Advance Booking

IN THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS

This is a book that comes out of its musty corner on the shelf every Christmas. I loved this book as a kid, and it's a Christmas tradition of sorts, to read this book.

On Christmas Eve, seven years after the death of miserly Ebenezer Scrooge's partner Jacob Marley, three Christmas ghosts visit him during the course of the night. The Ghost of Christmas Past shows Scrooge his boyhood, stirring in him dormant tender emotions. The Ghost of Christmas Present takes Scrooge to the home of his nephew Fred and his underpaid but overworked clerk Bob Cratchit. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows him his bleak lonely future if he did not learn his lesson and become a kinder man.

I started off with reading the illustrated children's version of the story, and then progressed to the original. This book is said to have played a major role in transforming Christmas from a sombre occasion it was into the merry festival it is today. Dickens incorporates themes of generosity and goodwill into his narrative, while at the same time, showing the condition of the poor working class in those times. We get a look into the mindset of rich English gentlemen who selfishly dismiss the poorer class as fit only for a prison or a workhouse.

The character I love most in the novel is Tiny Tim. Seldom do you get to meet such an endearing character to whom your heart goes out. He symbolized hope and cheer even in the face of adversity, and you feel really happy near the end of the story when you get to know that Tiny Tim got better and Scrooge became a second father to him. I also liked Scrooge's nephew Fred, a jolly, kind man who invites his miserly uncle to Christmas every year, despite his uncle giving him the cold shoulder.

A Christmas Carol is an incredible book about the spirit of Christmas, and I think that it's message should be remembered throughout the year, not just during Christmas.

FOREVER CHARMING

You know those books which give you a really warm fuzzy feeling. Anne of Green Gables is one such book. I first read it a couple of months back (don't be shocked, I'm quite behind on my classics), but it struck me as a very Christmassy book. It’s a book that makes you happy, and also stays with you long after you finish reading it.

Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert of Green Gables in Avonlea have decided to adopt a boy, but imagine their surprise when they find a girl waiting for them. The girl is no ordinary girl; she is the imaginative eleven year-old Anne Shirley, who on the drive from the station to the Gables, talks more than Matthew did in his entire life! After some initial hesitation, the Cuthberts decide to keep her, and thus a ray of sunshine enters their lives. The ray does get into numerous scrapes, is dreamy and scatter-brained, but wins the heart of everyone she meets.

Anne is one of the best heroines I have come across in a long, long time. She is highly imaginative, a chatterbox, vivacious and cheerful. I loved her flights of imagination and her honesty. She is uncomplicated, takes life as it comes and opens her mind to a variety of experiences, both real and imagined. She sees beauty in even the most mundane of things, enjoys the little things of life with as much enthusiasm as you would enjoy the big ones. You instinctively know you’d be great friends with her if you met her. I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed reading this book, especially in a time when the other books I had at hand were irritating, to say the least. The book has an old-worldly charm to it, so different from the current whiny teen lit. I can’t say I wish we could be back in the olden times, but I dearly wish we could have some of the writers of those times back. I’ll leave you with an excerpt from the book, which captures the essence of Anne.

“ ‘The Haunted Wood! Are you crazy? What under the canopy is the Haunted Wood?’
‘The spruce wood over the brook,’ said Anne in a whisper.
‘Fiddlesticks! There is no such thing as a haunted wood anywhere. Who has been telling you such stuff?’
‘Nobody,’ confessed Anne. ‘Diana and I just imagined the wood was haunted. All the places around here are so— so—COMMONPLACE. We just got this up for our own amusement. We began it in April. A haunted wood is so very romantic, Marilla. We chose the spruce grove because it’s so gloomy. Oh, we have imagined the most harrowing things. There’s a white lady walks along the brook just about this time of the night and wrings her hands and utters wailing cries. She appears when there is to be a death in the family. And the ghost of a little murdered child haunts the corner up by Idlewild; it creeps up behind you and lays its cold fingers on your hand—so. Oh, Marilla, it gives me a shudder to think of it. And there’s a headless man stalks up and down the path and skeletons glower at you between the boughs. Oh, Marilla, I wouldn’t go through the Haunted Wood after dark now for anything. I’d be sure that white things would reach out from behind the trees and grab me.’ ”

BURNING BRIGHT

For a long time, I had heard how fantastic this book was and how powerful the writing. But it was not until I finished the last page that I appreciated what a truly awesome book this was. I read it in fits and starts, but never did I lose track of the story. And with this book, I restart my efforts to complete the Guardian challenge by the end of this year.

