From: Mr. Terry Eagleton
To: Khushboo, you all know her well by now
Subject: Book recommendations because we are bored to death whilst awaiting mains result
nahin, i didn’t know about the hot air balloon thing. but if i tell my parents about it they will want to go too. we shall try to keep it pedestrian. okay, will start brainstorming movies for the next marathon. my girl is definitely one movie to watch. i think coming of age movies are a genre universally enjoyed regardless of the actually quality of the movie, so research more along those lines.
i haven’t read any of garcia marquez yet because i figured i would simply read the original spanish when i got good enough in it. but yeah, magical realism is kind of really annoying. i don’t know what to recommend because i read the randomest stuff both good and bad. so i shall recommend from the general repository of all my readings till now rather than from my recent reads. one book i know that everyone really likes regardless of personal taste is angela’s ashes by frank mccourt. if you are feeling snobbish, then you’ll be pleased to know he’s a pulitzer prize winner (i think). it’s a memoir of growing up in ireland but it’s the writing that makes it so good.
my all time favourite book to read over and over again is catcher in the rye. it’s a coming of age book about this angsty teenager who uses the word ‘phony’ too many times. although I don’t think this is a good time to read it – in between slogging it away for upsc – because the basic premise of the book is – what’s the point of anything at all?
And I’m sure you have read a bit of PG Wodehouse but I don’t think you’ve read any of his Psmith series? I presume that because those are not as readily available on bookshelves as bertie woosters or jeeves wala series. anyway, Psmith is one of my favourite fictional characters of all times. But that’s only if you are looking for some light, funny reading and not for anything with gravitas.
I am usually not a fan of graphic novels, and i think i’ve already told you about this one but Kabul Disco blew my mind. I love afghanistan for one thing, and this book is really funny and well written and teaches you a lot about lives of expatriates in Kabul. Can’t recommend it enough. The price was steep for me relative to the size of the book so I just sat one day in crossword and finished it in 4-5 hours. but now i’m thinking i wouldn’t mind owning it.
if you’re looking to kill two-three birds with one stone – enjoy a good fiction that’s a classic but is not very long, learn something new about a different culture and history, impress upsc board with the depth of your reading, then i think what you need right now is Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. I don’t even know how to describe it so you had best google it i think. but it’s about the europeans making inroads into this african village which was till now free. it’s told from the perspective of an african man and it’s got a very clash of civilisations vibe to it. the last few pages just blew my mind because it makes you realize that that must have happened with indian history too. it sounds like heavy stuff but it’s actually very light reading and can be finished within a week. highly recommend it, it’s a classic.
so i don’t know if your request for recommendations was just cursory, but i seem to have given you a whole article on it. you know how celebrities employ stylists to recommend clothes to them? i wish there was a job to recommend books to people. i guess there already is and it’s called a librarian. sigh…
i forgot to tell you, today i was telling my mother all righteously what indian express reported – that they didn’t build a basic perimeter wall around the uri cantonment but had enough funds to build a golf course. and my mom was like maybe golf courses are cheaper than walls and i was so infuriated with her for dousing the fire of my righteous indignation that i went and googled it and old reliable google says that it costs 10-20 lacs per acre of golf course and a standard 18 hole golf course is around 150-200 acres so that’s like 300 crores around of army’s funds. and then my mom was like, well that’s certainly enough money to build any kind of wall at all and i was like thank you, finally. and then she was like, well you shouldn’t come to me with passionate statements made in the air, you should come to me with facts. which makes me think that people shouldn’t bother burning their money down journalism schools, they should just live with my mother.
Bendiciones.
my small infinities 