I finished reading Visiting Moon by my professor Susan Viswanathan. I am currently studying Sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru Uinversity and Vishwanathan teaches us Classical Thinkers. Visiting Moon is a lovely journey of a divorced woman writer who lives with her two boys, yet leads an unsettled life. I also plan to read Antonio Gramsci's The Prison Notebooks which I recently bought as he influences modern thinking and philosophy a great deal.
Parul
I got hold of The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. My friends recommended it to me. It?s turning out to be a very slow and painful read but I am hoping that it'll turn out better. I am also an Agatha Christie fan and so I read them simultaneously.
Disha Bhattacharjee
I am currently doing a course in English Journalism from IIMC. So I like to read non-fiction as well, just to keep up to date. I am reading Jack Welch's autobiography Straight From The Gut. Welch is the CEO of GE and this is the story of his construction of the empire. I am also reading Eric Segal's romance Doctors. I also plan to read Shantaram as I have heard it to be an interesting read.
Saurabh Sati
I am reading The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century by Thomas L. Friedman, which opens up new avenues for understanding globalization. It has helped me enormously as I am working in a media related field. I am about to finish the last installment of the Potter series - Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.
Rupanjali Lahiri, Delhi University
I am reading The Kite Runner by Khalid Hosseini. It's an unusual and extraordinary story of growing up in Afghanistan - a country beset by violence and terrorism. Also it is the debut novel of Hosseini. I also plan to read Inheritance of Loss, which won the Booker Prize recently.
Sumit Ray, Delhi University
I am an avid reader and an Agatha Christie fan. Currently, I am engrossed in reading The Golem's Eye by Jonathan Stroud, who is a wonderful author of fantasy and mythology books. This book is the second installment in the Bartimaeus Trilogy and I plan to complete them all.
Jaya Mitra, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi
I have just finished reading The Strangers of the Mist by Sanjay Hazarika. I am from Assam and reading Hazarika makes me better understand the strained conditions and relations of the seven North-East states among themselves and the centre. Hazarika is a well-informed journalist and provides a perceptive analysis the emergence and growth of various terrorist groups working in the seven states.
Raktim Sharma, student
I have finished reading Two Lives by Vikram Seth (He's my favourite!) and am highly impressed by his other works too. I have also finished reading Somerset Maughm's Of Human Bondage and Hemingway's For Whom The Bell Tolls. I plan to read Shantaram next as I have heard a lot about it.
Soumya Gupta, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi |
Can writers, poets and artists do anything to help curb the scourge of terrorism that is killing innocents all over the world, be it Mumbai, Madrid or London? Is a terrorist a wounded individual out to wreak revenge on an unjust system or simply a cold-blooded killer masquer-ading as a martyr?
Send your comments to editor@indiawrites.org
Winners
of the best 5 entries get one book written by Dan Brown. |
There are many kinds and even genres of friendship, but there is something
uniquely fulfilling about the camaraderie inspired by love of books
and learning. Call it platonic love or a secret cult of lovers-readers.
If you wish to join the Book Brotherhood (or sisterhood, if you like) and
initiate friendships that will stimulate your muse, write to us about your
preferences and find a kindred soul to revisit pleasures of T.S. Eliot’s
urbane wit, Vikram Seth’s gift for writing sonnets, the sheer rapture
of reading Ghalib, delicious distraction of reading dishy airport novels…
Let go of self-censorship and discuss anything under the sun – the
pious fable and the dirty story share in total literary glory… |
It’s a secret vice of bibliophiles – lazily browsing through
yellowing pages of second-hand books for hours on end in quiet anticipation
that you will hit a masterpiece, and that too at throwaway prices. Imagine
getting the first edition of Keats’ Poems or Byron’s Letters
at a price less than what a hamburger and coke costs…
In this column, readers-seekers are invited to share their agonies and
ecstasies at these suburbs of the intellectual mart. They can also put up
their books for sale or make an exchange offer…
Don’t give books that you have wearied of to raddiwalla (junk dealer); put it up
for display here.
For one man’s ex can easily ignite another man’s passion and
be his soul mate!
Share your discoveries with editor@indiawrites.org
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After Percy Bysshe Shelley died, his wife had his heart preserved. She wrapped it in silk and carried it with her wherever she went.
Samuel Johnson wrote The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759) during the evenings in just one week to pay for his mother’s funeral expense. |
Canto
A subdivision of an epic poem.
