When chain letters arrived in illegible handwriting on faded inland lettercards, my grandmother would insist I write one and send it off so I wasn't the one breaking the chain. Fifteen years later, it's a modern-day, much-evolved chain letter. A meme. And I dare not be the unit that does not replicate. Besides, there's a committee (the Committee For Fair Blogging Practices) involved. So...
Total number of books owned: Everyone's been talking in cartons, but I have very... very few. I grew up on a stream of books supplied by my extended family and great school libraries (no, not Tom Clancy). In college all my money went on food and laundry, in post grad I read only non fiction course material so it's only now that I buy my own books.
Last book bought: Last evening I bought Maximum City by Suketu Mehta.
Last book read: Tokyo Cancelled by Rana Dasgupta and Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam. Now shuffling between Writing and Difference by Derrida, Strangers of the Mist by Sanjoy Hazarika and My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk. But now Maximum City threatens to overshadow all else (even by just sheer size).
Five books that mean a lot:
1) Three non fiction books that hugely impacted my life - at different points in time of course - (I know this is cheating, but if the Committee for Fair Blogging Practices - CFBP- would look the other way for just one moment...)
No Logo by Naomi Klein which made me read the New Left Review and follow the WSF and read indymedia and aspire to work for a small, independent media outfit. That was a phase of course, and it's over now - but I blog!
We Wish To Inform You... recreating with immediacy the Rwandan genocide.
The Other Side of Silence by Urvashi Butalia, blending personal history and feminist interpretation.
2) The Narnia series by C.S.Lewis: A fantastical world that emerges when you stumble out of a musty moth-balled closet into the pine coned world of the forest beyond. I couldn't get enough - recreating summer holiday bliss and inviting you into a familiar world where you knew all the cast and characters minus the nightmares that LOTR can give an 11-year-old (yes, I confess. Book Two gave me nightmares for a week). And large closets will never be the same again.
3) Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte: Studied it as an English text in school, then in college did a paper which studied it as a psychological text. In post grad, combined literature and psychology and looked at how some psychological disorders manifested in the book are partly a function of gender. Basically it's bailed me out on innumerable occasions. In school, girls began falling in love with Heathcliff-type boys and the dark, brooding look became much coveted. Now, it's an industry - movie, Cliff's notes, WH games... and in college I met someone who used heathcliff001@yahoo.com
4) Love by Pablo Neruda: The ten poems included in Il Postino. Lilting, melancholic, fragile. I will learn Spanish one day and it will be only to read Neruda.
5) (what? up already?!) I'd have to say The Catcher In The Rye. In college it was a PLU determinant.
Now that that's done (thank you Prufrock, even if I was somewhat by default!), can I have fun? She says I can!
Most fun book: Why shoot a butler by Georgette Heyer (cellotaped together) and the No. 1 Ladies Detective series by Alexander Mc.Call Smith.
Favourite short story: Lihaaf by Ismat Chugthai because she says so much without spelling it out.
I didn't get the shoo sha about: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (I'm still on page three) or Hari Kunzru's The Impressionist
Tag five people and have them do this on their blogs:
Roshan who's just been tagged by Dilip, but I think he could do with some extra pressurising.
Samanth
Rohini
Sibyl
Poison Pen
