What would Frida say

I recently came across this poem:

FRIDA TO MARTY MCCONNELL

Leaving is not enough; you must
stay gone. Train your heart
like a dog. Change the locks
even on the house he’s never
visited. You lucky, lucky girl.
You have an apartment
just your size. A bathtub
full of tea. A heart the size
of Arizona, but not nearly
so arid. Don’t wish away
your cracked past, your crooked
toes; your problems
are papier mache puppets
you made or bought
because the vendor was so
compelling you just
had to have them. You had
to have him. And you did.
And now you pull down
the bridge between your houses.
You make him call before
he visits. You take a lover
for granted, you take
a lover who looks at you
like maybe you are magic. Make
the first bottle you consume
in this place a relic. Place it
on whatever altar you fashion
with a knife and five cranberries.
Don’t lose too much weight.
Stupid girls are always trying
to disappear as revenge. And you
are not stupid. You loved a man
with more hands than a parade
of beggars, and here you stand. Heart
like a four-poster bed. Heart like a canvas.
Heart leaking something so strong
they can smell it in the street.

***
— Marty McConnell

I had a vague sense of deja vu, as if I was reading the wrong peom, and then I remembered this:

FRIDA TO SHARANYA

Sleep wherever is most convenient for you.
Whoever and whatever is left in the morning,
take home. Be kind. All the world is yours for
the taking, long as you know that your little heart is
theirs for the breaking. Leave lipstick on their
china and on your letters. Make sure they know
that you’re a mariposa, blue as copper sulphate,
or blue as the sea, blue as a baby stilled too soon,
darling wench, and you never really intend to leave.
Set love free like a boat with neither oars nor anchors.
Trust it. Don’t trust yourself. Accept every familiar
that comes, even if one happens to be a goat. Forgive
less of people. Remember that things come in triptychs.
Be magnificent, like Coatlicue. You only owe it to me,
but break a mirror now and then, if you can afford it.
Kiss as much as you want to, and as few. Be difficult.
It will make you more desirable. If it will help you to
let him go, cut off your hands. They will grow back.
You don’t need them. You don’t need him. The older
you grow, the more you will amputate. Dance on stumps
if you have to, but don’t stop. Wear one item of red
every Wednesday and when death comes for you,
you will go as his bride. Burn every bridge you ever
built, and build as many as you possibly can. The one
that takes you home will be the last one standing.
Sing over the bones. Go slow.
Don’t forget me.

***
— Sharanya Manivannan

 

The lesson is clear. In times of heartbreak – of any kind – ask yourself: “What would Frida say?” and proceed accordingly.

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Go-to authors

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#justread #reading

Note: I might keep updating this post, so if you don’t care to see the updates, just ignore it if it pops up on your reader.

I just finished reading Michael Lewis’s Flash Boys, which is basically about high frequency trading on the stock exchanges. I highly reccommend this book if you want to understand some of the terms that are bandied about in relation to the stock market, such as HFT and algorithms. And if you want to understand what went down in the 2008 financial crisis, The Big Short, which is now a movie, is the go-to book. Lewis has a way of laying out these complicated topics in a way that is engaging, but also lucidly explanatory. The interesting thing about the HFT development is not so much that essentially they thrive on unfair access to market information, with several big banks colluding, not how not transparent the market is, more so since the 2008 financial crisis, not even that they thrive on speed, but that while our common perception is that the stock market has become a virtual mumbo jumbo of computers and formulae – in effect, virtual – it turns out that to achieve this, they had to go back to basics. To wires and cabes and switches and digging trenches in the ground to achieve those extra microseconds that would give them the market advantage. That even the virtual comes down to what the poet Gertrude Stein called, the thingness of things.

And that while we nowadays think of Wall Street as full of big bad wolves, in this jungle, there are some outliers and sometimes even the big banks can become forces for good. Heh. It strikes me now that even the last book, The Big Short, was about mavericks who had some sort of moral fibre mixed in with the moneymaking.

