The Book Tag

Since I ran away from the last tag, I thought I would pick up a tag by Emma that I could not complete and it was months ago. And this time it is about books. The list of the books is long and I have read much less than what I would ideally like to read! But then I am going to do it even if I can tick just ten of the list of 106!

I am supposed to bold the ones that I have read, underline the ones I have read in school, italicise the ones I have started but didn't finish. I am surprised that 'The Lord of the Rings' is not included in the list. It is one of my absolute favorites.

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
2. Anna Karenina
3. Crime and Punishment
4. Catch-22
5. One Hundred Years of Solitude- Don't know why but I could never finish this one.
   
6. Wuthering Heights
7. The Silmarillion
   
8. Life of Pi: a novel
9. The Name of the Rose D
10. Don Quixote
    
11. Moby Dick
12. Ulysses
    
13. Madame Bovary
    
14. The Odyssey
15. Pride and Prejudice
16. Jane Eyre
17. The Tale of Two Cities
18. The Brothers Karamazov
19. Guns, Germs and Steel - I am reading this now so I guess this could be bold.
20. War and Peace
    
21. Vanity Fair
22. The Time Traveler's Wife
    
23. The Iliad
24. Emma
25. The Blind Assasin
26. The Kite Runner
27. Mrs. Dalloway
28. Great Expectations
29. American Gods
30. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
31. Atlas Shrugged
32. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
33. Memoirs of a Geisha
34. Middlesex
35. Quicksilver
36. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
    
37. The Canterbury Tales
38. The Historian: A Novel
39. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
40. Love in the Time of Cholera
41. Brave New World
42. The Fountainhead
43. Foucault's Pendulum
    
44. Middlemarch
45. Frankenstein
46. The Count of Monte Cristo
47. Dracula
48. A Clockwork Orange
49. Anansi Boys
50. The Once and Future King
51. The Grapes of Wrath
52. The Poisonwood Bible
53. 1984
54. Angels and Demons
55. Inferno
56. The Satanic Verses
57. Sense and Sensibility
58. The Picture of Dorian Gray
59. Mansfield Park
60. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest- Loved this one
    
61. To the Lighthouse
62. Tess of the D'Urbervilles
63. Oliver Twist
64. Gulliver's Travels
    
65. Les Miserables
66. The Correction
67. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
68. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
69. Dune
    
70. The Prince
71. The Sound and the Fury
72. Angela's Ashes: A Memoir
73. The God of Small Things
74. A People's History of the United States: 1492-present
75. Cryptonomicon
76. Neverwhere
77. A Confederacy of Dunces
78. A Short History of Nearly Everything
    
79. Dubliners
80. The Unbearable Lightness of Being
    
81. Beloved
82. Slaughter House- five
    
83. The Scarlett Letter
84. Eats, Shoots and Leaves
85. The Mists of Avalon
86. Oryx and Crake
87. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
88. Cloud Atlas
89. The Confusion
90. Lolita
91. Persuasion
92. Northanger Abbey
93. The Catcher in the Rye
94. On the Road
    
95. The Hunchback of Nortre Dame
96. Freakonomics
    
97. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Enquiry into Values
98. The Aeneid
99. Watership Down
100. Gravity's Rainbow
101. The Hobbit- Another of my absolute favoriyes.
     
102. In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences
103. White Teeth
     
104. Treasure Island
     
105. David Copperfield
     
106. The Three Musketeers

One person that I know and how reads a lot is Steve of Gonomad. I wonder if he will pick up this tag.

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

I started reading Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer late tonight (or should I say early morning, it is around 1.30 in the night). I am just through the back page, the snippets from the various reviews and the first chapter. I read a lot, or at least I try to. And never before I started blogging so early about any book. The first chapter starts backwards, Jon is hading back after standing on the top of Mount Everest and later discovers (while he is waiting for 'a traffic jam of climbers coming up to clear at Hillary Step') that he is left without oxygen. He also mentions at the very beginning what a disaster this 1996 expedition was going to be.

He wrote in the introduction that there are variations in his account that he did for the Outside Magazine and the book. Looks like that entire article is online at the Outside Magazine site.

Also, I have borrowed this book from my colleague (the same who took these pictures of Prashar Lake). Remember what I said there-

This is what Prashar Lake can look like in December! No, I didn't go there but Anil did ... Anil is my colleague from work, not at all active in the blog world and I guess least inclined too!

Well, he proved me wrong, he went ahead and acquired a travel blog! I hope he will update it too.

Retiring to the Hills in India?

The Bridge Near Seven Sisters Waterfall, North Sikkim

How many times have you come across a beautiful place and thought, “Oh! I could build a house nearby and retire here?” I must have done it every two kilometers in North Sikkim, it looks so bewitchingly beautiful and so utterly, truly and completely green. My husband, more often than not, nods his head in agreement. Till date, I have been scared of only one thing, the cold weather in the mountains. It is one thing to take it in small doses and it is quite another to think of living it day in and day out.

Then, I came across this paragraph about a house in Kalimpong (quite close to Sikkim) in The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai.

The house has been built long ago by a Scotsman, passionate reader of the accounts of that period: The Indian Alps and How We Crossed Them, by A Lady Pioneer. Land of the Lama. The Phantom Rickshaw. My Mercara Home. Black Panther of Singrauli. His true spirit has called to him, then, informed him that it, too, was wild and brave, and refused to be denied the right of adventure. S always, the price for such romance had been high and paid for by others. Porters had carried boulders from the riverbed-legs growing bandy, ribs curving into caves, backs into U’s, faces being bent slowly to look always at the ground-up to this site chosen for a view that could raise the human heart to spiritual heights.

It gave me some food for thought about our retirement dreams.

PS. My personal favorite still remains Ladakh.

Hotels, Restaurants and the Like

A Hotel Door (Pelling, Sikkim, India)

I was reading The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai on the trip to Sikkim. A paragraph where she is talking about Biju, an illegal immegrant in US working in a restaurant, caught my attention.

The sound of their fight had traveled up the flight of steps and struck a clunky note, and they might upset the balance, perfectly first-world on top, perfectly thrid world twenty-two steps below. Mix it up in a heap and then who would patronize his restaurant, hm? With its coquilles Saint-Jacques a la vapeur for $27.50 and the blanquette de veau for $ 23, ...

What were they thinking? Do restaurants in Paris have cellars full of Mexicans, desis, and Pakis?

No they do not, what are you thinking?

They have cellars full of Algerians, Senegalese, Moroccans ...

The major part of the book is also set up in a region close to Sikkim, Kalimpong (West Bengal) and has Mount Khang-Chen-Dzon Ga (Kanchanjunga) as the backdrop.

While I know very little about people mentioned in the book, I saw young kids working in hotels in Pelling and Gangtok (and this is quite common at smaller hotels across India). What haunts me most is that some of them had an absolutely miserable exprssions on their faces.

PS. I completed the book in Sikkim itself, and though it is well written it ends on such a miserable note for almost all the characters that it was a little too much for me to bear. I remember saying to Sesha vehmently after completing the book "I hate situations which do not offer any hope to the characters." I really do.