Bookends

Bookends has moved

2009-09-30T05:54:00Z

Bookends along with all of Livemint's blogs, has moved to a new Wordpress platform. So visit http://blog.livemint.com/bookends for more book related news, off the cuff links and the weekly Thursday books quiz. Also update your RSS feeds and tell all your friends!

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Moving

2009-09-14T08:57:00Z

As I'd mentioned in my last post, Bookends has moved to a spanking new location: http://blog.livemint.com/boookends. Please do visit -- two new posts today, including on the first review of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol -- and bookmark the new URL. All future posts will be put up there.

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Thursday afternoon books quiz - 19

2009-09-10T11:16:00Z

... is actually available here.

This is a new WordPress platform that Mint will be gradually adopting for its blogs, over the next few days. It should be a lot more flexible as far as what we're posting, and most importantly, it is a lot more orange. So please, ladies and gents, head over to the new Bookends and send in your answers to this week's quiz.

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Off-the-cuff links: What's in the next Dan Brown book?

2009-09-07T08:16:00Z

New York magazine goes at least part of the distance towards answering that question, in a very entertaining interview with Dan Burstein, editor of Secrets of The Widow’s Son, a book that tries to figure out what Brown's The Lost Symbol is about. Go read. I particularly loved this exchange:

"Q. Why did it take him so long to write this one?

"I’ve met Dan Brown once, and it’s presumptuous to say I understand him, but I think there’s a set of personal issues. He always wanted to be a writer. If you go back to his days at Amherst—he was in a creative-writing class with David Foster Wallace. Imagine you’re sitting there with this incredible intellect and trying to figure out how you can become a writer. And what he discovers is that he has a real gift for potboilers. And then suddenly you have four books on the best-seller list, and people are suing you for plagiarism when you haven’t plagiarized anything. It only took six years. It’s not like he’s Thomas Pynchon."

More here.

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Friday evening honour roll - 18

2009-09-04T11:58:00Z

An absolute deluge of attempts on this quiz -- thank you all for your replies. Akshat Kumar, Anandhi Ramesh, Amrita, Siddharth Raman, and Anil Kothuri just missed getting a perfect seven. Here are the answers:

1. @rbutl Wht do u mean u dnt giv a damn? Hell! Shd just hav stuck with @AshleyW

A. Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With The Wind. (The reference being to her two lovers, Rhett Butler and Ashley Wilkes)

2. Enormous amt of attitude from the manservant re. new mauve spats. Wht do u guys do 2 keep em in their place? Suggstns welcum.

A. Bertie Wooster, who always got a modicum of tough love from Jeeves when he attempted to get too adventurous in his sartorial habits.

3. Pic of my former workplace: http://bit.ly/l5cbC

A. Quasimodo -- the building being Paris' Notre Dame Cathedral, and so the book being The Hunchback of Notre Dame

4. Playing arnd w. the new 9000 computer before liftoff. Wht a cool gadget! @Chandra best thing uve eva made!

A. Either Dave Bowman or Frank Poole from 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Reference to Dr. Chandrasegarampillai and his computer HAL 9000)

5. Google Maps dsn’t recognise “second to the right, and straight on till morning” @TBell some help pls?

A. Either Peter Pan or Wendy, trying to find Neverland in Peter Pan

6. Epic win! Totally pwned the riddle posed by her: http://bit.ly/eec2r

A. Oedipus, who famously answered the Riddle of the Sphinx

7. RT @Bhima: Ashwathama is dead... man or elephant?

A.. Yudhishtira -- who "re-tweeted" Bhima's statement after killing an elephant named Ashwathama -- and then, because he could not tell a lie, whispered "whether man or elephant I do not know" under his breath. Of course, Ashwathama's father Drona did not hear the sotto voce and so lost all further will to fight -- which was exactly the Pandava plan.

And the honour roll entrants this week:

1. Roopa Machaiah
2. Abhilash Narayanan
3. Aparna Sriram
4. Ramesh Srivats
5. Divya Anand
6. Rithwik
7. Mekhala

Congratulations, all!

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Thursday afternoon books quiz - 18

2009-09-03T08:52:00Z

Here's a horrific thought: What if many of our favourite literary characters tweeted? Given the (entirely made up, by me, right now) Twitter post, give me the fictional character who might have tweeted it:

1. @rbutl Wht do u mean u dnt giv a damn? Hell! Shd just hav stuck with @AshleyW

2. Enormous amt of attitude from the manservant re. new mauve spats. Wht do u guys do 2 keep em in their place? Suggstns welcum.

