The Big Book Blog

Romance in its essence of literature encompasses accounts of chivalry and adventure. The youthful saga embracing bravery and courage, simultaneously combined in lyric and love has always been the 'go to' for most of us. From the adventurous mishaps of Gulliver and David Crusoe to the blooming romance between Romeo and Juliet, tarts of the masculine hero rescuing the princess locked in a tower guarded by a blood thirsty dragon- everything   collectively becomes the genre of romance. However, the romantic period brought in all notions embracing the individual 'I'- emotions and feelings and psyche mattered more than ever. An evening surrounded the Book Club with this quota of love. Love and romance from the borders of man and woman hunching a walk by the Eiffel Tower, the arena of self-love and acceptance, the affectionate crush among the school sweethearts to the modern assembling of the homosexual romance. We discussed a number of works in the broader genre of ...

It is the dream of every poet and writer for their work to be appreciated, and more so to be understood, through their works, among minds that think alike. The Book Club is such a platform, where readers and writers alike, join in various discussions that range from books to the world beyond them. The first book-club session of this year (2020) was less of a discussion, and more of a reading and sharing session. We all decided to share little snippets, and pieces of poetry that we had previously written. Some themes were dark, some were romantic, and some were even light and funny. A group of us sat around in a circle, at sunset, and read aloud some pieces that we had written from the depths of our imagination. Some pieces, we might have written for our eyes alone, but many of us found it comfortable to share them among these like-minded writers. One of our contributors had written a poem in Malayalam, which highlighted periods as the theme. She compared periods to a mansion...

The session was about self-help books and how to perceive them. The book in the spotlight was ‘How to win friends and influence people’ by Dale Carnegie. Disclaimer: Some people consider the ideas from this book to be manipulative. This is far from the truth. They are only manipulative if you make it so.  The book was written by Dale Carnegie in 1936.  In 2020, even after a century, the principles from the book are undeniable. Below are some of the concepts that we discussed in our session: Spotlight effect: Imagine there is a spotlight above you. When you are talking with a person about himself, the light falls over him. When you talk about yourself, the light falls over you. Your goal is to make sure that the spotlight stays on the other person.  People are interested to speak about themselves, but they are more interested in hearing what others think about them. Talk to them about themselves and they will never leave you. A person is more wor...

The sun had set in the western sky leaving streaks of crimson mingled with a bluish hue. The cool autumn breeze soothed our weary minds as we settled down to talk about the bookworm’s favorite Bond – Ruskin Bond. It is a name that rings a bell with almost every youngster in India starting from arguably his most popular book ‘The Room on the Roof’ to his short stories like ‘Tiger in the tunnel’ which are part of the English curriculum in most schools. With evening falling gently over our university campus putting nature at its most sublime beauty, what could be a better time to delve into the works of this master storyteller?     One of India’s most beloved writers, Ruskin Bond, an Englishman by descent, was born in Kasauli, India. A large part of his childhood was spent in Dehradun till, as a youth, he traveled to the Chanel Islands and London . Once he returned to India, he never left the country again. His deep love for this country is a big part of many of...

  We say time is the only resource that is distributed equally to everyone. Time does not show any partiality or discrimination. History can be said to be the time our world has once gone through. Around 13.5 billion years ago the big bang happened and the universe started expanding. That must be history.   The evolution of homo sapiens and ancient civilisations are also history.   But, what about a year or a month ago? What about yesterday or each passing moments of our life? Is that history or mere past? When history and fiction are mixed in the right proportion, great things happen. It could be a book, a movie, a poem or even a painting. We spent an evening discussing about these things. Our session started with the discussion on ‘Caging Skies’ by Christine Leunens. The novel tells the story of a boy who is a member of ‘Hitler Youth’ during World War II and has Adolf Hitler as an imaginary friend. The film ‘Jojo Rabbit’ was adapted from this book. Then ...

                    More often than not we find Indian authors being thrown into oblivion to make way for their international counterparts. Our childhood was mostly Enid Blyton and Nancy Drew rather than Sudha Murthy. But there had always been authors from the Indian subcontinent who had immensely breathtaking stories to share. Authors from our neighborhood had to take a hard road towards popularity, appreciation, and acceptance from around the globe. On account of that, the book club had a session named  'Desi Tadka', fully devoted to Indian writers and their writing style. We began with The Chetan Bhagat genre - filmy writing style and moved backward to Khushwant Singh, R K Narayan, Arundhati Roy, and Kamala Das, who had more serious themes.  There was also a short audio story session, where we listened to 'Khol Do', a very breathtaking short story by Sadat Hasan Mantro. The audio storytelling style is one with which mos...

Books and movies are my two loves. They open up a world of  imagination and storytelling. To me, book-to-movie is a literary form of art. Books and movies are two different medium. Books are verbal and use words to tell a story where films are visual and rely on the images to do the telling. ‘Which is better- books or movies?’ is an age old debate topic. As a person who loves to read books and watch movies, I have always felt that reading books is much better than watching movies. Reading books let you imagine the settings and incidents. It brings out the creativity in you. On the other hand movies skip out the details in book. Books will always be the best, but there are a few movies that take the cake compared to the text. From my personal experience, most book to movie adaptations tend to fall short in a lot of areas and take enormous creative liberties. However that being said, the most important part in an adaptation of a book for me is that the movie has to cap...

The desire to listen to stories were ever innate to human ears. Man, being a social animal, has always been interested in the whereabouts of the person next to them- experiences, trivial and incidental; made up fictions and truth; the unwrenched quest of a bearded traveler , to the top of a secret mountain and how yesterday Mr. Sam’s 102 years old grandmother made it back to life just in time.  I think this feature of man’s mind might have created the art of storytelling. A form that defined our oral traditions, were made legit into written records, into different genres that cherished our literature. One such genre, we took into our Book Club discussion was short stories. The short story as a genre, has been considered both an apprenticeship from preceding, more lengthy works, and a crafted form in its own right. It offers a single significant event to the readers, a minimalist  novel. It’s considered as a prose narrative “requiring from half an hour to one or two ho...

You may say people don’t read anymore. I’ll say that, in fact, the number of bookworms on the block is much higher than it used to be till a few years ago. The reason – simply a mind-boggling diversity of genres! While some may love crime thrillers, others may go for romantic paperbacks. While someone may relish fantasy, another may pick self-help books. Divided by tastes, albeit, they’re all united by one identity- readers! Our idea was to bring together different kinds of readers on a ‘common, non-judgmental, optimistic’ platform (as we advertised it) and talk about books and beyond. That’s how we came up with ‘The Book Club’ at Central University of Tamil Nadu . It all started on a Tuesday evening when around six of us settled down on the steps outside the multipurpose auditorium to talk about the last book that each of us had read. One thing led to another and soon we had a list of good-reads from various different genres. When we talk about our favorite things, we ma...