What else happened in 2009? Well, I read and read a lot and bought a lot of books. I don’t remember the names of all now and must remember and make a list. 2009 ended with my reading the first novel of the Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson – The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the new year began with the second, The Girl who Played with Fire…real crackling stuff…the most thrilliest(!) page turners that I have ever read in a long long time. I can’t wait to sink my teeth into the third one. This one will arrive by post, because I realized that I get a good discount when I order these books online and in most cases there is no postage, so I get to gain both ways.
I located and bought some wonderful books on music – Bhairavi: The Global Impact of Indian Music (Peter Lavezzoli), Music and Modernity: North Indian Classical Music in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Ed. Amlan Dasgupta), and Mixed Tape: The First City Interviews 3-Music. And along the way, bought some English translations of classical Sanskrit plays by Kalidasa and Bhavabhuti; these were to help me identify and annotate some Sanskrit verses used in an early Kannada novel that I was translating into English. And then I ventured into the Bengali literary territory to read English translations of Manik Bandyopadhyay’s and Mahasweta Devi’s short stories (I also bought these books published by Thema, Calcutta).
Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Beach is the other book I bought along with Larsson’s first of the Millemmium Trilogy. 2009 was also the year when I tried to read a bit of western philosophy and bought quite a number of books and the funny part is that I am still trying to read them; not easy reading at all… Derrida, Adorno, Horkheimer, et al. Pablo Neruda’s Isla Negra was one book that was a long pending purchase and the good old book store still had it on its shelves…thank god for that. I wanted to read something non-fictional by Umberto Eco and it was a slippery watery ride with Eco’s How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays.
The book exhibition at YMCA, Secunderabad yielded a good catch of 3 Dave Barry books (Dave Barry turns 40; Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits; Dave Barry’s Only Travel Guide You’ll Ever Need) and an Elmore Leonard novel. And I also found a refreshing stash of Asterix comics at a used book store and got them at a very affordable price…nothing like an Asterix for a dull or boring day…
There are some more books out there…I know…but all in all, a good productive year as far as reading was concerned…good only…
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