Recent Books...and waiting for more...

Hi all…

After I exchanged pleasantries with my former student of years ago, I went to Al Classic as planned…this time I was determined to pick up some books, because, for one, I had run out of books to read while travelling to my college, and two, I wanted to try reading some books picked out randomly, written by first timers, unknown, obscure (to me at least) writers…but what to do, the mind does not allow you to take too many risks…I bought 4 books, and out of them only one was by somebody whose name I had never heard of…this novel is called The Music of the Spheres (Jove Books, New York) by Elizabeth Redfern…this book attracted me for 3 reasons…its title (music), its cover (its got 2 sheets that form its cover, an oval cut on the top sheet frames the picture of the back of a top hatted man with a long black coat), and some excerpts of reviews on the front cover, outside back cover and inside sheets…I liked the ‘lead up’ on the cover (In the aftermath of the French Revolution, a war is brewing…In the shadowed streets of London, a killer is waiting…In the stars in the skies, a secret is hiding…)… this was a big risk, but I am immensely satisfied with the book so far…I have another 100 pages to go…I hope the end is good enough for me to take further risks…

But, the ‘canon’ sometimes becomes a big impediment, especially if you are a student of literature, in taking risks of the literary kind…and the other 3 books that I bought reflect this…Hocus Pocus (Berkeley Books, New York) by Kurt Vonnegut, Ragtime (Bantam Books)by E. L. Doctorow and Red Dragon (Dell, New York) by Thomas Harris…and there is a reason behind each purchase…my friend Anupam Deep Bindra worked on Kurt Vonnegut’s novels for her Ph. D. and Hocus Pocus was one of the novels… and we would never hear the end of her praises…I was not too enthused at that time, but I saw a pretty good looking copy, looked inside, and liked what I saw and read and thought ‘why not’… I heard about Ragtime for the first time sometime in 1992…my friend Satish’s initial Ph. D. proposal was on ‘historiographic metafiction’…and he was working with a set of English novels for this…Ragtime was one of the novels, along with (if I am not wrong) Gravity’s Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon) and Midnight’s Children … he used to speak a lot about this topic and the novels and I was intrigued, but I could not read those novels then…I later inherited a copy of Ragtime from my father-in-law, and had read that too, but the book is at least 20 years old now and is coming apart and I saw a really good clean copy and decided to buy it…Red Dragon, was... well…an impulse buy…mainly because I had read Hannibal earlier and thought I might as well read this too…but the book I have been waiting to buy from a used book store…The Silence of the Lambs…still eludes me...and I am reading this ‘Hannibal Lecter’ series in a totally convoluted manner…

So…these are the latest books…but I am really waiting for the big releases this summer…The Hindu carried an exciting preview of the 3 blockbusters of this summer… I have some inkling of Salman Rushdie’s new novel, excerpts of which were carried by India Today and a write up in Tehelka…Jhumpa Lahiri’s new collection of short stories Unaccustomed Earth is also out…Tabish Khair’s review in Outlook was perceptive and good…Outlook also carried Lahiri’s interview…but for me, the biggest bonanza is going to be Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, the first book in his Ibis Trilogy…I am an unabashed admirer and untiring reader of Amitav Ghosh’s novels…and have read his books many times over…and will not tire of reading them many times more…he is a master of style and is a master story builder…the voice is soft and penetrating…my brightest day was when I saw and heard Amitav Ghosh speak in Hyderabad when he had come to launch The Hungry Tide…I am going to get a copy on the first day of its launch in Hyderabad… first day first show…

Happy summer reading…

Jai