The Reading List - 1

New Year has new resolutions - as usual. Without any illusion of chasing grand dreams, I plan to read 100 books. Yes, ONE HUNDRED. I also noticed that my previous blog post was exactly attempting the same, last year. And I can also see that it died a premature death.

I plan to Survive.

My Completed Books list include:

1. The Film Club by David Gilmour (Memoir)

2. The Gaze by Elif Shafak (Literary Fiction)

3. The Gurnsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer (Genre fiction - drama/romance)

4. The Balloonists by Rajarshi Charkavarthy (Literary fiction)

5. The Girl who loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King (Genre fiction - Horror)

New Reads: A Beginning

Books read till now, with a one word observation. (Longer versions will come out, later)

1. Going Postal - Terry Pratchett (Hilarious - worth a read)
2. Making Money - Terry Pratchett (Hilarious - yes once again, as most of his books are supposed to be)
3. Almost Single - Advaita Kala (Not bad - light read and witty)

Currently Reading

1. Escape - Manjula Padmanabhan

Hello 2010

The date on my previous post tells me how I have been effected by the disease of laziness. But the year 2010 is going to be different. I know absolutely 100% of the earth's population would say the same thing, but I am okay with that. I have quite many resolutions up my sleeve but the most important ones are about reading and writing.

I plan to read a lot. Fiction and Non-fiction. I remember a blogger had started a reeboowee (read a book a week) and I realized many great minds think alike. Well, my goal is to finish 60 books this year. I plan to read a lot of non fiction as well; I am very poor when it comes to general knowledge.

I plan to write as well. Although my plan sounds highly ambitious with writing goals for everyday, I am going to try.

Mean while, I have already fallen short of my goal of read a book a week for the month of January but I have managed to finish three books.

Not novel anymore?

Writer's block is one thing. Inability to create novelty is another.
Looks like this inability seems to plague the best of writers.
What can be the solution? At least, I didn't think the solution offered at the end of the article was quite effective. If we were to stop reading authors because they 'might' end up becoming repetitive, then we may not know what we missed!

One Indian author who has surprised me every time he wrote a book is Upamanyu Chatterjee.
I had written about 'Weight Loss', one of his novels, here.
I wish he would write more.

My partial list

As Bethany mentioned in the rules, I am not planning to post a complete list of books (they may change any time) but I am determined to complete the challenge this year! So, here are the first few books that I already have in my collection, that I am very sure of completing!

1. Three Men in a Boat – Jerome K Jerome (England)
2. The Almond – Nadjma (North Africa)
3. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert (France)
4. The Shipping News - E. Annie Proulx (USA)

The rest will follow... I will be almost done with Three Men in a Boat and be posting my thoughts on it soon!

On confidence and quality

I had always wondered how people manage to publish books even if it is sub-standard in quality (of writing). I recently saw saw a book in the book shop. It was a book written by an engineering student. The story seemed to be focused on cricket. Nothing unusual, probably little boring, but what put me off was the blurb on the back cover. There were at least three obvious mistakes and I wondered how the hell did it pass through editing?
On an informal platform like blogging, I can understand people not focusing on sentence construction/grammar (I am guilty of it, completely) and spellings (to certain extent), but how on earth in a 'published' book?
Beats me.

OT challenge 2009

Last time I had not completed the Orbis Terrarum Challenge. And this time too, I am kind of unsure how to go about it. It is not so easy to get hold of books of authors of different countries (bad time for buying brand new books and no library in this town masquerading as a city).



However, I still plan to take part - with the unfinished books that I already have in our collection.