Bookends

Bookends has moved

Posted by sadmin at 
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! Share this post: email it! | del.icio.us! | digg it! | newsVine!

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Moving

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
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. Share this post: email it! | del.icio.us! | digg it! | newsVine...

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Thursday afternoon books quiz - 19

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
... 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...

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

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
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...

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Friday evening honour roll - 18

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
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...

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Thursday afternoon books quiz - 18

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
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...

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The history of that F word

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
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...

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Reasons to dislike Jaswant Singh's "Jinnah"

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
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...

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Friday evening honour roll - 17

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
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...

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Thursday afternoon books quiz - 17

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
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...

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

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
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...

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Friday evening honour roll - 16

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
Two people made it to our honour roll this week, and G. Sreekanth missed out on just the last question. 1. A. Oliver Twist , by Charles Dickens 2. A. Shakuntalam , by Kalidasa 3. A. Hamlet . This is Ophelia drowning herself, as depicted in a painting by John Everett Millais 4. A. Rubaiyat , by Omar Khayyam On our honour roll this week, we have: 1. Akshat...

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Thursday afternoon books quiz - 16

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
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. 1. 2. 3. 4. As always, email your answers in to samanth.s@livemint.com or leave them in the comments...

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

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
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...

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Friday evening honour roll - 15

Posted by Samanth Subramanian at 
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...

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