the pencil reads

I love the opening paragraph.

There was once, in the country of Alifbay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name. It stood by a mournful sea full of glumfish, which were so miserable to eat that they made people blech with melancholy even though the skies were blue.

Rushdie wrote this story for his 10 year-old son while he was in exile. The characters are quite extraordinary -- perhaps similar to the characters Alice meets when she falls through the looking glass in Alice in Wonderland . The story line is unique too. It is a quest to save the power of stories and imagination.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories is also an allegory of the Kashmir dispute. Rushdie openly champions the freedom of speech in this story in the fight between Gup and Chup. It is the story of light against darkness, speech against silence, and in the midst of this, Rushdie also pokes fun at hierarchcy, political figures and the election process.

Perhaps I've been spoiled by Tolkien. Rushdie's story-telling doesn't come near the fluidity and power of Tolkien's prose. Nevertheless, it was an entertaining read.

Two days. That was how long this third book in Pratchett's Discworld series took. This one didn't have Rincewind or Twoflower or the luggage in it, and it was a great read, the best so far, actually. It was kinda nice not to have the bumbling ill-fated Rincewind but instead have a precocious eight-year old and a fiesty granny witch against the entire wizardry establishment at Unseen University.

Anyway, this one is funny. Find it in a library close to you here.

Found this second book in the series more enjoyable than the first, maybe because I finally got the hang of all the strange physics and specialised terminology of the discworld.

Terry Pratchett's humour is very visual -- a lot of elbows in stomachs and quick dialogue. Someone should make his work into a movie. I have a hunch that it may work as a movie.


In other news, Pratchett voices his annoyance about an article in Time that said that Rowling didn't even know she was writing fantasy. Here is Pratchett's definition of fantasy in a speech given at the Carnegie Awards.

East, West is a collection of short stories by Salman Rushdie, author of the controversial book The Satanic Verses.

Did you know that Rushdie is married (for the fourth time) to Padma Lakshmi, a very sexy Indian model? See her photos here and tell me she is not gorgeous. How did Rushdie pull that off? I guess intellectual men have their own appeal. Or perhaps men on the death row by Islam... Ha!

Anyway, back to the book, the stories are grouped in three sections: those set in the East, those set in the West, and those with an infusion of both. In the East section, there is the story of a young jaunty woman at the British immigration who deliberately messed up her chances for a visa. In the West section, there is "At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers", a pretty damning piece of social commentary. The last story "Courter" was really quite sweet -- the Aya of the story and the courting Grandmaster porter won my heart.

After reading this collection, I realised that my idea of East-West relations may be somewhat naive. I relate easily to this passage:

Or was it that her heart, roped by two different loves,was being pulled both East and West, whinnying and rearing, like those movie horses being yanked this way by Clark Gable and that way by Montgomery Clift, and she knew that to live she would have to choose? (209)

But I don't anything about the assasination of Indira Ghandi by her two Sikh bodyguards, or the insidous side of colonialism. I would like to read up more on both of these topics. Meanwhile, the next book by Rushdie I would like to read is Haroun and the Sea of Stories.