It’s still a lousy year, but the foodiness has been decent and the reading, for a chnage, has been good. I particularly liked The Woman Who Thought She Was A Planet and other stories by Vandana Singh.

I thought the title was brilliant. It’s simplistic yet manages to scream ‘read me’. And read I did.

It’s a collection of short stories, and I liked most of them.

The title story, the one with that fascinating name, was decent. It doesn’t quite live up to its name, but it has rather good characterisation. There’s also a vague-ish story about a mathematician in search of answers, which rambled a bit. But the rest of the stories were pretty good. Like all good short pieces, they are neat and succinct and leave very few loose ends. Plus they're mostly fairly uncomplicated.

The third book in Samit Basu's Gameworld Trilogy is out and nobody told me!!! I like The Gameworld T, and I was quite looking forward to this one. I found out only after specifically googling for it because I suddenly remembered it was to be released in December.

The funniest thing though is I did a round of the new releases section at Landmark yesterday and never saw it there. Post the googling today, I called them and just as an aside asked them why they hadn't got up in New Relases. Got this gem - No one knows about it... so it's there in the system but I'm not sure if we actually have it. I'm not sure how that works. From what I recollect their system is reasonably accurate. They're going to call me and tell me if they actually have it now.

I called Blossom after that, and all I needed to say was Samit Basu's new book. They've got it, and not just in their system!:o) I think they've just redeemed themselves in my eyes.

*sigh*

Edit: Apparently other people read the bestsellers lists that the newspapers publish sandwiched somewhere in the midst of all their idiocy, so other people knew. I don't.

Landmark, Bangalore doesn't have it. Methinks Landmark, Bangalore isn't a patch on the good ole Apex Plaza one in the basement with the books spilling out of the shelves and the distinct lack of idiotic lighting.

The sulked about holiday wasn’t as bad a start to another year, after all.;o

D-day consisted of a non-delayed flight, orchids(yippeeness), apparel, and butterscotch cake.

The rest of the time - well, I met one out of the two friends originally intended on meeting (50% hit rate, yay!), and her "recently acquired" husband (none of our other mutual friends have met him yet, which is oh such a point to score on;o) ), hogged a bit (even if not as much as I’d have liked to), did not watch either of the two movies, and loafed a lot more than I like to admit.

But I did get time to read more or less uninterrupted, Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman’s The Fall of The Kings. I haven’t read Swordspoint but I read The Privilege of the Sword last month and liked it a lot more than I’d thought I would. The Fall of the Kings turned out to be very, very nicely written indeed, though I did think that the events towards the end didn’t quite live up to the richness of the rest of the book, especially the magic elements. Methought they do better at writing the mythic / historical aspect than the core fantasy part. Still a good read.

Landmark had a sale on all last month and I didn’t know. I no longer work a mere handful of buildings away from their oldest and still their bestest outlet:o

Anyway, managed to get there on Saturday and found, for some strange reason, stocked in the children’s section a lot of copies of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell available at a most amazing third of the price. So very happily scooped up one. The Ladies of Grace Adieu is out too but not at a third of the price, so here’s hoping the library gets it soon.

On to the more interesting stuff, I picked up Tales Before Tolkien at the library last week – it’s a collection of short stories by authors who might have influenced JRRT. It had the usual suspects – George MacDonald and Andrew Lang and Nesbit. There’s also a Rider Haggard piece, to account for the South Africa connection.

The one I found the best of the lot though was this one – John Buchan’s The Far Islands. I haven’t read any of his non-Hannay work; never come across it in fact, though I see a nice trove here. This side of his writing looks much better than the Hannay books, which I found readable, but a little rambly. The prose was much, much better here. It’s the sailing west concept, as the name evinces. And it’s done very, very nicely – subtle and intense at the same time.

Oooh! I liked. A lot.

I stayed up till 4 in the morning to finish it. And I’m so glad I did that since idiot newspapers found it fit to proclaim the answer to the all important question on page 1. Fools.

I'm pleased to report that my turning up at work on a Saturday is no longer as common a feature of my life as it was in my Chennai or Delhi days. I’ve probably clocked just about a Saturday a month since I’ve moved back here. That’s a state of affairs I could well get used to as I suppose this means I’m finally getting a life. Either that or it’s the return to internet access at home.

Anyway, I am however going in to ze workplace tomorrow. I’m having my copy of HP7 delivered there. So is one of the bosses (she who has been regaling me to Potter anecdotes every other morning, or whenever she’s having a bad time, for the last few weeks), and hence there must be no mix ups. There have been repeated requests given out to the reception along the lines of “Please call me as soon as the courier from Fabmall reaches...” by both frantic parties eager to know what lies at the end of the road.

*is excited*

In other stuff, the offsite at work finally happened today. We clambered down from the dizzy heights of a weekend at JLR’s Kabini resort to a KSTDC run thing at Coorg (interestingly to have happened the same weekend Coorg was cut off by rains) to a day at a resort on Bannerghatta Road, aka one of the worst roads in the country.

I’d contemplated skipping, partly because there were other things to do and partly as a protest against the great comedown from Kabini to someplace unheard of, but was coaxed into it by virtue of other things not happening and the fact that no one else seemed to support the protest. Think I even cribbbed to anupma about it.

Turned out to be fun though. ( Read more... )

At Blossom yesterday...

I took a different route home today. Instead of jostling for space with trucks, buses and other assorted vehicles on the rain-damaged highway, we took smaller roads that run parallel, and found ourselves wandering through puddles large enough to create illusions of Venice in the dark. Oh well – of Alleppy then.

It’s been raining.

And this is when I remember Alexander Frater’s Chasing the Monsoon, which is all about the south west monsoon.

( Read more... )