After finishing Flash Boys, I began to think about how Michael Lewis was now an author whose work I would read just because it is written by him and bound to be good. And I thought about which other authors have this status in my book. For example, as much as I love Pride and Prejudice and count it among my favourite books, I have never been able to read another Austen novel – though I am determined to persist with Sense and Sensibility. Here is my list of authors whose work I pick up on spec:

1. Salman Rushdie: I have read almost everything by Salman Rushdie and enjoyed almost everything except East/West *(non-fiction), Fury, and the Ground Beneath Her Feet (which I ditched halfway through and must return to someday). The lesson from the two I didn’t read is that I prefer his novels that are primarily set in India and do the magical realism thing.
2. Anuja Chauhan: Chick Lit writer extraordinaire and never fails to disappoint. I have reread her novels with satisfaction and basically she features heavily in my PhD so no surprise there.
3. Helen Fielding: Well, Bridget Jones’s Diaray is my gospel, so. But I even liked that Olivia Joules novel that noone else did. And I want to buy it. When I have bookshelf enough and time.
4. Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan: This one is a surprise to even me (though she too features heavily in my PhD) but I have enjoyed everything she writes and will buy anything new she comes out with. I surprisingly loved even the YA book.
5. Allison Weir: I read these fictionalised Tudor histories (she is a historian so she is drawing on propositions in Tudor scholarship and tend to be grounded in fact).
6. Sophie Kinsella: Admittedly, even the Shopaholic series is beginning to annoy me now (Becky really needs to show some growth) but I’d wager I’d still pick up anything by her. Though I’m uninterested in her Madeleine Wickham stuff.
7. JK Rowling: I even loved the Casual Vacancy and her detective series under the Robert Galbraith pseudonym. I draw the line at all the Beedle and Bard spin-off stuff though.
8. Michael Cunningham: I have read two of his novels – The Hours (which counts as one of my favourites of all time, as well as the movie) and By Nightfall (which I borrowed in lieu of something else by him that was recommended and that I couldn’t find, and which I ended up loving) – and I’m pretty sure I’d love anything else by him, though I have not actually gone out looking for it.
9. Rainbow Rowell: I wrote about her here.

Authors I will read only a specific series of:

9. Indu Sundaresan: Any of her history books. Similarly, I loved Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni’s Palace of Illusions but I don’t feel inspired to pick up any of her other books.
10. Janet Evanovich: The Stephanie Plum series. Even when they get repetitive, I will follow this one through to the end. But I’ve tried and failed to get engaged in the other series.
11. Hilary Mantel: The Cromwell Trilogy. Although it is obvious she’s a very fine writer, I don’t feel particularly desirous of reading her other stuff. Though I might.
12. Patricia Cornwell: Kay Scarpetta series. I have tried the others and they failed to captivate me. Even the Scarpetta series has gone tired, but I am still caught up with the characters.

Who are your go-to authors?

 

Elena

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When I read Elena Ferrante’s novels, I feel like my nerves are on edge, like I’m in a world of complicity, that they are – through strangers in a strange land – saying what I feel, telling my story. For the one and a half day or so it takes me to inhale the novel, I am in a fog, emerging only reluctantly to the ‘real’ world. V senses this, maybe I get a certain look, and he gets angsty. This too mirrors the world of the novels.

I was predisposed to like Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. Books about the strong bond between two girls – it sounds quotidian like this, but I know from experience that it is always more – sign me up.

But it was The Story of a New Name – which ironically is the story of an old name, the names that both girls keep – that really swallowed me. My Brilliant Friend seems almost like backstory, the childhood of poverty and the family and neighbourhood connections that made these women who they are. I did not love the writing, which I suspected would be better in the original Italian. There were powerful sentiments in that novel and the writing conveyed it, despite itself.

[spoilers alert]

The Story of a New Name yanked me in from the start. I’m glad it began where My Brilliant Friend ended – at Lila’s wedding. As we learn what happened to her in excruciating detail, I have flashbacks of my own. No, I was not beaten bloody on my wedding night, but I did have a similar sense of disconnection, this idea that the one one had chosen for stability, for being different, after a heady and charmed courtship that only soured towards the date, was more of the same and the only way to cope, was to detach emotionally if not physically.

Which one am I? is the obvious question, the question a female reader would ask, a tradition at least as long as Little Women, a book Lila and Lena too discovered and that triggered their ambition to write themselves to a better place. The two girls are distinct and yet their names lend themselves to blurring. Lila is Lila only to Lena; she is Lina to everyone else, just as Lena is Lenu.

I identify with Lila’s cold rages more than Lenu’s self doubt. But overall, I’d say I’d identify with Lenu, the bookish wallflower who slowly discovers her place in the world. I’m not sure I had a longstanding Lila. I did have one friend who would qualify in terms of both looks and impetuosity if not intelligence (Lila is a prodigy). In a sense, it is both their intelligence and their emotional complexity that defines the two girls.

In the matter of love, I am more Lila. Lenu stays with and makes out (for want of a better word since they significantly did not have sex) with Antonio although she considers him her inferior. She likes and is attracted to him but balks at committing to him forever. Been there done that.