Sometime in the future, books have been banned, and every book is burned by firemen and their owners punished. Montag is one such fireman, reveling in the anarchy of book burning. The people around him are equally callous: his wife Mildred the soap-opera-addicted vapid woman, his boss Beatty the fire-loving self-hater. But then he meets Clarisse McKellan, a simple girl who jerks him out of his slumber and forces him to re-examine his life. Montag learns the value of books and life, and makes some decisions that will take him on paths he has dared not tread before.

It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.
Montag grinned the fierce grin of all men singed and driven back by flame.

This opening paragraph may cause book lovers to shudder, but I was entranced by Bradbury’s prose, the vivid descriptions that come to mind with each sentence he has written. The scenes play out around you; I felt Montag’s agony and indecision as deeply as if they were my own. Bradbury constructs a society where free thinking and imagination, represented by books, has been burned down and replaced by homogeneity and dulling of the mind, symbolized by the parlor walls (TV). A memorable scene is when Montag reads the "Dover Beach" poem to his wife and her friends: each one is deeply affected but chooses to ignore it. And Beatty was painted in deep shades of gray; he hated books and savagely burnt them, yet quoted Scriptures and Shakespeare, showing that he was a well-read man. This is not a book to be read for story alone; it is a book meant to make you introspect, to stop and wonder what would happen if the story came true.

Fahrenheit 451 shares many thematic similarities with another of my favorite reads, Animal Farm by George Orwell. Both have a society gone wrong, and how this affects one man in particular. The issue of censorship figures largely, though I believe that Bradbury’s work is as much a condemnation of conformism as it is a criticism of censorship: Faber was scared to take a stance against book-burning; Montag was happy in his cocoon till Clarisse came; Mildred refused to open her mind to anything but the mindless drivel of the “family”. But Fahrenheit 451 is more positive in its outlook than Animal Farm; there is hope for redemption of human society, there is the possibility that the phoenix will rise again from the ashes. I’ll leave you with Bradbury’s explanation for the book-banning junta that shrieks its disapproval of every book that dares to think out of the box.

So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless.

Have you read this book? What did you think of it?

Read another review at: things mean a lot
Rhinoa's Ramblings
So Many Precious Books, So Little Time
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Steven's Library Annex

ALL ARE EQUAL, BUT SOME ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS

My dad got me this book when I was in seventh grade, a time I was knee-deep in Frederick Forsyth and Jack Higgins and the like. I saw the title Animal Farm, and was like, Dad, seriously, I'm way out of my kiddo reading phase! He was like, it's 150 pages, just read it and we'll talk about it later. I reluctantly did, and am I not glad I did!

Inspired by the boar Old Major's words, the animals of Manor Farm drive out the alcoholic Mr. Jones and rename their farm Animal Farm. The Pigs, with Napoleon and Snowball in charge, speak of setting up an environment where all animals are equal, and the other animals, notably the horses Boxer and Clover loyally do as they say. But slowly Paradise turns ugly, when Napoleon drives Snowball out on charges of spying for the humans, the dogs come in and life becomes harder for everyone except the pigs.

Animal Farm is a searing look at Stalinist Russia. Orwell wrote this novel at a time when the world was courting USSR, and had great difficulty publishing his anti-Soviet satire. After I was told that this novel symbolised the events in the Stalin era, I could identify a few of the characters: Napoleon was Stalin, Snowball was Trotsky, Boxer was the common man. This book marked the beginning of my interest in world politics and actually got me started on Russian literature (though this novel was written by an Englishman). Animal Farm has all the hallmarks of a classic: simple writing, thought-provoking storyline inspiring a gamut of emotions, and a cast of characters that stays with you a long time after you've turned the last page. A lump forms in my throat every time I read about Boxer's death, Napoleon's actions will cause even the mildest of people to fume with rage. They say that good things often come in small packages, and this slim book is among the best you can get.

