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(Postponed to Feb 20 )Bring Your Own Book (BYOB) Party on Feb 13, 2016 (Saturday)

Update: The Party has been postponed to a week later (February 20) due to some logistic issues. An updated post will be there soon. A separate mail is being sent to those who registered.

BYOB Invite

RSVP

Do you think the books make the best valentine? Have you read a book and are craving to chitchat about it with someone? Have a favorite book that you think everyone would love, if only they knew about it? Want to see what others are reading and have interesting conversations beyond weather, traffic, and real estate?

Then come to the BYOB party and talk away! Try to avoid a bestseller and if you have a copy, bring it along and read us a passage. All languages are welcome.

There will be refreshments and swag courtesy Worth A Read.

FAQs

So, what really happens at a BYOB Party?

Everyone brings a book and talks about it. Conversations follow and they are good. So are the refreshments!

You can take a look at what happened in some of our earlier parties here:

Do I have to be there for the entire duration of four hours?

We aren’t closing doors or locking you in. But the party is best enjoyed if you are there for the entire duration and listen to people talk about a variety of books. Trust us, you won’t know how time flew.

Do I have to bring anything?

Nothing really. But if you have a copy of the book you want to talk about, you might want to bring it in. Other attendees might want to have a look, or you might want to read a paragraph from it.

I am an author. Can I bring a book written by me?

A good writer should be a voracious reader. It would be preferable if you brought a book you really like written by someone else.

Who are the organizers?

Worth a Read

I have more questions. Who do I contact?

Shoot an e-mail to jayajha@instascribe.com.

Okay! I am ready to come. What do I do?

Just RSVP here and turn up on time!

Short Book Review: The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

SBR: What a contrast The Pillars of the Earth is to my previous read Fire from Heaven. If the latter’s writing craft was too evolved for regular readers, the language and the style in The Pillars of the Earth is plainer and more boring than the school essays. The author feels the need to spell everything out for the reader, and even then he repeats things every once in a while. There is far too much “telling” and no “showing” whatsoever.
The characters are one-dimensional and flat. Whatever little comes out of them is more 20th century that 12th (which the book is supposed to be set in). Given the tumultuous background of the clash between the state and the church, the succession war and the machinations ambitious and opportunistic nobility and clergy, you would expect to see complex, gray characters trying to cope up with and make the best of the conflicts and the uncertainty. But the book sorely disappoints.
The scenes of rape, sex and violence are described in (porno)graphic details. Their sole purpose is to titillate; they don’t add anything to the story or the character development. They represent sadist male fantasy more than the reality.
The accuracy of the historical setup is questionable. The only research seems to be in the area of the cathedral architecture, which was the motivation behind writing the book. But that too, unfortunately, doesn’t add anything to the story.
The plot, I think, is meaty enough, but the treatment spoils it all.
To read or not to read: Don’t. This book is a classic example that famous need not be great.

Book Recommendation: English August by Upamanyu Chatterjee

English August“Marvellously intelligent and entertaining” – one of the reviews printed on the back cover of English August says and I concur. Profanity, sexual jokes, and scatological humor abound, the protagonist is drunk and stoned almost every single moment, you feel like whacking him for being an indulgent, self-absorbed, spoiled youth who doesn’t take anything or anybody seriously; and yet you can’t help but see the world through his eyes –  in all its mundane, petty and purposeless glory.

You can decide what to make of the book. You can laugh out loud and forget about things. You can identify with the protagonist’s sense of purposelessness and isolation if you have been or are going through a similar experience yourself. You can wonder about the big, fat Indian bureaucracy, its lethargy and its corruption. You can hate our hero for being apathetic to a job where he could impact several lives meaningfully if only he would stop being cynical. And that is the beauty of the writing. It doesn’t preach or impose anything on you.

English August is a true modern Indian novel. There is no romanticization of either the good or the bad. There are no exotic, dreamy portrayals. No ultimate happy union of the east and the west, of the megalopolis and the hinterland, of the Kolkata-and-Delhi-boy and the small-town locals.  It is an affectionate yet unsparing portrayal of India.

In its craft, language and style, it stands right along with the best English novels worldwide.

Book Description

Below is the book description from the publisher’s website. (The edition I read was from Rupa and Co.)

