Goodnight Moon

The little man is getting progressively harder to put to bed at night. The only way to calm him down is a series of complicated steps culminating in a bed time story. I've been reading "Goodnight Moon" for the past few nights. Yesterday, S picked up the story reading bit in high spirits and ended up doing a mini lecture demonstration on the ills of children's books.

So, shall we read this book, G? Let's see, "Goodnight Moon". 

"In the great green room, there was a telephone, a lamp and a red balloon.." 

Why is there a red balloon in this room?

"… and a picture of a cow jumping over the moon."

Huh?  Little G, cows never jump over the moon. Besides, what cow jumps like this? Feels like a long jumper trying to set a world record. Okay, whatever.

"…three bears sitting on chairs"

Why are three bears sitting like they're in timeout? Have you ever seen bears sit on chairs, G? 

Goodnight nobody?! Why does my son have to say good night to nothing? What is this book that your mom has got you? 

The upshot of his tirade was that by the time he was done, G was heavy lidded, half asleep. And I had a good laugh listening to his commentary. According to my dear husband, Goodnight Moon was written by a disgruntled parent who, upon seeing all the silly children's books on the market making millions, decided to write a silly one themselves. 

I confess I am not a big fan of Goodnight Moon either. But hey, it works with the little human and that's what really matters in the end. 

the one where I manage to laugh despite serious post-partum pain

RS lent me Dave Barry's "I'll mature when I am dead" a few days before my due date to while away time. Aside from P.G. Wodehouse, he is t.h.e funniest, wittiest author I've ever read.

Let me just make two points:

- An author who can make a woman laugh hysterically just 2 hours after a marathon 31 hour labor/delivery is worth his salt. If anyone had even merely suggested that I loosen up and take a humorous view of things that day, I would have punched them in the face. That is how exhausted and sore I was.
- An author who can make sleep-deprived, exhausted, new parents loosen up @ 3 AM in the morning (after dealing with baby's 2 hour crying jag) is really worth reading.

Hats off to Dave Barry! Not that he needs my endorsement or approval - he is a Pulitzer Prize winning author. S & I have developed a comfy routine where we read Dave Barry late at night or during the wee hours of the morning after putting the little one to sleep.

As an aside, I also read Chetan Bhagat's "Five Point Someone" alongside Dave Barry. And the contrast was glaring. Granted these are two authors writing different genres, Chetan Bhagat still seemed to fall terribly short in language, style and story-telling. "3 Idiots" seemed a better version of "Five point someone". I started on "2 states" but it seemed to drag on slowly. So for now, I've cracked open "Boogers Are My Beat" by Barry. I am laughing already...

Guilty pleasures..

Not sure if anyone out there is wondering why I've been absent from blogosphere for quite sometime. But if you are, then here's the answer:

It has been an early winter in Lexington. I've been huddling inside with good books and movies. Having exhausted good chick-lit reads quite some time back, I strolled into the library for something new. "Finger Lickin' Fifteen" seemed to be a rather interesting title. Plus the cover was a beautiful, bright orange and I needed something bright to offset the gloom of winter. I fell so in love with the book, I started backtracking to the first 14 books in the Stephanie Plum series by Evanovich!

This series will not win any prizes for literary excellence. Nor will it wring your heart with moving stories set in war-torn nations. It most definitely will not rock your world with beautiful prose or poetry. But if you are like me and love a feisty heroine who muddles through life as a bounty hunter bouncing from one humorous adventure to another, this is the book for you! I am on #6 of the series now and I still have 9 more to go. Perfect to cuddle up on the couch with on cold, wintry evenings. Yummmm.

Twenties Girl

I finished reading "Twenties Girl" by Sophie Kinsella last week. As is usual with Kinsella books, I wolfed it down giggling and laughing throughout. As I finished the book, I was reminded of another "twenties girl" in my life.

This time, during my India trip, I managed to find this picture of my paatti ensconced within the folds of an ancient album. My grandma showed this to me when I was about 7 during a summer visit. I can still remember the shine in her eyes, face agog with excitement wreathed in a wide grin as she recalled this triumphant moment from her youth. Her eldest brother had returned from South Africa with a novel "thing" that could take still pictures. She was one of the first people in Sivaramapuram to be photographed much to the envy of her neighbors. Most people had not seen or even heard of a camera in the 1920s!

