Thursday, December 28, 2017

My Bookshelf Challenge





So My favorite comic artist Grant Snider From Incidental Comics uploaded this marvellous work recently. The thing about his comic strips are that they are so detailed and the words have as much power as the images. I thought I'll do my annual book update via this structure. So Here goes..



2017 has been a disappointing year reading wise. I read only 13 books of my target 30. I also read out of my comfort zone. Sci Fi , Tamil fantasy , Rural based books and classics are really not my cup of tea and cold the cup remained till I gulped it like a medicine. 
Don't worry I also hate it when they make the movie poster the book cover
The Sci Fi book was Ender's Game. Not bad actually got sucked into the dystopian alien fighting kids fighting monsters schtick in the end. Apparently it is a whole big franchise. Read it if you are into that kinda thing. 
The two tamil books I tried this year were Ponniyin Selvan and Moondram Ulaga Por. 
Must Read

Ponniyin Selvan was every bit the epic it promised to be and I can't wait to read the next books in the series! Kalki is really an artist of mythical proportions. However , since I was reading Tamil after a very long time it took me time to read this book. 

Moodram Ulaga Por was quite honestly Moondram Ulaga Bore. While Tamil flows like poetry to our author Vairamuthu , the subject matter is handled very didactically. But lots of mann vasanai and muyal kari. I can understand why people would relate to this book. However , I didn't think we needed a literal white savior to fix our agrarian scenario. 


I read Gulliver's Travels finally. While it was fascinating at first , some of the adventures like meeting the floating island people and science hating people got boring real fast. Still a fascinating satire which makes us question the nature of Human Civilisation. 


Moving on to the challenge : - 

1) The Book I couldn't put down - Every Jefferey Archer book. Every Damn one. That man knows how to write a story. If I had to pick one , it will be Kane and Abel probably. 
<3


2) The book I couldn't pick up - My law textbooks are heavy af 

3) The book you gave me / which I haven't read - Oops. Quite a lot unfortunately. First on the line will be Jackdaws by Ken Follett gifted by Naveena which I will read ASAP. 




4) The book I brought to the beach - Who does that to books? :O Although when I was a kid I used to sneak Famous Five books into the bathroom so that I can read in between my bath. Yes , I was that kid. 

5) The book I tried so hard to like - More like the book I am trying so hard to like. War of the Worlds by HG Wells. My my I never knew end of the world can be this boring! Another book that I just couldn't sit through was Shame By Taslima Nasreen. How can someone cut paste stuff from wikipedia and call that a book?


6) Book I have multiple copies of - Only Time will Tell By Jefferey Archer. It came out in 2010 right around my birthday and suddenly everyone was gifting me the same thing! This made me lay down a rule that No more Jefferey Archer books as gifts on my b'day ( my brother was assigned to buy me them every year ^_^ somehow every Clifton Chronicle book released around by Birth date :D ) 



7) The Book that saved my life - Well a lot of books have shaped me as a person. Secret Seven Series by Enid Blyton opened the magical pathways to books for me. This saved me from becoming a Tamil Serial addict at the tender age of 8 :P 


8) The Book I lent you - I have a strict no lending policy and catalogue all my books. They are my treasure , how can I risk losing them? 

9) The book I fall asleep to every night - I never re read , there are too many books to be read out there! 

10) The book I mistook for a hat - Blasphemy!

11) The book I am desperately trying to write - History written as fun short stories for kids. 

12) All the books that changed my life - Oh boy. Five Find outers Series by Enid Blyton , Harry Potter Series by JK Rowling , Mahatma Gandhi by Louis Fischer , Perry Mason Series by Erle Stanley Gardner , Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth and Paths of Glory By Jefferey Archer. 

You can also respond to these questions in the comments! Will be fun trust me. 

Thursday, December 21, 2017

Alphabet Song


Image from the internet

We’re all at the Anonymous CafĂ©
Basking in each other’s misery
Cotton over our bleeding hearts
Defying Death and all her friends
Ever ready to give it another go
Fossiled memories motivating rather than defeating

Grape sized heart can carry
Such humongous weight
Ignominious defeats
Justifying its strength
Kudos to us all for still trying hard.

Lavish meals and meringue pies
Can only take you so far
Novice Romantics chuckle at us silently
Our orchestra of sadness drown them quiet easily.

Be proud of all the battle scars
Queer we are not for choosing this
Rocky path
Songs getting written by of us at this very moment
Taste of victory after testing times is the best after all.


Right? 

So the Toads had an interesting prompt where you take a letter-word and run with it. I ran with the letters from A-T then ignored UVWXYZ because I already made my point. 

Sunday, December 17, 2017

Sense of an Ending

Once I was the new girl
quietly inhabiting my corner 
Inhibitions galore 
Tongues tied with awkwardness 
wrapping me up, producing no comfort. 

It took a fair amount of time,
some nice humans and 
a good deal of ass kicking and coffee smelling 
to be me in front of them. 
Then school got over and college got me
starting all over again. 

College took a fair bit longer 
with relocation , Hindi and whatnot
I had resigned myself to my fate 
of becoming the crazy cat lady or
the pigeon lady from Home alone. 



All it took was one kind human 
to introduce me to her friends 
With them I could finally 
Stand in the sun. 
A big family of friends we became 
a noisy bunch , food bonded us 
to extraordinary measures

We ate more than we spoke
maybe the only reason restaurants
didn't kick us out! 

We handled failures and successes 
makeovers and breakdowns 
with much elan 
and stuck with each other through it all. 
Intimidating other individuals with our 
sheer numbers
we had a ball! 

Now the days are vanishing rapidly 
and the sun might set on us after all. 
The time to restart is looming around the corner 
I  wish this time that 
I can put them in my pockets 
and carry them wherever I want!