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

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...
17 comments
Read more

Ram, Anandhi, and Co

Book Review Title: Ram C/o Anandhi Author: Akhil P Dharmajan Translator: Haritha C K Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2025 Pages: 303 T he author tells us in his prefatory note that “this (is) a cinematic novel.” Don’t read it as literary work but imagine it as a movie. That is exactly how this novel feels like: an action-packed thriller. The story revolves around Ram, a young man who lands in Chennai for joining a diploma course in film making, and Anandhi, receptionist of Ram’s college. Then there are their friends: Vetri and his half-sister Reshma, and Malli who is a transgender. An old woman, who is called Paatti (grandmother) by everyone and is the owner of the house where three of the characters live, has an enviably thrilling role in the plot.   In one of the first chapters, Ram and Anandhi lock horns over a trifle. That leads to some farcical action which agitates Paatti’s bees which in turn fly around stinging everyone. Malli, the aruvani (transgender), s...
8 comments
Read more

The Blind Lady’s Descendants

Book Review Title: The Blind Lady’s Descendants Author: Anees Salim Publisher: Penguin India 2015 Pages: 301 Price: Rs 399 A metaphorical blindness is part of most people’s lives.  We fail to see many things and hence live partial lives.  We make our lives as well as those of others miserable with our blindness.  Anees Salim’s novel which won the Raymond & Crossword award for fiction in 2014 explores the role played by blindness in the lives of a few individuals most of whom belong to the family of Hamsa and Asma.  The couple are not on talking terms for “eighteen years,” according to the mother.  When Amar, the youngest son and narrator of the novel, points out that he is only sixteen, Asma reduces it to fifteen and then to ten years when Amar refers to the child that was born a few years after him though it did not survive.  Dark humour spills out of every page of the book.  For example: How reckless Akmal was! ...
5 comments
Read more

The Ghost of a Banyan Tree

  Image from here Fiction Jaichander Varma could not sleep. It was past midnight and the world outside Jaichander Varma’s room was fairly quiet because he lived sufficiently far away from the city. Though that entailed a tedious journey to his work and back, Mr Varma was happy with his residence because it afforded him the luxury of peaceful and pure air. The city is good, no doubt. Especially after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, the city was the best place with so much vikas. ‘Where’s vikas?’ Someone asked Mr Varma once. Mr Varma was offended. ‘You’re a bloody antinational mussalman who should be living in Pakistan ya kabristan,’ Mr Varma told him bluntly. Mr Varma was a proud Indian which means he was a Hindu Brahmin. He believed that all others – that is, non-Brahmins – should go to their respective countries of belonging. All Muslims should go to Pakistan and Christians to Rome (or is it Italy? Whatever. Get out of Bharat Mata, that’s all.) The lower caste Hindus co...
122 comments
Read more