iGot! iGloat!

The loot so far.

THE CHRISTMAS MYSTERY - Jostein Gardner 

I'll forgive him 'Sophie's World' if this turns out well. One and only chance, before I get seriously prejudiced, Gardner. Historical/Theological Mystery. New Genre.

MY SUMMER OF LOVE - Helen Cross 

starring 15 year old Mona, a drinker, thief and fruit-machine addict, who meets well-endowed, posh Tamsin who has an acress mother and a sister who's died of starvation. black comedy expected.

BLOODY WOMEN, IRELAND'S FEMALE KILLERS - David M. Kiely 

women murderers, my favourite yet being Kate Webster, the one who boiled the dismembered bits of her victim and tried to sell off the fat as 'the best dripping'.

PRINCE OF THE CLOUDS - Gianni Riotta

Supposedly "even more enchanting than 'Captain Corelli's Mandolin'". Promises post-WW2 Sicily, a battle scene and a beautiful Russian woman.

THE FALL - Joyce Carol Oates 

My first Oates novel. Portrait of an American family in crisis, set in the mid-20th century. The plot is quite original, to say the least. Post a disastrous honeymoon night, a young woman's newly-minted husband throws himself into the Niagara. :-)

SMALL GODS - Terry Pratchett

The sight of this one among all those lurid lurve stories taught me what 'paralyzed with pleasure' means.

AH, SWEET MYSTERY OF LIFE - Roald Dahl

Neither juvenile fiction, nor macabre short stories, this one is a side of the master i've yet to encounter. Here he writes of the eccentricities of rural life.

1066 AND ALL THAT - W.C.Sellar and R. J. Yeatman

The much-longed-for, never-expected-to-be-owned satire on textbook history.

UNDER THE EYE OF THE CLOCK - Christopher Nolan

The brilliant, handicapped young writer's autobiography, almost.

LONGITUDE - Dava Sobel

Beautiful, beautiful, hardback. Coincidentally, right when the kids and i are working on the 'imaginary lines' too.

GOODFELLAS - Nicholas Pileggi

A look into the career and machinations of Henry Hill, a New York mobster, turned Federal Witness, turned one of the most hunted men of our times.

TOMORROW - Graham Swift

An intimate story. A look at long-standing marriage, parenthood and the fabric of families.

THE TEENAGE WORRIER'S GUIDE TO LURVE - Ros Asquith

If this is anything like Adrian Mole, then i'm blessed to have found this, being surrounded as i am, by tiny people with hormones doing funny things to them.

MISS PURDY'S CLASS - Annie Murray

Young schoolmarm in the early 1900s in the poorest area of Birmingham, and all the troubled children she comes to know and love. Inspirational almost-chick-lit. Got a nagging feeling the Hollywood factory has already moviefied this.

OPEN - Lisa Moore

Getting compared to Annie Proulx is no mean achievement. A collection of 10 stories.

THE BOOK OF GENERAL IGNORANCE - Stephen Fry/Alan Davies

If a book says 'George Washington's teeth previously belonged to a hippopotamus', i've discovered i'll buy it.
 

101 THINGS TO DO BEFORE YOU'RE OLD AND BORING - Richard Horne and Helen Szirtes

I guess a frog-in-the well provincial could be bettered by some armchair inspiration.

ROAD RAGE - Ruth Rendell

She, and she alone knows how to make a whodunnit moving, literate, insightful and thrilling. The best there is.
 

E IS FOR EVIDENCE - Sue Grafton

Kinsey Millhone, my favorite kick-ass sleuth, in another of her adventures. 

 

if i needed any more evidence of approaching senility, this is it. more non-fiction here than fiction.



Notice:

Amoeba, Stuts, B, Gunji;

I will NOT share. Unless, of course, you buy a few and share with me first.

