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This fortnight at Fabmall
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THOUGH MANY of us may not be comfortable with the idea of a bookstore that doesn't exist physically, and has no familiar smells, no secret nooks, no place for lingering over meetings, conversations and familiar store staff, who will keep aside your favourites, the fact is that the virtual bookstore is very real for a lot of people.
Fabmall has a large collection of books and apart from those listed on their site, they promise to source and procure books. Fabmall is at www.fabmall.com.
Some interesting titles here this fortnight:
The Line of Beauty
Alan Hollinghurst
Picador, Rs. 300
HOLLINGHURST'S THE Line of Beauty is a compelling, dark, deep, lyrical book. Which deserved the Booker. And no, it's not about "gay sex" (Daily Express's "Booker won by gay sex", and The Sun's "Gay book wins" promise more than the book has), though its protagonist is gay and there is as much gay sex in the book as there would be straight sex in a book that had a straight hero.
Anyone who has read Hollinghurst will know just how ridiculous it is to label him a "gay writer", because though he writes books, " ... which began from a presumption of the gayness of the narrative position... " they are also "... actually about all sorts of other things as well — history, class, culture. There's all sorts of stuff going on."
Indeed there is. All sorts of stuff. The search for beauty for instance in music, literature, relationships, architecture, and in the living of life. And it's compelling because what its characters do with life, and what life does to its characters is compelling. You want to know what happens after, not merely as an answer to suspense, but as insight into life and fate and stuff.
The Line of Beauty can get a bit suffocating and you'll have to put it down, but you'll find yourself wanting to pick it up again. And after 500 pages of this intense fare in which we aren't spared the darks, the author doesn't leave us in a dark, damp, cold, inhuman world without the possibility of love or beauty, but rather in a warm-cold, comforting-tragic, sunny-shadowy world which, at the risk of sounding like that proverbial stuck record, is compelling. You come away from this book fuller.
Rich Dad's Guide to Becoming Rich Without Cutting up Your Credit Cards
Robert T. Kiyosaki with Sharon L. Lechter
Warner Books, Rs. 328
NOT A book for book people, I tried reading it and it all seemed so bizarre, but then that's not saying much, because I'm still very poor and can't understand that money needs to be nurtured, and cared for and given the right sort of environment in which to grow and flourish into a healthy citizen, worthy of inheriting the world.
So don't take me seriously when I say that this book is virtually unreadable.
But in truth, as with most sequels, this one doesn't hold a candle to the first Rich Dad Poor Dad book.
How to Have a Beautiful Mind
Edward de Bono
Vermilion, Price not stated
DE BONO'S said pretty much all he had to say, and for people like me, who found him in those crucial years of crossing over from undergrad to post ditto, he made tremendous sense with thinking under, over and round about and his books had a sense of adventure and challenge.
This one is inane and hardly de Bono and seems to hardly warrant making a book out of — one can go to finishing school to learn how to talk, where to interrupt, how to be attentive and so on. But perhaps ours is a generation that knew how to communicate with other human beings whereas today's generations simply feel at sea when they have to share time and space with each other in actual rather than virtual contact.
Flipping through is more than enough and you might catch a line or two here and there of interest. But what it could do is to send you back to the old classics de Bonos — as it did me. Lateral Thinking, Parallel Thinking, Po, etc. All of which I'm sure can be had from Fabmall.
Secrets of the Code
Edited by Dan Burstein
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Rs. 265
NOT AN uninteresting collection of essays all related to the material in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. It also has some in interviews specifically related to the book.
The collection of essays is wide ranging and examines most of the sources cited by Dan Brown. It's interesting to read about the bloodline of Christ and the book that first mentioned it as much as it is to see how most writers only go so far to say that Mary Magdalene was Jesus' chief disciple and this really may be due to the reluctance to actually "solve" the mystery of the Holy Grail. Anyway, this book is quite interesting and more so because it has so much variety. It has an essay on the Opus Die.
KALA KRISHNAN RAMESH
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