Tis' the Time for Lists!

Continuing the trend of lists, here's another called The Top 100 Notable Books of 2010 from the New York Times!

I didnt want to include all of them here but just hand-picked a few that I'd love to sink my teeth into:

THE IMPERFECTIONISTS. By Tom Rachman. (Dial, $25.) This intricate novel is built around the personal stories of staff members at an improbable English-language newspaper in Rome, and of the family who founded it in the 1950s. --This should be interesting given how English has become so prevalent...wonder if we'd have to go through something similar when say, Swahili becomes the go-to language for the world.

ANGELOLOGY. By Danielle Trussoni. (Viking, $27.95.) With a smitten art historian at her side, the young nun at the center of this rousing first novel is drawn into an ancient struggle against the Nephilim, hybrid offspring of humans and heavenly beings. --Coz we've all got a little bit of an angel within each of us :)


THE LOST BOOKS OF THE ODYSSEY. By Zachary Mason. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) The conceit behind the multiple Odysseuses here (comic, dead, doubled, amnesiac) is that this is a translation of an ancient papyrus, a collection of variations on the myth. --As an ode to the Black Ships ;)

What makes your top 100?

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

I’ve bolded out the ones that I’ve read…leave your list in the comments section...abridged versions are TOTALLY acceptable :)



1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen



2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien



3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte



4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling



5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee



6. The Bible (not completely)



7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte



8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell



9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman



10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens



11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott



12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy



13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (not completely)


 
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (not completely)


 
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier



16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien



17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulkes



18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger



19. The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger



20. Middlemarch - George Eliot



21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell



22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald



23. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy



24. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams



25. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky



26. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck



27. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll



28. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame



29. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy



30. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens



31. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis



32. Emma - Jane Austen



33. Persuasion - Jane Austen



34. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis



35. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini



36. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres



37. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden



38. Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne



39. Animal Farm - George Orwell



40. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown



41. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez



42. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving



43. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins



44. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery



45. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy



46. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood



47. Lord of the Flies - William Golding



48. Atonement - Ian McEwan



49. Life of Pi - Yann Martel



50. Dune - Frank Herbert



51. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons



52. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen



53. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth



54. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon



55. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens



56. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley



57. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon



58. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez



59. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck



60. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov



61. The Secret History - Donna Tartt



62. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold



63. Count of Monte Cristo- Alexandre Dumas



64. On The Road - Jack Kerouac



65. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy



66. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding



67. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie



68. Moby Dick - Herman Melville



69. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens



70. Dracula - Bram Stoker



71. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett



72. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson



73. Ulysses - James Joyce



74. The Inferno – Dante



75. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome



76. Germinal - Emile Zola



77. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray



78. Possession - AS Byatt



79. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens



80. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell



81. The Color Purple - Alice Walker



82. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro



83. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert



84. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry



85. Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White



86. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom



87. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle



88. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton



89. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad



90. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery



91. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks



92. Watership Down - Richard Adams



93. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole



94. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute



95. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas



96. Hamlet - William Shakespeare



97. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl



98. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo



99. Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand



100. Tuesdays with Morrie – Mitch Albom

Authors that Just Totally Do it Man!

So this comes via a recent spate of Facebook forwards...Who are the top 15 authors (poets, and screen-writers included) who've influenced you and who will always stick with you? List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. 

Here's my list...as with all things, I'm desperately wishing it was the top 20 or wait top 25! There are so many more that I want to add in...like, Ken Follet, J.D. Salinger, Jeffrey Archer, Robin Cook, Ayn Rand, John Grisham, Eric Segal, Vikram Seth and the most recent addition, Aravind Adiga hahaha :) 

1. Khalil Gibran
2. Vikram Seth
3. Enid Blyton
4. Virginia Wolf
5. Fredric Forsyth
6. Jane Austen
7. J. K. Rowling
8. P G Wodehouse
9. Emily Bronte
10. Clive Cussler
11. Khaled Hosseini
12. Maya Angelou
13. Edgar Alan Poe
14. Alexandre Dumas
15. Stephenie Meyer

Look forward to your thoughts readers!