Hyper-critical, Reader-on-a-Mission Sailor Man;

keep your comments to yourself.

poster art

while hunting for old propaganda posters, i came across these lovely vintage travel posters.


great use of colour on the hawaii poster. the new york one is pure sophistication. i like the smart persuasion of the delta air poster for atlanta.





totally beautiful. would look great on a wall. not so great as a poster, though. what are people to think?

lovely colour and juxtaposition. an eye-catcher. these games went on to be called the 'austerity games', a nod to the privations and rationing of the post-war years.

a commercial poster. lovely use of colour and an unusual perspective. the work of an artist. the foot sticking out is a nice touch.

ww-2 propaganda poster focusing on the anglo-american alliance. rather direct, with hitler and goebbels lurking with evil intentions in the background - diminished figures compared to the robust allies on the foreground.

che always makes for great graphics. such an iconic picture. what a charismatic man. what could he have been thinking of, to have prompted that far off gaze? certainly not being emblazzoned on t-shirts and coffee mugs, at any rate.

 

small vehicles of joy. 

iBuy and then iThink

one should not covet a book by its cover, but one does.
i am such a sucker for catchy design and colour.

the Hachette editions of Alexander Mc.call Smith's Mma. Ramotswe books have such excellent woodcut-style cover art by Hannah Firmin, that i cannot help going into a trance imagining them on my bookshelf and wake up to find that i have bought them.
not that i'm complaining.

the gentle rhythm of the narrative and the contemplative pace of the stories bring to mind vacations spent lying stomach-down, reading and eating, to the accompaniment of the rain pattering down outside. Dusty Botswana of the sleepy, sweet-smelling cattle is a far cry from the robust lushness of my Malabar Coast, but the abundance of good food - the produce fresh from the garden - the chickens picking away in yards, the possibility of pausing whatever one is doing to just 'sit and talk'...all of that is the same.

  

 




sadly, leisure is such a lost art nowadays.
noone seems to know what to do without a computer or a cell-phone or a television to amuse oneself. why are all the realms that one could cross, in the snugness of one's thoughts so out of bounds for so many now?

i had once asked my students to think of a few things they could do to amuse themselves on a dark rainy evening, with the electricity cut off. they just could not! except for scaring people in the dark, and for telling scary stories to each other by torchlight, that is.

i wonder if we have taken away something vital from our children. the connection to the soil they stand upon, and that which has made all of us.

the worm turns

Read: 'love and longing in bombay' by vikram chandra - dark, funny, intimate, poetic, realistic, all at once. he takes the claustrophobic closeness and familiarity of bombay (i love him for calling the city that. glad he did not make it sound like the middle-aged-maharashtrian-housewifely sounding mum'bai') and makes a glowing collection of interconnected short stories out of it all. a long time since i really enjoyed reading indian authors writing in english. don't get me wrong. some (like rohinton mistry) are a delight, but the familiarity of the subject matters sometimes put me off. i am seriously looking forward to chandra's next. it is a nice thing. this looking forward.

Also read: 'ladies coupe' by anita nair. good in parts, with some really well formed sentences, but i cant help feeling that it is a bit too forced sometimes in its effort to be realistic. and the ending does not fit at all. the characterization goes all wrong there. middle-aged straitlaced spinster having a change of heart overnight, and suddenly becoming a new woman, and celebrating this new found emancipation by seducing a young man she just met on a beach? improbable, to say the least.  

Re-read: 'kari' by amruta patil. the graphic novel is beautifully laid out in black and white and an occasional splash of colour. i read it more for the look than for the story. the story is indeed interesting, and told through the tongue-in-cheeky, vulnerable, yearning voice of the boy-girl protagonist, but it is the graphic effect that is more pleasurable to me. 

i miss having illustrations in the books that i read. who decided that adults dont like to look at pictures as they read? no fair.

Also re-reading: 'persepolis' by marjane satrapi. i have a feeling i shall be doing a few more of this re-reading stuff. of the same book, i mean. the graphics are lovely, and the text is both direct and intelligently funny. i loved this book.  

Reading: 'wyrd sisters' by terry pratchett. what can i say? pratchett is king. i hope (a) he never dies or, (b) if he does, he does it very, very, very many years later. 

Also reading: 'literature and the child' by lee galda and bernice e.cullinan. it covers all genres of childrens'/young adults' literature, offers author profiles, exhaustive booklists and teaching ideas. thought provoking and detailed, galda and cullinan take a good look at how some of the deepest issues known to us are addressed through literature and how our children respond to it. themes like racism, incest, death, identity-crisis, perspectives, self-worth and adolescence are a part of the warp and weft of all literature, and they need to be sensitively treated while in the hands and minds of a child. it is rather steeply priced, though. sometimes i wish i had pots of money. allright, one pot at an opportune moment would do as well.

