The Art of the Infinite

April 13, 2013 Leave a comment

books“We commonly think of ourselves as little and lost in the infinite stretches of time and space, so that it comes as a shock when the French poet Baudelaire speaks of ‘cradling our infinite on the finite seas’. Really? Is it ourself, our mind or spirit, that is infinity’s proper home? Or might the infinite be neither out there nor in here but only in language, a pretty conceit of poetry?”   – Robert Kaplan & Ellen Kaplan, The Art of the Infinite: Our Lost Language of Numbers

The Kaplans have brought out the beauty of math through an engaging mix of history, philosophy, science and lyrical prose, equations, geometric projections, exposition and explanation of a unique range of topics from Alcibiades  to Godel to Gauss.

Being a lover of numbers, this delightful book ‘The art of the infinite’ is my ‘Read of the Week’.

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The Sisters Brothers

April 13, 2013 Leave a comment

9781847083180“Come with me into the world and reclaim your independence. You stand to gain so much, and riches are the least of it.”
– Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers
This books made me laugh with its adroit humor and cringe at the same time. Delightful. The story is narrated by Eli Sisters, a hired killer on the American west coast in 1851, around the time of the Gold Rush in the Sierra Nevada mountains. However Eli barely gives the American landscape a glance, and people met along the way are simple figures in his moral drama. Nor does Eli have any larger philosophical or socio-historical insights to offer for the century this story is set in. This hilariously anti-heroic and relentlessly compelling novel is my “Read of the Week”.

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The Tiger’s Wife

April 13, 2013 2 Comments

8366403When your fight has purpose—to free you from something, to interfere on the behalf of an innocent—it has a hope of finality. When the fight is about unraveling—when it is about your name, the places to which your blood is anchored, the attachment of your name to some landmark or event—there is nothing but hate, and the long, slow progression of people who feed on it and are fed it, meticulously, by the ones who come before them. Then the fight is endless, and comes in waves and waves, but always retains its capacity to surprise those who hope against it.”
― Téa Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife

This novel full of historic and human complexities of Balkans through its principal narrator, Natalia Stefanovic, a young doctor who lives with her mother, grandmother and grandfather in an unnamed Balkan city early in the 21st century, is my “Read of the Week”.

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American Gods

April 12, 2013 Leave a comment

113767203What I say is, a town isn’t a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it’s got a bookstore it knows it’s not fooling a soul.” ― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

American Gods is a masterful blend of mythology and existential questioning, crafted with the confidence of a storyteller who knows how to make the unreal feel intimately familiar. The novel follows Shadow Moon, a man adrift after personal tragedy, who becomes entangled in a looming war between the old gods brought to America by immigrants and the new gods born of technology, media, and modern obsession.

Gaiman uses this supernatural conflict to explore what a nation chooses to worship, and what those choices reveal about identity, belief, displacement, and memory. His America is vast, strange, melancholic, and quietly magical with a landscape where roadside attractions become sacred spaces and forgotten deities cling to survival.

What makes the novel enduring is its atmosphere: moody, mythic, and laden with symbolism. Shadow’s journey is both epic and introspective, revealing the cost of faith and the fragility of stories in a changing world.

While the pacing occasionally drifts, the richness of character, imagination, and cultural insight more than compensates. American Gods remains one of Gaiman’s most ambitious works, an absorbing, thought-provoking modern myth that lingers long after the final page.

 This dark, poetic and thrilling novel across an American landscape is my “Read of the Week”.

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The Sense of an Ending

April 12, 2013 Leave a comment

b3“How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but – mainly – to ourselves.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

The Sense of an Ending is a quiet, unsettling novel that lingers long after its final page. The memoir like novel is narrated by Tony Webster, who looks back on his friendships, his first love, and a moral failure he barely understood at the time of his youth. What begins as a calm story in nostalgia gradually turns into an examination of how memory deceives, and flatters us.

The author is less interested in what happened than in how we remember what happened. Tony believes he has lived an ordinary, decent life, but a late-life inheritance forces him to confront the possibility that his past actions had darker consequences than he imagined.

The writing is spare, precise, and simple. Barnes resists sentimentality, allowing ambiguity to do the emotional work. The novel ultimately asks unsettling questions about responsibility, guilt, and time. Do we ever truly understand our own lives, or do we merely settle for a version that feels bearable? It is a small book with a profoundly disturbing aftertaste.

This 2011 Booker Prize winning, witty, cynical and ironic novel is my “Read of theWeek”

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