Purchase Links

Short Book Review: Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault

Fire From HeavenSBR: Fire from Heaven is the first book in Mary Renault’s Alexander trilogy – historical fictions based on the life of Alexander the Great. This book traces Alexander’s life from his childhood until his ascension to the throne after his father’s death. The author’s formidable grasp of Greek history, politics, religion, culture and mythology shines unmistakably, without looking deliberate or ostentatious, in the realistic reconstruction of the ancient Greek society .
The language and the writing style has a literary beauty. But it sometimes becomes too convoluted to be comprehended. Combined with the extensive use of Greek vocabulary the book is a difficult read. Another gripe I have about the book is that the characters are not made realistic and relatable. Alexander’s portrayal is romantic and mystic. It seems like the author has not wavered from the depiction provided in her sources and has not attempted to humanize him. I find that disappointing.
To read or not to read: If you are familiar with Greek terms and geography, or if you are willing to put in the effort, you can read it for the history and the literary merit. If, like me, you want human, realistic characters in historical fiction, you’d be disappointed. Also avoid if you are looking for a quick, entertaining read.

Short Book Review: The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami

The Strange LibrarySBR: I. Don’t. Get. Haruki. Murakami. There is magical realism, but I don’t get it at all.
The most interesting part of The Strange Library are its illustrations which entwine with the text in interesting, quirky ways.  Good production quality enhances the appeal. So a print edition is preferable over a Kindle one (I had a hard cover print edition).
At the end of the day, however, I don’t get it.
To read or not to read: If you are a Murakami fan, go right ahead. If not, read at your own risk. The story is very short, though; so you don’t have to worry about the time spent. The production and illustration might be worth it for those visually inclined. Pick up the print edition.

Short Book Review: Dubai Wives by Zvezdana Rashkovich

Dubai WivesSBR: Dubai Wives is a book that could have been. The author has enough material in the variegated, but connected stories of the plethora of characters she explores in the book. But the book needed a sincere rewriting and a ruthless editing. The size could have easily been two-third of what it was, probably smaller, endlessly repetitive parts should have been torn away, and some very obvious language issues should have been dealt with.
To read or not to read: Don’t pick up unless a better edited edition comes out.

Book Recommendation: The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester

 

The Professor and the Madman“A tale of murder, insanity, and the making of the Oxford English Dictionary” goes the subtitle of the book I have selected for this month. It indeed is all of that. One might argue that the making of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the primary tale here, but it wouldn’t have made as fascinating a read if it also didn’t include the stories of the eponymous professor and the madman, two people intimately connected with the dictionary’s development. They were Sir James Murray, the primary editor of the dictionary, and Dr. W. C. Minor, one of the most prolific and productive contributors to the dictionary for about twenty years.

Okay! Quiz time:

  1. Which dictionaries did Shakespeare refer to while writing his plays?
  2. When Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was first conceived, how much time was the first edition supposed to take?
  3. How much time did it actually take?
  4. How big was the complete first edition of the dictionary?
  5. There was one word which mistakenly went unprinted in the first edition. Which one was it?
  6. How was the enormous word-list for the dictionary compiled?

Here are the answers, some at least. Others are partial and some withheld.

  1. None. There were no English to English dictionaries in existence in Shakespeare’s time.
  2. Two years was the estimated time when one of the early attempts was made. When the real push came under Sir James Murray, the time estimated was ten years.
  3. 1879-1927, that is forty-eight years of continuous efforts. Seventy years from the time of conception and beginning of fitful activities in 1957.
  4. 20 volumes containing 414,825 words.
  5. Read to find out!
  6. Through painstaking process of volunteers and staff reading through large number of books published over centuries and making word list from each of them! Existing dictionaries were used as a starting point too, but the comprehensiveness of OED was beyond anything compiled earlier.

And did you know?

  1. The primary editor of the dictionary was a person who had to drop out of formal education at the age of fourteen because of poverty.
  2. One of the most prolific contributors was an insane man guilty of the murder of a perfectly innocent stranger.
  3. The creation of the dictionary was made possible by the unpaid labors of a large number volunteers in reading books and noting down words and their usage. Crowdsourcing isn’t as newfangled an idea as we might be led to think!

Puritans interested only in the history of the dictionary may find the pages detailing the lives of these men distracting. But it is this glimpse into the lives of people involved (admittedly only two of possibly hundreds or thousands, but two very important ones) that gives the story its charm. You also get to hear of author’s ruminations on the advancing war technologies in the Civil War era contrasted with the area of medicine that was still old-world, and ill equipped to deal with the injuries of advanced weapons. You also get to know about the limitations of the understanding of mental health issues in nineteenth century and how it has changed since then. Some of it is perhaps there to pad up the pages and may sometimes feel too pedagogic, but the story flows smoothly. The time, surroundings and even private conversations of the people from a bygone era have been recreated with such confidence that one might wonder at times if the author has taken too much of creative liberty. But there are many letters, old newspaper articles, court proceedings and detailed asylum records that the author goes by, which lend credibility to the raconteur.