So there she is, my grandma, when she was around 18 standing in the thaazhvaaram of her family home. Old age has gotten to her these days and she can't move about much. But she still happens to be one of the most colorful, feisty and cheerful people I know. When I showed her this picture, her face softened as she went back in time and I think for a few minutes, she became 18 years old again -- shy, expectant and ready to take on life. If you ask her, she'll say she never feels older than 18. Ever. I believe her.

The Secret Life of Bees

Okay, I have to admit -- it has been a very long time since I absolutely relished a book like this. I lingered over this book enjoying the author's writing style and the beautiful, vivid imagery she conjured up! A story about one girl's longing for her mother, it is about the strength of sisterhood, the ability to heal and move on in life.

Some of my favorite quotes --

“You know, Lily, people can start out one way, and by the time life gets through with them they end up completely different.”

This one made me laugh. I remember, when we were kids, people used to ask my brother and I this question all the time. I came up with cluelessly staid answers ("Doctor", "Engineer" etc..) while my brother would say something startling like "Motorbike" or "Race car".

“You think you want to know something, and then once you do, all you can think about is erasing it from your mind. From now on when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I planned to say Amnesiac.”

This one resonated with me.

“There is nothing perfect,” August said from the doorway. “There is only life.”

“For starters, everything was blue. Bedspread, curtains, rug, chair cushion, lamps. Don’t get the idea it was boring, though. She had ten different shades of it. Sky blue, lake blue, sailor blue, aqua blue -- you name a blue. I had the feeling of scuba diving through the ocean.”

“A breeze moved through the room from the open window. I walked to it and stared out at the dark fringe of trees by the edge of the woods, a half moon wedged like a gold coin into a slot, about to drop through the sky with a clink”

This one is so true that I found myself nodding in assent.

“People, in general, would rather die than forgive. It’s that hard. If God said in plain language, “I’m giving you a choice, forgive or die,”, a lot of people would go ahead and order their coffin.”

“The month of August had turned into a griddle where the days just lay there and sizzled.”

“There will be a few hundred bees doing laps around the hive boxes, just warming up, but mostly taking their bathroom break, as bees are so clean they will not soil the inside of their hives. From a distance it will look like a big painting you might see in a museum, but museums can’t capture the sound. Fifty feet away you will hear it, a humming that sounds like it came from another planet. At thirty feet your skin will start to vibrate. The hair will lift on your neck. Your head will say, Don’t go any farther, but your heart will send you straight into the hum, where you will be swallowed by it. You will stand there and think, I am in the center of the universe, where everything is sung to life.”

A new beginning...

My first post of the year is going to be just an assemblage (is that a word?) of random things in my head. I tried to go for an emotional and meaningful post but it backfired on me.

--I wanted to write a New year's eve post commemorating the fact that I had 44 posts last year compared to the 35 in 2007. It would have been nice to make it a round 50 but I am not complaining. I think I kept up a steady stream of posts in 2008 every month instead of the spasmodic pattern of 2007. Enough gloating.

--Have been on a reading spree lately. Managed to devour four books in the span of 1.5 weeks! Started reading the Stephanie Meyer "Twilight" series. I am sure series-lovers will want to crucify me for this but the first book -- "Twilight" -- really sucked. It felt like I was trapped between the pages of a very badly written Mills and Boon romance. Too touchy-feely for me. Stephanie Meyer redeemed herself with the second one, "New Moon". The third, "Eclipse",was positively engaging. I guess it gets better as it progresses. Two more books to go in this series.

I also struggled through "The Gatecrasher" by Madeline Wickham (alias Sophie Kinsella). Extremely meandering story with no concrete plot. Ugh. Didn't expect this from the creator of the "Shopaholic" series!

Finished the "The Lost Army of Cambyses" by Paul Sussman. Masala thriller story in the mould of Dan Brown (though not close enough). Worth reading on a flight or a train!

I am about to start on "A Thousand Splendid Suns" by Khaled Hosseini.

-- 2009 has started out very promisingly with lots of cleaning getting done @ home. We managed to buy things we had been putting off, clean things that were pending and re-organized our home. I finally managed to hang up some photographs on the walls. I even got a rolodex so we can be better organized about phone numbers/addresses. Yippeee to that!

