Park Bench, Winter 2010 (Ann Arbor)
A much shorter post, after the carpal-tunnel-syndrome inducing post on Joseph Anton. Another reason to be brief is that saying too much about Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night A Traveler  would be to spoil the book for those who have not read it. It’s unlike any book you have read, or at the very least very few books read like this book.

As is evident from the starting few pages, this book is unusual. First, Calvino discusses how you will be reading the book. Every alternate chapter is written in the second person (another rarity). He writes about the experience of reading, for example - how important it is to have your feet up while reading (it’s almost a necessary condition for a good experience of reading). It takes the impatient reader (like yours truly), who is more than ready to get on with the story, a while to realise that this
discussion on the 'act of reading' is no digression - IT is the real story of the book. But, don't get fooled with the 'relaxing in a hammock' bit, it is a far from passive read: the reader is the hero of the book. In a gender non-neutral way Calvino has made the assumption of a male reader who will be joined by a female love-interest.

Even by the end, you may not know if this is a book with one story, or ten novels+1 wrapped into one book. Who in the world like to start and interesting book, read the first chapter or incipit, and then realise that pages are missing, or the book was misprinted.  It’s a bibliophilic detective case, a quest to find the missing pages of book(s). Changing voices, genres, locations, Calvino masterfully keeps up the page-turner-like intensity of what is obviously a very serious literary book. The plot gets rather tangled, intentionally so, and the lines between the real and make-believe blur; the real and make-believe change roles multiple times; identities keep shifting; characters that at once lie and also tell the truth. In short, you are never sure which is which. It teases and plays with the whole idea of narration, character and the role of the reader. It asks, if fiction considers narrators (first or third person) to be generally unreliable, are readers to be trusted?

One soon gets the drift of the architectonics of the book, but unfortunately it becomes a captive of its own clever structure, and by the later chapters the plot twists are predictable and seemed forced. Instead of neatly tying ends together, Calvino tunnels his way from one absurdity to another. The scaffolding - the method to the madness - becomes a gilded cage, and the inventiveness that seemed so fresh at first, stales. David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas that was heavily inspired by Calvino’s book, and plays on similar ideas - interconnected stories from one written record to the next, the changes of genres and styles of writing, but is no imitation. From the seeds of Calvino emerges from a better crafted version of the same idea.

Yet, I would not cast If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler in the list of Books That I Should Read But Have Been Told Otherwise. It has some absolutely beautiful passages. Even if the whole of it seems to make a laboured point, the book is immensely enjoyable on the level of the line.

Besides, who would not want to read a book, where you - the reader - are the hero?
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I am about halfway through Gary Burton's 'Jazz Improv' on Coursera offered in partnership with the Berklee School of Music. Even in a short few weeks, my mind has been expanded musically more that anything that I have done in the last few years. MOOCs are here to stay. It's not really like a classroom, but it has its advantages. The unquestionable advantage is the ease-of-access, especially  for those who, like me, are temporally and geographically challenged. Besides, they are kind of addicting and the conversations with others taking the course is often more illuminating that the material itself.
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A much shorter post, after the carpal-tunnel-syndrome inducing post on Joseph Anton. Another reason to be brief is that saying too much about Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night A Traveler  would be to spoil the book for those who have not read it. It’s unlike any book you have read, or at the very least very few books read like this book.

As is evident from the starting few pages, this book is unusual. First, Calvino discusses how you will be reading the book.
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A few years ago in the summer of 2003, I smuggled a copy of the Satanic Verses on a trip to India. It added an air of adventure and the secret, sweet pleasure of doing something forbidden in defiance of orders. For the first time, I had some ‘contraband’ that I was trying to sneak through the ‘green channel’ at the Mumbai airport.
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Mortality - Christopher Hitchens

Dying is serious business and writers, like all other people, die too. Some live long enough to write about their experience of ‘living dying-ly’ as Christopher Hitchens does here in his last book  Mortality before he succumbed to esophageal cancer in 2011. In terms of categories, to find this book you need to look under ‘memoir/essays’ >> ‘sickness’ >> ‘cancer’ and it’s still a crowded space - this genre of ‘cancer-lit’.

Jeet Thayil, a published poet and sometime musician, had enough time to bask in the attention in the heady few weeks after making it to the Booker shortlist for 2012. By the time I managed to obtain a copy of the book, Hilary Mantel had already won the Booker for Bring up the Bodies, the sequel to Wolf Hall.

Lately, I have fallen off the New Yorker Book Club bandwagon (which I was never fully on, I must admit). The latest offering of Diane Spiotta's "Stone Arabia" sounds great. From: Spiotta has captured one of the ironies of using the Internet: the language of the Web is all action verbs—looking, opening, closing, searching, hell, surfing—but a computer-user is normally sitting quite still. The dream of the Internet is one of unfettered movement, but its reality is stasis.

Ariel Levy writes about sexual revolutions before the sexual revolutions. In other words, there is nothing new under the sun.

In "India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation's Remaking", Anand Giridharadas takes a different tack from Thomas Friedman and others who have described the now familiar call centers and globalization that have turned India into an economic powerhouse. Instead Giridharadas decides to focus on the country's most important assets- its people and their changing attitudes towards the world, their families and themselves.
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In 1981, Vikram Seth was 29 years old and at Nanjing University. In the summer while traveling on a 'guided tour' in Turfan, he was seized with the idea to return home to Delhi overland from China via Tibet. Based on a journal he kept, this would be his first book. This was before he embarked on that remarkable novel in Onegin stanzas - Golden Gate and a decade before the Suitable Boy catapulted him to his rightful place as a lyrical master of the modern novel.
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It was snowing rather heavily and not the best of all days during a Michigan winter to be driving around. This past Sunday would a good day to meet Death on the highway, but instead I survived to hear Garrison Keillor introduce Billy Collins on the radio in Segment 2 of the Prairie Home Companion (interesting aside on Emily Dickinson's 180th bday). Use this link to navigate the audio (Dec 11 show index).
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