Who is Kuzhali Manickavel?

I happened to find an intriguing book 2 days ago "Insects Are Just Like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings" by Kuzhali Manickavel (I got mine from landmark), and have been obsessed with finding out as much about the author as I can ever since. I found that some of the stories in the book have already appeared in other places. Here is the list of stories i have found over the internet:

The Dynamics of Windows (one of my favorites)
Throwing Rocks at Dogs
Little Bones
The Dolphin King
Welcome to Barium
Everyone does integral calculus
Conversations during a cyclone and a flood
How to wear an Indian village
Cats and Fish
Because we are precious and brave
The domino effect


Most of these sites also have an interview with the author and they are as fascinating as the short/tiny stories.

Go read her stories and be amazed by their unpredictability, humor and sadness.

Punishment??

I finally finished Crime and Punishment and my roommate borrowed it from me. For him reading it seems to be the greatest punishment, but still he perseveres. He tries hard to read ten pages a day before sleep finally overcomes him. For me, the book wasn't such a strain thankfully. However I found that it required some patience on the part of the reader. It is mentioned in the notes that the book is not so much a whodunit as a whydunit which is true, but it was also described as an easy to read classic.

Currently I'm reading You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers. So far the book can be described as strange, but it has been an easy read when compared with Dostoevsky.

New adventures in Hi-Fi

Well, maybe not new but what I mean is that I have bought, yes BOUGHT, an audio book of Great Expectations over the Internet. Its an unabridged version of the book read by Frederick Davidson, so the book takes 18 hours and 42 minutes to finish (I have reached chapter 23 of 59).

The experience of listening to an audio book has been great especially since the reader, tries to talk in different voices for each of the characters. I also felt that as Pip grows up as the book progresses, his voice changes from a high pitched tone to a more mature one. However I found that I had to have more concentration while listening than while reading a book.

The book was available in 59 DRM (Digital Rights Manager) protected WMA files, which were not compatible with my Sony mp3 player. However, since I had bought the book, I was able to contact the support team (it's nice when people listen to you if you pay for stuff) and they suggested I write audio CDs (it would take 12 CDs) and then rip them to mp3. Thankfully I didn't have to follow this painful process, but was able to create images of the CDs using Nero software and rip the virtual CDs to mp3.

Drained...

Heck, I haven't been able to update my blog (to the dismay of thousands of my readers) and worse I haven't been able to read anything much. I blame it all on my job, you feel so drained after getting back home that all you feel like doing is sleep, or in my case flip aimlessly through channels on TV. Maybe I'm not meant to be working, after spending so many years (20 yrs) in school.

However, I plan to change all that. I went and bought a couple of books recently using the money I make. I bought Crime and Punishment to educate myself (and also because on the cover it said it was one of the most readable classics). I also bought Adverbs by Daniel Handler (the author of A Series of Unfortunate Events) because I found what was written on the back cover funny.

Adverbs is a collection of episodes happening to different people that are loosely linked together. But it wasn't a funny book as I expected after reading the back cover. It's a more serious book, where each chapter is based more or less on a single emotion. However, though beautifully written, I felt that the author gave more importance to the style of writing, rather than content.

A Confederacy of Dunces

When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him. - Jonathan Swift

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole starts with this quote. After reading the foreword by Walker Percy, I began wondering whether the same thing happened to the author itself. After writing the book he could not find any one to publish his work. Disappointed by this he committed suicide as an unsuccessful writer. Later when the work was published thanks mainly to the persistence of his mother, the work went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. I cant imagine a more dramatic story surrounding a book.

I was looking around the a bookstore, to see if anyone is actually buying the new Harry Potter book when I came across this book and couldn't resist buying it. Guess I will wait till a cheaper HP7 comes out before buying it.

After a Storm, Before a Feast

I have just completed A Storm Of Swords, book three of George R R Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice series, and it ends with a very nerve wrecking suspense. Some of the major characters are killed and some have even been brought back from the dead and all the other major characters are in a very critical situation.

However before starting the fourth book A Feast For Crows I have been reading Fragile Things, a collection of short stories by Neil Gaiman. I must say that I am not impressed by the stories. They seem to be very ordinary and feels like ghost stories told around a campfire.