Each of the three books of Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy" is divided into cantos. For example, in each of the cantos of "The Inferno," Dante meets the souls of people who were once alive and who have been condemned to punishment for sin. Return to Menu
Carpe Diem
A Latin phrase which translated means "Sieze (Catch) the day," meaning "Make the most of today."
The phrase originated as the title of a poem by the RomanHorace (65 B.C.E.-8B.C.E.) and caught on as a theme with such English poets as Robert Herrick and Andrew Marvell.
Consider these lines from Herrick's "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time":
Gather ye rose-buds
while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles
today,
To-morrow will be dying. |
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Russian tales ready to cast spell in India
By Manish Chand
Moscow: The ghosts of Gogol, Pushkin, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky will consort with the new icons of Russian literature for the next nine days at the 18th World Book Fair in New Delhi, re-kindling an old literary romance between India and Russia.
Sitting in the rarefied ambience of Petrovich Club, a stylish restaurant symbolising post-Soviet retro chic, Eduard Uspensky, a celebrity Russian writer and best-selling author of children's books, can barely conceal his excitement.
'I am really looking forward to going to India. Indians and Russians need to know their writers better,' says the 70-year-old creator of memorable characters like Uncle Fedya and Crocodile Gena that has seeped into Russian children's imagination
Over 100 top Russian publishers, authors and literary divas are in New Delhi to whip up a veritable literary feast, with Russia presiding over the show as a guest of honour, marking the beginning of the year-long celebration of Russian culture in India.
'It's a great idea to have Russia as a guest of honour at the book fair. Russian writers are popular in India, but they need to be discovered afresh,” says Eugenia Vanina, head of Indian Studies at the Institute of Oriental Studies.
Vanina, a passionate admirer of Indian literature, especially Indian classics, recited a couplet from the Bhagvad Gita in chaste Sanskrit and then translated it into lilting Russian.
“But it should not end there,' she adds.
Yaroslav Kostyuk is set to dazzle Indian bibliophiles with his exquisite miniature books measuring one centimeter to a few inches. “There is a certain artistry to putting together these microbooks. I will be talking about it in New Delhi,” says the book collector.
Managers at Biblio Globus, the largest book store chain in Russia, are brimming with enthusiasm at the prospect of displaying the best and brightest of Russian literature along with the old masters at the Delhi Book Fair.
“We plan to take a large collection of Russian books, including reasonably priced translations of classics, to the Delhi book fair,' says a manager at Biblio-Globus Publishing industry in Russia is booming with total revenues estimated to be anything between $4 to 8 billion.
Sergey Lukyanenko, the creator of fantasy blockbuster Night Watch series of thrillers which revolutionized post-Soviet cinema and Mikhail Veller, the best-selling author of page-turners like 'The Legends of Nevsky Prospect,christened by critics as 'the funniest Russian book of the last seven years,' and 'Everything about Life' will be some of the star attractions at the fair.
Playwright and novelist Yury Polyakov, a hot favourite with Russian television channels, is another contemporary Russian icon who is expected to grace the book fair.
Seminars, readings, quizzes, concerts of Russian folk instruments ensemble, Russian craftsmen, national costumes and painting competitions have been woven into a composite show that is set to rekindle interest in Russian art and literature in India.
Designed as part of the Year of Russia in India which has a white stork against the background of the flags of the two countries as its logo, the Russia Hall will be a virtual window to Russian culture in all its myriad hues.
Besides books, there will be various sideshows with Russian cosmonauts expected to enthrall Indians with their tales of space conquests. Rakesh Sharma, the first Indian cosmonaut to make space travel, will also be present at the fair.
It will be more than just spectacle. There will be a serious dialogue of ideas between Russian writers and contemporary Indian writers like U.R. Ananathamurthy, Githa Hariharan, Urvashi Butalia, Krishna Sobti and Vikram Chandra.
Children, many of whom have read delightful tales of Baba Yaga, the wicked witch, and the Firebird, have a treat in store for them. They can take part in Russian New Year's Tree Party with Father Frost and the Snow Maiden.
Around 1,300 publishers from 23 countries will be taking part in the mega book fair in New Delhi, which attracts millions of book lovers.
The Russian presence at the book fair will be reminiscent of the Soviet era when thousands of Russian books in cheap English and Hindi translations were freely available in India. The idea is to bridge the gap as the two countries are rediscovering each other anew, says Tatiana Shaumian of the School of Oriental Studies.
