July was a great month for women writers at our home! While J.K. Rowling held my daughter captive, I had a lot of peace and quiet to catch up on my own reading.
Go Set a Watchman - everything that needs to be said about the book has been said already by countless critics and readers. As everyone debates about Atticus, my main takeaway was about Harper Lee's craft! Every time you hear great writers talk about countless previous drafts and how different the current novel was from the one they originally started with, you have no clue how truly different it turned out. To me this was the revelation from Go Set a watchman - how Harper Lee was able to finish a story, then go back and completely re-do it from scratch as though she had a clean slate. I was blown away by that. I sometimes struggle to re-order power point slides or even worse rearrange bullets within a slide, so this to me was a remarkable achievement, something that i think all budding writers should take note of. Now that both the books exist it is hard to discount one and focus only on the other, and harder still to not think of them as sequels.
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger was another book I finally got to this year. Was it science fiction or romance? I didn't care as I enjoyed the plot of a modern day Penelope waiting for her Odysseus who is chrono-impaired and has no control over when or where he time travels to.
The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler was a disappointment to me. I came to this after "We are all completely besides ourselves" and the Jane Austen book just didn't do it for me. The premise of the book of course was interesting - 6 people, 6 novels and each person a representative of one of the legendary Austen characters, unclear who was narrating the story. Frankly most of their lives seemed boring and predictable like every person's life. While Austen is legendary for taking the mundane and making it exciting, Karen Joy Fowler was not able to pull it off (i.e IMO)
The next book was "At the water's edge" by Sara Gruen. I had enjoyed her first book "Water for elephants" and so when I walked into the library and found the book in the 2 week lease section, and read the blurb I couldn't resist it. One of my main regrets when I visited Scotland was not to have been to Inverness and the Highlands (something i hope to rectify in the future).So I am a sucker for a story which is set there and has the Lochness monster as a character. Once again this book was a good summer read, but not close to the previous book.
End of July the Booker longlist was announced. As I read through the blurbs I was fascinated by a few of them. I picked up "Illuminations" by Andrew O'Hagan. The Booker blurb described it as a book about "war, homecoming and families". I should say the war bit was tedious maybe because there have been other books that have done a much better job. So I almost skipped the parts about the war (Luke) and waited to read the bits about the families (Anne), dealing with old age, dementia, memories and confronting long buried family secrets - this part was very well written. Don't know if it will make the shortlist though.
The highlight of the month was a nonfiction book. "Sapiens: a brief history of humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari was one fascinating read! I have been recommending this book to everyone I meet.Of all the human species that once roamed the earth, what made the Sapiens unique and so successful? Our ability to cooperate in large numbers enabled by religion, money, empires, gossips, cognitive dissonance - in short our ability to believe and imagine a future not just as an individual but as a group. These charactersitics are not always for the better as they also led to imagined hierarchies (slavery, racism), rapid extinction of other species and the not so positive impact we've had on the planet. Human history has been often spin doctored to portray our species in a positive light but in Sapiens we see that History is just a collection of accidents. The book lays out our history in 3 sections - Cognitive revolution, Agricultural Revolution and the ongoing Scientific revolution. It is very hard to summarize our entire history in 400 pages, but the book pulls it off. It is certainly the best non-fiction book I've read this year.
Have more books from the Booker long list to get through in August. I am especially curious about "The Chimes" but finding it hard to get my hands on it. I am sure if it makes the shortlist it would be more widely available. Also want to read "Brilliant Green" - a nonfiction book about plants, but if it proves that plants are indeed sentient beings I don't know what i will eat anymore :)
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| Calligraphy of characters from the series |
Go Set a Watchman - everything that needs to be said about the book has been said already by countless critics and readers. As everyone debates about Atticus, my main takeaway was about Harper Lee's craft! Every time you hear great writers talk about countless previous drafts and how different the current novel was from the one they originally started with, you have no clue how truly different it turned out. To me this was the revelation from Go Set a watchman - how Harper Lee was able to finish a story, then go back and completely re-do it from scratch as though she had a clean slate. I was blown away by that. I sometimes struggle to re-order power point slides or even worse rearrange bullets within a slide, so this to me was a remarkable achievement, something that i think all budding writers should take note of. Now that both the books exist it is hard to discount one and focus only on the other, and harder still to not think of them as sequels.
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger was another book I finally got to this year. Was it science fiction or romance? I didn't care as I enjoyed the plot of a modern day Penelope waiting for her Odysseus who is chrono-impaired and has no control over when or where he time travels to.
The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler was a disappointment to me. I came to this after "We are all completely besides ourselves" and the Jane Austen book just didn't do it for me. The premise of the book of course was interesting - 6 people, 6 novels and each person a representative of one of the legendary Austen characters, unclear who was narrating the story. Frankly most of their lives seemed boring and predictable like every person's life. While Austen is legendary for taking the mundane and making it exciting, Karen Joy Fowler was not able to pull it off (i.e IMO)
The next book was "At the water's edge" by Sara Gruen. I had enjoyed her first book "Water for elephants" and so when I walked into the library and found the book in the 2 week lease section, and read the blurb I couldn't resist it. One of my main regrets when I visited Scotland was not to have been to Inverness and the Highlands (something i hope to rectify in the future).So I am a sucker for a story which is set there and has the Lochness monster as a character. Once again this book was a good summer read, but not close to the previous book.
End of July the Booker longlist was announced. As I read through the blurbs I was fascinated by a few of them. I picked up "Illuminations" by Andrew O'Hagan. The Booker blurb described it as a book about "war, homecoming and families". I should say the war bit was tedious maybe because there have been other books that have done a much better job. So I almost skipped the parts about the war (Luke) and waited to read the bits about the families (Anne), dealing with old age, dementia, memories and confronting long buried family secrets - this part was very well written. Don't know if it will make the shortlist though.
The highlight of the month was a nonfiction book. "Sapiens: a brief history of humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari was one fascinating read! I have been recommending this book to everyone I meet.Of all the human species that once roamed the earth, what made the Sapiens unique and so successful? Our ability to cooperate in large numbers enabled by religion, money, empires, gossips, cognitive dissonance - in short our ability to believe and imagine a future not just as an individual but as a group. These charactersitics are not always for the better as they also led to imagined hierarchies (slavery, racism), rapid extinction of other species and the not so positive impact we've had on the planet. Human history has been often spin doctored to portray our species in a positive light but in Sapiens we see that History is just a collection of accidents. The book lays out our history in 3 sections - Cognitive revolution, Agricultural Revolution and the ongoing Scientific revolution. It is very hard to summarize our entire history in 400 pages, but the book pulls it off. It is certainly the best non-fiction book I've read this year.
Have more books from the Booker long list to get through in August. I am especially curious about "The Chimes" but finding it hard to get my hands on it. I am sure if it makes the shortlist it would be more widely available. Also want to read "Brilliant Green" - a nonfiction book about plants, but if it proves that plants are indeed sentient beings I don't know what i will eat anymore :)