-- Some people have this gaping dichotomy between what they want to be and what they are. They insist that they are just suffering a lack of will-power and they really, really "want" to do something. But no matter how much you help or how hard you try, their actions point in a different direction. Makes me wonder if people have no idea what they want or what is good for them. I've also realized that spending energy trying to alter the course of someone's behavior is EXHAUSTING! :-)

Okay, for this largely trivial post, I am going to write something a bit more deep. I have been thinking about this for a while and want to get it off my chest. There have been times when I wondered if it was just freakish chance that I was on this earth, that maybe there was no rhyme or rhythm to the universe, that there was no 'karma" guiding the paths of our lives. I had my first taste of intense grief last year and with that grief came a tiny glimmer of intense appreciation of human life. A realization of truly how magical life and a living being is. It is difficult to explain that feeling. I think everyone has to feel it to really know it.

Farewell 2008 and welcome 2009! Belated new year wishes to all! :-)

Young Men in Spats - Page 123

In response to IBH's book tag: "The tag is about the book that you are currently reading, turn to page 123, count till line 5 and write down the lines after that!"

"But listen..."
"Good night, Mr. Widgeon."

The aunts said good night, too, and so did the butler. The girl Dahlia preserved a revolted silence.

From " Young Men in Spats" -- P.G. Wodehouse

I was looking for Jeeves-Wooster stories at the public library. Couldn't find a single one, darn it! So I settled for "Young Men in Spats".

Snakes in Dreams...

I read "Queen of Dreams" by Chita Divakaruni Banerjee in the 10 days before my wedding. Originally, I'd borrowed it from a friend when he went to India. But somehow, it ended up sitting on my shelf for a year without me turning a single page of it. I think I had a pre-conceived notion that the book would put me to sleep (maybe because of the "Dreams" reference in the title..?) and never read it. So, this was my in-flight reading for the trip home for the wedding and if it put me to sleep on the flight, good for me! In between shopping trips, chatting with relatives and mad dashes to the tailor, I finished reading the book.

Honestly, I can't say I was very impressed. The plot was initially very intriguing and definitely seemed to go somewhere. Rakhee is a confused ABCD with a very strange mom. The mom sleeps apart from her daughter and husband. She takes to sudden bouts of illnesses and has strange people visit her. Rakhee stumbles across her mom's diary after her death and reads about her past in snatches. It is a tale of caves, dream-tellers, of time travel and the "Elders" etc..Anyways, I was looking for some clarity and closure toward the end of it all. But there was none. Instead I started wondering if Rakhee's mom was perhaps just, you know, mental and living in two realities.

Anyhoo, the opening passages of the book say that if snakes appear in dreams, they foretell change. When I was between 5 - 15 years old, I would regularly have creepy dreams about snakes. One repetitive dream I had was a five-headed snake slithering down our street calling out my name and when I came out, it would start conversing with me in Sanskrit. Another one was when we'd be playing cricket on our terrace and the ball would fall into the sunshade. I'd climb into the sunshade to get the ball and suddenly find myself mired in a snake pit. None of the snakes in my dream would ever bite me or hurt me. But they'd slither around in their yucky fashion and make me extremely upset. Not that these dreams prevented me from sleeping or anything. But they were just mildly annoying and fatiguing.

My parents consulted some astrologers about this. They said that Mars was very weak in my horoscope and I had to wear a topaz ring to offset the weakness of Mars. I was also told to pray to Lord Muruga every day as he was the commander of all the planets. Well, honestly, I can't say all this helped. Nonetheless, the topaz ring was pretty and I still wear it today..:) I continued having horrible dreams until I was about 17. Then, one fine day, they suddenly ceased.

I don't know if in some Freudian way I'd come to terms with life and therefore, my subconscious stopped surfacing these dreams. Or maybe I'd just gotten used to snakes in some way. Anyways, it was a relief in some ways. Almost everyone I know has some recurring dream or other. What's yours?

Wuthering Heights..

I had this book for non-detailed study in Grade 9. I can confidently say that I never really GOT the book. Oh, I understood what was happening but I couldn't really connect to the spirit of the book at that age. The emotional motivations of the characters were just too complex for me to fathom --- especially the relationship between Heathcliff and Catherine. Why did Heathcliff torture Catherine if he loved her? And why would she lead him on if she liked him and then not marry him?!! In the end, I couldn't really figure out if Heathcliff was a good guy or an utter villain or why he did what he did. I disliked the book.

