Thursday, April 24, 2014

Recent Acquisitions


  1. American Pastoral (Philip Roth)
  2. Autobiography of a Corpse (Sigizmund Krzhyzhanovsky)
  3. The Marriage Plot (Jeffrey Eugenides)
It wasn't planned but yet again, I found myself inside a bookstore and gave in to the by now quite alarmingly regular compulsive disorderly impulse to get some. 

And within 24 hours of having acquired it, I am pleased to say that I finished The Marriage Plot (having come with high recommendations from the singular (no pun intended) Michael and Dzejla book club). The first 150 or so pages are among the funniest, most intelligent, warmest and most exquisitely plotted I've ever read in my entire reading career. Reading it proved so riveting that I surrendered with pleasure, called in sick the next day (today) and completed the entire 400 page story over the course of a lazy afternoon-evening-night marathon reading session. I'd almost forgotten the guilty, direct, immediate pleasure I still derive from reading a somewhat old fashioned novel - the one with a plot involving real humans with real stories as opposed to big-idea-books-masquerading-as-novels. (I don't remember underlining, criss-crossing, commenting so much on the margins as I've done in the first one third of the book.) Add to the above, the icing on the cake - one of the three main characters is so DFW that one would be blind to miss it - and the spell is complete. Although the book does sag from around the mid half until almost to the end, the first third is so brilliantly observed, breathtakingly beautiful, so effortlessly refreshing in its genuine humor that I don't feel like griping at all.

Bravo Jeffrey! You've restored a reader back to vigor!

Friday, April 18, 2014

When an Unstoppable Force Meets an Immovable Object

The funniest 4 minutes you will experience in this life: an absolute must-see for fellow Gunda fans - I give you... the Gunda Hobbit. I laughed so hard that tears gushed forth from my eyes, ears, nose and miscellaneous other orifices.

Thursday, April 10, 2014

As Brittle as Heart

His earliest attempts at feigning cool and getting noticed involved rote memorizations of $e$ to the fifteenth decimal place ($\pi$ was so last generational), with thrown in for good measure, would be an exaggerated affectation of nonchalance at having achieved such a superhuman feat of mental calisthenics, which nonchalance he'd then brandish at fellow toddlers' mouths agape. Little did he know that that afternoon at the playschool, he'd experience his first big heartbreak, its gossamer fissures' first reticulate tentacles deepening with every subsequent breakage, finally culminating in his premature heart failure that would lead the ever lugubrious coroner to remark "He died of a broken heart".

Monday, April 07, 2014

Tuesday, April 01, 2014

Stray Thought

If true beauty could kill, Wong Kar-wai would be the biggest mass murderer in human history.