Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Books, books and more books

Been catching up on my reading of late, and have managed to gather a backlog of books to read now. Buying books off this site http://indiaplaza.in where they give very aggressive discounts and I get atleast 25% off in lieu of my being an Indiaplaza book club member (which I have no idea how I became).

It all started with Potter's Hallows. Then went to a nostalgic reread of Amitav Ghosh's Hungry Tide (which reminds me, I need to pick up The Shadow Lines from Sridhar to read) . After that I was seized with a sudden urge to read/re-read Alistair Maclean. So I went to Amazon.com, pulled up his bestseller list and bought four books off it. Puppet On a Chain, Where Eagles Dare, Fear is the Key and The Last Frontier. Of these Fear is the Key was particularly good while Where Eagles Dare nearly put Bourne to shame. Anyway, my love of Maclean's books is founded on his classic (and first novel) HMS Ulysses which however is of a completely different genre.

Other books include Taken at the Flood, an okayish Poirot flick. And I shouldn't fail to mention Nausicaa. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind is a japanese graphic novel, the story of the princess of a small kingdom set in far away and yet to come times where little is left of a world destroyed by horrific wars. Nausicaa is just this completely beautiful novel and Arjun (who got these books as part of a test from one of his projects at Amazon's Narita FC in Japan) and me are waiting for someone to go to Japan so we can get the rest of the set.

Nausicaa reminds me of Piya (from the Hungry Tide). Both novels have these exceptional female characters as the protagonists and you can't but fall in love :P with them.

Coming up in this list are
* Eragon, Christopher Paolini's bestseller that has Tolkien written all over it. Hope to read Eldest after that.
* Chowringhee, a translation from Bengali by Sankar. Sunny read it and Debo's reading it now. Hope to get it when he's done with it.
* Love in the time of cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's classic, alluded to in innumerable places. Ordered this as a birthday gift for a friend but the birthday came and the book didn't. So, I defaulted to a chocolate pack for a gift and am retaining the book for myself. What better excuse :D
* Up Country, unknown book, Nelson DeMille, unknown author (atleast to me). This book and the King novel, I got both from Indiaplaza for buying flight tickets.