Saturday, December 04, 2004
my early reads
To me reading is a very tiring way of enjoying oneself .... so these days I try to be a bit discerning in choosing what books to read....if I want easy and instant pleasure I choose watching DVDs ...though of course many really good films are also emotionally taxing....
Coming back to books... I'm a bit careful now on what I choose to read... and I don't mean we should be snobbish or elitist in our choice of books...but what I'm trying to get at is that books should kind of stick in your mind and may even change or color your life in a new ways...after you've read them... the after effect should linger in one way or another...and I only want to read books that I also want to proudly keep in my library....so no more pulp and airport fictions for me...or those authors that I consider only trying to make money out of writing rather than writing to say something....
When I was young I used to read those abridged classsics... you know people like Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Black Arrow", Dracula (Bram Stoker), Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain), Don Quixote (Cervantes ) etc....later in the university I revisited some of these books in complete and unabridged versions.... and I just rediscovered Mark Twain last year.
I'm surprised that he also wrote really marvellous travel books and I found "Innocent Abroad" his book on travel to Jerusalem was really hilarious....may be I'm wrong but I think gonzo style of writing by people like Hunter S Thompson and the manic writings of P J O'Rourke may be influenced by Twain...
....Then I discovered those old European writers...Zola, Balzac, Gogol (Russia), Dostoevsky (Russia) Fontane , Kafka etc....Dostoevsky's "Crime and punishment" is one of the books that influenced my moral outlook...in fact my hotmail email address is taken after the protagonist....raskolnikov....
These days I don't read much old classics anymore ...I'm trying to listen to the current voice by reading LIVING good new writers like Zadie Smith ('White Teeth' was a good tragicomic story about these young muslims in Britian who gradually became "extremists"...) and not so young British and non British and established authors like Ian McEwan, J M Coetzee etc... these guys are still very much alive unlike those old Dostoevsky, Zola and the rest of old masters who are of course long dead now...
Coming back to books... I'm a bit careful now on what I choose to read... and I don't mean we should be snobbish or elitist in our choice of books...but what I'm trying to get at is that books should kind of stick in your mind and may even change or color your life in a new ways...after you've read them... the after effect should linger in one way or another...and I only want to read books that I also want to proudly keep in my library....so no more pulp and airport fictions for me...or those authors that I consider only trying to make money out of writing rather than writing to say something....
When I was young I used to read those abridged classsics... you know people like Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Black Arrow", Dracula (Bram Stoker), Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain), Don Quixote (Cervantes ) etc....later in the university I revisited some of these books in complete and unabridged versions.... and I just rediscovered Mark Twain last year.
I'm surprised that he also wrote really marvellous travel books and I found "Innocent Abroad" his book on travel to Jerusalem was really hilarious....may be I'm wrong but I think gonzo style of writing by people like Hunter S Thompson and the manic writings of P J O'Rourke may be influenced by Twain...
....Then I discovered those old European writers...Zola, Balzac, Gogol (Russia), Dostoevsky (Russia) Fontane , Kafka etc....Dostoevsky's "Crime and punishment" is one of the books that influenced my moral outlook...in fact my hotmail email address is taken after the protagonist....raskolnikov....
These days I don't read much old classics anymore ...I'm trying to listen to the current voice by reading LIVING good new writers like Zadie Smith ('White Teeth' was a good tragicomic story about these young muslims in Britian who gradually became "extremists"...) and not so young British and non British and established authors like Ian McEwan, J M Coetzee etc... these guys are still very much alive unlike those old Dostoevsky, Zola and the rest of old masters who are of course long dead now...
