Holiday Reading

I haven't referred to any lists for my holiday reading this time around. I have started with Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Not a pleasant start. The movie itself was so terrifying. I don't really chase and watch any of those "horror movies", but The Road disturbed me more than any movie I had seen. Perhaps, as Sherlock Holmes said, you feel horror when a situation kindles your imagination. In A Study in Scarlet, when Watson was upset by one murder, he who has seen so many in the battlefields, Holmes says:

 “I can understand. There is a mystery about this which stimulates the imagination; where there is no imagination there is no horror.”

I wonder how I would have felt reading The Road, if I had not seen the movie. McCarthy is a brilliant writer. I was tempted to read McCarthy because of the late Roger Ebert. In many of his reviews and blog posts he talked about McCarthy which made me curious. Read his post Perform a concert in words where he talks about how McCarthy's Suttree influenced him. Perhaps this blog post of his might turn out to be my holiday reading list!

I have also started reading Neil Young's autobiography (or let's say, journal) Waging Heavy Peace, which is the reason for posting this. In fact, I am also listening to his latest album Psychedelic Pill side by side. The album works well as a companion CD to the book. In the book, Young writes a lot about his passions which have turned into entrepreneurial initiatives, like the studio quality music player Pono and his hybrid car engines.  In the album opener "Driftin' back" which runs for 27 minutes, he expresses the same sentiments ("I don't want my mp3"). Young is not trying to be a great literary writer with this book, he has written the passages very casually - you can find the word "cool" every now and then -  which is interesting, as he is an amazing song writer (But me I'm not stopping there/Got my own row left to hoe/Just another line in the field of time - from Thrasher).

Neil Young's father was a writer. When he was a child, his father told him "Just write every day, and you will be surprised what comes out". I am following that advice too. Hence this post.

H/T: E's flat blog for the Holmes anecdote.

The lost art of buying albums...

The Civil Wars's new  self titled LP 

Michael Kiwanuka - Home again (our current favourite)

Leonard Cohen - Old ideas (CD was ridiculously cheap compared to Vinyl)

Mumford and sons - Babel (the wife's choice)

Tedeschi Trucks band - Revelator +live 2CDs

The Civil Wars - Barton Hollow Deluxe edition (my favorite album of 2012)

Into my head!

Author Graham Greene's name registered in my mind when I read obituaries of RK Narayan while I was in college. My room-mate had a subscription to Frontline magazine, and they extensively covered Narayan's life and works in that issue, including a piece by N. Ram, and how Graham Greene 'discovered' Narayan.

I am a great fan of Pico Iyer's writing, having read two of his books and many articles. Also, a bit jealous of the life he leads - he still doesn't carry a mobile phone, I can't go that far but have made up my mind on not possessing  a smart phone - spends his time between Kyoto and a monastery in the west coast of US, is a friend of and have interviewed Leonard Cohen, wrote a great travel book and found a wife in the process, as someone remarked (The lady and the monk) - what more can you ask for!

Anyhow, on reading about the release of his last book - The Man within My Head, subtitled "Graham Greene, My Father and Me", I wanted to read at least a couple of  Graham Greene books. The reviews of Iyer's book stated that you really don't have to be a Greene reader to enjoy this book, as the book is more on Iyer's personal life, his relationship with his father, etc. However, I thought that I would enjoy the book more if I had some background to Greene's writing. Hence here I am with a target of finishing 3 Greene books at least - The Quiet American to start with. I am half way into the book and I am really glad that I chose to read Greene! And I can't believe that it was written in 1955!

Two random quotes from The Quiet American:

I shut my eyes and she was again the same as she used to be: she was the hiss of steam, the clink of a cup, she was a certain hour of the night and the promise of rest.

‘I’m not involved. Not involved,’ I repeated. It had been an article of my creed. The human condition being what it was, let them fight, let them love, let them murder, I would not be involved. My fellow journalists call themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action – even an opinion is a kind of action.

Moonrise Kingdom

January issue of The Atlantic has profiled the Pythons - The Beatles of Comedy by David Free (Free is an Australian!)

Free mentions:

I concede that there are people who don’t find the parrot sketch funny at all. I know a couple of them personally. They are unmoved by the sight of John Cleese in his raincoat, wielding that stuffed parrot and saying, “It’s bleeding demised.” I know them, but I can’t help them.

Exactly my sentiments after  I watched Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom - not the comedy per se, but the whole movie as such. Its classic Wes, with classic Wes moments and a classy cast.