InstaScribe

June 3, 2019
by Neelima
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Mental Health and Milk Teeth @ BYOB Party in May 2019 (Part 2)

Shruti talked about two books – Everything here is Beautiful by Mira. T. Lee and Milk Teeth by Amrita Mahale.

Image result for everything here is beautiful amazon “Every Here is Beautiful is a stunning debut,” Shruti said. The story is about two sisters, Miranda, the older sister, and Lucia who is schizophrenic. In spite of her precarious mental health, Lucia lives a life of no compromise and it is Miranda who tries to help her sister in time of need. The novel, which featured as a Top 10 debut, talks about a variety of issues from love, mental health, marriage to immigration and displacement.

“It seems autobiographical,” Shruti said. “The experiences outlined in the book are so real that it can not be otherwise.” Mira T. Lee is familiar with mental health issues in her family. She’s also invested heavily in research.

“This is one of the better books on mental health, I have been told. The book particularly interested me as the author talks about schizophrenia impacting young mothers. It’s amazing that many of us can wake up in the morning without feeling depressed and be able to spend time with our children with a sense of joy. You just feel blessed,” Shruti said.

Theater is an excellent medium when it comes to educating the public about mental health disorders. For those of you in Bangalore on June 14, you may want to catch a play called Broken Images starring the talent Shabana Azmi, written by Girish Karnad and directed by Alyque Padamsee. The theme of the play centers on schizophrenia.

Image result for milk teeth amazon Another book Shruti found fabulous was Milk Teeth by Amrita Mahale. The story hosts a number of parallel plots. Tenants, landlords and developers each have their own agenda at a time when the landscape of Bombay was changing drastically. The book does share the theme of real estate in Mumbai with Adiga’s Last Man in Tower but there the similarity ends.

The conversation moved onto the delight of children’s books these days and the beauty of native stories brilliantly translated by writers like A. K. Ramajunan and Arunava Sinha. It was debatable whether the English language could provide the range of experience that native languages were able to.

More books in Part 3.

May 31, 2019
by Neelima
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Visual Friday: Diverse Women Writers – Adriana Lisboa

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May 30, 2019
by Neelima
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Writing Shapes @ Link Wanderlust

Everything that you write has a structure, a shape. Just like a house can elegantly capture the light and become an expression of the architect’s personality, a book also follows certain patterns. Jane Alison believes that writing has a visual quality to it. Words have texture. We can feel the scene that is described. We travel through the words on the page. The dramatic arc that Aristotle talked about does not do enough justice to the possible shapes that a narrative can create.

“Beginning, middle, and end; complication, change, denouement. Two thousand years later, in The Technique of the Drama, Gustav Freytag examined Greek and Shakespearean tragedies and drew a graphic like the pattern Aristotle described, showing the parts of drama: introduction, rise, climax, fall, and catastrophe—Freytag’s famous triangle or pyramid.”

But there are more shapes in literature, take Italo Calvin’s crystalline element in Invisible Cities or what Gottfried Benn called an orange-shaped narrative. W. G. Sebald’s writing is anything but linear.

“Patterns other than the wave, though, are everywhere. Here are the ones Stevens calls “nature’s darlings.” Spiral: think of a fiddlehead fern, whirlpool, hurricane, horns twisting from a ram’s head, or a chambered nautilus. Meander: picture a river curving and kinking, a snake in motion, a snail’s silver trail, or the path left by a goat grazing the tenderest greens. Radial or explosion: a splash of dripping water, petals growing from a daisy’s heart, light radiating from the sun, the ring left around a tick bite. Branching and other fractal patterns: self-replication at different scale made by trees, coastlines, clouds. Cellular or network patterns: repeating shapes you see in a honeycomb, foam of bubbles, cracked lakebed, or light rippling in a pool; these can look like cells or, inversely, like a net.”

Go Beyond the Narrative Arc and approach a more innovative organic approach to story creation.

blue flower

May 29, 2019
by Neelima
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That’s the Word for It: Abseil

Abseil is a mountaineering term and refers to a technique used by climbers, mountaineers, cavers, canyoners, search and rescue and rope access technicians to descend cliffs or slopes when they are too steep and/or dangerous to descend without protection. In the US, rappelling is the term used.

Here is the use of this sporty word in literature:

“You can never stay angry too long in the bush though. At least, that’s what I think. It’s not that it’s soothing or restful, because it’s not. What it does for me is get inside my body, inside my blood, and take me over. I don’t know that I can describe it any better than that. It takes me over and I become part of it and it becomes part of me and I’m not very important, or at least no more important than a tree or a rock or a spider abseiling down a long thread of cobweb. As I wandered around, on that hot afternoon, I didn’t notice anything too amazing or beautiful or mindbogglingly spectacular. I can’t actually remember noticing anything out of the ordinary: just the grey-green rocks and the olive-green leaves and the reddish soil with its teeming ants. The tattered ribbons of paperbark, the crackly dry cicada shell, the smooth furrow left in the dust by a passing snake. That’s all there ever is really, most of the time. No rainforest with tropical butterflies, no palm trees or Californian redwoods, no leopards or iguanas or panda bears.

