A Cup of Tea & Biscuits

"It feels like I'm experiencing someone else's dream. Like we're simultaneously sharing feelings. But I can't really grasp what it means to be simultaneous. Our feelings seem extremely close, but in reality there's a considerable gap between us." - Aomame Had I known, before I borrowed the book, that 1Q84 was approximately 920 pages, I might not have read it. I would have, in all honesty, picked up the Lord of the Rings again in preparation for The Hobbit. But I had already checked it out and I obviously could not put it away. [ Writing out a quick summary of this novel is going to be quite a task for me because there are so many details in it that I would love to include. I must, however, try and keep it short, so I will simply restrict myself to sharing my thoughts and opinions of the book ]. The plot of the novel is quite large though it essentially boils down to a love story that persists through 20 years of time and finds closure in the alternate real...

My mind, the part of it that appreciates a good book, was rather wary and numb of mainstream portrayal of vampires and their kin. It's too much glitter and falling into arms of an immortal one who will protect the helpless heroine for all eternity going on there. It may be what makes them read by all and produce a senseless fan gathering, but it has not allowed imagination grow. Therein lay my mindset when I picked up Vampire Empire by Clay and Susan Griffith. The blurb on the back of   book set my expectations - as simple as it seemed. I was so pleasantly taken in, hooked and surprised. This trilogy, titled Vampire Empire , written by Clay and Susan Griffith , begins with the premise that the Great Killing of 1870 pitted the entire world into a horrifying war. A plague, if you will, of vampires. Millions of humans died at the hands of the parasites while the aftermath ensured the death of more. Empires were brought down and humanity driven to the edge of despair. Vampires settled ...

It occurred to me that I have been ignoring this blog for way too long even though I have been reading constantly. I must admit that I have fallen back on my schedule - 10 books behind last week now reduced to just 5 books - but I've been working my way through it. I have made remarkable progress in my attempts to include American authors, straying away from my comfort zone of British writers. Ray Bradbury and F. Scott Fitzgerald being the two I finally crossed off my list. While I loved their writing and found salient features in both, Farenheit 451 and The Great Gatsby ,  James M. Cain 's  Mildred Pierce , the most recent book that I've put back on the shelf, has brought me back to this blog. Why? Because I read through this unputdownable book with a grimace. Mildred Pierce is a middle-class housewife of a cheating husband, Bert, and mother to precocious and arrogant Veda and unassuming Ray. Set during the Great Depression, and at a time when Mildred finall...

Heavy metal, or simply metal, is a misunderstood genre. While there is very little of mainstream music I admire or even listen to, metal has been a good friend through my teenage years and has followed me into adulthood.  There is an element of metal music that hits home. It's not just the loudness and the bass and distortions. There is feeling in it, the lyrics are more intense, the music conveys a far deeper meaning. It's not noise. It's larger than that. I'm an 80's child that grew up in the 90's so I know what pop music is supposed to be and I've enjoyed my share of boy bands and solo artists. But most of the artists I like and songs I bobbed to were before my time. They were from the 70's and 80's. I couldn't enjoy a lot of the late 90's music because of the importance given to performance than actual singing or music. It became more about the 'oompf' factor. Metal, on the other hand, goes for the subtle bang. Yes, most to all me...

I love my books and I like good adaptations of them as movies, plays, musicals, television series, etc. So, when my Deutschlehrerin casually told me that she was going to watch Pride & Prejudice I went, literally, berserk. How could I have not known about it?! A little theater company called the  Lifeline Theatre  was putting up a two month production of  Pride & Prejudice  - the third in its history. Naturally, I didn't care where it was (just a half-hour ride on the CTA Red Line, so that was good) or how much the tickets cost (a reasonably priced ticket actually), I looked for a weekend when I would be able to attend, not even bothering to consult the guests I was supposed to be hosting last evening, and got my tickets. I was excited, but a bit subdued. No use getting my hopes up only to be disappointed, I told myself. This is, after all, my most beloved book ever. Nothing else that I have read in the thirteen years since has compared to Miss Austen's writi...

