Review: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

My very first review of this book on Goodreads minutes after I had finished reading was this "A terrible, extremely over-rated pretentious book with a love story as lame as they come." And this new extended review does not mean I take any of that back!
Many times after I have read a particularly unsatisfactory book, I throw myself into a recurrent dilemma. Should I be honest and put down exactly how I feel (in this case, violated and cheated) into my review ? Or should I wait until my feelings about the book have simmered down to the extent that I am not waspish anymore? With books like this one, I frankly do not care anymore. 'The Night Circus' is a book that makes me angry. Very angry!
Here's how this scenario unfolded:
Me browsing the internet to see a book being called 'The next Harry Potter!' - Woah, what?? 'Click'. 'Summit Entertainment buys rights to make it into a movie'. Oh wait, didn't those guys make movies out of the lame Twilight series? Maybe they're trying to redeem themselves! Oooh David Heyman's signed on to produce the movie! SOLD!
Yes, I was this extremely naive person, who was one of the several people conned into buying this overly hyped book. Read the following if you are a fantasy lover like me and tell me if anything about it should have been warning enough.

The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night.

But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway—a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them, this is a game in which only one can be left standing, and the circus is but the stage for a remarkable battle of imagination and will. Despite themselves, however, Celia and Marco tumble headfirst into love—a deep, magical love that makes the lights flicker and the room grow warm whenever they so much as brush hands.

True love or not, the game must play out, and the fates of everyone involved, from the cast of extraordinary circus per­formers to the patrons, hang in the balance, suspended as precariously as the daring acrobats overhead.

Written in rich, seductive prose, this spell-casting novel is a feast for the senses and the heart.


Paragraph 1:
Yes the circus does arrive without warning but why is this never described from the point of view of the people who actually work there? Also to me the feel of a black and white circus seemed extremely claustrophobic and I did not enjoy being it in. The major part of the story is written in second or third person present tense with a smattering of first person present tense at the end. I do not mind the third person style of writing, but it was the second person present tense style that I found the most annoying. It was as if the author was trying to hard to make her readers see things that weren't necessary. And Erin Morgenstern does a good job of describing caramelized popcorn. However, I do not have to smell popcorn or any sort of food in a book to like a story. That's a job for a cookbook! Books should make it easy for you to see what the writer intends to show you. A writer who tries too hard to make you see her imagination is a definite fail. And as if the complexity wasn't enough, there are story-lines that follow no particular chronological order. So you are left to manage the sudden changes in the tense, the period and four different story-lines which if you are not careful, will leave you as twisted as the contortionist from ' Le Cirque des Rêves'.

Paragraph 2:
Let me start off by defining a 'duel'. I used Wikipedia here because I really want to stress upon the ending of this definition. 'A duel generally signifies an arranged engagement in combat between two individuals, with matched weapons in accordance with agreed-upon rules.'
In 'The Night Circus' Marco and Celia, the two protagonists, 'duel' without knowing their opponent and without any rules. They 'strike' by actually creating whimsical things for the circus, so the opponent can drop by to admire and if need be add their own touches to it several years later. I'd rather watch a turtle race a sleepy hare right about now. Well, now that I look back at the review on the book cover (yes the one that I copied above), adjectives like 'fierce' and 'mercurial' actually make me laugh. I wish the editor had used a 'find-replace' feature to replace them with 'lame' and 'nutty' respectively.

Paragraph 3:
No one is in any real danger at any given point in the book and by the end of the book 'NOTHING ACTUALLY HAPPENS'! However, by then I was fuming with rage at  the author and at the loads of loony publishers so bad that I almost missed the forced happy ending to the story.
Example from a news article: "Let's say The Help and The Da Vinci Code were high-water marks in our bookselling history. My prediction is The Night Circus is the 200-year flood. I loved (those books)," she says, "but this is better than The Da Vinci Code and better than The Help. It's a whole different level of writing."-Vivien Jennings, founder of Rainy Day Books Inc.

This might be a good book for a different sort of reader, but I find it worrisome when the writer of a book describes herself in the following words, "I paint very messy. I throw paint around," says Morgenstern, who now lives in Boston. "So when I let myself do the same sort of thing with my writing, and I would just write and write and write and revise, that's when I found my rhythm in writing." *Shudder*

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Review: The Silmarillion by J.R.R Tolkien

The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am going to attempt to write a review for one of the best books I have ever read, and it is daunting. But then so was reading it.