Book Review: The Mango Season

Following is a review from of the BC members...also, a little tweety told me that there are other books being read such as Pillars of the Earth and the Golden Compass to name a few. Hoping that this first review will be inspiration for others to send their thoughts on their person reading lists :)

As my fellow book club friends know, I'm new to reading and of the few gems I've read, Mango Season is one of those that you want to finish as soon as you start reading--my personal best in coming in the under-two days mark! And as with all page-turners, this book has the perfect blend of being small, easy to read and visualize, a character you can get behind and a light tone that gets you hooked all the way through to its twisty end.

I could relate to it more, not just because it's a story of an Indian girl but, more so because it's a story of an Indian girl living in the United States. After reading a lot of serious books, this one was a good change and made the reading even more enjoyable.

So instead of telling you bits 'n pieces of the story let me tell you what the book is about...It's a story of a woman (Priya) who lives in America and is returning home to inform her family that she wants to marry an American man (Nick),something that most Asian families would probably dread! As soon as she declares her intention, all the melodrama starts to unfold...the big fat Indian family members picking on each other to the eldest male in the family struggling to hold his position as the head of the family, the traditional bride seeing ceremony, all the drama that the girl staying in America will do when she returns about the way her city has developed..And the best part are the Mangoes that all Indians relish to the fullest, and the pickles we make from mangoes...yum!!


I think the part of the book which still makes me smile is that after all the melodrama and the struggle to make the family agree to the union of the Indian and the American there still remains a surprise in the end which the family still doesnt know about. Just when the reader cheers on the uber-conservative Indian family for coming along the acceptance route and becoming progressive, the author throws the reader a curve ball that makes you wonder whether prejudices are confined to certain countries, or are there some gaps that are just too vast for any family to overcome?
 
I don't want to give away the suspense so you guys have to read on and discover the funny twist....I think it is a good light read for everyone...enjoy!

Slaves and Oracles--Up Next

In an effort to keep things easy, breezy and beautiful, Cover Girl style, the BC will be reading The Black Ships by Jo Graham

As debut books go, I'll reserve my judgement until I reach the last page, and may be less demanding of her than with a more veteran writer. Synopses and reviews online look interesting though with slaves, abandoned ships and Oracles describing fates of the damned. Historical novels make the perfect time machines no? Who needs Back to Future!

PS: Apparently, Wikipedia, my personal Oracle says: Black Ships is the official name given to Western vessels arriving in Japan between the 15th and 19th centuries. The word "black" refers to the black color of the older sailing vessels, and the black smoke from the coal-fired power plants of the American ships.

From XL to XS

While we usually don't feature book reviews, I just had to talk to you about this book, From XL to XS by Payal Gidwani Tiwari--the first and (I could be wrong) only true celebrity fitness expert in India.

Check it! She's most famous for Kareena's size zero notoriety and Sridevi's awesome 50+ come back as the reigning post-cougar siren of Indian cinema. (Cinema so quaint right? Right up there with talkies...I do believe I should be born in another era.)

You've got to hand it to them crazy Bollies, apparently Ms. Payal helps them fight their inherent fat DNA, delivering perfect bodies, 21st century style...you go girl, eek!

For a sweet under-Rs. 200 price point, you know I'm hollering for my personal copy.


PS: I loves me some cross collaboration...the dual promotion of Golmaal 3 and the book launch pretty smart thinkin' yeah?

Justify Murder?

What a gruesome thought right? But, the ladies of the Book Clubbers (BC*) had an extremely impassioned discussion yesterday at the monthly meeting on whether "Balram" Munna, protagonist of White Tiger ought to be castrated for building a life on a single act of inhumanity.

Seems like a given does'nt it? Murderer once = murderer always and henceforth, shall forever be proclaimed as "scum of the earth" as one fiesty BC declared.

While not novel, the character potrayal by Adiga and the sarcastic voice of Balram made everyone push their boundaries on age-old questions of, does the end justify the means? With a better motive, would Balram have been more likeable? Was Adiga extremely unilateral in his portrayal of the backwaters of India and as a reader do we owe the writer an open mind that doesnt shy away from harsh realities?

Ripe for discussion...you bet! Whether you empathize or get disgusted by Balram's open greed and shocking ability to be completely selfish, it's definitely worth a read.

*Not a democratically agreed upon truncation of the official name...but heck, as the editor, I got some mad "pull" as they'd say in India. Hells bells yeah!