But Lenu has her sights on the cultivated, intellectual type symbolised by Nino, and it has always puzzled me how I do not share this attraction. From early on, I saw Nino for the self/absorbed brooding intellectual male that he is and hoped Lenu would not pursue him. I was almost relieved that he met his match in Lila, though I empathised (somewhat) with Lenu. Why she didn’t just tell Lila early on or even a bit later what her feelings were is one of my frustrations with her, but I guess that’s how people are. They don’t always do the logical thing and sometimes the face-saving gesture turns into quicksand. But apart from disliking the arrogance and essential selfishness of the intellectual male type, I’m also rarely attracted to that type at a baser sexual level. It’s like a mind body split with me. Or maybe at some level I’m just scared of a competition I will lose and prefer to be the admiree not the admirer in love?

Like Lila in her choice of Stefano, I tend to choose the classically masculine and seemingly safe type. That this safety does not always last is probably part of the package and our (Lila and my) outsized drama at its crumbling is also of a piece.

I am all about female friendships and yet I have only once had that kind of intense singular bond with a woman. Maybe the intensity of it is why I have usually deflect the possibility of such relationships with women, because the potential heartbreak so much more searing.

The thing that set me apart from these characters is of course their poverty. The book makes the reader identify with Lenu and so with her struggles to make it through the upper middle class milieu or academia. Her realisation is of lacking what Pierre Bourdieu called the cultural capital of the middle class; her experience is akin to that described by Dalit students in India, the feeling that no matter how hard you try, you lack something undefinable that is essential to success. Ironically, the reader would have to be of the privileged class, just to be reading the book.

This book engulfed me so totally that having digested and spat me out, my nerves tingling, I’m actually holding back from reading the next one. For one day at least.

So The Goldfinch

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These are scattered thoughts, not a review

1. Overall, I liked it.
2. I like books about art, so I was prone to like it. The artwork at the centre of the book by a little know artist, a painting I would have otherwise looked at and gone meh. But the characters in the book read so much significance into it, which is exactly what art does. It’s the details, the more you look at it, that you realize the thing is not the obvious thing but a spark something else (yeah, I’m being articulate here). But apart from that, how the book set up that one painting as a touchstone – or keystone as Theo calls it – speaks so much to the idea of the art object as fetish.
3. The book is also a bildungsroman and I’m a sucker for that too. It’s been compared to Dickens (well, Great Expectations I guess), but I’m not a fan of Dickens – sacrilegiously, I don’t think I’ve read an entire Dickens novel ever although I’ve read the abridged versions as a kid so I feel like I have (and maybe I will remedy that). I thought it was more Cacther in the Rye in spirit, what with the precocious New York boys and all.
4. That said, why does Donna Tartt seem to always have male protagonists? (oh wait, I realize the middle book doesn’t). I wasn’t a great fan of The Secret History. I hated all the characters in that book. The protagonist was tolerable but just about; it was never clear to me why he was so enamored of the others. Even the horrible thing they did was pretty obvious. There’s a better book about girls obsessed with their Latin teacher with a deep dark mystery that I read. Maybe because it has girls, and their feelings and motivations and characters are better drawn.
5. People have said they didn’t like anyone in this book either, but I liked Theo (mostly) and even Boris and definitely Andy. In fact, I disliked Theo the most when he chose not to call Andy when he came to New York.
6. There is a point at which, however, the book just gets to be too much. Like okay all literature from the 20^th C onwards is bound to be miserable, but the rollercoaster that is Theo’s life just got to me at some point. Every time things seemed to be settling down, bam! another crisis. At one point, I couldn’t take it any longer and turned to Wikipedia for a plot summary, which at least tided me through one of the crises that pained me the most. After all that, the book came as close to a happy ending as a 21^st C novel with literary pretensions will allow so I guess that’s some consolation.
7. There seems to be debate about whether the book is literature or not. This is always a sticky question, but I guess if Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom is, then why not this? Though, yes, as someone has pointed out, some of the metaphors (the moon one) for example are trite, and I did think that stream of consciousness parts could not hold a candle to the greats of that style – Woolf, Joyce, or even Allen Ginsberg.
8. One reviewer on goodreads.com said that if it’s possible for a book to give one PSTD, then this one did it for her. I won’t say the book traumatized me, but it was hard going in parts, mainly because so much happens to the same person. The story and characters will, however, stay with me, so there’s that.

