What I talk about when I talk about running

I am not a Murakami fan; in fact, I have hardly read any of his novels to completion before. I started reading "Kafka on the Shore", but promptly gave it up as I realized that the genre was not really up my alley.

So why did I decide to purchase a copy of "What I talk about when I talk about running", a memoir by Haruki Murakami? Because I am a runner. At least I try to be one, despite the many obstacles I've faced and keep facing in my attempts.

I started running roughly a year after we moved to Canada. Before then, I had always been a couch potato. I never played any sport as a kid and was used to taking the bus or the "auto" to go places back home in India. I cringed at the thought of physical exercise and I had a particular fondness for the kind of high-fat yogurt that was so thick and creamy that it felt like pudding. I remember the time when, after immigrating to Canada, my husband and I used to take walks to the library, a 3-mile walk from home; before we set out, we would buy a bag of chips and a white Toblerone bar and finish them both as we walked to the library and back, a jaunt with the objective of burning calories. The result of all this: I ended up ballooning to 143 lbs in the year 2000. I don't remember any specific moment of epiphany, but that year, the exercise bug bit me.

I didn't start out running right away; first, I "power-walked" for a few months. Then I signed up for a 10K race and embarked on a run-walk program that started off with a modest 30-second run segment every 5 minutes of so. By the time I had completed my first 10K program, not only had I shed a few pounds and started to look a little more fit, I had also been initiated on the pattern of chronic injury.

My shins are my weak spots and every time I set my sight higher than a 10K run, I end up with repetitive injury in my shins. I have already recovered from 2 bad cases of "stress reactions" in my shins, the first resulting in a 1-year lay-off from running and the second a 3-month lay-off followed by physical therapy.

Despite all these injuries that don't seem to ever leave me alone, I still run. Every time I fall down, I get up and get moving on the path to become a full-time runner. Sometimes, I wonder: there are other ways to stay fit; why do I desire to be runner so much?

Nothing I have tried gives me the kind of joy that I experience right after a long, hard, sweaty, pulse-quickening run. Nothing has helped elevate my level of fitness as running. Nothing is simpler to do, more meditative, more solitary, than running. Nothing gives me the sense of achievement as setting a goal for myself - a 5K or a 10K or a 15K run - and actually training for it and completing the distance. I love running, and that is why, every time I get injured, I have the desire to fix myself and start running again.

And that is exactly why I picked up the book "What I talk about when I talk about running": because I am a runner.

I finished the book, however, with mixed feelings. As a runner, I appreciated it. I imagine I'll even re-read the book over and over again. I enjoyed the sections where he describes his running lifestyle, his thoughts and the feelings he experiences when he runs. Some of my other favourite sections in the book include his lyrical, evocative description of Charles river and his runs along its bank. I could see that he was in love with that river. His musings about the surface of the water in the river, how it changes with the seasona, how clouds are reflected on it, how various birds float and people row their boats on it, were thoroughly enjoyable. I have been to Cambridge, MA once and I could see myself running along the river as I read his words.

But this doesn't mean that his writing is stellar. On the contrary, I was very disappointed by it. Let me give you some reasons why.

Unless an author's writing stuns me utterly, I've always been turned off when he or she waxes poetic about inanimate objects, anthropomorphising them. Murakami is almost obsessed with anthropomorphising clouds and wind and rain and other non-living things. For instance, in page 5, he talks about how a thick cloud moved in during one of his runs, but quickly whisked itself away "as if it had remembered, 'Oh, I've got to do some errands'". A cloud remembering its errands! That was a little too forced and sentimental for my taste.

The book is an undeniable easy read. In fact, it reads like a blog, one not very coherent or thought through. The chronological order is not linear and it is hard to follow his journey as a runner without flipping back a few pages and re-reading some paragraphs every now and then. The narrative, the style and the diction all seem to be pedestrian. There are too many repeated phrases and too many filler words ("sort of", "kind of", "after a fashion" etc.).

Many unoriginal, obvious observations presume to be philosophical musings. For instance, in page 121, you'll encounter this sentence that is wrong on so many different levels: "And one of the privileges given to those who've avoided dying young is the blessed right to grow old." It is a tautology, essentially saying that if you don't die young, you grow old. Isn't that obvious?

Not only that, note in the same sentence: "one of the privileges...is the right". Isn't there a difference between privilege and right - the former being conditionally granted and the latter being something one is born with? How can you put those two words together like that and expect the sentence to flow well? Perhaps the author is just trying to be funny, but the sentence makes one do a double-take, at the very least, before one can move past it.

There are other similar sentences that seem to hiccup on the page: "No matter how much I write, I never reach a conclusion. No matter how much I rewrite, I never reach the destination". I don't see why those sentences are put together like that and to what logical end their pairing tends.

Overall, the book is prosaic, but as a runner, I am sure I'll cherish it and give it a second and a third chance. If you're a non-runner or someone not into endurance activities, however, I'd not recommend this book to you.