3. Pic of my former workplace: http://bit.ly/l5cbC

4. Playing arnd w. the new 9000 computer before liftoff. Wht a cool gadget! @Chandra best thing uve eva made!

5. Google Maps dsn’t recognise “second to the right, and straight on till morning” @TBell some help pls?

6. Epic win! Totally pwned the riddle posed by her: http://bit.ly/eec2r

7. RT @Bhima: Ashwathama is dead... man or elephant?

As always, send in your answers to samanth.s@livemint.com, or leave them right here in the comments. Honour roll, people, honour roll!

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The history of that F word

2009-09-02T08:54:00Z

No, not "firetruck."

A new book, The F-Word by Jesse Sheidlower, promises to forever change the way we look at our swearing. Sheidlower, an editor-at-large for the Oxford English Dictionary, apparently "combed vast numbers of books, magazines, films, and other works for references to the most beloved, least printable word in the English language and all its variations." These variations are often more interesting than the word itself. For instance:

1. "MILF" -- which finds a place in this book, and which I first remember as being popularised by that deep psychological epic American Pie, in which it refers to our hero Stifler's maternal parent.

2. "Windf***er" or "f***wind" -- both of which were apparently names for hawks from the 1600s. Colourful chaps, those 17th-century ornithologists!

3. "A Dutch F***" -- which is not the carnal practice of the residents of the Netherlands -- well, maybe that too -- but is in fact the practice of lighting an unlit cigarette with a lit one. Remember this one, in case you ever run into somebody attractive in Amsterdam; you can ask for one, and when hauled up in court, protest that you were only asking for your cigarette to be lit.

4. "F***friend" -- which I had not run into, but which I assume is the same as a "F***buddy."

5. "Hotter than a fresh-f***ed fox in a forest fire" -- which apparently means "pretty damn hot," and which apparently evolves into "Hotter than a fresh-f***ed female French fox in a fuel-fed forest fire." Now, the alliteration is all very nice, but I'll need to read the book to figure out some basic doubts: Why a fox? Why a forest fire? Of such mysteries is life made.

6. "Sofa king" -- which is what Wiktionary calls "an intensifier." Use it in a sentence? "How tired are you? I'm sofa king tired." (Try saying that out loud.)

What the f*** are you waiting for? Buy the f***ing book!

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Reasons to dislike Jaswant Singh's "Jinnah"

2009-08-28T04:09:00Z

Forget the fracas. There are plenty of other reasons to dislike Jaswant Singh's Jinnah, which bears a curious and completely inexplicable triple-barrelled subtitle: "India - Partition - Independence." Here are a few; you may choose from these, or read the book and choose from many more.

1. The most misleading blurb in history: On the back of the book (Rupa, Rs600 or thereabouts, very heavy), we have this blurb: "Jinnah is an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity," by Gopal Krishna Gokhale. Now, granted that this was Singh's thesis, and so he had to choose a quote that buttressed his argument. But could he not find somebody who had not died in 1915, a full 32 years before Independence, and long, long before Jinnah (wilfully or reluctantly) called for a separate Muslim state? Also, did Gokhale really capitalise the "u" in "unity"? Was he, in other words, an editor at Rupa? Which brings me to my second point...

2. Punctuation: Oh the horror! Rupa is not usually known for its pristine punctuation, and we have learned to forgive it in most Rupa publications. But surely somebody at Rupa must have known that this would be an important book and widely read? (The author's name is a dead giveaway, I thought.) Surely Rupa could have considered outsourcing the editing of its text to somebody with a solid knowledge of punctuation, like say a student fresh out of a decent middle school? Here are some examples, picked at random:

Pg. 105: "The war had caused frustration, also ambivalence even among the Muslims in India."

This isn't a complex sentence, but it has been so terribly parsed that I had to read it three times to fully understand it. Here is another instance of commas being sprayed onto the text as randomly as droplets of milk from a baby's mouth. Pg. 116: "There then, occurred a major crisis, in the Malabar."

Jinnah does not fare too much better with quotation marks; often there will be a closing quotation mark, and I will wonder where the quote opened, and track it back, and there won't be any opening quote at all. There are awfully worded sentences, where subject and object and tense and verb clash in heated disagreement: "The Lucknow Pact of 1916 is a striking example of what could be achieved by men of resolve and goodwill and yet in the final round still failed to deliver." Parentheses are thrown about like confetti, the phrases contained within them having no right to be there.