S is for Sue Grafton

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#books #kindle #reading

I recently finished all 25 of the Sue Grafton’s alphabet titled detective stories, starring the female detective Kinsey Milhone. After three years of reading almost nothing unrelated to my PhD – even the chick lit was read with an analytical mind and anything not related was read with latent guilt – reading something as innocuous as not one, not two, but two dozen detective stories was like a luxury that I had to keep pinching myself about. I had promised that I would not just read light stuff, but literary stuff – well that would happen anyway – but also academic stuff. Right now, though, I seem to be basking in the frivolous, if one can call crime that.

These are not the most ingeniously plotted narratives – I could guess what happened at the end of more than a few, especially as I went deeper into the series. There are long descriptions that one could just skip – what she saw and how she felt while running (I actually liked this because she seemed to describe my own sentiment while running so perfectly). More tedious are the detailed descriptions of Santa Teresa landmarks (initially I appreciate the sense of place, and then it wore on a bit too much) and worse the landscape and geography, but hey, she’s got to fill pages.

One part of the appeal are the characters – Kinsey, her neighbour Henry, the feisty restaurant owner Rosie and the other members of her surrogate family. There are slowly progressing plotlines such as Kinsey discovering more of her own family history and her relationships with men. As the series progresses, Grafton gets more experimental in her writing – nothing pomo, but I could see she was trying new things. From telling the story only from Kinsey’s perspective, she introduces multiple perspectives and also chronological leaps back and forth. I must say that I preferred the parts that focused on Kinsey, though in the very last book, I did like the multiple perspectives.

I believe Grafton had some biases. She described people’s body weight in detail, and often the fat ones didn’t turn out to be nice. Pearl in the last couple of books is an exception. I also recall that when there were gay people in the book, they ended up being baddies. Maybe I’m nitpicking, but hey I kind of almost have a doctorate in that.

Ultimately, the appeal of the detective genre – as opposed to crime thriller –  is that despite the crime and the potential for mayhem, the world rights itself. The detective by solving the mystery restores order to the world. That is subliminal satisfaction of the genre. That is why I found it so comforting to read at a tumultuous time in my life.

[MILD SPOILERS ALERT]

If I had to pick a favourite, I’d say the Y book – though maybe because it’s most fresh in my mind, but I also liked the high school setting and drama. I liked the ending of the X book best. I loved the romance in the book in which she and Dietz get together.

Grafton died before she could finish the last Z book in the series, which is a shame. I believe she would have tied up some loose ends in that final book. By the Y book, Kinsey was financially secure. She had come to terms with, if not completely embraced, the idea of having some blood-relations. The chick lit enthusiast and auntyji in me of course wants to see her settled down. Because of the way Y was set up, I’d put my money on her landing up with Cheney. I wouldn’t have minding Dietz, but somehow I don’t think that would have happened. Actually, any of the three men in Kinsey’s life would be fine by me. I would also liked to see Henry get together with Pete Wolinsky’s widow Ruthie.

Kindling

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So I got a Kindle.

I am not one of those who objected to the device on the basis for some nostalgia for the printed page, though there is that. There is a tactile pleasure to holding a book, and I think it’s important especially for kids.

However, I do have access to good libraries in Hong Kong where I can get books for free. Much as I like the idea of bookshops, I cannot afford them at the pace at which I read. V was not on board with the idea of a Kindle because he felt that I could use an ipad and then the device could be used by other people too. So I shrugged and moved on.

Then on Nene’s birthday we landed up in Sham Shui Po which is this secondhand mecca for anything and everything including electronics. I had a cold and at some point came home, while Nene and V stayed on to browse random stuff. While dozing off, I got a message from V: “Did something I hope I’m not going to regret.” “What? Did you buy more fish?” was my reply. Everything time V goes out to get something small for our fish tank, he comes back with a bag of fish, most of which do not survive.

Turns out it was a Kindle. And of course he regretted it.

Because from that day on, I started reading non-stop. Which is perfectly normal for anyone who knows me, but without the Kindle I was hampered by a number of little things that the Kindle has sorted out:

1. Access to books: Yes, I have two library systems in relatively easy reach, but the Kindle books are even closer. I’ll admit I have not bought a single book yet. I have dipped into a friend’s not-so-secret stash. I will buy certain books, but frankly if I was not on the Kindle, I’d be reading through the library so I’m not a physical book customer lost.

2. Weight: The Kindle is so easy to slip into even my smaller handbags. I can carry a tome like The Goldfinch around without any issues (one of the reasons I haven’t gotten around to reading that book is because of the size).