A dictionary is something we take for granted in today’s world. It has evolved from the printed tome it used to be to its online avatars. And now we may not even care to go to a dictionary-specific website because a google search to define a term throws up the details right there. It is easy to forget what a humongous enterprise creation of something like a dictionary, which is to represent a language in its fullness, is. A book like this is important to remind us just how thankful we have to be even for the things that feel like they have always been there.

One important warning is warranted here. The tale of insanity has some rather unsavory and grotesque moments. So, despite a cute topic like making of the legendary Oxford English Dictionary, do not hand over the book to kids. Read yourself first to determine if they are old enough to handle it.

Book Description

Below is the book description from the publisher’s website.

It is known as one of the greatest literary achievements in the history of English letters. The creation of theOxford English Dictionary began in 1857, took seventy years to complete, drew from tens of thousands of brilliant minds, and organized the sprawling language into 414,825 precise definitions. But hidden within the rituals of its creation is a fascinating and mysterious story–a story of two remarkable men whose strange twenty-year relationship lies at the core of this historic undertaking.Professor James Murray, an astonishingly learned former schoolmaster and bank clerk, was the distinguished editor of the OED project. Dr. William Chester Minor, an American surgeon from New Haven, Connecticut, who had served in the Civil War, was one of thousands of contributors who submitted illustrative quotations of words to be used in the dictionary. But Minor was no ordinary contributor. He was remarkably prolific, sending thousands of neat, handwritten quotations from his home in the small village of Crowthorne, fifty miles from Oxford. On numerous occasions Murray invited Minor to visit Oxford and celebrate his work, but Murray’s offer was regularly–and mysteriously–refused.Thus the two men, for two decades, maintained a close relationship only through correspondence. Finally, in 1896, after Minor had sent nearly ten thousand definitions to the dictionary but had still never traveled from his home, a puzzled Murray set out to visit him. It was then that Murray finally learned the truth about Minor–that, in addition to being a masterful wordsmith, Minor was also a murderer, clinically insane–and locked up in Broadmoor, England’s harshest asylum for criminal lunatics.The Professor and the Madman is an extraordinary tale of madness and genius, and the incredible obsessions of two men at the heart of the Oxford English Dictionary and literary history. With riveting insight and detail, Simon Winchester crafts a fascinating glimpse into one man’s tortured mind and his contribution to another man’s magnificent dictionary.

Purchase Links

 

Short Book Review: The Circle of Reason by Amitav Ghosh

 Circle Of ReasonSBR: I picked up The Circle of Reason without knowing that I was getting into magical realism. Magical realism, for the uninitiated in simple words, is a genre that combines fantastic and real worlds and goes on as if it is all normal. There won’t be an explanation of the “magical” parts.
In the book the real part is realistic enough. The friendship of college days that lasts even through the subsequent divergence in personalities, views and lifestyle decisions, the phrenology obsessed middle-aged teacher in a quaint Bengal village constituting mostly of refugees from East Bengal, the tragic culmination of paranoid politics and individual madness and a bird-watcher police officer thrown in the chase owing to some complicated turn of office politics make for a strong story. Then the magical elements become more prominent and although I follow the rest of the story, I don’t quite get the point. Since I haven’t read the seminal works of magical realism like One Hundred Years of Solitude by  Gabriel García Márquez or those by Salman Rushdie, I am not sure what to compare it with. Perhaps I will return to this book after I have read some of those.
To read or not to read: If, like me, you are not into the magical realism genre yet, you probably don’t want to start with this book and instead pick up something more widely talked about. If you have read some of those, it might be worthwhile giving this book a try. If you just want to read Amitav Ghosh as an author, I would suggest The Shadow Lines. I am not too fond of his Ibis trilogy, but that has a fan following. So that can also be a good starting point.

Response to “Superstition and the inherent cruelty of rationalists” by Devdutt Pattanaik

On the heels of my review of two of his books, I thought it was a good time to post my response to one of Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik’s articles in Scroll.

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In his article Superstition and the inherent cruelty of rationalists, Dr. Pattanaik does the same disservice to the rationalists that he accuses the rationalists of doing to the superstitious and the religious. He creates a straw man out of the rationalist, makes a category for him, and attacks him ruthlessly. It isn’t clear what his definition of a rationalist exactly is (philosophical definition, for example, can be quite different from what people infer just from the English word). I assume he uses the word in a colloquial way.