ON THE EDGE OF A CLIFF

Finally, the first of my Guardian challenge list done. I found Catcher in the Rye a very intriguing book, though I took some time to plough through it. One thing I figured is that nothing has changed in the 50 years since the book was published; we all have felt what Caulfield feels, at some time or the other.

The protagonist of the book is Holden Caulfield, who has just been kicked out of prep school. We see various students through his eyes, and follow him after he leaves the dorm in the dead of the night. Instead of returning home, he checks into a hotel, gets drunk and meets a prostitute, before sneaking into his house to meet his kid sister, Phoebe, who is the only one he seems to connect with.

One thing that struck me was the sense of loneliness throughout the book. Caulfield thinks everyone around him is phony, so he has no friends to speak of. In all his drunken ramblings, we sense how alone he is, and how much he misses his dead brother Allie. The talk about "phonies" permeates the book, and I sort of identified with it, remembering the countless times I have felt the same. Holden talks and thinks like an adult, but there is a part of him which wants to remain a kid forever. The book is realistic in its capturing of teenage rebellion and thought processes. Holden usually starts talking about something and ends up at a completely different point, much like the late-night discussions we had, where we started talking about what to study for the exams and ended up discussing the media's reaction after the Mumbai terror attacks. But there was something about the book I didn't quite like, something I can't really pinpoint. Maybe it was all the cussing, maybe it was Holden's adult experiences, I don't know. Sometimes I felt Holden himself was a big phony, for all his bluster.

Holden is like a lost soul, who has imbibed the jaded cynicism of the adult world without really knowing where he fits in. I am a little ambiguous about this book: it is accurate in its descriptions, but sometimes it seems so fake. Or maybe this is just the Holden Caulfield in me speaking.

THE AGE OF INNOCENCE

I hardly mentioned this to my friends, but I hadn't read To Kill a Mockingbird. Atleast, not till a couple of days ago. But I am sort of glad I waited this long, because I am able to better appreciate the significance of the novel and the situations.

Scout, who narrates the book, is a tomboy just starting school. She has hours of fun with her brother Jem and her friend Dill, playing pranks, enacting stories and trying to lure their reclusive neighbour "Boo" Radley out of his mansion. They are motherless, living with their lawyer father Atticus Finch, and cared by their black maid Calpurnia. They are subject to much scrutiny when Atticus defends a black man, Tom Robinson, accused of raping a white woman. Through the trial, Scout and Jem learn much about the nature of people, and imbibe the values that drive Atticus.

What I absolutely loved about the book is the innocence of all the children. In Scout's narrative, there is no heaviness to overshadow the child's voice. Scout's words and actions are fresh and uncomplicated, as in the scene where she faces a mob out to lynch Tom. Her relationship with Boo is lovely, from the initial stages where she teases the man she has never seen, to the final meeting and poignant separation.

The novel has many themes: courage, compassion, prejudice, justice and equality. The racial prejudices that coloured American society are clearly depicted, in the everyday actions of people towards blacks and in the attitude of the "tired old town" to Atticus' championing of a black man's rights. Atticus' unwavering sense of justice and his willingness to stand up for what he thinks is right makes him a memorable character. Also, Lee explores the stringent rules on women and gender and class prejudices through people's reactions to Scout's innumerable scrapes. She uses satire and irony to address complex issues, weaving an elegant tapestry which gives a peek into the Southerner's lives. To me, many of the issues that the novel addresses have particular significance; as an Indian girl in a male-dominated engineering college, I see many of the prejudices being played out in our so-called enlightened youthful country. To Kill a Mockingbird has been called "a book every adult should read before he/she dies", and rightly so. I'll leave you with one of my favorite paragraphs from the book, when Scout escorts Boo home, reflecting on their relationship, in what I think is a melancholic allusion to life as such.

