5 Books to Read this Summer – 2021

Let’s be honest. Despite the progress with vaccinations, this year too feels like last year in terms of travel. Some of us have also had to deal with difficult personal and professional challenges. The pandemic makes the days blur. Despite all this, I still find reading the best form of escapism. I have read some wonderful books in the last few months. Although, I have been moving from Scotland to England, and I have been busy.

To share my joys, I thought I’d compile some summer reads here for you all –

5 summer reads – 2021

1. The Unremembered Places – Patrick Baker

This is one of the finest pieces of travel lit I have read in a long time. Baker’s prose is evocative and atmospheric. He writes about the remote and forgotten places in my dear country Scotland. And every chapter will take you on a journey through the pages ad reams of time. I found myself thinking about this book long after I had finished reading it. And I can also see myself re-reading it a number of times. If you want to switch off from the world and are happy when your mind is wandering, do read this.

2. Things I have Withheld – Kei Miller

This is for non-fiction lovers. It is also a book I’d recommend if you want to learn more and participate in the race discourse. Through a collection of essays, Miller explores what it is like to navigate the world as a black man. But it is not just another book on the subject. Miller’s work is unique in that he writes about the things he has stopped himself or been stopped from saying. And there is a lot of that. Race is a topic of nuance, and this is a book that respects that and does not shy away from it.

3. Empty Nest – Carol Ann Duffy

If you cannot concentrate on reading for too long as the stresses of the pandemic are too high, then I recommend this slim volume of poetry. Duffy’s seletion includes poems from a wide range of poets, who all explore the concept of their children leaving. It is, however, a very emotional read. If, like me, you have been forcibly separated from your family during the last 15 months, then this is a book that you will be phoning them about. It is as immense as it is small.

4. The Oak Papers – James Canton

For nature loves, this is a thoroughly delightful and unique read. Canton celebrates the oak tree, one that is central to the British isles. And he does so by picking a particular one dear to him and visiting it for a whole year, through all the seasons. What comes out is a wonderful read about the healing power of trees, the sense of entwinement with the natural world, and some introspection. Recommended read for a sunny afternoon in the park.

5. The Good Neighbours – Nina Allan

If, by some magic, you are travelling, then this is a book for you to take on holiday. Set on the Isle of Bute and with its murder mystery backdrop, this is a great read. The female protagonist is easy to relate to and her seach for the truth amongst the horrors in her past will keep you hooked. You can dive in and out of this, you can read and move on, or you can linger. Your choice!

10 Favourite Love Quotes

Here’s 10 of my personal favourites:

“I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it — to be fed so much love I couldn’t take any more. Just once. ”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can’t strike them all by ourselves”
― Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate

“For I am the daughter of Elrond. I shall not go with him when he departs to the Havens: for mine is the choice of Luthien, and as she so have I chosen, both the sweet and the bitter.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“It is that happy stretch of time when the lovers set to chronicling their passion. When no glance, no tone of voice is so fleeting but it shines with significance. When each moment, each perception is brought out with care, unfolded like a precious gem from its layers of the softest tissue paper and laid in front of the beloved — turned this way and that, examined, considered.”
― Ahdaf Soueif, The Map of Love

“The moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you’ve already stopped loving that person forever.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“You can never know if a person forgives you when you wrong them. Therefore it is existentially important to you. It is a question you are intensely concerned with. Neither can you know whether a person loves you. It’s something you just have to believe or hope. But these things are more important to you than the fact that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees. You don’t think about the law of cause and effect or about modes of perception when you are in the middle of your first kiss.”
― Jostein Gaarder, Sophie’s World

“The only thing worse than a boy who hates you: a boy that loves you.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I want to fall in love in such a way that the mere sight of a man, even a block away from me, will shake and pierce me, will weaken me, and make me tremble and soften and melt.”
― Anaïs Nin, Delta of Venus

And in the end, I leave you with the most heartbreaking love poem by Pablo Neruda, placed to incredible violin, watch here.

Eyes Like Lighthouses When the Boats Come Home … a review

I’ve taken a long time to write this one up. But it is a book of poems, so my excuse is that I read it in fits and bursts, on my commute as well as in bed, savouring it slowly. When Dane Cobain, the poet, asked me to review it, I expected something, I don’t know what the word for it is, traditional. But this book has been a pleasant surprise on that front. Allow me to elaborate by using some examples.