3. Reading at bedtime: The built-in light technology is a lifesaver. The reason reading on the ipad did not work out is because a) the ipad is heavy, but more crucially b) it gave me a headache. With physical books, I had tried those little lights you can attach to your book, but they were never entirely comfortable. The Kindle means I can indulge in my favourite bedtime pursuit without hassles.

4. Bingereading: I just queue up book after book, thereby leaving less time for dealing with my own emotions for example. Of course, this is exactly what V feared. On a positive note, I look at my phone and scroll aimlessly on Facebook less. Not that that’s of much consolation to those who need my attention.

The first book I read was Jilly Cooper’s Jump, which was quite bad. Jilly Cooper’s horse series are not high literature by any stretch, but the first few had engaging characters and of course lots of horsey action. This one, though, was just all over the place. Nevertheless, it was a good fit was the very busy period in which I read it, because I wasn’t that into it and could go back to work when needed.

Now I’m immersed in Sue Grafton’s alphabet series, which is perfect for my mood. They are not 100% gripping but gripping enough as detective series go. I like the matter-of-fact tone and I love the central character Kinsey Milhone. There are so many of her character traits I identify with – the need to protect oneself from attachments to other people, the running without joy but out of a sense of necessity, the unrepentant love of junk food, the love of small, cozy spaces to name a few. I also had the hots of Dietz, especially in the first book that he appeared. The mysteries themselves sometimes had holes in them – P for Peril was the worst – but I can live with that. I was sad to hear that Sue Grafton passed away before she could complete the series.

I know that the Kindle pro and con debate is an old one, but what do you think? Yay or nay?

 

 

Some Rainbow love

I’ve been wanting to read Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell for oh about three years but when I finally got hold of her couple of her books they were her adult fiction. I enjoyed them and was pretty sure the book that made her reputation would be better. 

Somehow I could never get my hands on a library copy though. 

Then suddenly, I spotted Fangirl in the kids section of all places. I grabbed it and ditched one of the picture books I’d picked out for the kids. V rolled his eyes at me. 

And I loved it. This book goes on my virtual must read (again) bookshelf. It’s nothing profound, but just the quirkiness of the characters and the authenticity of the experience (the disorientation of freshmen year in a college dorm if youre an introvert) itself. There’s also the whole wanting to be a writer part, loving, nay needing to write that I identified with. And  And certain kinds of writing not being given due credit.  Then there’s the sisterhood conflict and that always gets me. But what really got to me was the fact that she had two other books going on in that story – excerpts from the Simon Snow fantasy series (a thinly veiled Harry Potteresque phenomenon) and the fanfic that the main character – the Fangirl of the title – writes. Whatever one feels about YA  a genre it’s takes some writing chops to do that. 

Then I read Eleanor and Park. I enjoyed it, a sweet teenage love story, an interesting even original one that is also about being a misfit, but I didn’t love it as much as Fangirl. Read both, I’d say. 

Bookish

I have finally conceded that the house is overflowing with books, and after giving away many of the children’s, it’s time for the ultimate sacrifice of giving up my own. I could ship some to the in-laws’ – god knows, they have space – but something in me balks.

Instead, I cull through my collection and see what I can sacrifice. Books I know I will not reread. This is the barbarity of Hong Kong and it’s shocking 10,000$ a square foot.

I post on an FB page for circulating books. I don’t have much hope because these pages are peopled by expats who think Central is all of Hong Kong. But miraculously someone replies. She lives a few stations away from me.

We have a little exchange over messenger. It is charming. She offers me some books in exchange. Although accepting would defeat the purpose, I can’t resist. To accept would be defeating the purpose. That little conversation made me smile. It made me think how this is how one could make friends – though of course I don’t want new friends, no sir. We, two perfect strangers, bonded over books.

We did the exchange the next morning. It was quick, no further chat. A little disappointing, but nevermind. As I said, I don’t have space for new friends. But for a fleeting moment, that feeling. There are people out there who get it.

***

I gave away three books and landed up with four. They were just what I needed over a long weekend filled with silence.

1. Landline by Rainbow Rowell: I have wanted to read Eleanor and Park for the longest time. But I guess this was the book I needed to read right now, even if it was somewhat romanticized. A marriage filled with resentment. This line:
   

   When Georgie thought about divorce now, she imagined lying side by side with Neal on two operating tables while a team of doctors tried to unthread their vascular systems.