Atlas Shrugged

A couple of days ago, I posted my opinion on the philosophy of Ayn Rand, as I interpreted it in my reading of Atlas Shrugged. The book is over a thousand pages long, and has so many ideas and characters, that I felt I couldn't do justice to it by also commenting on the fictional aspects of the novel in the same post.

So, here it is, my promised note on my take on the novel, Atlas Shrugged.

This novel is the author's masterpiece, where she puts forth her views on many things including capitalism, altruism, work, marriage, love, sex, parenting, independent thinking, religion, God, goverment regulation of free enterprise and so on. This may make it sound like a treatise on Ayn Rand's philosophy at best, but it is really much more than that: it is also an intermittently nail-biting mystery story, a novel with a very original plot and unique characters. It is a novel about a man who promises to stop the motor of the world and makes that happen. It is a story of triumph, a cautionary tale, a romance mystery and a philosophical guide, all in one.

One of the first scenes in the novel is Dagny Taggart, to me the most memorable heroine of all times, sorting out an issue that has stalled the train that she is riding and owns. The engineers in the train demur, saying that their job is only to take orders and they cannot move the train without getting their orders from high above. Everyone in the chain of command that is reachable hesitates, thinking not about the feasibility of their solution as it applies to the problem at hand, but about how to deftly avoid getting blamed for any action.

Dagny takes charge as only Dagny can. She knows what needs to be done and orders her engineers to do them. She is smart, beautiful, honest, hard-working, unfazed by adverse criticism, and capable of getting things done. She is almost perfect; but is she realistic?

I've read somewhere that Rand's works are a composite of realism (depiction of things as they are on earth) and romanticism (depiction of things as they should be). I'd really categorize her work more as a caricature, a cautionary tale by depicting people to the extreme. Sort of like George Orwell's 1984.

All her characters seem to cry "extreme". Dagny Taggart, John Galt, Rearden, Francisco and the other great minds in the story are extremes of the "good" kind of people. By "good", I mean the kind of people who live and work according to the virtues in Ayn Rand's philosophy, Objectivisim: reason, independence, integrity, honesty, productiveness and pride.

And then there are the bad people, the ones whose denigration is screamingly patent in the story, the ones who possess none of the Objectivist virtues, only the opposite of them. These are James Taggart, the parasite who works the system using influence and back-scratching; Wesley Mouch, who comes up with such extreme "directives" on production and trade that, wherever in the planet you're, you will likely be happy that your own government is not peopled with such dangerous minds; Philip Rearden, who is an "altruist", but a non-producer, living on the income of his brother; Lillian Rearden, whose marriage to Hank, is a farce, where neither party gets any happiness, only heartache and hurt. To be fair, a marriage like the Reardens' and a leech like Philip do sound very plausible, but the other characters in the novel stretch the bounds of realism.

It is not just the people that sound like cautionary caricatures, it is the story itself that begs you to widen your credulity a little too much. A bunch of men creating a small community that thrives undetected in a corner in Colorado? Perhaps it was possible then, when the country was far less inhabited, but it certainly sounds like a fairy tale to me now. And what about all the resources needed for the community to thrive? Ores and water and fertile lands. They all seem to be conveniently found in that small area that the community quarantined for itself. How could that realistically happen?

In the end, the novel says that this small community gets better and better and soon builds railroads across the country. But somewhere along the way, though it is not clearly spelled out, it seems like most of the rest of the country degenerates into the oblivion of poverty and, quite possibly, death. I don't understand what is the use of building a railroad when most of your customerbase has perished. I see that the men with stellar minds have survived and established for themselves a sound and grand community. Those are the producers, the apples of Ms. Rand's eyes. But what about consumers? Don't you need more than just a small community of people to make a profit out of your railroad? Isn't your profitable production ultimately limited by the number of consumers you have? It sounds like Ms. Rand has forgotten something in the equation here; that, yes indeed, no man is an island unto himself.

The novel is a 1000-odd pages long, but I really think it would have greatly benefited from serious editing. Same theories, same tirades, same kinds of interactions pepper the book. John Galt speaks in the end, and, boy, does he speak! His speech alone is 56 pages long in my mass-market paperback edition! Yes, he does have a lot to say, a great many ideas indeed. But, I thought, give me a break! A speech for 56 pages!

That said, I enjoyed this novel quite a bit. There were times when I felt I couldn't take the harangue anymore. I had to put down the book temporarily and move on to reading other books at those times. But I did feel a magnetic pull to this book everytime I decided to give up. I think it is nature of the book - its being pregnant with ideas - that brought me back every time.

I think that the book has a lot to offer and I am better, happier and prouder for having finished it. I'd suggest taking your own sweet time with it, however, and not getting frustrated by the author's famous rants.

The Time Traveller's Wife

Death is something that I deal with very poorly.

My mother died when I was five. Her absence has been a constant presence in my life, though I seldom talk about it to even my immediate family. As a girl, I had lied on my bed several nights and wondered weeping silently so no one would hear me, "why did this happen to me?!" I hardly knew my mother when she lived, but when she died, I knew what problems a girl growing motherless faced. I longed for her so much that I even told myself stories about how she could come back one day, like how people in movies came back towards the end, supposedly rescued by a deus ex machina from an accident they had got into.

