Christmas Carol

My first Dickens novel if I dont count the children version of abridged Oliver Twist. And also read it on christmas eve. Apt timing I believe.I dont know why I never tried Charles Dickens. He is among the genre of writers like Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, etc whose writings I adore. When I was browsing through a book shop looking for some classics to read, I happened to come across Christmas Carol. It was small. Just a 100 pages classic. That itself was unique and also wanted to read a dickens novel for a long time but never did. So I grabbed the book and read it. The title and the introduction in the back gives away the story but classics are read not for their stories but for their characters and the way the story is told. Well I read it for that. It was nice. The way the ghosts makes Scrooge realise the christmas spirit is nice. I wonder if Uncle Scrooge the name of the character of Duck Tales is inspired by it. This book has made me to want to read more dickens. The character of Scrooge is so universal and relevant and relatable, its amazing how nicely it is captured in so short length. To build characters and make them akin to readers by building upon them in some length is the norm but to do it in such a manner is sheer genius. The english has to be read to believe it. Its charm is much better than the swear words riddled and shortfened english I hear today... Have to now decide which dickens novel I should read.....

Treasure Hunting...

I was always harping in my high school days that I will never change. Well, I was more pea brained then than I am now.I have realised the folly of that and nowadays I never say NEVER. I have changed, for better or for worse.Some changes are good and some are not so. I can live with that but what I hate is how currently I am not noting down any excerpts from the books I read.I had this habit of writing down excrepts from novels I was reading in a book which I liked and after sometime reading those and remembering the characters, storyline of the novel,the emotions I felt and what made me take a note of it, who I had in mind when I was writing it. (Yeah I am jobless.. I think and do such stuff...)I really miss those. Whenever I come across something good I think of doing it and forget. maybe going forward will do. I used to write down not only lines which would resemble a quote but also some dialogue or a sentence along with the author name and the Novel. Some sentences are so profound that it just amazes me how authors can come up with that or how truly they have articulated the insight of human behaviour in some sentences. The excerpts are not always from classics like Leo Tolstoy novels.Sometimes if I go through the book where I have written it, some excrepts are from novels which are categorized as just a time pass read and one would never think anything quotable can be found there.Like from Perry Mason- The case of the substitute face" I am the flippant younger generation, Mr. Mason-born without reverence-yet reared without guile,thank heaven." Oh what a sentence!!! Its just me. I can totally relate to it.I feel sad that I have captured only a few and missed many which I wanted to.Well hopefully I will do so going forward. Still there is one that I have not missed. its my all time favourite because there can be only one favorite.Only rare cases there are exceptions.I think choosing between family members is the only one. My favourite is the one which was given on front page of the novel Fasting & Feasting by Anitha Desai.I am not so sure.I have not noted down the novel name. But the excrept is a poem by Che Fece...I1 Gran Rifiuto By C P Cavafy, translated by Rae Dalven. I really don't know both the persons and also not a great fan of poems. But this blows my mind.

"To certain people there comes a day when they must say the great yes or the great no. He who has the yes ready within him reveals himself at once, and saying it crosses over to the path of honour and his own conviction. He who refuses does not repent. Should he be asked again he would say no again.And yet that No-the right No-crushes him for the rest of his life."


Most of us would have faced this. We are either Yay or Nay persons.The way this poet has put forth is bang on. These are the joys of reading books. You will stumble upon such treasures a lot..So I am off to treasure hunting..


P.S. Google is great.I just googled the words Che Fece...I1 Gran Rifiuto By C P Cavafy and got a blog which had the same poems.