There’s no such thing as a gentleman

anymore;

just men and women

stumbling through life

in the same way they always have.

Welcome to society,

our capitalistic, gender-neutral

society;

we are all equal

in our misery.

I thought these lines were beautiful, but sad, accepting, but rebellious. It is the harsh reality of our times, put quite in a brutally honest way. I haven’t read something like this for a while. Read this

Then the web hit its terrible teens

and we signed up en masse

to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube,

Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat

and WhatsApp,

and now our fragmented entities

are just stressful lives

lived out in public;

mass hallucinations and delirium

pulling us together and

pushing us apart.

Another set of lines that struck a chord for me. But it is not just the online world that Cobain rips apart. It is everything from religion to region, with a good measure of myth and mystery. Some of it is also very personal, very intimate, like having a drink with the poet and the things he might let spill over it.

I’ll leave you with a small set of lines which could be quite controversial, but are especially relevant with so many upcoming referendums and elections.

If Britain

is only for the British,

then I’m no longer

British.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I have a soft corner for poetry and Cobain weaves his frustrations with the modern world deftly into stanzas which come across as masterfully crafted.

 

I’m reading poetry…

Happy Birthday, Longfellow!

Intimacy … a review

It is the saddest night, for I am leaving and not coming back. Tomorrow morning, when the woman I have lived with for six years has gone to work on her bicycle, and our children have been taken to the park with their ball, I will pack some things into a suitcase, slip out of my house hoping that no one will see me, and take the tube to Victor’s place.

In the first two sentences, Hanif Kureishi establishes everything about the novella. A man is walking out of his marriage. They have children. His wife does not know. He is sneaking away. Their lives have been hitherto ‘normal’. He has no concrete plans upon leaving. There is a sense of tremendous loss and melancholy. This sets the vein for everything that follows. Kureishi is a tremendous writer.

I picked this book up at the library because the first two sentences form the blurb of the book and I was instantly hooked. I was not disappointed. It read a lot like Anne Enright but only much, much better. The entire book only spans a day and a half, but speaks of a lifetime of memeories, life, laughter, and pain.

I loved how each thought in the protagonist’s head spins off into some sort of memeory. It is not exactly ‘stream of consciousness’ though. Just a beautiful series of images that take a reader through his past and made me think that life is so strange that if you think from the point of view of the wife, she actually has no idea at all. And this immense sense of loss is so deep. The characters are all suitably flawed as well, and the author does a good job of laying their insecurities and inadequacies bare.

This is not a very long read, took me two or three hours at best.So it s a good read for a short travel. But it does leave you with a sense of displacement and sadness so I would account for that and not read it if you’re going to a party or something!!

Trigger Warnings … a review

I got this book as a Christmas present from a faraway friend who has the most eclectic reading taste.She asked me if I had read any Gaiman and when I said no, she proceeded to post me this. I can safely say that this is unline anything I have read in a long time.

This book is primarily fantasy fiction, with elements of magic realism, surrealism, and general strangeness that run in a common vein throughout. Made up of many short stories and poems of varying lengths, this has a  nice dip-in-and-out quality to it. And that is exactly what I needed as I have been travelling over the holidays to various people. I like to read short stories which then don’t weigh on my mind when I’m doing other stuff and make me in any way anti-social.

Some of the stories have stayed with me. Especially, a modern day retelling of Cinderella, which is my favourite Disney move since I was three! Gaiman is a natural poet and his writing has a haunting, wistful quality about it that is very engaging. In some ways, this book was a reminder of feelings of reading Murakami’s The Elephant Vanishes. And as far as I am concerned, being reminded of his writing is never a bad thing.

If you fancy a different kind of read, shorter fiction, fairy-tales for adults, or just want to add some surreal to the January fog, this is your book. Enjoy!

