The Wretched of the Earth – Frantz Fanon

A fantastic read if a reader is interested in understanding the effects of Colonialism. The word “Profound” can be used aptly to underline the impact this book has on the reader. It’s amazing to see the level of dissection Frantz Fanon has achieved with respect to Colonialism. It’s quite interesting to go through the psyche of colonial and colonized subjects – colonial being the people who come in from outside and exploit the natives to the maximum extent to their own ends and the colonized being the natives who are exploited.

Each and every aspect of colonialism has been painted in a vivid picture. The society primarily categorized into two parts, the rationale behind the existence of violent tendencies among the natives, the role of violence during the build up to conflicts and liberalization, the aftermath of independence, the approach that needs to be taken to rebuild a nation, perception of culture before, during and after liberation – are some of the factors that can be recounted wherein the author has dwelled in-depth. The surprising aspect is the objectivity the author has attained in explaining the realistic situation that existed or still exists in Africa given the backdrop of repression, tribalism and conflicts. Being a psychiatrist by profession must have helped the author immensely in analyzing various aspects of this world of suffering and oppression. Still, you will realize that he couldn’t have come up with this work if he didn’t go through what a lot of Africans went though under colonial powers. Given this, it’s extraordinary that he still remained sane enough to come up with this work.

This book will definitely have a profound influence on the reader. It’s not an easy book to get through. But, it will provide the reader utmost joy, satisfaction and a lot to think about various degrees of discrimination which we see in every walk of life all over the world.

This post was submitted by Vijaya Sarathy.

He may not be a great writer’s writer, but the power that his words have of evoking a visual picture in one’s head is remarkable. And I think that’s a great ability to possess, because it means that the reader gets that much more involved in the story; there were many points in the book where I didn’t realize how long my jaw had dropped open and stayed that way, or when my heart started racing as the protagonists of the book got chased by creatures of the wild, and the loathing I felt for the villain of the story. It’s no wonder that at least eight of his twelve books have been made into movies.

Micro is the story of Nanigen, a company with a fascinating technology and a devastating secret. It all begins when the company’s VP, Eric Jansen, visits his brother at his university to recruit fresh talent. Peter Jansen is an expert in venoms and envenomation. His fellow scientists include an ethno botanist, arachnologist, entomologist/coleopterist, botanist, biochemist and a doctoral student. (An increase in Scientific Intelligence – a by-product of all Crichton books for the reader.) Together, they’re asked to take a trip to Nanigen’s headquarters in Hawaii, where they manufacture nano-robots that help them study the region’s rainforest and harness natural chemicals that can be used by pharmaceutical companies. Days before their departure to Hawaii, though, Peter receives a message from his brother asking him not to come. On his arrival, he learns that his brother’s dead. Determined to get to the truth of things, Peter traps the company’s CEO into a confession which leads to him and his friends being shrunk to mere inches and abandoned in the rainforest to be devoured by the micro world.

What follows is a graphic account of the students’ fight for survival against elements that wouldn’t bother them if they were normal size. The good news is, there are survivors. The bad news, there are things you’ll discover about ants and wasps and centipedes and mynahs (yes, them too) that will leave you horror-struck, and maybe worried for life.

Crichton paints a vivid picture of the micro world in the book, leaving you amazed and terrified in equal measures. As far as I’m concerned, though, it’s whetted my appetite for more of his books. I’m looking forward to reading the book that triggered my love for dinosaurs, the most.

This post was submitted by Nabila Tazyeen.

The Hypnotist is part chilling, part mystery and wholly involving. The book is set in Sweden, where teenager Josef Ek’s family has been brutally murdered. Everybody’s dead except for him and an older sister who lives in a cottage in the middle of nowhere. Joona Linna, the lead detective on the case, wants to talk to Josef to figure out who did this and save his older sister before the killer gets to her, but Josef’s life is hanging by a thread. So Joona cons well-known trauma doctor Erik Maria Bark – formerly a leading hypnotist – into hypnotising Josef. Eric faces a moral dilemma at the request – ten years ago, he swore never to practice hypnosis again; but faced with the chance of saving a life, he gives in. What neither Joona nor Eric expects is a revelation so sick, so gut-wrenching that it puts Eric and his family’s life in danger and Joona in the middle of a case that gets increasingly complex with every passing minute. Lives unravel like a ball of wool after that and reach a point where the nail-biting mystery takes two different paths. It’s totally insane on so many levels.

Lars Kepler – the pseudonym for the husband-wife literary duo Alexandra and Alexander Ahndoril – does full justice to being a crime fiction author. The characters are well-defined, the story racy and the ending so unexpected that it leaves you gasping for breath and stumbling for words.