Dying to read: 'the naked man' by desmond morris. purely scientific interest. and it has some very, shall we say, interestingly named chapters. only thing is, this will be an exchange book. the old ek hath le, ek hath de, kind of deal. to get my paws on this, i'll have to temporarily part with morris's 'the naked ape'. the thought hurts me a great deal. not the getting part, but the giving part. my heart bleeds. i hate lending books. if i had a baby, i might lend her/him to someone for a little while quite gladly, but lending books is beyond me. what this says about my depraved state of womanliness i cannot say, but there it is.

if wishes could be horses....silver jubilee approacheth!

the numbers seem incredible. come tomorrow, n i'l be 25! quarter-century. two and a half decades of walking this earth, and nothing major achieved. time to compose the to-do-before-i-die list.
here goes;
a) travel to the mountains with a biker party, roughing it out, eating momos by the wayside, staying at dharamshalas, breathing fresh air, feeling the wind whip through my hair...
b) straighten the curly cloud
c) adopt a kid
d) get glamorous
e) retire at 40 to a stone cottage in laddakh. totally unwired - no phone, internet, TV
f) volunteer teaching at a school which needs it the most. laddakh again? in the snow bound winters when schools shut down for lack of teachers?
g) learn to play the violin
h) learn urdu. bliss! to be able to read manto and chugtai in the original...
i) get a puppy- a pug or an alsatian
j) write a book
k) buy mom a house in kerala with a mango orchard around it. hens, a vegetable patch, a central courtyard, a swing, red plaster on the sit-out floor....
l) wear an off-shoulder dress! cherry red!
m) learn to apply eye-liner. properly, i mean. atleast enough not to look like a kid has been at one's eyes drawing particularly ziz-zaggy zig zags around them. looking like a colicky panda kills all glamour, past experience tells me
n) learn to eat with chopsticks
o) sponsor a kid's education
p) learn to cook biryani
q) learn karate. will be such a pleasure to kick certain people in the mouth!
r) build my own library
s) backtrack across turkey. with someone.
t) take a road-trip. again with someone.
u) find the someone.
v) watch basic instinct without flinching
w) teach a unit on shakespeare. make it fun. make kids fall in love with the bard's golden words.
x) watch 'the phantom of the opera', and 'jesus christ superstar' live
y) go to the promised land, visit the wailing wall, float on the dead sea, live in a commune
z) swim with the dolphins, snorkel


so many things. will have to keep updating this.

oh, in case any of the gang is wondering what to give me for the b'day, here are a few subtle hints...picture book style.

these are a few of my favourite things.....


a greek island. a house on it. simple stone cottage. freshwater spring.







a pug! to make me feel less bad about the early crows-feet and laugh lines.






a girl's best friend...a pair of them. solitaires.








a bonsai.

hp7 atlast

i just got the HP7(that's Harry Potter 7 for the uninitiated) today!

Read 2 chapters while gulping down some snacks, drinking some scalding coffee, tying my shoelaces, combing my hair and wearing my jacket (quite gymnastic of me,what?) prior to rushing to school for the sadela DTT.

at this rate, i might start rivalling shraddha at time management. till now, the mad hatter and i shared the same idea about time- a kind of hopeless exasperation. i'd even started thinking of time as a very malicious 'he'.

saw the sun after three rainwashed days. nice to see the smiling face of Phoebus.
and oh! i just blew out the fuse of the bedrooms. again. lucky i had to come to school today. escaped the customary tonguelashing from mom. this is what they call the silver lining, i guess.(or is this particular dog having her day atlast?)
whatever.

hmmm......another day gone feeling the deepest of blues.

i just realised i need this. badly.

(except the diaper bit,of course. substitute- tissues)

i read a bit out of alice in wonderland to the jaded senior citizens of grade 6. one whippersnapper made the amazing statement that when she had read it first, she found it to be the 'most boring book of her life' (which is of a vintage of some 11 years). gak! people hating the march hare? strange,strange world. strange,strange times.

oh well. she did go ahead to pay me the momentous compliment of saying i made it sound interesting.

now i can die happy. my life's purpose is served. nirvana, ho!