Death left a deep scar in my young heart that, even today, it depresses and frightens me in real life. Death of fictional characters, however, hasn't ever bothered me too much. After all, they are fictional, I remind myself. Besides, most times the depiction of the resulting agony is overdone that all I can say is, "please, get a hold of yourself and move on!"

But things were different today, after I finished reading "The Time Traveler's wife". The characters in this book have been developed so masterfully that I felt rent apart when one of them dies, thinking alternately of the people I have lost in my life and the ones I don't ever want to lose, feeling a mixture of longing and sorrow and fear. I put the book down, ran over to my husband, who hadn't still woken up, and gave him a squeezing hug. He was startled, and asked me if I was scared of something - I couldn't answer, I couldn't let him out of my squeeze. My heart was touched like it hadn't been by a novel before.

The novel is about a man with a unique genetic disorder that makes him travel across time. Now, that may sound like science fiction, but it is so much more. It is a love story between a man and woman that is superbly written to the very end. I fell in love with the author's style of writing - so crisp and short and sweet, yet so evocative. This is apparently the debut work of Ms. Audrey. I am spellbound and I'm surely expecting her subsequent works.

This book must be read with a mind open to the fantastical possibilities in time travel. I loath to give any more details about it for the fear of giving the story it away; all I can say is that plot is brilliant, the prose is beautiful and the characters are extremely well-done. And there is tons of clever repartee throughout the book - Henry, Clare, and Gomez, especially, seem to be experts at it. I loved it, I loved it, I loved it!

Anything more I say is not going to do justice to this beautiful novel. I'd urge everyone to read it; in my opinion it is a heartwarming modern classic.

Eat, Pray, Love

This is how it began. The book was ubiquitous: in reading group lists, on the front shelves of every bookstore, featured in TV shows - you name it. I was intrigued; little did I know that such hyped books rarely deliver on their promise.

The book is supposed to be about a woman's search for herself through her stays in Italy, India and Indonesia. Sounds promising, doesn't it? I was expecting the book to reveal some valuable truth that I can treasure as I grew older. Something that would transcend time and race and gender. Being a book on travel, I was also expecting it to take me places, make me see people and cultures, to see my own culture in a way I had not seen it before. I was smiling and patting the book all the way from the bookstore, inebriated with expectation, hardly able to restrain myself from reading it while sitting in the car at red lights.

I started reading it full of hope and excitement. The preamble to Ms. Gilbert's travels, which is a harrowing description of the breakdown of her marriage, was bearable (albeit pointless). I kept wondering how people can be so brittle as to allow a seemingly ok marriage to shatter them to such pieces. It was not as though there was physical or emotional abuse going on, at least from her description of it. If she was any good at writing and if indeed her marriage was so intolerable, she would have been able to convey the misery of it without any problem. But no, the misery was missing, and yet, our author was in shambles over it. I was puzzled, but I decided to proceed.

Then came the section on Italy, which was so much more fun to read. She talks about food and men and sights of Italy and her attempt to learn Italian. So much more fun than the author passing out on her bathroom floor talking to God! I whizzed through this section and regained my hope for the book. The hope, unfortunately, was short-lived.

For then came the section on India and I knew then that it was doomed. The author travels to India to stay at an ashram of a guru whose picture she finds in the apartment of her ex-boyfriend. Now, this is where I begin to wonder how a civilization that has achieved all that it has achieved through glorification of rational thinking can contain people that are so unbelievably irrational. You can forgive this kind of blind faith in a culture that is not exposed to the fruits of reason. But to see a well-educated American woman fall at the feet of an exotic looking "godperson", thinking that such an act is the panacea for all that is ailing her - now that is unpardonable, in my view.

This kind of "eastern spirituality as the antidote for western troubles" view bothers me a lot. To be clear, I am not against meditation. Sitting still with your own thoughts doesn't reek of irrationality as falling at the feet of a stranger or waking up at 4am and tormenting yourself by reading pages and pages of incomprehensible hymns in Sanskrit (while thinking non-stop about how much those same hymns are tormenting every cell of your body). But that is not the pinnacle of irrationality in this book.

The pinnacle of irrationality, really, is the kundalini snake that the author obsesses over page after page. Apparently, if you meditate the way Ms. Gilbert did using a mantra, you'd be blessed with the appearance of this snake from your pelvis, shaking you up so bad that it would be a transcendental experience. "A snake from your pelvis! You gotta be kidding me," was my reaction. "Just go outside the ashram, woman," I thought, "and see how people live. Don't obsess over something as silly as a snake from your pelvis, when dumbfounding poverty and suffering are all around you."

I couldn't take the kundalini snake for much longer. I am one of those people who would give a book a good chance, but wouldn't torture themselves if they find that the book was not worth the trouble. Getting through almost half the book was a solid chance, in my opinion. Giving up at that point was better than heaping myself with more of the same nonsense. Life is short, after all. So I decided to stop reading.