I read 'The Silmarillion' eleven years after I had read 'The Lord of the Rings. One advantage was that I went into it with a fair knowledge of and love for Tolkien's style, so I knew I was not going to give up after reading a few pages as I had initially done with 'The Lord of the Rings'. But it had been far too long since I read the Lord of the Rings, and in the interim I had not appreciated Christopher Tolkien's intervention in 'The Children of Hurin', despite his best intentions. So I was worried that this book would turn out to be similar, because it too was published posthumously by Christopher Tolkien. I am glad I was wrong.

To be honest, this would probably be a great book for the most ardent Tolkien devotee. I found it really difficult to keep up with, but again like I said before, Tolkien's style and language are so beautiful that they kept me going. I have gone back to read parts of it again, and even now for the purpose of this review.

'The Silmarillion' is right up there with the likes of 'The Kalevala', 'The Mahabharata', 'The Iliad' and 'Odyssey'. Comprising a major chunk of 'Tolkien's legendarium', to be lost in it is a wonderful experience, although very often mind-boggling. You will not remember all the names in the book. It is way too complex for that. So just flow with the narrative the first time around.

The epic consists of 5 major parts.
It begins with 'Ainulindalë', which is akin to the creation myth from different religions. Eru Ilúvatar, or 'God' decides to create the Universe, and from his thought spring several celestial beings called the 'Ainur'. The name of this part is an homage to the Ainur and their Music that leads to the creation of the Earth (Arda/Ea).Ainulindalë literally means 'the Music of the Ainur' and you are free to interpret the Music as you like, because there is no clear explanation of what it exactly is. Melkor, one of the Ainur whose ego gets the better of him, decides to meddle and make his own Music. Some readers might lose interest, and if they don't enjoy the book at this point, they should probably stop and read something else, because it is only going to get way more complex. For those who took up this book because they had a passing interest in the LOTR, they should probably skip right to the last chapter, although that would mean missing the story of the Silmarils. And this is after all 'The Silmarillion'!

If you are one of the few who are determined to persist and finish the book, the next chapter Valaquenta, describes the different Ainur (or Valar) who descend to inhabit Arda, and their constant struggle against Melkor, now known as Morgoth. Close on the heels of that is the crux of the book, Quenta Silmarillion, which narrates the tale of the magical Silmarils. I simply loved Tolkien's story telling, especially the extremely beautiful tale of Beren and Luthien. I will refrain from recounting the events in this part as they are far too many, but if you have read 'The Children of Hurin' and 'The Unfinished tales', you'll come across many a familiar name.

The smallest chapter is 'Akallabêth', which describes the events in the Second Age including the rise of Sauron and the travails of the Dunedain, the most famous of whom is Aragorn, whom we met in 'The Fellowship of the Ring'. The final chapter 'Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age', leads into the events in 'The Hobbit' and 'The Lord of the Rings' and is the one most readers find familiar.

Tolkien draws aplenty from Norse and Celtic myths and legends, so you will find a lot of familiar themes like 'The Creation', 'the Fallen', 'the Flood' and different Ages. On a side note, similar themes also exist in Hindu mythology (and also in the Transformers series!), and comparing the similarities is something that I find quite interesting.

I love browsing through online discussions of the book and when my Tolkien book club was reading it this spring, I went back to skim it one more time. The language makes you a lot more literate with the 'beautiful' old style English and there is just so much to learn by diving into the rich world created by Tolkien. Some critics say his characters are very one dimensional, but I think even if they are, they are the best one-dimensional characters in literature and serve their purpose well in the story. I wish I could do more justice to this review, but it is somewhat beyond my scope. I might review it properly at some point. Right now I am using this as a writing exercise for myself, and if I have somehow managed it, a way to entice few more readers into the Tolkien cult.

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I am guilty of this, but I hope to learn.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/25/some-comma-questions/

Yawn!

Reading is really an awesome habit, except for one flaw.
Yeah you got that alright!
Sitting on your butt all the time, or worse curling up in a weird (yet somehow comfortable) posture anywhere and everywhere. And if the book is a drag, then God save you from the snore that escapes your lips!
I find myself indulging in a lot more reading of late (not to mention zombie-web-surfing) and I have been avoiding the gym (although I blame the weather for being exceptionally snooze-worthy for the past few days!). But the latest thing that made me awfully guilty was when I heard from my gym concierge, who was not so great at disguising his concerned email from being as direct as "are you alive?" .
So to get me some zing back into my lazy life, I decided I just had to go in for retail-therapy! The good news is that it was retail-therapy with a purpose to literally put things back in motion. I am talking shoes, people! Plus especially after hearing great reviews about these cuties from my colleague, Jen, I just HAD to have them!
Presenting...