So rationalist is the average person who doesn’t believe that a cat crossing the road before you is a bad omen and doesn’t keep a fast on Mondays to get a good husband. Rationalists prefer not to be bothered by other people’s religious, and what they consider irrational, beliefs, but believe it or not, most of them don’t drag you out of your house and demand you to be hanged if you keep your Thursday fasts. They aren’t the people to deny human emotions either. They don’t behave like robots themselves, nor do they expect others to behave so. They don’t do a cost-benefit analysis before talking to their spouses, visiting their relatives or buying a gift for a friend. Yes, they exist on the same continuum that the author seems to present as some ultimate weapon against them.

“Would rationalists support my “choice” of not mourning for their murder?”  Dr. Pattanaik asks triumphantly. I wonder why he thinks the answer would be no.  Unless it is a school and he expects to be reprimanded by the headmaster!

But even more than that, he conflates rituals with superstition and seems to claim that if we don’t mind one, we should not mind the other too. Not all rituals are equivalent to superstition. Ritual can be a shared symbol. A two-minute silence is just a way of expressing respect for the dead, a practice everyone has adopted and hence is universally understood. It will be called superstition if one starts to believe that it will help the dead pass on to the next world. And it will become harmful if people start being harassed or killed for not observing it, or if they have to forego a month’s hard-earned money to conduct some aggrandized version of a ceremony to avoid being made outcaste.

But by itself the two-minute silence mourning ritual is just like saying ‘hello’ when you meet someone. It is a shared symbol, a way of acknowledging another person’s presence with or without further conversation. A rationalist will question whether the law should demand that a person must stand when the national anthem is played or sung, although as a shared social understanding, he will for the most part follow the practice.

Further by relegating everything to a point in a continuum, one can’t turn his back on the fact that some rituals are harmful, while others don’t put society in danger. The definition of harmful can change with time. It can even be subjective, but that discussion can’t be avoided. On a less populated planet, cremation of the dead on wood fire will not be considered harmful. So whether a rationalist believes in it or not, she can just let it be. But in an already over-polluted, over-populated city, that ritual will have to be questioned. So will murdering people because they deny your beliefs as superstitious. Actually go right ahead and deny the rationalists’ beliefs as dry and ‘cruel’–  a rationalist will not call for your murder for that. He will question you  though. Questioning the ideas by themselves, whether of the superstitious or of the rationalist, can’t be a crime to be killed for. Not in a rationalist’s world, assuming his definition of rationalist includes the scientifically minded people who understand that as our understanding of the world changes, the ideas of harmful and harmless, of correct and incorrect also change.

There is an important place for mythology in society. That place does not need to be secured by attacking or ridiculing rationality.

Short Book Review: Shiva to Shankara and Shikhandi and Other Tales They Don’t Tell you by Devdutt Pattanaik

Shiva to Shankara: Decoding the Phallic SymbolSBR: I am reviewing two books together because I read them not more than a month apart and they are both about Indian mythology from the same author. In both the books the collection of mythological stories are good. If you have grown up hearing Indian stories, some of them will be familiar. But Dr. Pattanaik, true to his vocation as a mythologist, collects them from many different sources; so you are likely to find stuff that’s new to you, or at least a variation on what you have heard.
What doesn’t work in both the books is the part that I expected to find scholarly. In Shiva to Shankara: Decoding the Phallic Symbol,  the historical changes happening in the society and the stories being added to the Shiva canon are treated equivalent. It is good poetry and makes for a nice read, but doesn’t help in “decoding the phallic symbol” in a satisfactory fashion. The author’s philosophy is to treat mythological truths no different from other kinds of subjective truths (historical truths, for example, which can’t be always accurate, but which historians and archaeologists go to great lengths to try to prove or disprove). I appreciate the sentiment, accept the importance of mythology, I know the truth is almost always subjective, but don’t like the conflation of the two kinds of truths (if I am allowed to have different kinds that is).
Shikhandi and Other TalesShikhandi and Other Tales They Don’t Tell You has to be appreciated simply for its subject matter. The author has drawn attention to the issue of queerness through the Indian mythological stories where gender and sexual identities are often fluid, without any apparent discomfort to the society. It points to a much more liberal tradition in our country than what we have today. But in the introductory chapters and in the footnotes after each story (which are sometimes longer than the stories themselves), he gives scholarly inputs and interpretation, which are often careless generalizations and simplifications. Having read about some of them from other sources, I know that I can’t trust him to even try to be objective there or to not twist perspectives to fit his pre-decided, resonant narrative.
To read or not to read: Read for the stories, but keep your judgmental antenna up on the parts that deal with history, philosophy or interpretation of the stories.