Started reading Rushdie (again) today- by picking up his 'Satanic Verses'.....basically because I wanted a book that I've never read before. Had tried it half a year ago, but gave up- partly because reading became a luxury in light of my other roles and responsibilities. I blame a fast 'mum-sy' life or the TV...!
As a kid, I read (and loved) Kipling, Mark Twain, Enid Blyton and Jane Austen (in my teenage years)..Little Women was a biggie for me, as was Jo, one of its principal characters...
Amongst Indian and other South-east Asian writers, I like Arundhati Roy's God of small things, and Khaled Hosseini's A thousand splendid sunsets, and The kite runner..but if I have to name my all-time favourite Indian writer, it has to be Munshi Premchand, and Kalidasa who was masterful in his imagination...(I can still recollect my Sanskrit Doctorate mother translating the fragile, quivering, passionately imaginative and beautiful prose for my father, from the ancient text of our scriptures that Kalidasa wrote in, to hindi or gujarati...The way she described the smile on Uma's countenance as she beheld Lord Shiva in his samadhi or narrated the writer imploring a rain-bearing cloud to carry a message to his beloved....made me feel fortunate beyond description, to be her daughter)
Is it just me or does anyone else feel put off, instinctively, by a book by the time they've read five to ten pages??Sometimes, if I'm lucky, I'm gripped by this inexplicable urge to plan my life so it gives me maxed-out time to continue reading when a new book comes my way...for me, personally, Michael Crichton's MICRO falls in the first category (AVOID it), while anything by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is, obviously, in the latter realm. The man is a master storyteller!! Case in point, his One hundred years of solitude and Love in the times of cholera....even Of Love and other demons....
Happy READING!!
(WORLD BOOK DAY today! -01.03.2012)