Voracious Reading Back In Vogue

There was a time when I was known to be a voracious reader, reading works of Ayn Rand, John Grisham, Jeffrey Archer, J.K. Rowling, Salman Rushdie, Dominic Lapierre, Gregory David Roberts and J.R.R. Tolkien almost one after the other. But then since I entered Final Year, I literally gave up reading because I couldn't find time for it. And now I've come to realize I've got to make time for reading and now I have taken up a challenge for myself - to finish the entire Bartimaeus Trilogy within 1 week. I'll have to juggle my free time between watching the IPL and my end sem exams; but then it's high time I did some solid reading.

I swear to give a blog post with a review of all 3 books within a week.

The Quest is complete

The Lord Of The Rings

It is my favorite book of all time, my favorite movie series of all time. I’ve read the book, an insane 17 times and would continue to do so once every year. Thanks to the crazy no. of times that I’ve read the book, I am capable of, at times, quoting lines from the book in real life situations. E.g. when a couple of years back there was this whole, “Sachin must retire” bullshit campaign after India lost a few matches, I wrote this blog post and quoted an LOTR favorite – “Faithless is he who says farewell when the road darkens”!

Fresh after one of my readings of the book series, I end up having a hangover of the old English style which JRR Tolkien has used in the books. There was this one instance when I irritated the hell out of a teacher in 12^th standard when she asked me some shit formula in Chem II which I had no idea about, so I said, “To this question… the answer… I know not”. She got so freaked out, she just asked me to sit down and carried on.

Anyways, I have to thank my brother’s friend PL Kashyap, it was he who introduced me to The Lord Of The Rings. Since then I’ve gone on to having finished all of Tolkien’s works. But I would say one thing, my fanatic love for this “trilogy” [Tolkien buffs will point out that it wasn’t a trilogy, but what the hell, I’ll call it a trilogy for simplicity], has its roots in the fantastic movie series directed by Peter Jackson. Each movie was a masterpiece of acting, direction, dialogues, action, drama, and exceptionally awesome special effects. The journey of The Ring-bearer and The Fellowship from Rivendell to Mordor has been shown so brilliantly that one can safely say that if Tolkien were to have directed this movie, he’d have made it exactly the same.

Other fantasy books off late which have been made into movies haven’t had the same success as The Lord Of The Rings, maybe because the creators of the movies aren’t exactly fans of the books. That explains why the Harry Potter movies haven’t been regarded as good enough movie versions of some great books. The Eragon book series isn’t exactly the greatest series to have been written, but the movie was definitely one of the worst movies to have been made. The kind of effort that must’ve gone into making LOTR as a movie series can only be imagined, but apart from the exceptionally good music score, or special effects; the one thing that sets LOTR apart is the amazing ensemble cast [which was acknowledged by an Oscar]. The casting and acting has been more than perfect. Gandalf played by Sir Ian Mckellen was according to me one of the best books-to-screen depictions of any fantasy character.

I am writing this post, fresh after completing my quest of watching all 3 extended DVD versions of the movies, consecutively. I had wanted to do this for a long time, and finally managed it in the fag end of my B Tech days. Another awesome memory to add to my engineering days.

Thank you, JRR Tolkien, Peter Jackson and unknown dude who burned the DVD’s for me!

For those who haven’t yet watched this masterpiece of film making, here are a few snapshots which may make you want to see it immediately.

Brisingr

I've finally begun reading the 3rd book in the Eragon Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini. I've barely done 43 pages, but I'm glad that the writing style is the same and the pace is pretty decent.
After The Lord Of The Rings and Harry Potter, the Eragon series has been the only one I've followed closely. A pity that the movie "Eragon" sucked big time, I guess every book isn't as fortunate as The Lord Of The Rings to have a great director like Peter Jackson to transform the book series into an equally great movie series. My suggestion, get a copy and read it.
Happy Diwali and Happy Reading!

Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Naa, TRDDC, Wanted, Rabbi Shergill... Rock On!

It's been a break since I last blogged, i've read another 100 pages of Atlas Shrugged [got to finish another 300]. One thing about really fat books like Shantaram and Atlas Shrugged; since it takes one a long time to read in the middle of a busy schedule, one falls into a sense of security; one that says, no matter what there's at least that book to be read. No matter if you've seen and finished another season of House MD, or seen Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Naa twice, or that there's still some time to go before Sachin wields his Bat on the Ground, or that there's still time for Heath Ledger's final performance, or that companies keep coming and one keeps finding a new excuse for skipping it coz actually you're just not interested in what it does, or that the world is moving faster everyday, some people are surging ahead while others are falling behind; you still have that book to finish. It's going to be there, that next page isn't going to change until you pick up the book and start reading.
Reading, and listening to Rabbi Shergill's brand new album [Avegi Ja Nahin] which you've illegally downloaded from Bollyextreme. You promise that someday you'll buy out Rabbi Shergill's entire discography, even though his lyrics are in so pure a form of Punjabi that you can hardly decipher a sentence, but the music so soulful that it doesn't matter.
A break in reading leads to a premiere of Wanted on the PC. The movie is good but you wish the bootleggers and movie pirates did a better job so that you'd get some quality returns for your investment of 7 download hours.
Then you enter the real world and head for TRDDC and are glad that you got a Project of your choice. Life becomes even better when one discovers a shortcut road which makes the distance to TRDDC less than half of what it is if one follows that normal route.
Then you get back and realize, oh fuck "Rock On"'s music must have released, and then after you hear it you wonder how the movie would be coz the music is seriously awesome.
Then you get back to reading more of Atlas Shrugged with Rabbi's music in the background, how many more of such classic books are thus far unread by me? Who is John Galt?