100 books to Read before you die !!

Recently I came across a list, containing books that are quintessential read before you call it quits. Though I don't agree with it- this is till where I have reached- books on the list read till date-35

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen Love it read it memorised it X
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien - saw the movie does that count?
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte- got through the first chapter, will get to the rest
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling X these are 7 books not 1!!!
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee X
6 The Bible - Not planning to read…
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk X
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell X
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams X
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy -X
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens X
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen X
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini [x]
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne – There’s a book about Winnie the Pooh? Seriously, who wrote this?
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown [x]
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding X
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel- Planning to read it!
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen X
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens X
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck X
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas X
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding – Some one stole my copy before I could read it!!
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie X
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker X
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom – Seriously? This is on the list???
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery [x]
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas X
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

East of Eden: A reflection

I am on a mission to rediscover classics, books I should have read in my adolescence but couldn’t. The next in the series was John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. This one richly deserves its place amongst the classics. After reading it I know why. I realized what separates good from great, and drama from a saga. It is a richly woven and brilliantly nuanced tapestry of human follies, serendipity of emotions and painstakingly etched characters. The story-profound in its detail is spanned across 3 generations of two families whose intertwined kismets commit them to repeating a vicious cycle of karma. The pervasive theme seems to be a quest for redemption and the thought of inescapability of fate from father to son, brother to brother. And yet steinbeck keeps reminding us 'Thou Mayest'- its always our choice.

Steinbeck seems to operate in an enclosure of alternate reality amidst the mundane everyday. His story is not fantasy but is fantastical, the people he creates are haunting and haunted. The characters seem to dwell in textures and colours of their own creation, from the unabashed blackness of Cathy to the various shades of gray of everybody else’s. In this book very clearly- the characters are the heroes.
They are bound by their pasts and doomed to their destinies but always with a small window of opportunity of only they are brave enough to take it . His characters all seem to be seeking some form of parental validation. The story is about two families the Hamiltons and the Trasks who by routes of their own device settle in Salinas Valley, California and from thereon, through bad times and good, dry season and the wet their lives unfolds. The most moving and complex for me is Cal and his relationships, those with people around him and with himself. He has self doubts and even self loathing he is determined to be not like his mother but thinks it is inevitable. His progress in the book, his betrayal of his brother and subsequent forgiveness by his father is breath taking, his character is always kept on the precipice of darkness but always capable of better. The book’s misogynistic undertones are subtle but nonetheless present and pervasive-women are either out rightly evil, weak, simple or just fickle.
Steinbeck said he put in this book all he had. And I think what he has is a masterpiece for the ages.

A little soul searching

I don’t understand those who say unhappiness stimulates their creative impulses, I cant comprehend how morbidity and despair could have artistic fervour as their by products. For me if that darkness ever strikes, its absolute. Black and brooding like a merciless killer, akin to the infinite trap of a black hole nothing escapes, not even things that were as essential as life its self. The being dies, and a joyless other-being takes its place, who is not even liked by himself, thus, the endless cycle of self loathing, self re-crimination begins. and you deny yourself something that made you-you, you abstain from one thing that fed energy to your soul and nourished your mind. It has happened enough times for me to understand it. But self knowledge is not proof.