I am ashamed to say that I recommended this book to my sister-in-law even before I read it and judged it for myself. I did give her the disclaimer that it could be a bit freaky and I just had seen it on the Oprah show. Speaking of Oprah, I have lost faith in Oprah's book recommendations after reading this book. I feel very guilty for being part of the promotion of such drivel. Just goes to prove that one shouldn't judge a book by all its hype.

PS: My husband (who was a patient listener to my ranting when I was reading the book and who urged me all along to toss it into the recycle bin) sent me this other scathing review of the book.

The Birth of Venus

It was "The pillars of the earth" that spurred me on this path of reading medieval novels based in Europe; that, and the fact that we're currently planning a trip to Europe this summer. Safe to say, you could expect more posts about such books in the near future. (I recently bought the sequel to The Pillars book, "A world without end", and am itching to start reading it.)

The latest book I read that fits into this category of medieval novels in Europe is Sarah Dunant's "The Birth of Venus". The book begins at a convent where a nun passes away, allegedly from a tumor in her breast. Later, as they undress her in preparation for the burial, the other nuns discover that neither was her tumor real, nor was she a modest nun as she was supposed to be: her naked body reveals a libidinous tattoo of a snake traveling the length of her torso, from her chest all the way to well below her stomach.

Thus begins the account of the interesting life of a free-spirited, learned, smart woman in 15th century Florence. While we learn about the coming of age of our heroine Alessandra, we follow also the history of the time of Florence. We learn about the great artists and how art played a major role in Renaissance. We learn about the oppressive religion that tried to stamp out any creativity and suffocate women of the time (as religion is often wont to do). We learn about the politics of the time, of how Florence went from a republic to an oligarchy to a fundamentalist state to a republic again.

There were some very strong women that appealed to me in the story. Alessandra, of course, is known not for her beauty, but for her intransigence and her learning. Women of her time were prodded to be more conversant in dancing and entertaining, but were severely discouraged from learning. But our heroine would have none of that. She outshone her brothers in her school and had more pleasure in learning classics and conversing art and politics than in primping and preening like her sister did. While she is recalcitrant, she is not idealistic. She proves that she is pragmatic when she succumbs to pressure and acquiesces to an arranged marriage to an elderly man, and later when she retires to a convent instead of choosing to live alone. To be clear, I'd have been happier if she had chosen to live alone, but perhaps that wouldn't have made for yet more irreverence in the story as her joining the convent did. Alessandra was surely a heroine written to my taste: book-loving, free-spirited, prone to debating, irreverent and an oddity of her time.

The other two women who grabbed my attention were the black slave Erila and Alessandra's mother. Both of them happen to be strong-willed women too, crashing any simplifying notion that women of those times were all meek and powerless. There have always been people that didn't fit the various kinds of straitjackets that society wanted them to fit into - these are the people that stand out in one's memory and ultimately, in history.

The novel has a fornicating nun, a promiscuous pope, a prior who is the epitome of evil, adulterous men and women and stupid religious fanatics who can easily be led like a flock of sheep. But I've read about these kinds of people in other novels. What was really new to me in this novel was the genuine gay love affair that is a central plot of the book. It was wonderful to read about the love of two men, depicted in quite a matter-of-fact manner, making you realize that there is nothing unnatural about it. It helps to remind present day society that such love has existed for millennia, will continue to, and is quite as heart-warming and tender as any other kind of love out there.

In summary, the novel shows how society at all times are made of all kinds of people, and though some people may do things that are morally unacceptable to others, they are not necessarily bad people. How can such a tender man like Christoforo be thrown in hell just because he was in love with another man, despite his other wonderful traits? How can our kind Alessandra be more evil than the priest Savonarola who wrecks the economy of a once prosperous state in pursuit of this blind ideology?

I loved the book and couldn't put it down for two days. I am not sure how much of it will remain in my memory a couple of years from now - while I think it is a great page-turner and a beautiful story, it is not a magnum opus of a genius for sure - but I thoroughly enjoyed reading this (easy read of a) book and would readily recommend it to a friend.

PS: Note the The Birth of Venus is the title of a famous painting by Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli.

The Pillars of the Earth

I finished this 973-page book two days ago and I must really give it a big, fat endorsement. Looking at the size of the book, I was at first intimidated to pick it up. I haven't read many humongous books like this one and I was afraid my interest would peter out as the pages kept coming. But the plot of the book was so gripping that my fear proved to be completely unnecessary.

The book is about the building of a beautiful cathedral in a modest 12-century town. You'd think that such a story wouldn't appeal to anyone but architects who have an ear for all the technical terms related to building. But while the story is about the cathedral, it is about a plethora of other things too, and that is truly what makes the book so appealing. So what other things is the book about?

The first thing that comes to mind is the eternal struggle between good and evil, which, needless to say, has been the crux of millions of stories written in this world. There are good people that you'd love in this story and there are bad people that you'd abhor. Good people happen to be just as shrewd as the bad, and the bad ones just as victorious as the good. The story really seesaws between the good and the bad people, each having the upper hand at one point or another. If the story had inordinately tilted toward bad people, I'd have spurned it as a depressing tale, while if it had swung on the side of good people all the time, it wouldn't have been quite so interesting. The balance is what keeps the 900 odd pages moving quickly, almost imperceptibly.