#writing201 #fingers #prosepoem #assonance

A Week In-sanity

day 01
The webbed fingers of lotus leaf veins, move outwards, and quiver along the surface of water. When the breeze makes them gently sway, they send ripples out, like a thought stream that has just entered my mind.

day 02
The bile yellow light of the bulb spills out of the windows and onto the fingers of the roof thatch. A cricket sings, a flog croaks, and hot summer sweat runs down the back of the woman in the kitchen, making rotis.

day 03
When she sang out loud, all he wanted to do was run his fingers down her neck, the back of it, her spine, and the small of her back. He thought he was in love, until he met her… now he is obsessed with her voice.

day 04
On a cold, blue morning, as the sun tried to come up the horizon and push out through the clouds like the birthing of a child, dull gold sunlight crept in through the blinds in slanted fingers of honey.

day 05
Cycling down the steep slope, no brakes, pedals freewheeling… the wind cuts through her hair and makes it blow past her ears in dark black fingers of freedom… she comes to a slow halt as the slopes die down.

day 06
In a glade within a dark, deep forest, a lone flower grows, with finger-like scarlet petals. A sudden stillness is disturbed by a sensational flurry of butterflies, as they twine up in turrets and go higher, higher.

day 07
On his palette, an explosion of colours. I asked him, ‘What are you going to draw for me?’ ‘Your hands,’ he said. ‘All those colours, friend?’ ‘So I can trace the outline of every finger as I see it in my head – different.’

#writing201 #heroine #ballad #anaphora

Song for Sweet Isabel

Sweet Isabel by the North Sea,
Had naught to love.
Maybe she said, it was not to be,
On land nor heaven above.

Her days were spent in darkened thought,
Her nights on a cold hard bed,
Her mind with black stories fraught,
Of being stone cold dead.

With heavenly beauty was she born,
But only wished to die.
Her hair, the colour of ripened corn,
Her eyes, the colour of the sky.

Sweet Isabel by the North Sea,
Had naught to love.
Maybe she said, it was not to be,
On land nor heaven above.

One day she met a bonnie lad,
And gave her heart to him,
With him she could never be sad,
He seemed come from her whim.

He took her out on moonlit nights,
And on the days they swam out to sea.
He said he understood her plight,
And was her love to be.

Sweet Isabel by the North Sea,
Had naught to love.
Maybe she said, it was not to be,
On land nor heaven above.

Decades passed and moons went by…
And on a grey damp morn,
The foam was low, the waves were high
Sweet Isabel’s heart was shorn!

For the lad was but a selkie man,
Whose heart belonged to none.
He swam away, bid back to his clan,
With nary a backward song.

Sweet isabel back in her shell,
Vowed never to give her heart.
From heaven she had come to hell,
And now she couldn’t tell them apart.

Sweet Isabel by the North Sea,
Had naught to love.
Maybe she said, it was not to be,
On land nor heaven above.

#writing201 #poetrypotluck

I had to read a lot of unusual and previously unread poems when I started doing the literature course last year. One poem that stuck with me was Keats’ Hyperion. Out of many favourites, this is a recent addition. I enjoyed studying it because of the ease with which I understood it and the theme on which it is based. The imagery is beautiful and in my opinion is one of Keats’ best works, it is also his last. I cannot imagine he was only 26 when he finished it.

The poem opens with the scene when the Titans have been defeated by the Olympians. Saturn, who has lost his throne to Jupiter, sits sad and broken. Thea, an Amazon, attempts to rouse him to stand back up and motivate the other Titans that all is not lost. The still unfallen Hyperion rejoices n his palatial abode but eventually he too, admits defeat to Apollo.

It is a very long poem and so I am not posting all of it; the following is a good part to get a flavour of the poem and then you can follow the link to go read the entire text.

He stood, and heard not Thea’s sobbing deep;
A little time, and then again he snatch’d
Utterance thus.—”But cannot I create?
Cannot I form? Cannot I fashion forth
Another world, another universe,
To overbear and crumble this to nought?
Where is another chaos? Where?”—That word
Found way unto Olympus, and made quake
The rebel three.—Thea was startled up,
And in her bearing was a sort of hope,
As thus she quick-voic’d spake, yet full of awe.
“This cheers our fallen house: come to our friends,
O Saturn! come away, and give them heart;
I know the covert, from thence came I hither.”
Thus brief; then with beseeching eyes she went
With backward footing through the shade a space:
He follow’d, and she turn’d to lead the way
Through aged boughs, that yielded like the mist
Which eagles cleave upmounting from their nest.

For the entire poem, click here.