3. "Attitudenising": Apparently this ugly, ugly word is legitimate now -- but I don't have to like it. On Pg. 224: "Paradoxically, the Congress achieved the very reverse of this, all such attitudenising gave the Muslim League a new lease of life and set in motion a process that culminated eventually in the partition of India."

4. Massacring history: Well, massacring the art of writing history, at any rate. Jinnah was the first history book I'd read in a long time that took me back immediately to my school textbooks. It is dry and boring. It is essentially a cobbling together of secondary sources, binding them into Singh's theories. Through its narration, it strips an exciting time of all its colour, reducing it to a plodding sequence of facts. Within its chapters, it organises itself on principles of extreme incoherence. Worst of all, it arrogantly assumes that history consists simply of the power-plays made between various political factions; there is little concrete reference to the political sentiments of the Indian millions.

I understand that it must be difficult to write a complex book while you are at the same time storming the well of the House or fighting elections or plotting intra-party strategy. For Jinnah, in fact, I fully blame Rupa, which allowed a half-baked, poorly edited book to go to press.

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Friday evening honour roll - 17

2009-08-21T10:34:00Z

A thickly populated honour roll today, with a number of people also cracking the theme. Divya Anand mistook Roald Dahl for Kerouac; Prasanna Walimbe mistook him for Lewis Carroll. A couple of others got two out of four answers right.

1. Which famous literary character was probably as crazed as his name suggests because of the fumes from the mercury that he used in his millinery trade?

A. The Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland

2. Name this author:

A. Roald Dahl

3. The ____ Fist, shown below, was used by a certain gentleman in 1970 during his campaign to be sheriff of a town named Aspen, in Colorado. The blank is an adjective that is very often associated with this gentleman; one of the possible etymologies of this word is the Italian root for a gullible person, a "sucker." Who is he, or what is the word?

A. Gonzo; the author is Hunter S. Thompson

4. Which author, when asked about his theatrical productions, wittily said: "Some of my plays peter out and some pan out"?

A. J. M. Barrie

This rainy evening's honour roll:

1. G. Sreekanth
2. Rithwik
3. Abhilash
4. Meera Krishnaswamy
5. Anil Kothuri
6. Roopa Machaiah (who couldn't put the pieces together for the theme)
7. Akshat Kumar

The theme here is Johnny Depp. Depp plays the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton's upcoming movie, and has played Roald Dahl's Willy Wonka, the Thompson character in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Barrie in Finding Neverland.

Congratulations, all, and welcome to some first-timers!

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Thursday afternoon books quiz - 17

2009-08-20T09:01:00Z

Welcome back to your spot of Thursday afternoon distraction. This week, a theme: All four of the answers below connect up to a larger answer. So give me the individual answers as well as the larger theme.

1. Which famous literary character was probably as crazed as his name suggests because of the fumes from the mercury that he used in his millinery trade?

2. Name this author:

4. Which author, when asked about his theatrical productions, wittily said: "Some of my plays peter out and some pan out"?

As always, send in your answers to samanth.s@livemint.com or leave them right here in the comments. The honour roll goes up at 5 pm tomorrow!

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"The Godfather," alive and kicking in Indian lending libraries

2009-08-19T07:11:00Z

In a recent column, Nilanjana S. Roy (always a pleasure to read) raises an interesting question: Why is Mario Puzo's The Godfather still widely read in India? She doesn't really go on to answer that specific question, though. Apart from wryly noting that the Corleones, in being "the classic large, warm and utterly dysfunctional family," could very easily be the Capoors, she otherwise only explains how The Godfather is enjoyable reading -- not specifically how it is enjoyable for us in India.

But along the way, she makes a very valid point about how many of us are still reading authors like James Michener, Harold Robbins and Puzo, pulp kings of the 1960s that have somehow endured in India. She could add to that list James Hadley Chase, the covers of whose books always promised untold delights when I came upon them in my dusty neighbourhood lending library. The lending library could, in fact, be a key reason for this phenomenon. I'd like to put forth my humble theory that such lending libraries, having acquired a critical mass of books that they know are enjoyable, would stop further new acquisitions unless absolutely necessary -- unless people demand John Grisham so much that it would be foolish not to stock up some of his works.

This could also be why, for example, these libraries still showcase their Archie comics right at the entrance, and still fill their children's lit. shelves with Hardy Boys and Enid Blyton. When I last visited my neighbourhood library in Chennai, a year or so ago, the only new entrant into that shelf was J. K. Rowling; there was no Philip Pullman, no Terry Pratchett, and no Stephanie Meyer. (Yet.)