"Neighbours bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between. Boo was our neighbour. He had given us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of goodluck pennies, and our lives. But neighbours give in return. We never put back into the tree what we took out of it:we had given him nothing, and it made me sad."

A survey done to mark World Book Day revealed that two out of three Brits claimed to having read a book they actually haven't. George Orwell's 1984 tops the list, with 42% admitting to having lied about reading the book. Here's a list of the top 10 fibbed about books.

1. 1984-George Orwell (42%)
2. War and Peace- Leo Tolstoy (31%)
3. Ulysses- James Joyce (25%)
4. The Bible (24%) (!!!)
5. Madame Bovary- Gustave Flaubert (16%)
6. A Brief History of Time-Stephen Hawking (15%)
7. Midnight's Children- Salman Rushdie (14%)
8. In Remembrance of Things Past- Marcel Proust (9%)
9. Dreams from My Father- Barack Obama (6%)
10. The Selfish Gene- Richard Dawkins (6%)

Read more about the survey here.

Well, there is no such list for India, but according to me, the most fibbed about books would be God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy and Midnight's Children. A lot of people I have met claim to have read the first, but can tell me nothing save "Oh, her writing is very good, but I didn't like it that much". I frankly admit, I haven't read anything out of the above list except 1984 and Brief History of Time, and and an abridged form of the Bible. I started Midnight's Children, but haven't got beyond the grandfather's marriage.

I don't really think there's any point in lying about what books you have read: you'll get caught anyways. You're thinking of impressing the other person, but if all you have to say about the book is that the writing is "great", rest assured, the other person is going to be on to you. Then you'll be in a worse state than you would have been if you had spoken the truth. I won't be high and mighty and say I've never done it, but a couple of awkward experiences( one forgetful one with Anna Karenina: I'll share it sometime) have taught me that it is better to keep my mouth shut than try to appear literary. Yes, I have read more Jeffrey Archer than Leo Tolstoy. If you are going to judge me for that, I'm not really sure I want to talk to you. What say you?

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU

I first read 1984 in Class 9, and I admit, I was not exactly at my perceptive best. I missed many of the allusions, didn't really get the bleak ending. But in the aftermath of 9/11, with the U.S. government using its sweeping powers and world sympathy to "protect the country from the evil forces of terrorism", I identified a watered-down version of the novel. Since then, I have read bits and pieces of this book over the years, but it was only a few days back that I actually sat down and read it from cover to cover, and decided that it would make a perfect post for my blog's one-month anniversary. Many of the elements of this novel, written in 1949, are visible around us today, though not to the extent portrayed in the book ( and I hope it'll never reach that state). This novel presents a searing description of a revolution gone wrong, a totalitarian regime which permeates every living moment of the citizens.

Winston Smith is an insignificant Party member working in the Ministry of Truth, erasing and editing records to fit the Party's version of events. The year is 1984 (or so he thinks), and the Party's control rests on three main pillars: Newspeak (reducing human vocabulary so that people can't think rebellious thoughts); thoughtcrime and doublethink (accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs). There are four departments: Ministry of Truth which concerns itself with news and entertainment, Ministry of Peace concerned with war, Ministry of Love which maintains law and order, and Ministry of Plenty responsible for economic affairs. Winston secretly rebels against the Party's doctrine, and finds a soulmate in Julia, another Party worker. In a world where romance is an offence, their love is destined to be shortlived.

1984 has many thematic similarities to Animal Farm, namely a failed revolution, individuality crushed under collective power, and mind control. Though based on Stalin's rule, many concepts are similar to what we see after 9/11 and have come to accept today: censorship, intrusive surveillance and government encroachment on individual rights. The Party slogans are chillingly familiar: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery and Ignorance is Strength; slogans which are the cornerstone of many dictatorships. If you haven't read this book, go buy a copy. You'll find something new in every reading.