If you’re a crime fiction, mystery thriller junkie, I’d recommend you pick it up immediately. It’s a book you won’t regret owning, I promise. Or you could wait to watch the movie adaptation, due to release in September of this year. But do you really want to put yourself through the long wait?

This post was submitted by Nabila Tazyeen.

The author’s a Brit, so her humour doesn’t disappoint. There are lots of moments that had me in peals of laughter for hours, silently guffawing, or shouting a mental ‘Woot woot! You go Girl’ at various points of the book. Rachel Summers, list junkie and sought-after makeup artist, gets dumped by her boyfriend in the most classic, spineless fashion possible: “I think we should take a break.” And like most women, she can’t deal with the suspense of what comes at the end of the so-called break. So she confronts her boyfriend and finally gets her answer: “You’re boring, this relationship is boring, I don’t want to be with you.” So her two best friends – interested-in-men Michael and single-and-loving-it Emelie decide to get her out of it by getting her to do what she does best: make lists. But this list isn’t like any she’s made before in her life; this is about the going all out, getting radical, changing life forever stuff that she’s never contemplated doing before.

What follows is a Canada-hopping Redhead Rachel on overdrive, chapter after chapter. She poisons her friend (ah ha! Now you want to read the book, eh?), sells her ex-boyfriend’s rare vintage Beatles vinyl and buys herself £500 worth of Agent Provocateur lingerie with the money, and feels chemistry with someone she never thought she’d feel it with.

It’s a light-hearted and hilarious read, especially since I enjoy British phrases like “Sod off” and “You mental cow” – so much classier/convincingly insulting than the usual American terminologies. I just really wish that the book had ended with her being single; instead, a Knight in Shining Designer Clothes enters just in time to rescue her from singlehood and swoops her away from an airport.

*Hmph* Some single women have all the luck, I tell you. Hmm, maybe the secret lies in the list…

Excuse me while I go make one for myself.

This post was submitted by Nabila Tazyeen.

This post was submitted by Urmi Chanda-Vaz.

“I”, a divorced twenty-nine year old lives a humdrum life; writing brochures & pamphlets; wandering about the seedy bars of Tokyo. One day, he receives a letter from his vagabond friend, the “Rat” along with an apparently ordinary photograph of a herd of grazing sheep somewhere in Japan. “I” decides to use this picture in one of his articles in a newsletter. Here enters a henchman of the “Boss” – a commanding underground leader whose empire almost controls the entire economy of Japan – who seems to have a very mysterious motive in tracking down one particular sheep in the picture.  “I” is forced to go on a trail in pursuit of this extraordinary sheep. During the course of this surreal journey, he meets a call girl-cum-ear model with celestially beautiful ears and extra-sensory powers, a nutty sheep professor with a perplexing past, and an idiosyncratic sheep man whotalkslikethisforsomereason.

Like most of Murakami’s works, “A Wild Sheep Chase” is an eclectic medley of comedy, mystery, fantasy, mythology and philosophy.  It is also an essay on the post-war Japan’s pop-culture. And lastly, it leaves you with more questions than answers.

Read it. At the end of it, you may just be crafting your own theories on ‘the sheep’.

It should not take two months to finish, but ‘My Name is Red’ is by no means an easy book. It is an exotic thriller, a study in language and a smallish history of Islamic art, all at the same time. Sometimes one loses patience, when Pamuk takes his time to weave into the plot minor stories from Islamic folklore and literature, but he is almost immediately forgiven for the wealth of knowledge and beauty flowing from his pen. These micro story clusters, usually in threes, are chewy, sweet, though not entirely indispensable. Pamuk uses these tales of shahs and pashas, artists and miniaturists, dervishes and lovers in the old school style of fables, richly texturing his plot. Every word, every turn of phrase has been artfully chosen by the writer so it resembles the coloured yet troubled world of artists.

The artists, heroes and villains of this book are all miniaturists belonging to the Ottoman Empire. Caught between their loyalties to olden Herat masters and new and lucrative Frankish techniques offering recognition and fame, these miniaturists live in times of intense turmoil. Working together, yet individually, on a secret book commissioned by the Sultan, they are pitted against each other. Jealousy, rivalry and suspicion lead to the murder of one of the miniaturists by another, and the drama begins to unfold.

