Skip to main content

Reading




Sitting in the cosiness of my little home, I have explored the mystery of the cosmos, encountered Schrodinger’s cat, chatted with Baruch Spinoza, witnessed Antony and Cleopatra melting Rome in the Tiber, travelled among the arid mountains of Afghanistan where hooded faces sought god in the barrels of guns, and listened to the music of the stars.  And accomplished a lot more, all thanks to books.

I love books more than people simply because it is easier to understand the former whether they be fiction or non-fiction.  When it comes to fiction I like the kind which explore life in depth.  I like fiction spiced up with philosophy, history and possibly a little mystery too.  

Good fiction takes us through the dark labyrinths in the human psyche.  Even psychology has not understood the human motives better than Dostoevsky or Joseph Conrad or Javier Marias.  The most sacred religious scriptures cannot refresh my soul as does Nikos Kazantzakis or Franz Kafka. Jose Saramago’s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ which culminates in Jesus’ lament on the cross, “Men, forgive Him, for He knows not what He has done,” synchronises exactly with my understanding of Christianity.

I love reading history provided it is written by writers with some imagination.  Ramachandra Guha’s India after Gandhi and Freedom at Midnight by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre suit my taste as much as Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens and Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City.  John Keay’s scholarliness is as okay with me as William Dalrymple’s lucidity.

When it comes to religion, Karen Armstrong scores high in my list.  She is both scholarly and empathetic. I found Gurcharan Das’s The Difficulty of Being Good a particularly striking exploration of the Mahabharata.  Jennifer Michael Hecht’s Doubt: a history is a unique blend of history, philosophy and religion.

There are books and books.  I cannot exhaust the list of books I admire.  I’m happy that I have so many friends, innocuous friends, who inspire me day in and day out with so much wisdom.

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 170: #fictionornonfiction

Comments

  1. Pranju chakrapaniMay 20, 2017 at 3:44 PM

    Perhaps a dedicated complete book list (both fictions and non fictions) blogpost made by you would be of great help to the readers. I have read a fair amount of books, but your reading habits show quality over quantity.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 21, 2017 at 2:50 PM

      Such a list will be too long. I have mentioned some of the best I've read. Even then the list is not exhaustive.

      Delete
  2. None to be knownMay 25, 2017 at 8:31 PM

    If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.There lies the difference. To understand a book all that you will need is a dictionary and a brain to think. But to understand someone you will have to take all time in the world. Keep reading books, but remember that a book is only a book, and you should learn to think for yourself.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

In this Wonderland

I didn’t write anything in the last few days. Nor did I feel any urge to write. I don’t know if this lack of interest to write is what’s called writer’s block. Or is it simple disenchantment with whatever is happening around me? We’re living in a time that offers much, too much, to writers. The whole world looks like a complex plot for a gigantic epic. The line between truth and fiction has disappeared. Mass murders have become no-news. Animals get more compassion than fellow human beings. Even their excreta are venerated! Folk tales are presented as scientific truths while scientific truths are sacrificed on the altar of political expediency. When the young generation in Nepal set fire to their Parliament and Supreme Court buildings, they were making an unmistakable statement: that they are sick of their political leaders and their systems. Is there any country whose leaders don’t sicken their citizens? I’m just wondering. Maybe, there are good leaders still left in a few coun...
12 comments
Read more

Whose Rama?

Book Review Title: Whose Rama? [Malayalam] Author: T S Syamkumar Publisher: D C Books, Kerala Pages: 352 Rama may be an incarnation of God Vishnu, but is he as noble a man [ Maryada Purushottam ] as he is projected to be by certain sections of Hindus? This is the theme of Dr Syamkumar’s book, written in Malayalam. There is no English translation available yet. Rama is a creation of the Brahmins, asserts the author of this book. The Ramayana upholds the unjust caste system created by Brahmins for their own wellbeing. Everyone else exists for the sake of the Brahmin wellbeing. If the Kshatriyas are given the role of rulers, it is only because the Brahmins need such men to fight and die for them. Valmiki’s Rama too upheld that unjust system merely because that was his Kshatriya-dharma, allotted by the Brahmins. One of the many evils that Valmiki’s Rama perpetrates heartlessly is the killing of Shambuka, a boy who belonged to a low caste but chose to become an ascetic. The...
8 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more