This is not exactly a review - because I don't know the language well enough to write a German review, but I will, in due time. Reviewing the Harry Potter books would take its toll on me because of the details in it - the same goes for the Lord of the Rings. Maybe if I'd  reviewed them as I read them it would've made it easier but... Anyway. Harry Potter in Deutsch . I'm re-learning the language - signed up for the A1 level once again because I haven't retained what I learned three years ago. I can understand random words and simple sentences and make wild guesses at what the more complex sentences convey, but I would like to know the grammar, the structure and the foundation of the language so that I may indulge in German literature. These being my baby steps towards reading Goethe's Faust in German. I thought I'd start with something simple. Fairy tales, not so much, so I picked up a book that I know very well - Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen - wh...

If I recall rightly, one of Guy de Maupassant 's short stories, I forget which, that led me  W. Somerset Maugham 's writing, his short stories in particular - Footprints in the Jungle, Rain and several others that appeared in his collective works. I never went back to reading either of their novels until now. I've known the story of The Painted Veil for a long time, having read excerpts of it here and there and watched the trailer to the movie adaptation starring Edward Norton (sigh) and Naomi Watts , and finally bought the book just last week on a whim - I haven't yet watched the movie. It is the story of a young, silly girl named Kitty who marries Walter Fane, a bacteriologist working in Hong-Kong, soon after her younger sister announces her engagement to a man with a title. While in Hong-Kong, Kitty has an affair with assistant colonial secretary Charles Townsend, a selfish man who believes Walter would rather forgive his wife and continue to live in assumed igno...

I will never get bored of claiming that, to me, one of the greatest love stories ever written is Pride & Prejudice. So far every companion novel, and the so called prequels and sequels, I've read, all recount the love story from different perspectives, hence, I was rather curious to see what a mystery novelist would make of it! Death Comes to Pemberley  written by  P. D. James , author of the Adam Dalgliesh  mysteries, was published in 2011 - I mention this because her first novel Cover Her Face  came out in 1962 and she, the author - Phyllis Dorothy James, Baroness James of Holland Park, is 91 years of age! Why is this significant to me? Personally, she is the oldest living author that I've read. Anyway, the book. The book is about the murder of Captain Denny, whom we know to be George Wickham's comrade-in-arms and, quite possibly, only male friend. Set primarily in Pemberley and the surrounding woods, the story begins with a recap of the events in Pride & P...

I don't normally read things off the 'best-seller's' list. If I do, then it's either by recommendation or I'm so completely bored with everything else that I need to indulge myself in the commercial world of writing. But I'm still uncertain as to what possessed me to pick up Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James . My excuse, which is the whole honest truth, is that I saw it on Amazon's 'Top 10 List', didn't read the reviews, barely skimmed through the book cover summary before I read it. So, in all honesty, I didn't know what I was in for. Quite like the female protagonist, Anastasia Steele, a twenty-one year old soon-to-be college graduate who stumbles into the office of a mega-rich modern day Adonis named Christian Grey. She is instantly attracted to him, what with all his to-die for looks and secret-hiding smiles. She doesn't know it, but he becomes just as, or much more, smitten by her. Quite soon he makes an 'indecent proposal...

I have a habit of stumbling upon the nicest of songs/artist while on Pandora! My latest trip was over a German metal band called  Agathodaimon , sub-genred in gothic and black metal. I heard them on an instrumental metal radio channel on Pandora and am now very please that I did! I expected them to be an instrumental metal band, but was pleasantly surprised to their songs hovering between gothic and black metal (I'm not big on black metal), with harsh and soothing vocals. Yesterday's Reprise  from  Chapter III  (the instrumental song) Alone In The Dark  from  Phoenix To Our Ashes  from  Phoenix  (one of my favorites)

I haven't read too many American historical novels, only because there are so many more European historical novels that took up most of my time and not because I'm geographically biased or anything :) A colleague, who mostly reads crime, mystery and thrillers, recommended this book telling me that she never expected to like it, but did. I must say I concur with her opinion. I didn't expect to like it, but I did. Water for Elephants , written by Sara Gruen , is written in the first person by Jacob Jankowski, a ninety or ninety-three year old resident of a nursing home. The story drifts between the ninety or ninety three year old and the twenty three year old. Jacob, a veterinary student at Cornell, loses his parents in a car accident just before his final exams. Shocked and taken over by this intense loss, which also costs him his family house and his father's practice, Jacob wanders about and in a moment of, what I term, insanity, climbs aboard a train hoping to get bac...