...round and round. In our case we've been getting rounder and rounder while little G has been getting longer and longer. Since claiming responsibility for letting my interests slip away is a difficult admission to make, I shall save myself some guilt and stick to pronoun we for a while.
We have been identifying rhymes, picking out favourites already and clapping away when such ones play. We smile a lot and we sing along in our squeaky bad-even-in-the-shower voice (one of us can only babble still.) We love books and don't you make the mistake of thinking that we just stick to baby board books that have big fat pictures on them that invite you to point and smile and say gaaaaaaaaar and go clap clap clap. Ha, instead we love big fat books that make the adult go ga ga ga and those are the books that from the shelf come one by one and toss behind when we're done done done. baby perfect flourish. Out they come and out they stay until activity-weary mom puts them back in vain. Out they come again. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Harry Potter have been subject to particularly harsh treatment since we've stacked them in the lowest shelf.
We love
Margaret Atwood (
an excellent collection of links on Atwood at Luminarium) and we have made up our minds that we shall read everything published. Our personal Atwoodian collection has been growing and so has our generous unasked for recommendation to friends.
Negotiating with the Dead is brilliant, witty and cunning. Walk into the sentence trap and nod and nod while wondering what you are agreeing to. We have also reread Waltzing Again, a book that we so devoured last December, and loved it better if that were possible. We have been going around with a pink highlighter and furiously marking lines! The Blind Assassin is partly read and sitting there because we find non-fiction easier to assimilate than fiction. The kind of thinking that reading good fiction involves is very challenging to us at the moment.
Now that we are three paragraphs into avoiding guilt and feeling puffed up (must avoid ballooning descriptions to keep guilt at bay) at the effort and looking at the clock and thinking that the last sentence must be typed soon or sleeping G will morph to crying G, it is time to switch to trusty, lanky, self-critical I:
I realized, on a quick look back at recent reading practice, that I have started to gravitate towards biographies. A few days ago I picked up
Andrew Lycett's Conan Doyle, a book whose existence I had been completely unaware of upto that moment. Someone from that foggy slushpile of memory had remarked that biographies were written for mature (read OLD) people. That remark of all the discarded remarks found its way to light at a perfectly inopportune hour.
After some consideration I am pleased to declare that I still have something called the reading habit and while I cannot quantify it because each day is so fuzzy and intangible, I do note that books get read and get replaced by new ones, magazines also get read over a month (before the next one arrives), online articles are skimmed, starred and read on lucky afternoons, newspapers get missed in the bargain and much to her chagrin, dear L does not have a clue about what is happening to General Election 2009. Yes, I intend to vote thank you very much.
Jaago Re! And yes,
IPL Season 2 is the only soap opera I watch.
One of the nice little retrievals I've done is listen to A R Rahman's
1947 Earth. I used to play it a lot when it was first released. Then it got lost in myriad new things and I remembered the album when someone asked me about Rahman and the Oscar. Was it a popular album? I don't know. But the music grows on you. I do know that. The other Rahman albums I plan to unearth are
En Swaasa Kaatre,
Pudhiya Mugam and
Indira (especially for Thoda Thoda Malardhadhenna, a past favourite.)
Let me leave you with a few Atwoodian quotes from Waltzing Again:
"Complication" is a matter of how you perceive yourself in an unequal power relationship
good writing of any kind by anyone is surprising, intricate, strong, sinuous
I think everyone should go out and get themselves a set of colored pencils and play with them. They will have fun
Under pressure, you can't depend on human nature to remain the way you think it ought to be. Under pressure people do strange things.
By my age and stage, you're going to know a couple of things. And if you don't know these things, where have you been all your life? Number one: some people aren't going to like you. This may come as a big shock. But it is true of every human being. There's some people who aren't going to like you. And there's some people who aren't going to like what you do, no matter what it is. So why not enjoy yourself and have fun?
There is a great risk of my typing in a large portion of the book if I go on picking out the pinked beauties, so take my word for it and read the book. Bye-bye.
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