Yeah, yeah the bag's a splurge, but look how cute! (Not to mention I'll be blinding everyone with a double dose of hot pink flash!).
And since my gym is close to a bookstore, maybe I'll even spend more time browsing through the aisles ! (Hey that's exercise too!). Now I only wish I could master reading while running. Although I think, that could be slightly dangerous! =))

Review: The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I had never heard of this book as a kid. I and my sister were exposed to more British books than American ones. (Well, I didn't even know Dr. Seuss until the World Wide Web came into our lives and by then I was a teenager!). As kids, we owned tonnes of Enid Blyton books (around the age when we should have read this book), and as we grew older more American books (Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys) found their way into our lives. Then it was back to Harry Potter and Tolkien! I came across this book when someone I follow on Goodreads rated this generously with a note that this book should be interesting no matter how old the reader was. Well, it is never too late to catch up with good literature, is it? (Ah I just jumped to "Conclusions"!)

The Phantom Tollbooth is about a kid named Milo, who is completely disinterested in his life. Enter a magical 'DIY' tollbooth that seems to have appeared from nowhere (*cough* Sweden?) with precise instructions on how to use it. A drive through the tollbooth (on the road to Expectations), takes Milo into the kingdom of Wisdom , but not before briefly being lost in Doldrums (!). The kingdom is a place in turmoil because the two nutty brothers who rule each half (Dictionopolis and Digitopolis) have banished rhyme and reason from it. As in literally! Rhyme and Reason, the princesses who tried to knock sense into their warring brothers' brains,were unsuccessful and booted out of the kingdom.

Milo ends up with the unlikeliest of companions, a watchdog and a humbug (again, quite literally so!)and travels to bring back Rhyme and Reason. Along the way he meets more characters and places, whose names are such witty puns on the characteristics they embody, that you can't help but chuckle.

While I went into this book knowing well that it was a children's book, I was somewhat surprised by the amount of word-play and mathematical reasoning depicted in here. I am not sure every kid who read this book or had this book read to him, would have fully appreciated the meaning behind it, but I guess some of them have gone back to re-read it as adults. One star off, only because I kept getting lost in 'Doldrums' myself at some points in an effort to keep up with the puns and navigate the typos in my ebook. Some parts of the story were just plain silly to me, but they would have entertained a kid perhaps. I think at a point I was trying to find puns where there weren't any, and as someone who dislikes mathematics, I did not enjoy being in Digitopolis :-)

I'll leave you with my favorite lines from the book by the SoundKeeper;
..."And it's the same for all sounds. If you think about it, you'll soon know what each one looks like. Take laughter for instance," she said, laughing brightly, and a thousand tiny brightly colored bubbles flew into the air and popped noiselessly. "Or speech," she continued. "Some of it is light and airy, some sharp and pointed, but most of it, I'm afraid, is just heavy and dull".

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Have you ever wondered...

....if there are typos in the hieroglyphics? Or for that matter in any indelible ancient inscription? And the writer realized he could not erase it and just went..."Oh too bad. Well, try deciphering that 1000 years from now, suckaaaah !!"

Rock, paper, Kindle?

..Or a Nook? Before you get annoyed by this oft repeated word in my blog, let me tell you that this will be the last time I mention it ( or atleast until a few more blogposts have gone by and you have forgotten....).
This post is about the continuous conflict in my mind, actually in many a book-lovers' mind. I love the feel of paper. But if you have already read in my "About me" section, you'll know that the space in my apartment is a major constraint for my desire to indulge in buying as many books as I'd like. As a result of that and several other factors, (read 'rat-race' to graduate, find a job and then keep the job and the above mentioned apartment) my reading suffered . You'd think if space at home was the problem, the simplest solution was to walk into a library and check out books like a normal person would. But no! My OCD to 'own' books overwhelmed and prevented me from being that sane.
Luckily for me, the digital age in books was blooming by then. So one day, I finally walked into a store to buy some books and ended up buying a Nook. My reason for this was somewhat (I'd like to believe, extremely well) thought out. See, Nook is a Barnes and Noble product. Its sales keep the beautiful places called bookstores alive (unlike sales of the Kindle or even printed books from this all-consuming black-hole of an online store, Amazon). Genius? I think so!