The second thing I noticed about the book is that the universal nature of life as a roller coaster comes through very well. Characters tumble down to the very pits of their existence in a short time and through persistence and clever thinking climb up again, becoming rich merchants, powerful earls and great bishops. In this sense, this is an uplifting as well as a cautionary tale, reminding you that whatever problems you have now shall come to pass and whatever glory you have now is easily lost.

The book is full of remarkable and strong women. I've always been made to believe that women of the dark ages were oppressed and existed as a shadow of their men. Not so in this book. Almost every woman is smart, strong-willed, enduring and courageous. I'll be fond of Aliena and Ellen forevermore. The men in the tale aren't slouches either. They are just as strong, ambitious, and calculating. There are all kinds of men and women too: merchants and builders and monks and bishops and kings. A story about so many people spanning so many years couldn't have been told so smoothly by anyone but a master. And Mr. Follett has proven to be one.

Lastly, most books I've read about the church in the middle ages seem to be about the evil nature of religion or some alternative take on the history of Christianity. This book, on the other hand, showed how there are good and bad religious people, stupid and practical religious people. It was refreshing to read an author whose sole intent seemed not to be the vilification of a section of people.

Of course there were some things in the book that struck me as very fishy: While most sexual scenes seem to be there for a purpose, the book does have quite a bit of sex in it. Is this a male author's fantasies coming through? Or did normal medieval people indulge in sex as people like Tom and Ellen and Aliena and Jack did in the book - just for the pleasure of the activity? Could a medieval single woman have been to live alone, earning her own keep, like Aliena did, without society frowning upon her and obstructing her life?

I did love the characterization in the book, especially (as I mentioned before) of that of Aliena and Ellen. William Hamleigh smelt of evil and Waleran Bigod of corruption, though I could catch the vulnerable, human side of them every once in a while. In fact, that is really the beauty of the book: it is so well-balanced. Good and evil people, ups and downs of life, and characters that show the all too human traits of contradictions. It is a marvellous, complex book that will remain in my memory for a long time to come.

The Da Vinci code - A Roller-Coaster ride

Here I am, sitting on the couch, warmly ensconced in a faded, old blanket, in the dark hours of midnight, listening to raindrops strike the eaves of my apartment, sounding more like boulders than raindrops, as the wind howls through April blossoms and all else is quiet.

You may wonder why I am still awake at this hour of the night. Well, I was reading "The Da Vinci code" and I just finished it.

The book started off excellently. Granted, time seemed compressed in it; things happened at an unimaginably fast pace. But the story itself was intruiging. I love solving puzzles and the story almost explodes with a plethora of them. Anagrams, symbolic clues, cryptic clues, you name it!

The middle part was fascinating as well, especially to an iconoclast like me. Anything that smears the face of established religion automatically draws my attention. With what seems to be meticulously researched information on Jesus Christ and Christianity, and the lies that have been propagated about them, the novel became so gripping that I walked to the bus stop one morning - a good thirty minute commute, up a steep hill - with my face buried in the book!

I was thoroughly enjoying it. Had I stopped right there and written a review, I would have given it an A+ for sure. Unfortunately, I waited a little too long. I tasted the dregs before I commented on my coffee. The ending was - how shall I say this right? - anti-climactic. Or must I say pedestrian? Or incredible? Whatever the word is, I was utterly disappointed.

I have watched too many Hollywood movies to appreciate such unrealistic twists in tales. Things came too easily to the protagonists: people were easily conned by them, characters that posed an impediment to their quest somehow removed themselves from their path, and they solved clues with what seemed to be blinding alacrity. Things seldom, if ever, come so easily in real life. The story showed all the ugly signs of the usual conflict-resolution-conflict-resolution-all-is-well-or-you-never-know formula. It suddenly felt like a trashy novel not worthy of being read by eclectic readers.

That said, would I recommend the book to a friend? Absolutely. Would I call it a one-of-a-kind, must-read book? Perhaps not. The book is very well researched and has a cornucopia of food for thought. If you're very used to reading meandering classics and expect stories to be not predictable, you might be disappointed with this book, but the overall ingenuity of it perhaps might trump your disappointment, as it has done for me.

The movie comes out on May 19th and I'll surely be in line to watch it!

Washington Square -- A symphony of wonderful characters

I read this book when I was travelling down the Pacific Coast on my bicycle. As is the case with James's novels, what stands in my memory is the ambiguity rife in it. Also, again, as is the case with James's novels, the characters stand out sharply: Catherine Sloper, with her pedestrian nature, her stoicism, her lumpy presence like a stone in the middle of a hall, and her stubbornness with respect to her love; Austin Sloper, with his cleverness, his indomitable will, his villainy, his cold-heartedness; Mrs. Penniman, with her flightiness, her infatuation with romance and drama, her double-handed dealings; Morris Townsend, with his parasitic ways, his manipulation of Catherine, his suave manner: all these stay in mind long after you finish reading the book.

