Thursday, August 28, 2008

Psychobabble

I regret the untimely, but slow dying of the words.

Sometimes it happens I guess, a flourishing kingdom gets plundered.
A prosperous life gets dry.

But we can always bask in the glory of the past.
Without making 'the' today miserable.

When something goes wrong the index finger is all ready to point the blame onto someone.
Its hard not to do that, sometimes genuinely and sometimes not so.

So here's to the glory of the past. And to the serenity of the present.

After all, what's more alluring than 'peace', with yourself and the world (if not the words)?

Afterthoughts....

A conviction that the words will not die.
A secret stray ray of hope shines.
Words will get fuelled. They will flow, they have to.
Nothing can stop them.
The words WILL have to flow.
After all, words are thoughts that get frozen, those that dont just evaporate...

Monday, August 04, 2008

The Pages

That was a long time ago- when I was in a chronic spell of reading- reading page after page, book after book, hours after hours, ... late into the night, into the wee hours of the morning. That reminds me of a little story, something I find hilarious today but horrific then.

It was right after 11th grade final exams (Gosh it's almost a decade ago... and I want to write those exams again... and sometimes I still have nightmares that I've missed a paper between my finals and its either Math or Kannada), July 31st, I was turning page after page of Sidney Sheldon's 'Tell Me Your Dreams' gripping novel. It was just about time for the morning rays to hit the horizon and the birds to chirp the darkness away when I wrapped the book to a finish and kept it aside.

I heard the most strangest of sounds and got this eerie feeling. I peered through the window and could hardly believe my sight when i saw this figure that seemed to be afloat. I instantly drew the curtains and woke up my sister... ' Saw a ghost' and snuggled!! Chanted all the mantras I knew and slumbered, while my sister sat awake (in fear). Needless to point out, I thought I'd seen a ghost ( I still believe so!).

And here's this tag (after a long time)... :) Here's a book list... Shalom's got me running through this list of books and made me see how much I've read and how much more there's left to read!!!!!

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.

2) Italicize those you intend to read.

3) Underline the books you really love

4) Reprint this list in your own blog.

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1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible/ The Bhagavad Gita As It Is

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams


26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens


33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma - Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez


44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy


48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel


52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen


55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon


60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Naboko

v63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (children's version.....does that count???)

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding


69 Midnights Children – Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte's Web - EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery


93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo