Category Archives: Classics

Joining the Classics Club

Today, I have decided to join The Classics Club – a club of book bloggers that focus their reading on the classics.

The rules are simple – commit to reading 50 classics within 5 years. And these days, with the advent of vampire lit, I find that I prefer to read classic books that give me a lot more to think about than simply wondering when the movie version of the book is going to come out, and which new hunk is going to star in it, and become the next worldwide heart throb.

So, classics it is, and I have also created a list of the books I plan to read within the next 5 years here. I hope some of you would like to join me on this ride . If so, please leave a comment, I would love to hear from you about the books you are planning to read.

Those who are not so interested in the classics, no worries. I still plan to work in my regular reading in between. It makes a pleasant change to work in a few bestsellers, YA, fantasy, thrillers, and yes vampires because we all need some sparkle in our lives, right

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Teaser Tuesdays – Hard Times

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Hard Times by Charles Dickens

Here’s another teaser from Hard Times by Charles Dickens. Really this book is full of awesome quotes. No wonder, it is a classic.

I wish,’ whimpered Mrs Gradgrind, taking a chair, and discharging her strongest point before succumbing under these mere shadows of facts, ‘yes, I really do wish that I had never had a family, and then you would have known what it was to do without me!’

- Hard Times by Charles Dickens

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Hard Times – A Book Review

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Hard Times by Charles Dickens

Hard Times is primarily the story of the conflict between fact and fancy. Thomas Gradgrind is a schoolmaster living in the grim town of Coketown. He is firm on the idea that what should be taught in the home and the schoolroom is facts, nothing but facts. Fancy of any kind is to be discouraged in the strongest possible terms, and it is with this philosophy that he runs his school and raises his children.

It is only as the years go by and his muddled children – Louisa and Thomas make a mess of their lives that he realizes the consequences of their upbringing.

Hard Times is also the story of how industrialization has made Coketown a grim place to live and it highlights the differences between the haves and the have-nots, and the increasing distrust between the two classes of people. It also chronicles the rise of unionism – probably one of the earliest fictional books I have read that covers these issues.

My Review: This is probably the most “modern” Dickens novel I have read. It is much shorter than most of his books and extremely bleak. Unlike his other books that are peppered with numerous characters and that sometimes overdose on the sentimentality, this book is very bleak and very focused. There are only a handful of characters but they are drawn well. The plot is predictable, but it is paced very well. And his writing, as usual, is first class.

The book starts extremely slowly taking the time to set the scene, but once that is done, Dickens moves his story very fast. I ended up reading the second half of the book in a single setting. Anyone who has read Dickens will realize this is a pretty remarkable state of affairs . In fact, I wouldn’t have minded too much if the book had gone on a bit longer even.

For some reason this book is not a favorite of most reviewers, but I liked it a lot. I”ll even go so far as to say that Hard Times has now replaced Bleak House as my favorite Dickens and I highly recommend it for anyone looking for an easy start to Dickens’ work.

Teaser Tuesdays – Hard Times

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Hard Times by Charles Dickens

If he had only learnt a little less, how infinitely better he might have taught much more!

- Hard Times by Charles Dickens

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

The Ugly Duckling – An iPad Book App Review

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I loved the story of The Ugly Duckling when I was a kid. It was the perfect reassuring story for oddballs like me who always felt like they didn’t fit in with the crowd.

And now, I am so thrilled to share this story with my daughter and watch her also enjoying this sweet little story in a dynamic 2.0 version – the iPad app.

The Ugly Duckling iPad Book App by Publisto

Now, I have blogged before about how reluctant children could be coaxed into reading books using the iPad here and here. And I am so pleased to know that more publishers are joining the bandwagon with quality book apps.

After loading this app from iTunes (price $4.99), the snubnose and I settled down to read. The basic story from Hans Christian Andersen is charming anyway, and this app retains all the charm and warmth of the original story. The voiceover (can be turned off if required) is the best. I loved the clarity and the sweetness of the voice. The music and sound effects are also of high-quality. If you don’t want the voice, it’s also possible to record our own voice.

The graphics are also charming, not too bright, not too modern looking. They give the effect of the book within the iPad.

Sweet Imagery

I also love how with these apps, the text becomes bold as the voiceover speaks the words aloud. Such a small feature, but makes it easier for smaller readers to follow along without me having to touch the iPad screen.

Apart from the sweet and well-written story, the app also offers some fun add-on stuff to do. There are jigsaw puzzles to do, pictures to color in, dot-to-dot puzzles, matching puzzles using your memory, and even (my favorite) postcards that can be emailed/tweeted/facebooked. How cool is that?

Here are a few images showing what’s on offer…

Pictures to color in

Jigsaw puzzles to do

Beautiful e-postcards to write and send to friends

And so much more…

After going through the gamut of features, me and the snubnose were absolutely exhausted and happy. This is a truly worthwhile purchase and I highly recommend it for moms who struggle with getting their children to pay attention to regular books. For example, the snubnose has very fixed reading tastes – only Barbie, Princess Poppy, or such books for her. However, I see that when I showed her The Ugly Duckling book app, she quickly became engrossed in the story. Success!

Note: Publilsto provided me this book app for review. However, this is an honest and unbiased review. We truly loved every aspect of this book and think they have done a great job with this app. They seem to have other book apps in the pipeline too…The Swan Lake sounds pretty exciting and may excite older readers who have already read The Ugly Duckling.

The Canterbury Tales – A Book Review

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The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

Whew! I am finally back with a book review. I really didn’t expect to take such a long blogging and book break. But life’s been hectic and I have had a severe case of mommy brain –just haven’t been able to focus long enough on any one task without cocking up my ears to check if baby is crying or not…if baby is not crying, then quietly tip-toeing in and checking why baby is not crying…ending up waking up baby and baby crying…endless crazy lovely cycle.

But now, life has started to settle down a bit more. I am back at work, back reading, and hopefully back to blogging as well.

The first book I read this year has been The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. I don’t know what made me pick up this book because reading verse is really not my thing. And this book for the most part is entirely verse. Only a friend challenged me to it, and that coupled with my native stubbornness made me complete a book that was really a meh at best.

The Canterbury Tales is a series of short tales. A group of strangers are heading out to Canterbury on a pilgrimage. To enliven the journey, each one tells a story. As is the usual in such type of books, some stories are excellent, some are all right, and some are just downright terrible.

I don’t want to summarize the tales here as there are better summaries of the tales available on the web…for example, http://www.gradesaver.com/the-canterbury-tales/study-guide/short-summary/ has nice summaries on all the stories in the book.

It is enough to say that this book requires, really requires a lot of effort. The language in the book is Middle English and it takes some time to understand and process it. After struggling for some time with the printed book, I decided to use the awesome Audibly app for the iPad and listened to the story while I followed along with the book. This helped me focus on the language and the footnotes without trying to follow the rhyming and the pronunciation. Once I got used to the lingo, I soon found it pretty easy to read and appreciate and found that I even did not need the audio cues.

The actual stories vary greatly from each other in quality, length, and even values. Some of the tales are very bawdy, bordering on the vulgar, a couple of tales are chivalric, some are very devout, and then there are one or two that are absolutely senseless.

Surprisingly, I loved the bawdy tales. The characters and the situations in them are laugh out loud shameless and funny. Not so surprisingly, I disliked the religious and the chivalric tales.

What is amazing though is how often I realized that some of these tales were already familiar to me, having been modernized and adapted in different languages also! I just never knew that the source was probably the Canterbury Tales.

Overall, this was a book that I eventually liked. It was a tough one to get through however and definitely not for the casual reader. Even though I read a lot of English classics and was mentally prepared for some amount of verbosity, I was startled to find that some of the 30+ page stories could have been easily summarized within a page or two without losing anything.

A Moveable Feast – A Book Review

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A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

I have read a few Hemingway books and loved them, but never really thought much of him as a person (I tend to be a bit moralistic about serial marry-ers, daters, etc.), but I had such a pleasant surprise reading A Moveable Feast that I think I have to revisit my notions about him.

A Moveable Feast focusses on Hemingway and his first wife’s early married life in the 1920s when Hadley and Hemingway were in Paris as a newly married couple and moving among the members of the “Lost Generation” — people like Gertrude Stein, the Fitzgeralds, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, John Dos Pasos, and Picasso.

The book is a series of anecdotes about Hemingway’s encounters with all these luminous personalities and sometimes these encounters are flattering to them and sometimes not. What they are is very interesting. All these people are so vividly drawn that as a reader they almost come to life.

Just as interesting is the setting of the book – Paris is always a dream destination for me, and reading about all his haunts and his pastimes was such fun. If you are planning to visit Paris and if you love books, then you absolutely must take this book on your trip. If you don’t believe me, check out Chasing Bawa’s post. I would love to track down and visit some of his hangouts someday.

My copy of the book also had some lovely photos of him with his friends and family, and it really added to my pleasure in this book.

I was surprised by his tender and affectionate relationship with his wife Hadley (although it is not the focus of the book); he comes across as such a macho man that this side to his character came as a surprise. Towards the end though, I suspect there were some major edits about what really happened. He conveniently leaves out his entire trip to Pamplona in Spain (where he first starts an affair with his wife’s friend…eww), and his last few pages deal with the break up of his marriage too superficially, but I guess he is entitled to keep some amount of privacy for himself and Hadley. I did find his last words on his marriage very poignant:

When I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.

But then of course, this was a path he had chosen, so I didn’t really feel thaat sorry for him!

What this book has done is whetted my curiosity to know more about Hadley, and I am planning to do that by reading The Paris Wife by Paula McLain. Although it is not a biography but a retelling, I would love to hear the story from the wife’s point of view as well.