I find that James's novels never have any form of closure; they leave ends dangling. These days, however, I am beginning to lose my taste for completely sealed plots. When I finish reading a Jane Austen book, for instance, it's over, it's sealed, like a corpse inside a coffin. There is no mystery in it. Everything is spelled out for you clearly. While I am not saying that that is really a disincentive for reading Austen's novels, I do think that the opposite is an incentive for reading James's novels.

When I finished reading Washington Square -- it was while I was sitting on the soft white dunes in Nehalem Bay, watching the lapping waves -- I sat for a while vacantly gazing at the horizon. My husband later commented that there was a wistful aura about me, an abstractedness that was characteristic of a person longing for something or a person trying to figure out something.

I sat reflecting on the gravity, the profundity, of the characters of Catherine, her father, and her lover. I felt good about the determination of Catherine. Even though she was not the smartest herione I've ever read, she gained my esteem, just by sticking to her decision. Even though, in the middle of the novel, I cursed her for being so naive, so gullible, that the men around her could manipulate her so much, I began to appreciate her in the end.

Austin Sloper reminded me of my dad, both by being like him and being so unlike him. How manipulative one's parents can be! They work their way with you, by tying you with the invisible rope of filial affection and gratitude. I remember how obedient I could be made, when I was still living with my dad, by the very thought of his sacrifice for me. Don't get me wrong; he never asked anything of me explicitly. It was almost a tacit understanding between us. I had (and still do have) an adoration very much like Catherine's for her dad; I had a sense of duty towards him, just like Catherine does, that prevented me from acting against his wishes.

Though my dad commanded my respect and love, he never acted cruelly like Mr. Sloper does in Washington Square. He never manipulated my love for him. And I reckon he never will. Yet, this feeling called filial gratitude is so powerful that it ties you down. I so identified with Catherine in that regard.

Even though the ending of the novel seems to leave things undecided, Washington Square fills you with mixture of sadness and awe and puzzlement when it's over. Even though it can be hard to read at times, and seems to loiter aimlessly, like many of James's novels do, Washington Square is a delight to read; it's so peopled with interesting characters.

Persuasion: I am persuaded that Austen is a wonderful writer!

I never thought I'd read another Jane Austen novel and actually like it! I detested 2 out of the 3 of her novels I'd read, and it was my general opinion that Austen was not my cup of English Tea. Yet, if you'd met me just a couple of days ago, you'd have caught me with my face buried in my paperback copy of Persuasion, a wonderful Jane Austen novel.

Why did I grow tired of Jane Austen, in the first place? To be fair to the ancient lady, I liked Pride and Prejudice; the dialogues in it were incisive like a saber. But the other two Austen novels I read -- Sense and Sensibility and Emma -- didn't have much to pique my interest. The former one was mediocre and the latter downright pathetic. I remember thinking that Austen always wallowed in one little murky pond -- romance leading to marriage. I got the impression that her heriones were cowardly creatures who were so accepting of the norms of their times, who couldn't dare to be different, that they almost became banal! I swore to give up on Austen.

But strange are the ways of ardent book readers! When I was on my Pacific coast bike tour, I picked up Persuasion from a used book store. It was 10 days ago, in the sultry Lincoln City in Oregon. I can't quite place my reason for deciding to give the book a chance, but I started reading it the very night I bought it.

I remember reading that Austen's novels have as meticulous a structure as a nineteenth century ball dance. They're symmetric and events lead into the consecutive events as beautifully and methodically as an inveterate dancer executes step after step after step. I saw that description ring true in this short book Persuasion.

The symmetry central to the novel is so striking. The herione Anne Elliot has two sisters, both of whose temperaments are so unlike hers. There are two more sisters in the novel, the sister-in-laws of Anne's sister; their temperaments are so like and they sport an affection for each other that the Elliot sisters sadly lack. Anne is surrounded by an overly cautious godmother, an overly vain father and sister, an overly self-centered sister, all of whom are impediments in her quest for Captain Wentworth's hand.

The story moves from Kellynch Hall, her ancestral house, to Uppercross, her sister's house, to Camden place, her residence in Bath. The first house sees nothing but her downfall, in both the annulment of her engagement with Captain Wentworth, and the loss of her father's position; the second sees better times, though blended a little with uncertainty, as Wentworth returns to scene and begins to talk with Anne after 8 years; the last house sees the happiest of times, as Wentworth begins to return her attention and things end happily, at last. As you get acquainted with these different characters and situations, and feel the seemlessness of the flow of one situation into another, you feel as if the novel is jotting distinct points in a plane, which when joined will result in a beautiful drawing. I've no wonder someone equalled it to a nineteenth-century dance!

Not only that, I can also see my folly in thinking Austen's heriones to be reactionary, cowardly figures that bow to their times. They are not, though they appear to be so. Anne Elliot, for instance, rebels by approving Mrs. Smith's friendship to her, even though her father reprimands her for having connections with "a person with such a common surname as Smith". She rebels by holding firm to her love, even though her relatives disapprove of it. She doesn't care too much for rank. She can think; in fact, think better than the gentlemen. She shines brightly, shines more than a cookie-cutter woman of any era would.