Last week, a friend forwarded me a short story with a protagonist called Heathcliff. That reminded me of Wuthering Heights and on a whim, I decided to actually read a synopsis of Wuthering Heights. Wonder of wonders, it made a lot more sense to me now than 13 years ago! I think it takes some emotional maturity to understand how intense love can turn into an intense love-hate emotion. By the way, I still believe that if love turns to hate, it was not really love in the first place. But I've seen it happen and I guess I can accept it now.

So, my advice to the designers of school syllabi is: Don't introduce novels just because they're high sounding and have good titles. You're killing the spirit of the literary work by introducing it prematurely to a young audience when they're not capable of appreciating the different shades of the novel. It gives them a dislike of such works.

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Don't Blink..It is Pink, Pink, Pink All the Way!

You know how, when you commit to something publicly, you're made to bite the dust immediately? Like the time you turned down dinner invites from friends proclaiming that you're going to the gym that evening and wouldn't miss working out for the world. Then, it turned out that you had a very bad day at work and all you want to do is sit moping on the couch. Of course, it would so happen that the friend in question would call and snicker,

"Hey, I thought you were at the gym??! What're you doing at home? So much for your resolution! You missed a good dinner! Ha!"

It is indeed true, dears, that the Universe loves to mess with your head. It loves embarassing you in front of other people.

I've shouted to the world from rooftops that I don't like the color
pink. When my mother-in-law asked me what color
sarees I would like for the wedding, I had just one condition: No hot
pink or nearby shades. Anything else is fine. I was doing just fine until hubby dear got so attracted to a pink saree with kundan work at Pothy's. While I gulped and swallowed looking for alternatives, my mom and MIL swooped down with admiring cries of "Ooohs" and "aaahs". Umm..err. And so it was, dears, that I added the first-est, pink attire to my wardrobe. Anyways, I think that was an omen -- a sign from the Gods -- to mend my pink-hating ways. By the time I returned to the US after the wedding, I had added 3 more items in pink --

1. 1 gorgeous lehnga in pink courtesy Mum.
2. Kundan set to match the lehnga, also in pink courtesy Mum.
3. One more pink saree courtesy MIL.

Sigh. Honestly, I can't really say I hate those dresses. I mean, they're so gorgeous despite the color! Like I said, these were all signs of what was about to happen to me.

Anyways, not to bore you with all my personal make-over stories. I started off writing this post because I just finished reading "Can you keep a secret?" by Sophie Kinsella. And, dears, I am simply hooked! The story, like the cover, is a hot pink, cutesy, girly-girly plot. I never thought I'd become addicted to chick-lit but I am. The protagonist is simply too funny and preposterous. She gets into all sorts of weird situations but manages to wriggle out in the end! All-in-all, too good to pass up and I had to finish the book in one sitting (4 hours)!

Oh, dears, this doesn't mean that only girls should read this book. If you just want some mindless fun served with a sprinkling of human drama, you should read it! :) And umm..if you want some more of this, you should read the Shopaholic series by the same author. I did. And although I might never, ever get to the point where I love hot pink clothes, I think I've grown to appreciate those who wear it..:)

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The da Vinci Code

I started reading "The da Vinci Code" yesterday evening. It was highly recommended by a couple of my friends and one of them was kind enough to lend it to me (Couldn't find it at WT's). It is quite gripping and I have just gotten past 4 or 5 chapters. Think it will occupy most of my weekend because it has everything I love- mystery, history and art!
Still slogging on with Satanic Verses but I am going to put that on hold for now.
I noticed something weird happening with my blogs. I posted a comment on my friend's blog and the previous comment just disappeared! And on my own blog, a few comments have gone missing by themselves. I don't know why this is happening??!!! Tried checking the settings but nothing there would mess with the comments.
A little mystery to ponder about....

Satanic Verses...

I started reading The Satanic Verses a week back. I read around a 100 pages or so and found it in a different style. It has been a while since I read a novel out of the Thriller/action/mystery genres. So I am having trouble getting my brain to wrap around the kinds of metaphors, allegories and allusions that Rushdie is using. People turning into animals, men growing horns, people turning into angels??!!! Having a lot of trouble figuring out what is meant to be read as a hallucination, or reality or metaphor or whatever. The end result is that I decided that it took a lot of grey matter usage for me to read it now and put it on hold.