2. The Expatriates by Janice Lee: Another one I’ve wanted to read for ages, but with the PhD I have never had the time. I probably still don’t. But right now I needed to lose myself in something. The Expatriates is about the kind of expat I am not, the rich ones. But it is set in Hong Kong and so recognizable. I have a thing about collecting books from places I’m tied to. This one I will keep.
3. The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver: I had heard about the Poisonwood Diaries, but somehow never felt compelled to read it. This one drew me in because of Frida and Diego. The lady who gave it to me said she gave up before it got to the Frida part. I’ve got to the Frida part, and it’s pretty good.

Diana Vreelanding

I must confess, I was more familiar with Diana Vreeland’s name and her association with Vogue than anything more substantial about her. Nevertheless, her memoir DV sounded right up my alley.

Unfortunately, I was not. First of all, it’s more anecdotes and free-flowing thoughts as narrated to an interlocutor than an organised reflection. And then some of the thoughts were too bratty and posh for even my high tolerance level for that sort of thing. By the end of it though, I warmed to her style (while setting aside my misgivings over the politics, such as her assertion on the place of women etc) but still felt I had not really got a complete picture of her life or contribution to fashion.

Diana Vreeland – Empress of Fashion cured all that. It is a fabulous book, not just painting the portrait of an extraordinary person whose genius is evident only in a fragmented way in DV. Amanda Mackenzie Stuart puts Diana into the context of her time, a time when some women were highly educated but most were essentially powerless and when fashion offered and still offers a real-world domain in which women can wield power. For Vreeland, it was more about creativity than power. Her social connections got her a job, and thereafter she ran with it and became an influencer.

Throughout the biography, this strain of self-creation runs through. Vreeland invented herself from material that she had been told since childhood was substandard. Her mother flat out considered her the unworthy ugly child, and she coped by deciding that she’d fulfil her own fantasy of swanhood. And she did, partly by extending that fantasy outward to the whole world. She remained a relevant force in the fashion world well into latter years too. Sacked from Vogue, she was granted a position at the Costume Institute of the Met and she ran with that and reinvented it too.

While reading the book, I realised I was not really familiar with American fashion of the 30s-late 50s period, and I started Googling the names mentioned in the book and the images are so inspiring.

Dress by designer Claire McCardell

Dress by Mainbocher

Photo by Richard Avedon

Photos by Louise Dahl-Wolfe

Book passovers

Nishita had this list up on books she’s not sure she wants to read that made me think on similar lines. Here’s my list:

Books I’m going to pass on

1. The Luminaries: Borrowed this with great enthusiasm, found it too heavy – both in actual weight and content – gave up on it. It’s supposed to be awesome, but I think because it didn’t grip me from the start, I couldn’t be bothered to lug around the book and I wonder if I ever will be.
2. The Lord of the Rings series: Tried, failed, tried again by getting hands on the each part of the trilogy in separate books, failed again. Tried to watch the movie. Watched a bit. Interest died.
3. Russian authors of the 19^th century: Just can’t seem to get into them. Sad but true. I’m holding out for Anna Karenina but not very hopefully.
4. Anything by Charles Dickens: I’ve read the abridged versions so much so that I convinced myself I had read Great Expectations. Can’t find it in me to plod through the originals now. Like Thomas Hardy, Dickens is someone I would have read – and probably enjoyed unlike Hardy – had I been forced too in lit class. Now it’s too late.
5. The Hunger Games: I’m not into reading fantasy anyway, and I discovered the movies first, loved them, developed huge crush on JLaw and can’t be bothered to read the books.
6. Wuthering Heights: I feel I should read this as a counterpoint to Pride and Prejudice, but it all seems so grim.

Book I am determined to read

• Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red: The idea of this book seems awesome – a murder mystery based in the world of miniature painting. Everyone says it’s awesome. Why can’t I feel the same way? I don’t know. I’ve started and stopped numerous times, found myself fascinated by miniature painting from the parts I read, tried to convince myself it’s a book that should be read in stints when a cousin visited and finished it in two days flat. Now it’s been so long since I last dipped into it, I know that I’m going to have to start from the beginning all over again and that is not an appetizing thought.

However, I take solace in the fact that the same thing happened with Love in the Time of Cholera and suddenly, I happened to pick it up at the right time (for me) and now it’s one of my favourites ever. Heh.

• The Fault in Our Stars: Because MinCat.

Actually, there are loads of books, even edifying books, great literature and all that, that I’ve passed on. Life’s too short and there are too many books to read. Why waste time on those that don’t really hold you? Same with people, I guess.

What are your passovers?