Unfortunately, I now find myself tearing an even bigger hole in my wallet (No, the free BnN gift cards from work don't cut it). Books that I genuinely love, must be available on my bookshelf, in their paperback (or even better hardcover) form. You think I have a bigger problem? I do too!
So far I have controlled that desire by glancing at my sorry little bookshelf every now and then. But the day I have my own house, will also be the day all common-sense goes out of the window. A window that perhaps looks like the one below.

Tell me, how can a book-lover resist having something like this?

or.....

THIS!
       
                           

  ....Ok may be the second one's slightly more flamboyant, but here comes my personal favorite..
    Tadaaaaa!!!

                               

                                                                         So much potential!

Some might argue, that if this same kind of reluctance to evolve towards writing onto paper had overwhelmed the early people, we'd still be chipping away at rocks with a chisel, or chalking stuff up on slate. Well, we all agree that lugging those things around wouldn't have been fun, don't we? Plus what with erosion, most of that hard-work would have gone to waste, anyway. So yeah, maybe there'll come a day when we completely give up paper! But until then, despite the fact that I am embracing the digital era, I still pledge to read the printed  word.

Books and a Nook (Post #17)

Ok, I am being extra chatty today, but is it me or is there really a pandemic of trilogies and multi-book series in the publishing world? I was browsing through a listopia list on Goodreads when I came across this..

I scrolled to find series that had upto 30 books in the series! I mean, seriously?!! Why are there so few 'single' books these days? Apart from J.K Rowling who dove into remarkable success with her Potter series, I am yet to find another series that I can bear to re-read. But again that's my personal opinion. I really enjoyed Stieg Larsson's Millenium trilogy and Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy and thought they were well written, but in both cases the sequels were much less satisfying that the first book. Fans of 'Twilight' may bay for my blood when they read this, but after the first book, I felt as if  Meyer kept droning because she was being paid by the word. After reading ALL her books (Stupid of me, but I wanted to see if I was missing something) this dialogue by Jacob in Breaking Dawn aptly sums up Meyer's writing “Where is this psycho crap coming from? Are you making this up as you go?” Ok I had to Google for "Breaking Dawn's worst quotes" to find that one but come on THAT was funny!
I understand this shower of sequels brings in revenue for bookstores and publishing houses, not to mention the writers who are depending on the publication of their next book for their income, but don't you think at some point it is also diluting the number of "good reads"?

Review: A Clash of Kings by George R.R Martin

A Clash of Kings by George R.R. Martin
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

They say.."Once bitten, twice shy". I should have taken this quote seriously, but alas. I decided to give this series one more chance and now feel terribly abused. The book to me seemed like nothing but immature, perverse rants by the author. I happened to scroll down the reviews list on Goodreads after I saw that the average rating for this book was a whopping 4.38 out of 5, and found everyone raving about the book. I shouldn't have been surprised though. Anyone who disliked the style in the first book would have stopped right there. I just happened to go on with it anyway, because I thought the story had potential. I figured it couldn't get any worse, right? WRONG! The author's writing is perverse,sadistic to the point of nauseating, completely avoidable in the story and just keeps going on and on. Well, it totally demotivated me from picking up the next book in the series.

The book is all about a bunch of mediocre men wanting to be king and killing/looting/raping people left and right, annoying, loose women, upright, boring women and mopey people shuffling along throughout the 800+ pages of the book.

I got to a point where I just could not deal with the depressing story-line anymore, and Martin is excellent at discouraging any hopeful readers. So, I just took the easier way out and skimmed Wikipedia for the story (saved me from dealing with the ugly language in Martin's books) and I am left satisfied that I made the right decision, albeit a tad late. It's too bad that there were a couple of characters I was beginning to have an interest in.
Anyway, an excerpt from Martin's wiki page
"Major themes and areas of exploration in his short fiction include loneliness, connection, tragically doomed love, idealism, romanticism, and hard truth versus comforting deceit. Many of these occur in his magnum opus as well, but most of them are more abundant and obvious in his shorter works." Comforting deceit? Beats me!

Anyway here's the summary of all 7 books,including the couple he's writing. Be ready for spoilers!!