Just the bush.”
― John Marsden, Darkness, Be My Friend

“We always used to use a reef knot with a half hitch either side. The more you pull on it, the tighter it gets. If he’d abseiled over High Rock then there is no way that knot could or should have come undone.’ ‘Exactly,”
― Damien Boyd, As The Crow Flies

May 28, 2019
by Neelima
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Readers can’t Digest-Week 232 (22-May to 28-May)

1. Raymond Antrobus becomes first poet to win Rathbones Folio prize

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2. Iranians, Afghans Plead With Amazon For Self-Publishing In Persian

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3. Game of Thrones new books will not match HBO show’s finale, says author George R.R. Martin

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4. Man Booker International prize: Jokha Alharthi wins for Celestial Bodies

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5. Amazon Literary Partnership Announces More than $1 Million in 2019 Grants

seriously GIF by Luke Cosgrove

May 27, 2019
by Neelima
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Sieges and Whales @ BYOB Party in May 2019 (Part 1)

Image result for Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City amazon The best thing about the BYOB Party is that you discover new writers. “What better way to escape from reality than by reading sci-fi and fantasy?” Sudharsan said as he kicked off the discussion talking about Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City by K. J. Parker (incidentally that is a pseudonym. The author’s real name is Tom Holt, a secret he managed to keep for 17 years), a cult fantasy author. What makes Parker’s books so unique is that he goes into the period in question with mind-boggling precision and he avoids magic (he does use magic in his short stories though), the usual staple of fantasy writing. You only have to read his account on sieges to glean the depth of his research. Some of the prominent themes in his works are the use and misuse of power and technology.

In this book, a siege is approaching and the city is ill-prepared. Sieges were a way of life in the Middle Ages and civilization was built in the making of fortresses and the breaking of them. It is up to dishonest Orhan to save his people from slaughter. “I really enjoyed this work,” Sudharsan said. “It is just so different from conventional fantasy reads.”

You can listen to the author speak about his writing journey here.

Image result for billion dollar whale amazon Another book that Sudharsan picked up was totally unrelated to fantasy —Billion Dollar Whale by Pulitzer Prize winning journalists, Tom Wright and Bradley Hope. This book hailed as the story of a modern Gatsby was a huge success. It was named Best Book of 2018 by the Financial Times and Fortune. The book chronicles the 1MDB scam with its roots in Malaysia, spreading out its tentacles to turn into a white-collar crime on a global scale.

,Jho Low, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, took the help of Goldman Sachs and others to siphon money out of an investment fund. Low was a flamboyant character and didn’t hide the money he made- he threw humongous parties and financed Hollywood movies like The Wolf of Wall Street. In spite of facing criminal charges, Jho Low remains a fugitive. If you are a fan of the biggest heist story of this century, you may want to read this book.

“It’s interesting to read about how power and money work,” Sudharsan said. Watch the writer dissect this plot here.

The question came up whether the book was banned. Not in India anyway though India does have a tradition of banning specific books. Take The Polyester Prince: The Rise of Dhirubhai Ambani by Hamish McDonald, The Descent of Air India by Jitender Bhargava and Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. More banned books mentioned here.

More books in Part 2.

May 24, 2019
by Neelima
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Visual Friday: Diverse Women Writers – Cristina Henriquez

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May 23, 2019
by Neelima
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Checking Channels: What Should I Read Next with Anne Bogel

If you are looking for some good book recommendations, you will enjoy listening to What Should I Read Next by Anne Bogel or Modern Mrs. Darcy as she calls herself. Her podcast is aired every week and she talks to a guest about three books they love, one they hate, one they are reading and what they need to read next. All genres turn up and the format is engaging.

Bogel is warm and chatty. She brings out the best book recommendations from her guests.

Listen to the show here.

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May 22, 2019
by Neelima
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That’s the Word For It: Ephebiphobia

The word Ephebiphobia or the fear of youth is attributed to a 1994 article by Kirk Astroth published in Phi Delta Kappan. In the UK, this reverse ageism is also called paedophobia. The fear of young people has been a fixture of most societies. Youth are seen as brazen, adventurous and decadent. They are unmanageable and impossible to control. Their defiance of authority turns them into a threat.

I couldn’t find this word used in any book on Goodreads but I found it in an essay:

“Sure, Grossberg says, all generations worry about the generations that come after them. But such media hyperboles, Grossberg says, reflect such a spike in ephebiphobia — the fear of teenagers — that Rolling Stone described today’s adolescents as the “most damaged and disturbed generation the country has ever produced.”-Cherry Crayton, Are We Down on Our Kids?

May 21, 2019
by Neelima
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