The characterization is done well; the language, needless to say, is exquisite; the plot moves rapidly forward. All in all, a wonderful novel, fit for reading and rereading on any day. I am not ashamed to have broken my vow to try another Austen novel.

Harry potter - A Literary Sensation or Tripe?

I must admit it: The much-talked-about and much-maligned Harry Potter books are plain cool page-turners. The author J.K. Rowling is such an adroit raconteur that once you pick up one of her books, you're loath to put it down. I've often been late to work, of late, because of gallivanting happily in Potter-land.

When I was a child, I didn't have the pleasure of reading many children's books. Reading was not a habit that my folks allowed me to nurture in myself. So I am perhaps not the right person to comment on a children's book.

Nonetheless, I know that what a child looks for in a book is totally different from what an adult looks for in it. Does a child think about the beauty of the words, grammar, punctuation etc., when she reads a book? Maybe not. To her, the paramount thing is the story. As long as the story is gripping, and keeps moving her from fantasy to fantasy to fantasy, she is happy.

If an intriguing story is the only judging criterion, I daresay that the Harry Potter books are exceptionally good. If Harry Potter is just another Children's book -- not Children's literature, just another commonplace book -- then I'd have no gripes against it. But Harry Potter is not labeled as "yet another Children's book". It's hailed as a literary sensation, a Children's classic, the best thing to happen to the world of publishing.

It's become so popular not with just children, but even with adults. It's become so hip that a leading Hollywood actor was recently spotted with a copy of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince held aloft in his hands, while winding down on his patio with his girlfriend. Even The New York Times recently changed its policy to establish a separate children's bestseller list to accomodate the raging Potter-mania.

You'd think that such a sensational book series would be excellent. And if you do, you'd not be far from right: it's indeed excellent in its storyline. But when it comes to the quality of writing in the book - the abhorably bad use of our dearly beloved language in it - there's nothing much to eulogize about.

Turn every page in a Potter book, and a solecism and few hideous-looking sentences will greet you; the author surely has a knack for them. If I write a few convoluted, inane sentences in my blog, I can say that I don't care because it's an unedited blog; I can at least pin my mistakes on to my lack of an editor. But if Rowling, of such fame and fortune, can't use her tools well, and doesn't want to learn to use them well, can't she at least hire a good editor to correct her abuses?

A writer shouldn't rely solely on her editor for her grammar. She must learn the tools of her craft herself. Tools are important to every craftsperson. A software engineer, for instance, wouldn't get away with not knowing how to write a simple "for" statement. A carpenter who has no clue what a dovetail joint is will scarcely make a living from carpentry. So why would a writer like Rowling disregard learning the correct use of her adverbs and adjectives and gerunds?

It's not just this blatant disregard of Rowling for good sentence constructions that appalls me; it's also the apathy of her readers to it. Of course, her readers are mostly kids, I agree. And kids perhaps lack the ability to spot poor language usage. But I do know that several adults praise Rowling as the author who is the direct heir to C.S. Lewis's throne in the kingdom of Children's literature. What happened to the reading ability of these adults? Why can't they see that her pages are full of flagrant lapses in language?

All her six books have their own little examples of shoddiness, but the last four stick out like rashes on a pale skin. You can see that the writer has done a slipshod job with the sentences (however beautiful her imagination is), the editor has done a slipshod job with cutting out the solecisms, and the proofreader -- my God! -- has done an utterly deplorable job with keeping out the typos and redundant words. (I remember that in the first few pages of "The Prisoner of Azkaban," the adverb "apparently" had been mistakenly printed twice in the same sentence!)

When I read the first chapter in the sixth book of the series, I was flabbergasted by the number of twisted, ugly, nonsensical sentences in it. I took a blank paper and started jotting them down. My squiggly handwriting soon filled two full A4 sheets!

I don't have those sheets with me now. But I figure that, very soon, I'll get around to publishing an errata for the first chapter of that book -- Harry Potter and the half-blood prince-- here.

So, until then, I am off to Hogwarts!

How fortunate!

I began this morning, as usual, with a book.

The book I am reading presently is a memoir entitled "Reading Lolita in Tehran." This book, gifted to me by my husband for our sixth wedding anniversary, is the memoir of a college teacher in the inchoate days of the Islamic Republic of Iran. After she resigns from her college, declining to wear a veil, this free-spirited woman gathers a group of diverse Iranian girls and creates a weekly class that surreptitiously meets every Thursday morning in her house. There, they read and discuss literature.

The narrator and her students -- she calls them her "girls" affectionately -- all have a glowing fervor for literature. But living under a fundamentalist government, they can't indulge that fervour as they want to. Their government imposes severe restrictions on what people can and can't do. Reading "risque" novels, for instance, is banned. So is women's wearing colourful clothes. But our narrator is a daring woman, who flouts these restrictions, albeit stealthily, and encourages her students to do so too. Beneath her roof, these young ladies freely read and express their opinions.

I am in only the first few pages of the book. But, already, I love it! The author paints pictures with her words. Whether she is talking about the girl with almond-shaped eyes or the one whose skin is so transparent her veins show through, she does an awesome job with her descriptions.

