kirukkal.com

For starters, there is a meme that’s rolling in the Indian Blogosphere which intends to make bloggers list their acquaintance with books. It was Chenthil who tagged me. So here is my list.

Total Number of Books I Own : Must be close to 200. This excludes the book that I gave off to cousins at various points in time.

Last Book I Bought : I imported Collection of Sujatha’s Shortstories Part II through a friend in India recently. Bought J D Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye last week, for my personal collection.

Last Book I Read : Best American Shortstories 2004, Fred Moody’s Seattle and the Demons of Ambition, Ashokamithran’s Thaneer and Jumpha Lahiri’s The Namesake. Actually I tend to read around 3-4 books at a time, being lazy !!. One before bed, one/two during commute, one in the bathroom. There are 30 books that I’ve booked in the library and I’ve no idea when I will read them.

Five Books That Mean a Lot to Me : I’m going against the meme. Who cares !!. I can’t get just 5 books listed. No way.

In Tamil –

Sujatha’s Nilla Nizhal. I read this during my teens and it made me fall in love with tamil fiction. Though this wasn’t the first story of Sujatha that I read it was my breaking point. The protagonist Mukundan is partly me and partly you. While I read it today, I don’t see why I loved this book so much but at that point, it reflected my teenage thinking towards various things in life. Include 24 Rubaai Theevu also in this category.

Sujatha‘s Shortstory Collection and Guru Prasadin Kadaisi Dhinam. Read them to agree with me. Guru Prasadin Kadaisi Dhinam is arguably Sujatha’s best small-big story.

Aadhavan‘s Enn Peyar Ramaseshan. I only wished Aathavan lived to write more stories like this and enthrall us.

Kalki’s Parthiban Kanavu. Though Ponniyin Selvan is also hugely inspiring, as you read Parthiban Kanavu, one could directly feel a virtual movie screen opening up before you. A perfect historical thriller. Kalki is probably the most inspiring writer after Bharathi.

Ashokamithran‘s Pathinettaavadhu Atchakkodu and Thaneer. Pathinettaavadhu Atchakkodu explains why Ashokamithran is Ashokamithran.

G Nagarajan’s Naalai Matrumoru Naaley. An unknown classic.

In English –

Jean-Paul Sartre’s Basic Writings and Nausea. A good friend of mine introduced me to Sartre. It was Krishna who first spoke about Existentialism and Karma in Bhagavat Gita. Then it was Sartre.

Dostoevsky’s Demons. A Russian classic and often compared to the George Orwell’s best.

R K Narayan‘s Swami and Friends. The simple yet classy style of writing of RK Narayan is something that many of us yearn for. It was with Swami and Friends, the world of Malgudi was uncovered to the world. An classic forerunner to Harry Potter and Hogwarts adventures.

George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman. The king of sarcasm with wits unlimited and philosophy topped.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Made into a movie by Stanley Kubrick, Lolita was a true classic of it’s times. I saw the movie first and then I went back to read the book. Unlike the general opinion, I liked the rather long, descriptive and romantic version of Nabokov’s Lolita as a book than the movie. Thought the movie by itself was fun, in my personal opinion, the true work of Nabokov wasn’t reflected in the movie.

Mark Twain’s Tom of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Jules Verne’s Passepartout of Around the World in Eighty Days and the Dickensian pathos of Oliver Twist had great impact in me during my early teens.

Tag five people and have them do this on their blogs:

Desikan, Kinglsey, Anand, Latha, Ragu and Ramesh.

Thought the last three don’t have blogs and they are my offline friends, I will send this across to them on email to see if they can fill this up. Anyone who reads this and is interested, please pick it up.