Comments
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 I can't go on, says Beckett's Unnamable. I will go on. A writer's injuries are his strengths, and from his wounds will flow his sweetest, most startling dreams.
-- Salman Rushdie in February 1999: Ten Years of the Fatwa
 And Proust, too, killing himself to write his book comes close to the concept of dharma when, echoing Balzac, he says that in the end it's less the desire for fame than 'the habit of laboriousness' that takes a writer to the end of a work. But dharma, as this ideal of truth to oneself, or living out the truth in oneself, can also be used to reconcile men to servitude and make them find in paralyzing obedience the highest spiritual good. 'And do thy duty, even if it be humble,' says the Aryan Gita,
'rather than another's, even it be great. To die on one's duty is life: to live in another' death.
V.S. Naipaul in India: A Wounded Civilisation
 My discovery over the years is that the mother tongues have so much in them, so much that is alive, and are much more pervasive, in all strata of society, in all ages from children to the very old, men and women, literate and non-literate. What holds them together? It's not Sanskrit. It's these mother tongues. I think I went into linguistics because of that. That spoken languages had to be very, very important. It was important in my youth to have discovered this.
-- A.K. Ramanujan in an interview
 Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them. Maybe I wanted to find more rigorous ways of thinking. We are talking now about the earliest writing I did and about the power of language to counteract the wallow of late adolescence, to define things, define muddled expression in economical ways. Let's not forget that writing is convenient. It requires the simplest tools. A young writer sees that with words and sentences on a piece of paper that costs less than a penny he can place himself more clearly in the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.
-- Don DeLillo
 Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. An artist is a creature driven by daemons. He doesn’t know why they chose him and he is usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.
-- William Faulkner
 I am trembling with cold
I want to feel nothing!
But the sky dances with gold.
It orders me to sing.
--
Osip Mandelstam
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The Top 10:
Fiction
- The Inheritance of Loss
Kiran Desai
Penguin Books
- The Innocent Man
John Grisham
Arrow Books
- The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini
Penguin
- Like the Flowing River
Paulo Coelho
Random House
- Shantaram
Gregory David Roberts
ABACUS
- Passion India
Javier Moro
Full Circle
- The Road
Cormac McCarthy
Picador
- The Afghan
Frederick Forsyth
Random House
- Ines of My Soul
Isabel Allende
Fourth Estate
- Dear John
Nicholas Sparks
Sphere
Top 10: Non-Fiction
- The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857
William Dalrymple
Penguin Viking
- In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India
Edward Luce
Little Brown
- Mohandas: A True Story of a Man, his People and an Empire
Rajmohan Gandhi
Penguin-Viking
- Kama Sutra: The Art of Making Love to a Woman
Pavan K. Varma
Roli Books
- Life Lessons from the Monk Who Sold His Ferrari
Robin S. Sharma
Jaico
- In the Name of Honour
Mukhtar Mai
A Virago Original
- Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
Suketu Mehta
Penguin
- Trees of Delhi
Author: Pradip Krishen
Delhi Tourism
- The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming The American Dream
Barack Obama
Crown
- Making Globalization Work: The Next Steps to Global Justice
Joseph Stiglitz
Penguin Allen Lane
(IndiaWrites Bestsellers List is based on inputs from select bookshops in India & an informal survey of readers’ preferences.) |
It may sound clichéd that reading is an art, but the fact is that
there aren’t many passionate and attentive readers around. Of course, there will always be distracted souls turning
to pulp fiction or some odd forgotten classic to escape from boredom and
the killing sameness that pervades modern life.
Read it here... |
Booker Prize winning Indian author Arundhati Roy has been nominated for
the prestigious Spanish Prince of Asturias Prize for 2006.
The award carries a cash prize of 50,000 Euros and a sculpture by Catalan
artist, Joan Miro.
A foundation named after Spain's Crown Prince Felipe chooses the winners
in different fields such as communications and humanities, social sciences,
international cooperation, scientific investigation, arts, harmony and sports.
Big Prize for 'The Master'
Irish author Colm Toibin's ‘The Master won the world’s richest literary award
Utterly Monkey bags the Trask Award
After Zadie Smith's third fictional novel 'On Beauty' won the Orange Prize for Fiction
Big Prize for 'The Master'
Irish author Colm Toibin's ‘The Master won the world’s richest literary award - the 68,000-pounds
Shakespeare the all-time winner!
'1599-A Year in the life of William Shakespeare' beat other highly prestigious covers to win the Samuel Johnson non-fiction prize.
MORE NEWS |
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