythical places around there.  It is about a family trying to get a girl married, her suitors and who she chooses to end up with.  It is breezy and gives you a peak into a different era.  I absolutely love EM Forster's writing.  It is so insightful and deep.  His "Where Angels Fear to Tread" is set in Italy.  The way he describes different cultures and the time, place and people who inhabit them is quite wonderful.   

I am trying to write everyday. I got myself a substack account and started posting my musings there.  No one has looked at or commented on any of my posts so it is for an audience of one - for all intents and purposes.  

I love all kinds of writing but dont read thrillers and mysteries anymore.  Maybe its because BBC Crime Shows have spoilt me. I prefer watching them, to reading thrillers. 

Anyway, cheerio, it was nice spending this late hour writing this!  Going to sleep now.  

I look forward to more reading, walking, meditating and revelling in aloneness!