Have you read The Paris Wife? What did you think of it? It’s recently published and got quite a lot of attention in the blogosphere. Did reading it make you want to read A Moveable Feast?

Teaser Tuesdays – A Moveable Feast

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A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

- A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

The 30-Day Book Meme – Day 9 and 10 Book Meme Questions

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In today’s post, I am going to answer the next 2 questions of this book meme.

Day 09 – A book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving
Day 10 – Favourite classic book

I started reading Bleak House by Charles Dickens because I was in a bit of a reading funk. I was not enjoying the bestsellers of the day, and badly needed a change. I certainly didn’t expect to love it as much as I did. Reading Bleak House also rekindled my love of classics, and now, I regularly add a couple of classics into my reading list to shake things up a bit.

However, my favorite classics have to be those that I read as a child/teenager. I have blogged before about how much I enjoyed Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson as a child. To me, it’s the original pirate saga, and no book/movie will ever come close to recreating the combination of magic, madness, charm, and menace that was Lord John Silver. I still remember the creepy factor of the Yo,ho,ho and a bottle of rum ditty and the chills that the mention of The Black Spot gave me. Such a superb children’s classic! I must revisit it again.

I also enjoyed the gothic mysteries of Wilkie Collins – The Woman in White, and The Moonstone. Lovely reads! Who ever said classics are boring or for the old?

Lady Chatterley’s Lover – A Book Review

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Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence

This book is one of the most famous banned books and I have been long curious to know what all the fuss was about.

The story is pretty basic. Lord Chatterley returns from World War I paralyzed waist down. His new bride Lady Chatterley cares for him after his injury but slowly starts to feel stifled, and longs for something. She soon finds satisfaction in a brief affair with her husband’s friend. When that affair fizzles out, she has an affair with the gamekeeper who maintains Lord Chatterley’s woods. What happens next forms the bulk of the story…

My Review:

Never has a book started out so promising and ended so tamely. I absolutely loved, loved, loved the first 50-100 pages of this book. It was gripping, the psychological studies of the various people in the book were absolutely spot on, and the setting very vividly described. And then the affair starts between Lady Chatterley and Oliver Mellors. And things just went absolutely downhill from there.

It’s not that I am a prude that could not tolerate all the sex in the novel. But it was just sooo badly written. And no…I am not going to print some of the language and the words used here. Just let me say, it was most unromantic and almost bestial. I guess that was his intention anyway – to remove all the floweriness that is normally associated with love and show it as it is. All I can say is, it was not my cup of tea.

The dialogues were god-awful and had me cringing with embarrassment for the main pair. While I started off this book feeling very sympathetic to Lady Chatterley and her lover, their constant self-righteousness and lack of any kind of guilt whatsoever banished all that.

There are many reviews of this book that praise how D.H.Lawrence has captured the class distinctions that prevailed during that time. But to me, they all just seemed forced into the novel. It was like D.H.Lawrence was beating me over the head with his message. To a great extent, it’s great that the focus extends to the issues of the time (mainly class, and questions of industrialization vs agrarian culture), but it is done at the expense of developing strong characters.

Another conflict that is played out in the book very subtly is the conflict between the intellectual and the physical. Lord Chatterley is the intellectual. He is constantly thinking of stories to write, and means of improving the productivity of the coal mines that he owns. Lady Chatterley is least interested in these endeavors. She wants a child and a loving marriage – something that Lord Chatterley is unable to give her. He does not mind her having affairs although she must come back to him in the end and she must bear a child only from someone who is his social equal – rules that she promptly violates.

Lady Chatterley herself is a pretty unsatisfying character. She feels stifled by the confines of her setting. But the only outcome that she could devise for herself was love with someone else. Also, she comes across as very dumb and it was hard going reading her incoherent and impractical thoughts on a lot of the central issues of the day. Her lover and gamekeeper Oliver Mellors is also pretty annoying. He is totally against industrialization. He wants to go tell people to not work so hard and to enjoy their lives more…but does he offer any real solutions? No. It’s just random talk. And this pair despise the husband who is actually taking an interest in the coal mines and trying to find out if there is a way to increase profitability out of those dying mines.

Basically, I am trying to say I felt for Lord Chatterley the most. Sure, he is a product of his times – vain and snobbish, but he also seemed the most intelligent, and literate. There is one scene in the book which D.H.Lawrence has written in a way that is meant for us to hate him. This is a scene where his wheelchair gets stuck on a hill and he loses his temper very badly with his wife and the gamekeeper who are trying to help him. Me? I only felt sorry for him. It seemed a very natural reaction for a man to get angry because of his own helplessness.

And I guess, that’s where I have to end this review and say that I am probably still way too conventional for this novel. Sure, I enjoyed it. And I am glad that the ending is fairly satisfactory to all parties concerned. But, I would not call this feminist in any way. It’s good reading, but it’s probably a little dated. There are some valid arguments made, but a lot of it is very clumsily written and a little too heavy handed.

Still worth a read though and definitely a ground-breaking novel for the time!