More captivating than her descriptions of scenes and persons, though, is her narration of the plight of women in the post-Islamic-revolution Iran. It feels more like reading a foreboding, futuristic, George Orwell novel than a memoir of a college teacher. The dictatorial nature of the Iranian fundamentalists is that shocking. These fundamentalists are oppressive and brutish; they kill hordes of people, without batting an eyelid, for the shakiest of accusations. A vein throbs painfully in my heart when I read about their heinousness; a vein that I can't quite locate. Has "1984" come true in some parts of the world?

The world that the author paints - outside her own home - is quite drab. Women are all draped in shapeless blacks and greys and browns, all losing their individuality, all looking like dull figures framed in sombre colours. They don't have the liberty to show any colour in themselves: they can't, for example, wear lipstick or paint their fingernails. They must be covered from head to toe, and not even a wisp of their hair, in its modest splendour, must be visible. And what if they disobeyed any of these edicts? Quite easy: They'll be put in sacks and stoned to death.

It seems to me that the fundamentalists who churn out such rules can only think of women as one general, lifeless thing. Every woman, to them, is not an individual in her own right, having her own liberties, nurturing her own thoughts, ideas, and opinions. All of them are the same and can easily fit into an one-for-all slot. Such lack of imagination, such banality, nauseates me. I wonder what a boring, monochromatic world theirs must be.

As my friend Palani often tells me, I have no clue how bad things are in many parts of the world. The realization came upon me this morning that the regime in Iran is not a regime, it's a stranglehold! Why else would a college girl be punished for "running up the stairs when she was late for her class?" What other reason can there be for the faculty in the author's college to be more concerned about the strand of the author's hair showing through than the quality of education imparted to their students? How else can we explain their censoring of the word "wine" from a Hemingway novel and the prohibition of Bronte's books for their adulterous contents?

When I ran this morning, as I usually do after reading, I was reflecting on what I had read: How terrible it must be to be living such a dreary, frightening world! How lucky I was! How lucky I could run when I wanted to, on the streets, in an attire that I chose, with men going about their business and not harassing me! Many times, I feel like running is a drudgery that I would rather avoid, if only it were possible to maintain good health without adequate exercise. But today I felt running to be liberating. How many women in this world can't run even if they want to?

I was reminded of the words I read somewhere: "It's not that I have to run, it's that I get to run." I didn't have to run this morning, but I could. There was no one arresting me for it.

End of the Affair

[Disclaimer: Possible spoilers ahead]

Usually, when I read a book, I read it because someone else praised it, or because it was on one of the "Top Read" lists, or simply because the title sounded appealing when I spotted it in the library.

When I picked up "The end of the affair", I didn't have any of those reasons in mind. I picked it up because I fancied a trashy read: A book just to while away time with, to possibly entertain myself. I didn't expect it to be of any literary value. I thought it was only a little more than a "Mills and Boon" romance book.

Blast my ignorance, for this book's author was one of the masters of the craft, it seems. I found that out later from my husband Narayan. In fact, the author Graham Greene was one of the dear friends of R. K. Narayan, a legendary Indian author. His works had been reviewed and critiqued by several famous people, and by no means was he a "junk book" author.

True to his fame, the book was well-written. Let me qualify it: The book was well-written, for the most part. It was neither overly evocative nor did it lack description. I found that it had the right proportion of description and hot-plotting for an average reader. The phrases used were brilliant and the story was intriguing.

Yet for all the author's fame, the book wasn't perfect. (Can any book be?) His punctuation! It is quite possible that he spent his days at the Grammar school snoozing in the back benches, for his punctuation was utterly deplorable. It was even worse than mine, I thought. Don't get me wrong: I am not a purist when it comes to grammar, yet I find it annoying when I have to reread a sentence because a tiny comma is missing from it. It interrupts my flow, and my flow was interrupted in scads of paragraphs in this book.

The second beef (why is it always beef and not chicken or tofu?) I have with this book is that, at the very end, it meanders too much. For a work to be brilliant, both its beginning and its end must capture attention. In this book, the end didn't pique me quite as much as the beginning -- and even many parts of the body -- did. That, in my opinion, is a big flaw. When I came to the end, I just couldn't understand where the story was going. Why does he harangue so much on religion? How does it all fit in the story? I found myself wondering constantly.

I hate to compare books -- every book has its own merit and is pieced together in its own fashion -- but I found that a similar-themed book, "The Life of Pi", brought home a similar idea in a much pithier manner. Oh, did I love "The Life of Pi" when I got to its punchline! That was what was missing in this book -- that powerful punchline to deliver a powerful message. (Let me clarify: Though I say that the message the author tries to deliver is powerful, I don't quite agree with it.) Rambling on and on with no destination in sight, especially towards the end of the journey, quickly gets tiresome.

Other than that, I enjoyed reading this short book. Its characters shone like little Topazes. Hate and love glittered. I can remember the minor character Parkis as much as I can remember the eccentric herione Sarah. Making the main characters unforgettable is one thing, but making the minor ones so too is remarkable. And in this, Graham Greene has tremendously succeeded.