One Night Stand, With a Book

What’s the last thing you stayed up half the night reading because it was so good you couldn’t put it down? The Crying Tree by Naseem Rakha. It was the very first novel I finished in 2011, read it all on a day when I was in Penang, Malaysia. A mother sought out the killer [...]

Play By the Rules

I had been reading the literary fiction shortlist for Independent Literary Awards in January. It’s been an interesting but rewarding experience to read the novels, and my honor to be part of the judging process. At one point of reading, I struggled between voting for the most literary work and opting for the book I [...]

Size Does Matter

What’s the largest, thickest, heaviest book you ever read? Was it because you had to? For pleasure? For school? Largest: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, Vintage trade paperback, 1296 pages, 2.6 pounds Heaviest: Gone With the Wind by Maragret Mitchell, trade paperback, 960 pages, 2.8 pounds Longest (single volume): Noble House by James Clavell, [...]

[339] Diamond Hill – Chi-shun Feng

” Nobody knew why it was called Diamond Hill. There were certainly no diamond mines, nor diamonds on anyone’s fingers. ‘Diamond’ in Chinese can also mean excavation of stones and slate. It felt like a sick joke on the thousands of people there struggling to survive in poverty. ” [15] A big thank you to [...]

Eccentric Core

Is there a book you absolutely love, but for some reason, people never think it sounds interesting, or maybe they read it and don’t like it at all? Eccentricity has it that I’ve got more than one book in this category. I consider my reading a digression from the mainstream genres like popular fiction. My [...]

Rabbit Hole

Director: John Cameron Mitchell 1 hour 32 mins. Rated PG-13 Rabbit Hole hints at the restraint with which a couple copes with the loss of their young son in an auto accident. Only gradually do we work out what, or who, is missing. Eight months later, Becca (Nicole Kidman) and Howie (Aaron Eckhart) exhausted the [...]

[338] C – Tom McCarthy

C reads very much like a literary experiment. Literary fiction it is, it doesn’t remind me of any stylistic precursor. The enigmatic title refers to the protagonist, Serge Carrefax, who grows up around the turn of 20th century in England in Versoie House, where his father runs a school for the deaf. He and his [...]

Periodicals

Even I read things other than books from time to time … like, Magazines! What magazines/journals do you read? Unlike most books, I hardly read magazines from cover to cover. I leaf through them quickly during small windows of time in between meetings and errands. That said, I still read a huge amount of magazines [...]

[337] Norwegian Wood – Haruki Murakami

” I have always loved Naoko, and I still love her. But there is a decisive finality to what exists between Midori and me. It has an irresistible power that is bound to sweep me into the future. What I feel for Naoko is a tremendously quiet and gentle and transparent love, but what I [...]

Give Me 5: 5th Anniversary

The blog turns 5. What was meant to be a chronicle of my thoughts and reflections from reading has turned into a vanity project. The best thing out of this blog is the interaction with fellow readers, who have pointed to me books that I would otherwise not read. On top of blogging about books, [...]