A suitable book

"No one ever talks to anyone in our family, we just exchange brilliances."

A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth, is a terrific book, with sympathetic characters and set during a fascinating historical period. At about 2000 pages, it took me a little less than six months to read (while life went on, and yes, I've been reading other books during that whole time).

She was used to rereading her letters a dozen times, examining for days from every possible angle some remark that someone had made to someone else about something that someone had though that someone had almost done.

Mostly it's a story about Lata, and her family's attempts to find her a suitable boy to marry. Much of the rest of the time it's about her extended family and their acquaintances. And all these domestic scenes — romantic troubles, and financial worries, and career choices — are interspersed with chronicles of the legal and procedural difficulties of recently independent, post-Partition India.

In this way it's similar in structure to War and Peace. And yes, I did skim through some of the technicalities regarding land ownwership, just as I'd skimmed through some of Tolstoy's battlefield descriptions. Not because they're not interesting. But at some point it's too much, it becomes numbing.

But, never mind. This is a minor quibble. Because mostly, until it's too much, it's very interesting.

The physical and emotional centre of War and Peace, I always felt, is Natasha's dance, where she assumes her Russianness. Also the hunt scene, the connection to the land on which Russia is built. I find it interesting that similar scenes should occur in A Suitable Boy. There is a dance, only it's a tango; Lata throws off some of her Indianness to embrace modernity. Arguably she remains of a traditional mindset, but I think this scenes sees her come into her own, be in herself. The wolf hunt has none of Tolstoy's majesty; it's pathetic, but also significant in terms of the people's relationship to the land.

Seth's writing is simply lovely.

Mrs. Rupa Mehra was confirmed in her opinion that Meenakshi was extremely odd. To steel yourself against mangoes showed a degree of iciness that was almost inhuman.

It's funny and emotional. There's music and Shakespeare, love and death, shoe factories and Hindu festivals.

It's as if he didn't exist, thought Maan — as if he's in purdah. I've heard of him but I've never seen Him — like the women of the family. I suppose they exist as well. Or perhaps they don't. Perhaps all women are just a rumour.

Jo Walton wrote a great review on Tor.com, and made this interesting observation:

Seth is writing for an anglophone audience but he doesn't hold your hand and explain everything. Nor does he throw you in at the deep end to sink. There's a very well done structure of explanation that will feel very familiar to a science fiction reader. He sometimes explains things, but he doesn't keep on doing it, and he sometimes just gives enough context that you can work it out. The whole way he uses exposition and incluing is very smooth and very much like what we're used to in genre. India in 1950 isn't as unfamiliar a world as Arrakis or Annares, except where it's weirder and even less familiar.

Also cricket and literature ("He's just a writer, he knows nothing at all about literature."). And tragedy, personal and national. The political campaign trail. Family secrets. Near-murder.

It has a lot.

Along one wall of the bus, the following message was painted in a murderous scarlet" Do not travel when drunk or with a loaded gun. But it said nothing about goats, and there were several in the bus.

Several actual historical events are woven into the narrative, for example, the 1954 Kumbh Mela stampede as well as religious riots and various political goings-on.

Mahesh Kapoor did not know either the Hindi or the English names of the birds and flowers that surrounded him, but perhaps in his present state of mind he enjoyed the garden more truly for that. It was his only refuge, and a nameless, wordless one, with birdsong its only sound — and it was dominated, when he closed his eyes, by the least intellectualizable sense — that of scent.

I'm glad to have read it. Yet, I couldn't help wishing it was a little bit shorter. (I might've preferred to read in one intensely immersive burst, rather than pace it over an extended period for the sake of a readalong with others.) Still, I miss it, and I'll be looking for the sequel. Publication of A Suitable Girl is currently slated for 2016.

What is tango?

"Tango?" said Mrs Rupa Mehra in alarm. "What is tango?"

