Bookmark alert!

This is the first set of books that I borrowed after getting my library card. As a card holder I am allowed to keep each book for three weeks. Though the due date is July 12, I found a few from the lot un-put-down-able. So they were devoured with a sense of urgency, following which I got down to sketching index card-sized bookmarks for each.

#1 The Sandman by Lars Kepler

A gripping thriller. The starting of the book reminded me so much of The Silence of the Lambs. Especially the introductory scene of Anthony Hopkins who plays Hannibal in the cult movie. The description of the killer in the book matches much to that of Hannibal. With short chapters, and short sentences, it is a breezy read. Add to that the very engaging plot, it can easily get you hooked tight. The story is about a psycho serial killer, Jurek Walter, who suspected of the most heinous crimes in Sweden, is locked up in a solitary cell for over a decade. But his name crops up again when someone who was assumed to be dead in his hands ages ago, shows up along the railroad in Stockholm. And this leads to detective Joona (who was instrumental in locking him up) and his team, unearthing a case they had long thought was done and dusted.

#2 A prison diary by Jeffrey Archer

After being convicted for perjury, Jeffrey Archer was sentenced to four years in prison, in 2001. The book written under subheads of date and time, gives the readers a sense of how Archer spent his days in HMP Belmarsh, a high-security prison in South London. Though it’s almost the same routine everyday in the prison, the book is anything but boring. Archer gives a detailed narration of his conversation with the convicts who include murderers, thieves and drug addicts. He follows a strict discipline of writing two hours every morning, and whenever he gets time through the day. Written on an hourly basis, he manages to give an earnest glimpse into life in the person, and into his deepest emotions, which range from anxiety to fear, anger and depression.

#3 In other words by Jhumpa Lahiri

I started this book at 6.30 am on Friday morning, and finished it in one sitting. In a span of two hours. Written in Italian on one side and English on the other, it is just 150 pages long. Lahiri talks in depth about her love for Italian language, and how she managed the arduous task of learning it, and eventually publishing a book in it. The Pulitzer-prize winner is an American of Indian origin. While her mother tongue is Bengali, she considers English as her first language. As a child, she had to be fluent in Bengali to please her parents, and in English, well, to get decent grades and make friends. It was not until 25 that she was besotted by the Italian language. She says in the book that it was like falling in love…all she wanted to do was be surrounded by it, write in it, and read in it. She moved to Rome, and limited her reading list to Italian books, jotted down all her thoughts in Italian for almost three years, and was trained under multiple Italian teachers, before she confidently took up the challenge of writing an entire book about this journey… her affair with the Italian language.

The end.

Alias Grace

In 2015, Chennai, a city in South India, experienced one of the worst floods in its history. I was a victim. Stranded in an apartment alone for five days, I just had a couple of candles and Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last for company. Everyday, as darkness fell, I opened its pages, reading only a few at a time, for I was scared to finish it before the water cleared outside. I had gotten attached to Stan and Charmaine and their life in the Positron Prison. I shared their emotions, for I was in a prison of sorts. It’s probably the time that I picked to read that book, but ever since, I have been a Margaret Atwood fan. Later, I picked The Handmaid’s Tale, and binge-watched the series on Hulu soon after. A few months hence, I decided to start another of hers. Alias Grace. The book is unconventional in its format. With multiple news reports, and excerpts from literary masterpieces. While the first half was a drag, the second, leaped forward like a horse on steroids. Grace, a teenager with a somber demeanor and an alluring beauty, is accused of murdering her master and housekeeper, with the aid of another helper in the house. But was she actually a part of it? I assumed, rather strongly, ‘not’. My curiosity was tepid to start with. I found myself racing through the parts where she narrates her childhood and slowing down as the plot gets closer to the murder. There are parts concerning hypnotism and somnambulism which seem a little abstruse. But it’s padded with a good amount of drama, which kept me hooked. However, it felt wrong to sip a glass a lemonade and devour on it languidly under the bright sun… solely for the fact that there was in the late 1800s a real person named Grace. A ravishing beauty. Murderess. Talk of the media in Canada and the US. Most of what’s in the book was inspired by the unfortunate events as they had happened then.

To see my other bookmarks, please click here and here.

The end.

Achingly beautiful

In the long hours inside the flight, I read the intense but insanely tragic love story of Anthony and Gloria. Between looking outside at the foam-like clouds, and munching on packets of pretzels, I devoured on the pages of one of F Scott Fitzgerald’s best works, The Beautiful and Damned. While waiting at the gates before boarding, I feverishly turned the pages; the faster I read, the faster they fell in love. As my flight took off, they entered their first year of marriage with parties, booze, and frolic. At 33,000 feet above ground, refreshments were served. A person at the neighboring seat accidentally poured a cup of coke on my leggings. Incidentally, there seemed to grow a large dent in Anthony and Gloria’s relationship. Fights, lack of money, a one-year separation, alcoholism. And then came the biggest wrecking ball of all, an illicit affair. At this point, my husband and I realized that we had missed our connecting flight. Back home, after multiple gasps, sighs, and a few tears, I turned the last page of the book, in the twilight of Thursday. I recalled a certain line by Maury (Anthony’s friend) that befitted the moon that now rose like a shiny pendant in the dark blue sky. He had said, “I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.”