The principal characters are the murdered miniaturist, Elegant Effendi; the royal workshop head, Master Osman; the co-ordinator of Sulatan’s book, Enishte Effendi (who is also murdered along the way); his nephew, Black Effendi; his daughter, Shekure; Esther, the Jewish clothier and matchmaker; and three other master miniaturists, nicknamed Olive, Stork and Butterfly. It is known to the reader that one of this trio is the murderer, but Pamuk carefully conceals his identity till the end.

The narrative is done through each of these characters, and there’s a breathtaking change of perspective with every successive chapter. A narrative of this style is quite unlike anything I’ve ever read before. The chapters are simply titled ‘I, (character name)’, so the reader knows easily whose voice he is hearing. Pamuk slips effortlessly from the mantle of a murdered to an artist, to a woman to a man. There are these exquisite chapters where the author even assumes the voice of a colour, an illustration or a mythological character, thus making organic the world of paints, brushes, and passion. His lines can easily be likened to brushstrokes, not big and broad, but fine like a miniaturist’s. After all, it took Pamuk nearly eight years to create this masterpiece.

This post was submitted by Urmi Chanda-Vaz.

These and more questions are answered by Malcolm Gladwell in “Outliers – The Story of Success”. Yes, he can get a bit repetitive, especially when the point he is trying to drive home is pretty simple and makes intuitive sense. However, it is still an interesting read from start to finish mainly for the little tid-bits of information that keeps coming your way on every page, the many incidents that make people and their lives worth reading about. The many examples all point to one thing – that your success is way more than just the derivative of your own abilities. There are many other factors that come into play, some so subtle that it takes many years to figure out the pattern. These factors could range from the month you were born in to your ethnicity and cultural legacy to the opportunities or lack of these that you were offered at various stages of your life. Spanning across many disciplines and eras, Gladwell goes about his business convincing the reader that there is much more than meets the eye. In fact, he even proposes that it is possible to predict which people will achieve success based on some data about their lives.

Maybe it is not as path-breaking as Gladwell appears to think it is. But read it for the little jewels strewn across the pages that make you sit up and say, “Hey, I didn’t know this! Very interesting.”

This post was submitted by Anuradha Parekh.

Skipping Christmas is about Luther, a man with a grown daughter away from home on work, who has had just about enough with Christmas – the lack of parking spaces, or for that matter, space of any sort. Intrusions from neighbours, street competitions on the most well-decorated rows of homes, charities, lighting up Frosty the Snowman – Luther is up to his neck with all of it. And so, he decided that he’s going to save on Christmas expenses and use that money to treat him and his wife Nora to a Caribbean vacation, far from the madness of the season. In his efforts to make the most of the vacation, he decides to turn into a hunk of irresistible charms by treating himself to tanning sessions and fitness regimes. Nothing deters him from his agenda of getting away, not even sweet-voiced carolers and conspiring neighbours. But then, his daughter calls home and says that she’s coming over for Christmas. With her never-been-introduced fiancé. And so Luther and wife are thrown into a mad rush to put together a fancy Christmas at the last minute.

My verdict of the book: Airport read. In fact, I think I finished reading it while onboard a one-hour flight. The book has its moments, but in all honesty, I think John Grisham does a better job with serious books than he might with casual ones.

Skipping Christmas also been adapted into a movie starring Tim Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis, titled ‘Christmas with the Kranks’. So if you’re in the mood to skip reading, you can always catch the movie.

This post was submitted by Nabila Tazyeen.

Holden Caulfield was a misfit in this world. His life-view was too simplistic and devoid of connivance, scheming or manipulation. Holden saw through people’s masks, he saw through what you and I try to be amidst society. Being dispelled out of Pencey Prep, his high school, Holden returns back to his troubled household – not as much to see his parents as much to be with his younger sister Phoebe. In this journey from school to home, he finds himself staring at the disgusting faces of humanity and asking questions which no one really had an answer to. “Where do the ducks go in winter when the lake freezes,” he asks the New York cab driver. The cab driver thinks his passenger has lost sanity and chuckles at the question. But really, where do the ducks go – you ask yourself.

The Catcher in the Rye is a powerful book. If read when one is teetering on the edge of adulthood, this book can permeate your soul and douse you with a cloak of cynicism. Life, subsequently, has to work really hard to rid you of that cynicism. That is the power of this book. And what remains, after all the cynicism wears off, is one simple thought – that of what Holden wants to be in life. When you read that part of the book, the part when the title suddenly makes sense, that is when you realize that you’ve just read one of the best books ever written. It really is no wonder that this book figures in the top 10 of almost all respectable book lists.

John Lennon’s assasin, Mark Chapman, first got an autograph of Lennon before shooting him. That autograph was on a book titled “The Catcher in the Rye”.