Since the time I read about Six Degrees of Separation in Whispering Gum’s blog, I have been turning the thought in my head, to see how I would link the books, and to know if I can jog my memory. I am trying this month and I hope I would try this exercise regularly. It’s fun.
From Kate’s blog (booksaremyfavouriteandbest), I understand that the journey for December has to be started from Stephen King’s IT.
The clown wasn’t scary, but the fictional town Derry was. How could children live in a dark, dark town like Derry! I stayed up reading till 5 AM a couple of nights to finish reading the book because my ticket for the movie was booked. Stephen King cheated me. I didn’t know the book was THAT long. That was TOO long. I am sure his editors were scared to read the book, so they failed to run their scissors on hundreds of pages. Speculations aside, the book helped me to make some decisions: I will not read King’s book for the next two years; they make me anxious. I will not read horror for a little while. I really need a breather. (Delia, I will read your story alone. Yaay!)
I read Nicola Yoon’s Everything, Everything just before the movie was released. I enjoyed Maddy’s journal entries and her mini -reviews. I love when the characters talk about books. In Everything, Everything, Maddy reviewed The Little Prince, Flowers For Algernon… Oh! To my dismay, she mentioned a few spoilers too. But that’s okay. I look forward to reading Flowers For Algernon. And who doesn’t love The Little Prince!
In Wild, Cheryl Strayed wrote about SO many books. Loads of them. But I chose to read Eudora Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter. I read it when Chennai was flooded in 2015 and I read it by the subtle light of candles. In retrospect, I realise that I could have read something fun because the city was already drowning, but for reasons which I can’t fathom, I read The Optimist’s Daughter. It’s just the kind of book that’s placed in a particular spot in my bookshelf, so that it can keep looking at me. It’s that dear.
“At their very feet had been the river. The boat came breasting out of the mist, and in they stepped. All new things in life were meant to come like that.”
― The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty
Just when Chennai was facing the worst deluge, I read Yoko Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and The Professor too. The problem with the book was that it brought too many wonderful characters into my life and I didn’t know how to love all of them. As I write this post, it occurs to me that I had wanted to read The Housekeeper and The Professor to feel all the warmth and kindness, and to forget that we were stranded with no power and to make peace with the image of a boat tearing through the floodwater in my street.
I read Takashi Hiraide’s The Guest Cat even before I read The Housekeeper and The Professor. Maybe, The Guest Cat showed me the sort of Japan that I couldn’t see in Haruki Murakami’s books. Those were the only Japanese works I was reading then. So The Guest Cat cleansed my palate and widened the horizon. Chibi, the cat, is precious. The couple who are in love with Chibi are more precious. How painful it must be to fall in love with the cat who doesn’t belong to them! How hard it must be to mourn the cat who doesn’t belong to them, but who belongs to them in many ways! The Guest Cat tests our patience. Nothing really happens. But, that’s the thing. Nothing really happens but the loss and longing bubble in the pit of my heart.
“Having played to her heart’s content, Chibi would come inside and rest for a while. When she began to sleep on the sofa–like a talisman curled gently in the shape of a comma and dug up from a prehistoric archaeological site–a deep sense of happiness arrived, as if the house itself had dreamed this scene.”
― The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide
While I am at an animal-book, let me slip a note about Patrick McDonnell and Daniel Ladinsky’s Darling, I Love You: Poems from the Hearts of Our Glorious Mutts and All Our Animal Friends. Most poems in the book are shorter than the title.