"Bye, Ma," said Meenakshi. "Tango. A dance. We're going the Golden Slipper. Nothing to worry about. There's just a large crowd and a band and dancing."

"Abandoned dancing!" Mrs Rupa Mehra could hardly believe her ears.

— from A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth.

(I'm only about a third of the way through the book, but the number of pages is alarmingly high — easily the equivalent of two average novels.)

Part seven with all its parties and socializing has been particularly delightful. Lots of clever repartee, and throwaway lines like, "He's just a writer, he knows nothing at all about literature."

Weight, comfort, inevitability

Lata went for poetry. On the way, however, she paused by the science shelves, not because she understood much science, but, rather, because she did not. Whenever she opened a scientific book and saw whole paragraphs of incomprehensible words and symbols, she felt a sense of wonder at the great territories of learning that lay beyond her — the sum of so many noble and purposive attempts to make objective sense of the world. She enjoyed the feeling; it suited her serious moods; and this afternoon she was feeling serious. She picked up a random book and read a random paragraph:

It follows form De Moivres's formula that zⁿ = rⁿ (cos n + i sin n). Thus if we allow complex number z to describe a circle of radius r about the origin, zⁿ will describe n complete times a circle of radius rⁿ as z describes its circle once. We also recall that r, the modules of z, written |z|, gives the distance of z from O, and that if z'=x'+iy', then |z-z'| is the distance between z and z'. With these preliminaries we may proceed to the proof of the theorem.

What exactly it was that pleased her in these sentences she did not know, but they conveyed weight, comfort, inevitability. [...]

She read the paragraph again, looking serious. "We also recall" and "with these preliminaries" drew her into a compact with the author of these verities and mysteries. The words were assured, and therefore reassuring: things were what they were even in this uncertain world, and she could proceed from there.

— from A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth.

No resolution

In 2013 I read approximately 50 books. Some were very long, and some were very short. I say approximately because some were so short it doesn't quite seem fair to count them. And it depends if you count all three parts of the trilogies that were packaged as single volumes. And there's the book I mostly reread, cuz I was looking for something and got sucked in, but I didn't count it because I skipped a few pages here and there. And then I included something I read for work and not for fun. And I'm too lazy to make a decision about these things and go back and count them properly. I read approximately 14,000 pages (why, yes, I did keep track). I say approximately because some page counts include endpapers and other book matter, and given the wide variety of material I read, one cannot establish a standard page. Also, about a third of my reading was e-reading.

About a book a week. That's about normal for me for the last several years. About 38 pages a day. That's not likely to ever change much, as that's just how much time there is in a day. Good for me. As for people who continue to say they don't have time to read: whatever.

My very favourite book that I read in 2013 was Kate Atkinson's Life after Life.

To everyone who visits my humble little blog, cheers! I just uncovered a slew of comments I was previously unaware of, made mostly via Google+, I think. I didn't mean to ignore you, I just didn't know you were there.

Random Things

How awful was The Time of the Doctor? Taking shortcuts in all the wrong places in favour of overly drawn-out sentimentality. And a bunch of it was just dumb (see this review, for example).

The article "How Do E-Books Change the Reading Experience?" demonstrates how people continue to conflate content with form. One of the contributors writes, "E-reading opens the door to distraction." Get a little self-discipline, I say.

I started a self-paced MOOC back in December, User Experience for the Web, mostly for work-related reasons but also because I'm kind of hooked on the MOOC concept. I'm determined to finish it in the next couple days, and I plan to report on the experience here.

Started playing Psychonauts with the kid. It's no Grim Fandango, but it's fun, and it does take me back... (to a simpler time? a previous life?).

I am reading A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth, with a few people. A very big book. A coworker and I had drawn up a reading schedule — we're slated to finish by May. I was a couple weeks late getting started, but now I find myself pulling ahead. It's really wonderful — soap-opera-y and political. I was delighted to find that it is being read by dovegreyreader and company, so there are some resources for us to fall back on.