Skip to main content

Book Memory #1 : Jurassic Park

Today, Tanu Shree Singh, the owner of the Readers' group I belong to, Senior Reading Raccoons, asked us all what our pet peeve was relating to books.

She wittily listed a few pet peeves that were likely to bother us. Little was she to know it would trigger off a tsunami of  book memories from me. So I took myself off the thread and started writing on my blog here.

Good Book Memory # 1: My dad had just come back from a trip to Los Angeles. It was 1994. As always I looked forward to his return not just for his presence, but also the presents, the greedy 17-year old that I was! :P

He had bought Jurassic Park - Part 1, the book. I was in Class 11. It was a rainy day and I was lying in bed in the rambling bungalow we lived in then. The environs and mood matched that of the book. I was completely gripped by the T-rex that chased velociraptors in the rain. When I  went back to school, I remember narrating this to my friends, captivated.

I also saw the movie, but I had already imagined it in my head and my imagination had done a pretty good job. Our school took us for the movie once. I also went to Delhi and saw the movie with my grandmom, uncle and family. I saw it once with friends in Chennai, too.

So this book was pretty special to me.

Now comes the bad part: I lent the book to a friend. She lent it to a gang of her friends, without once checking with me, and I never got it back! It still hurts!


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

My Book Review of 'Bitch Goddess for Dummies'

Recently, I attended a zoom session on chick lit by the Chennai Lockdown Literary Festival (CLLF). In the session, one of the speakers was Maya Sharma Sriram. I was so impressed with the way she conducted the session and answered the questions that I decided to pick up her chick lit novel, ‘Bitch Goddess for Dummies’ brought out by Rupa Publications in 2012. And I was not disappointed. I’m not sure if I was biased toward the book by the personality I had seen on zoom or not, but I quite enjoy chick lit and have read several chick lit novels in my thirties.   So the novel is about a 27-year-old woman Mira Iyer who decides to transform her personality from good girl to ‘bitch goddess’ to deal with the people in her life. Her mom who is constantly trying to fix her up with some eligible guy so that she can get married and Sanya, the real office bitch who is always cosying up to their bosses and vying for a promotion, are just two of the people in her life causing her angst. So it’s go...

Book Review of 'Resilience: Stories of Muslim Women'

I read ‘Resilience: Stories of Muslim Women’ by Shubha Menon recently.  The author, who belongs to one of my writing groups, requested a review of the book and also sent me a review copy. The foreword is by Syeda Hameed. Syeda Hameed established the Muslim Women’s Forum in 2001. The author, Shubha Menon, has documented the life of Muslim girls and women of Nizamuddin Basti in Delhi. She discusses the origin of the basti, how it became a magnet for displaced Muslims and goes on to outline “scenes from the medieval ages” in the basti. Sordid realities such as the practice of halala and mutah are discussed, which are used to terrorise women. The author shares the story of Farida, who has five sisters. By the time Farida was sixteen, she was a mother of two and abandoned.  She had been only accorded the status of a domestic servant. Her husband had cruelly divorced her saying “ Log teen bar talaq datein hain, mein tumhein hazaar baar talaq deta hoon.” After a few years, ...

Blogging with a Purpose - Theme Post

I’ve loved books since I was a child. I vaguely recall the 'Ladybird' series of books that I read as a child, but the first novel I remember reading was ‘The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage’ by Enid Blyton that my mom brought home for me to read from the library when I was in Class 4. I then finished the children’s books section in library after library in my neighbourhood. Reading has served me well since I now work as an editor. Reading was what filled my hours as a child and kept loneliness at bay. Reading is what helped me find myself at age 40 when I got back to the habit after several years of reading sporadically. I now average about 25 books a year that I track on Goodreads .  I’ve had the opportunity to interact with quite a few authors online and offline. My cause for the Blogchatter #BloggingWithAPurpose campaign is "promoting authors." There is a popular joke in the publishing industry these days that there are more authors than readers. Authors a...