The lending libraries were, in a way, the free market's response to the state-owned libraries, which were bureaucratically run, which chose their books lazily and unwisely, and which were often just large reading rooms with a scattering of shelves, inconveniently far from where you lived. The lending libraries, on the other hand, were located in little cubby holes that nevertheless managed to accommodate a surprising number of books; when I lived in Vasant Kunj in New Delhi, I remember, one library squeezed itself into a tiny space that the DDA had envisioned for storage of bicycles and other slender material.

Few bookstores, at that time, stocked as many "good" books as we would have liked. (That situation continues even today in New Delhi.) So often the only way to read something worthwhile was in fact to go to these lending libraries and hope that some unknown benefactor had left behind her copy of Swallows & Amazons or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. For students in particular, the lending library was a godsend; we couldn't afford to buy books first-hand, our school libraries were very often a thinly disguised joke, and the city's second-hand book market was not easy to frequent on a weekly basis. The asthma from the libraries' dust was a small price to pay.

There are now interesting, asthma-less versions of the neighbourhood lending library online; check out, for instance, Bookmeabook.com. Some inexpensive book sellers have closed: I'm thinking of Moore Market in Chennai, Bangalore's Premiere Bookshop, and apparently also New Delhi's Sunday market at Daryaganj. There are more bookstores than ever before, offering books at reasonable prices, but they are also employing more morons than ever before when it comes to choosing the books to stock and helping customers to buy. (At the unbelievably boring Saket branch of a nationwide, yellowish, cruciverbally named bookstore chain, one shelf of books is actually labelled "FICITION." I am not making this up.) The more things change, the more the remain the same.

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Friday evening honour roll - 16

2009-08-14T10:21:00Z

Two people made it to our honour roll this week, and G. Sreekanth missed out on just the last question.

A. Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens

A. Shakuntalam, by Kalidasa

A. Hamlet. This is Ophelia drowning herself, as depicted in a painting by John Everett Millais

A. Rubaiyat, by Omar Khayyam

On our honour roll this week, we have:

1. Akshat Kumar
2. Sourav Roy

Congratulations, all! Have a happy Independence Day, and see you next week.

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Thursday afternoon books quiz - 16

2009-08-13T11:32:00Z

The quiz goes up a little belatedly today, but we have a uniquely themed quiz in store for you. Below are a series of paintings depicting various scenes / characters / themes in works of literature. So given the painting, just give me the name of the book.

As always, email your answers in to samanth.s@livemint.com or leave them in the comments below. Good luck!

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Off-the-cuff links: Swine flu, and the nature of "epidemics"

2009-08-11T09:53:00Z

The article isn't, unfortunately, all available online, but if you can track it down, it's worth reading. Jill Lepore, in the New Yorker, writes about an epidemic of "parrot flu," how it spread in 1929-30, and how the media's reporting of it had much to do with its spread. It reminded me a lot of the current swine flu situation in India; while it is terrible that the disease has finally struck down some victims here, the television channels seem to be equating it with the ferocity of the bubonic plague.

Lepore mentions Paul de Kruif, "a master of the 'epidemic exposé,' the hair-raising account of a disease that threatens to destroy the human race." De Kruif wrote a book called Microbe Hunters, a hugely successful book of pop science (the emphasis being on "pop"). It might be a good time to pick up that book and flip through it, but meanwhile, here's a very good essay on de Kruif, his life and work.

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Friday evening honour roll - 15

2009-08-07T13:20:00Z

A sparse honour roll this week, with only two people getting all five answers correct. Oddly enough, Midnight's Children seem to give some people trouble; the blanked-out words, of course, correspond to the title of the book.

1. "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

A: The Great Gatsby

2. "Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would fnish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth."

A: One Hundred Years of Solitude

3. " Yes, they will trample me underfoot, the numbers marching one two three, four hundred million fve hundred six, reducing me to specks of voiceless dust, just as, in all good time, they will trample my son who is not my son, and his son who will
not be his, and his who will not be his, until the thousand and first generation, until a thousand and one midnights have bestowed their terrible gifts and a thousand and one children have died, because it is the privilege and the curse of ________ ________ to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace."

A: Midnight's Children

4. "But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing."

A: The House on Pooh Corner -- although I accepted all variants on Winnie the Pooh

5. "The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off."

A: Catch-22

Congratulations, honour rollers:

1. Divya Anand

2. Abhilash

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