Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck is a story of two workers who travel together in search of work, mostly farming, in the hinterlands of America. This is however not a story about their times or their hardships or the lives that they and millions of other lowly paid workers like them led. It is rather a touching story of brotherhood and broken dreams.
The title tells you nothing about what the book entails, yet when you finish it, you realise that there couldn’t have been a more apt name.
A novella that has just a few sequences in it spread across just a couple of days, the arrival of the two workers – George and Lennie – at the farm, them working, them talking of their dreams, a series of unfortunate events and finally the end. That’s it. A book that doesn’t take you too long to finish but stays with you long after.
“As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment.”
… This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
And that’s how this book starts. A mad mad book. Absolutely hilarious and with a logic so warped that you give up on it, Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a comedy sci-fi adventure novel (if there is such a genre in the first place that is) that redefines all three – comedy, sci-fi and adventure.
It starts off with our hero, Arthur Dent, being whisked away by his friend Ford Prefect (who is in fact an alien who is desperate to get out) onto a spaceship minutes before his house and all of Earth for that matter is demolished to make way for an Intergalactic Highway. Imagine being so insignificant that the entire planet is nothing more than a boulder to be pushed out of the way in the whole scheme of events in the universe. Puts individual problems into perspective.
Moving on, Arthur Dent finds himself in this spaceship with another human being and a two headed President of the Galaxy who is on the run for stealing the very spaceship they are in. Together with a depressed robot (yes, depressed robots. You’d be depressed too if you are made to do menial tasks like bringing tea when you have the brain with a functioning capability of a planet) they set out on a journey to find, well, with no particular purpose at all.
And this madness is only the beginning. What follows is not just a plot that beats all the obvious predictions you can make as a story unwinds, but also a style of writing that leaves you part laughing part snickering at the turn of every page. Dry wit. At its best. Douglas Adams is my absolute favourite when it comes to humour and creativity. Read him once and you’ll know why he has the cult following that he does.
Toni Morrison in Beloved tells us the story of a slave family during the times when slavery was being abolished; when they’ve lived such a life and didn’t know how to live otherwise or are still living in the aftermath of what they went through. A time, when legally slavery was done with, but society still had a long way to go in terms of realigning ideologies.
Subtle realities hit you in the passing. Brutal realities. Things that happened to them, choices they had to make, blatant hypocrisy they had to accept as normal, everything hits you. When one of the characters talks of freedom as
“To get to a place where you could love anything you chose – not to need permission for desire. That was freedom”
Animal Farm by George Orwell is one of the two scariest books I have read. The other being another novel by the same author which I will be writing about later on. Coming back to this one. Scary. Yes. That is the word. But it isn’t a horror story. Nor a thriller. Or a murder mystery.
It is pure and simple facts. A reality that is so bare and true that it scares the hell out of me every time I read it. Published in 1945, this story can be seen playing out for real even now.
Animal Farm is the story of a farm where the animals feel suppressed by the Humans who own the farm and make them toil but don’t given them their labour’s worth of food and rest. So they decide to revolt against the owners, take over the farm and demonstrate how it should be run. With dreams of equal rights and benefits and a bright future, the set out to achieve the same.
A children’s fantasy novel like you’d expect from Enid Blyton, though this is the first fantasy work of hers I’ve read. There have been The Famous Fives and The Secret Sevens and the Malory Towers and the like but all of those were real people so to say.
The Magic Faraway Tree is nothing like that. An adventurous tale where three siblings, Joe, Beth and Franny, take their cousin Rick to a magical tree in the forest behind their home which houses strange characters such as Moonface (who obviously has a face as round as the moon), Silky (a pretty little fairy), The Saucepan Man (who is covered in kettles and pans and is short of hearing thanks to the noise his vessels make), Dame Washalot (an old lady who loves washing), Mr. Watzinaname (the perfect nobody character) and The Angry Pixie (name says it all). Together these embark on a journey that start with them climbing up the tree into the clouds. The tree serves as the pathway into the different mysterious Lands atop clouds which station themselves on the tree every few days.
Booked for 100 