Behead, rape, behead, incest, bastard, repeat. Aaaaaaaaaaaarghhh!!!

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Review: Mrityunjaya- The Story of Karna by Shivaji Sawant

Mrityunjaya, The Death Conqueror: The Story Of Karna by Shivaji Sawant
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I must start off by admitting that this review may be extremely biased. Biased by the fact that I consider the Mahabharata the best epic ever! Every character has an interesting story, and despite a few supernatural elements, every human character is...human. Human, with all the flaws and strengths, and no one is more so than the protagonist of Mrityunjaya, Karna. Since this review also goes on my blog and there is a slight problem with the spoiler HTML tag on my blog, I have removed it. Please stop reading further if you do not want to be exposed to spoilers.

As a kid, I had heard a lot about Mrityunjaya, and seen the book at home, but the fact that it was written in Marathi dissuaded me from touching it. Even though Marathi is my mother tongue, I have never studied it formally and therefore have a greater comfort level with reading English than Marathi. So a combination of my new Nook, Barnes and Noble gift cards from my company (yeah baby!) and Goodreads, revived my interest in hunting for a translated copy. Thanks to an Indian version of Amazon (www.flipkart.com/india), and my sister, I finally laid my hands on a beautiful hard-bound English translation. And then I lived the phrase "lost in translation" right from the first sentence! However, despite the clunky phrases, I was able to translate it back to what it would have sounded like in Marathi in my head and enjoy the beauty of the book.

Even if you haven't read this book, even if your introduction to Karna is through the Mahabharata alone, you cannot help but feel empathy for the eldest son of Kunti. Mrityunjaya only deepens it.
Mrityunjaya was written as a semi-autobiographical take on Karna’s life. The book is written from the POV of six characters. Karna opens and takes us closer to the end of his story, interspersed with chapters by Kunti (his mother), Duryodhana (his best friend), Vrishali (his wife), Shon (his younger foster brother) and a grand ending by the Lord, Sri Krishna himself. Apart from indulging the semi-autobiography of a fictional figure, Sawant touches on one of the biggest realities of human society, one that has not changed since time immemorial. He reminds us of how we, as a society, place an abnormal amount of emphasis on someone's background to form an opinion of them, irrespective of their actual behavior or worth . It never even crosses our mind that each person is the architect of his own attitude, built off of their external environment. Even though the protagonist was in reality the son of the Sun-God himself and as radiant as him, the fact that he was fostered in the hut of a poor charioteer stacked up unfairly against him. The society then treated him as someone of low status and unfortunately, because things haven’t changed by an iota now, nothing would have changed for him, if he were alive today.

Karna is given a three-dimensional personality in Sawant’s version, something which the original Mahabharata does not provide. Sawant also takes a few liberties with the original, but the changes he makes only make the story more realistic. The characters of Vrishali and Shon for example, are given such appropriate voices, that you are left wondering whether Sawant had the fortune of stumbling upon some long lost letters written by them. Kunti’s character is fleshed out very well too, although you can’t help but wonder, what kind of a mother would choose her own honour over her son’s. One revelation on her part would have brought back his lost glory and honour, although it is commonly believed that the war would have happened anyway. Sawant also gives the Pandavas’ characters a darker shade of grey than in any other version of the Mahabharata. Duryodhana’s character remains the same, although it now makes me want to explore Bhāsa’s “Urubhanga”, which is Mahabharata retold from the POV of Duryodhana! Some day!

Despite the atrocities heaped upon him throughout his life, Karna grew to be an invincible warrior , a gentle and fair ruler of Anga (after Duryodhana bestowed the title upon him), a loving husband, an indulgent brother, a loyal friend and above all the epitome of generosity. So generous, that when a poor brahmin comes begging even as he lays dying, he breaks his golden teeth to give them away as alms!

While you commend Karna for being a rebel and not succumbing to the unfair norms of the society, you hit upon the obvious flaw in the hero. His egotism. You wonder why he was so ashamed of being recognized as his charioteer father’s son, despite loving his parents immensely. And if that shame, and the resultant blind loyalty to his lone supporter, Duryodhana, was the result of his downfall. The Mahabharata is an epic more complex than anyone can ever imagine. You can discuss, debate and argue about it until eternity, and yet cover only a fraction of it.
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Hamartia :The character flaw or error of a tragic hero that leads to his downfall.