About bookstores and stuff

A bookstore like Barnes and Noble or Borders is sometimes like a club-house. You visit it regularly and you start seeing patterns; you start encountering the same people and soon you have a favorite chair. But it is sufficiently different from a club house that you aren't really sure if you should acknowledge the other people who you always see at the store, you know as in "hi, which book? I'm reading What Shamu taught me about Life, Love and Marriage.". I haven't tried it because I don't know if it is done! Anyways, the other day I was sitting on *my* favorite chair in the store, reading, when I heard this customer, an elderly lady tell one of the store representatives of how bookstores have become the new libraries. The representative seemed to be in a hurry, but didn't really want to offend a potential customer, so she kept saying "yeah, it is interesting how the roles have changed". The customer soon enough felt that she really wasn't able to support the conversation all by herself and let the representative go. I think that store representative has a tough job; I think all bookstore employees have a tough job - they see all these people reading books, sitting on a torn leather chair with their feet on the coffee table, dozing of occasionally, and they might starting feeling jealous once in a while. That jealousy has the potential to turn into anger when they start seeing the same person on the same chair two times a week or more. And that potential anger surely must turn into rage when they see that same person each time walk out the door in the evening fifteen minutes before closing time without a store branded polythene bag in his or her hand. I doubt these stores have sound proof chambers where employees can scream out all the held up anger inside. Listening to Michael McDonald's (did you know he played with the Doobie Brothers?) live solo album that is played in repeat mode in the store throughout the day can only make things worse.

By the way, have you heard a track by Steely Dan called Deacon Blues? It has these lines:

I'll learn to work the saxophone
I'll play just what I feel
Drink Scotch whisky all night long
and die behind the wheel

Interestingly this is only the second Steely Dan song I've ever heard (the other one is Do it again). I say interestingly because I first heard Do it again more that six years ago.

But getting back to the topic of bookstores, I wonder if I should feel guilt-ridden to admit that I read a complete book in the store the other day. It was a small book with large font - the book was Cormac McCarthy's Sunset Limited (yes, I've seen No Country for Old Men). I didn't realize I was going to finish the book when I started browsing through the pages, but the dialog between the characters in the book got interesting and so I continued reading. Soon I was just a couple of pages from the final full-stop in the book. When it was time to turn the last page over, I did so with some trepidation; I was a little worried that I might set some kind of a security device off

The book you are holding (Sunset Limited) has been marked
Please carry it to the check out counter and make a payment for the book.

Luckily that didn't happen. But I didn't really know what might happen. Reading a complete book in a store isn't something I'd done before. And I haven't even met that many people who have claimed to have done that. In fact there is only one person I know who has admitted to have read an entire book in the store, but he said the book was a science fiction and he claimed to be a fast reader.

Actually, I have heard at least one other Steely Dan songs before. I didn't know Reelin' in the years was a Steely Dan song. Actually I didn't know that song was called Reelin' in the years. That song is a staple on the local Classic Rock FM stations.

Movie Review: Little Miss Sunshine

I saw Little Miss Sunshine last evening. I'd read a lot about the movie - all of them were good reviews. So I'd high expectations about it. Unfortunately, while I thought the movie was nice, it wasn't as good as I'd expected. I think the reason for this is that I'd seen a movie called Around the Bend a few months ago, which had many of the same elements as Little Miss Sunshine did. To give you an idea of how similar the movies were, let me recap - both movies involved a family spanning multiple generations, and involved a road trip. In both movies the family members weren't on speaking terms with each other at the start of the movie/road trip (literally in Little Miss Sunshine), but are drawn closer towards the end of the trip. And in both movies, the eldest family member died. Given all these commonalities, you can probably understand why I didn't enjoy the movie that much. If you haven't seen either of the two movies though, you might enjoy it.

Book Review: The Guide by R.K. Narayan

Midway through reading R.K.Narayan's The Guide, I noticed a couple of things about the story - one, how the story was narrated, and two, the absense of any long detailed description of anything. It was as if Narayan, was trying to writing a story as he thought of it and didn't want to waste any time writing down the details. The book has a very nice non-linear style - starting with Raju's release from jail and then switching back and forth between his life before prison and his current life, until the two narratives meet into the present. Starting with the prison part gives the story a nice momentum that keeps the reader engrossed because they wamt to find out why he went to prison in the first place.

I'm not a writer (as in - I haven't written any books), but I do like to write and I've attempted to write short fictional pieces, and one challenge I've always faced while writing them is the part about the details - details about the characters, of the place and surroundings, of the times the characters live in; it's something I've never been able to do, which probably explains why I haven't really completed any story I've started. A good writer brings to the table a good sense of observation. Take V.S. Naipaul for instance. He's a favourite author of mine, mainly because of his style of writing, which is very detail oriented. When Naipaul is writing about a walk that one of his characters takes, he'll provide enough detail that you could paint an entire picture based on the description; he describing not only the road on which he (or one of his characters) is walking on, but also the color of the road, the trees that stand along the road complete with the names of every tree the character encounters on that walk. R.K. Narayan in contrast avoids most of the details. He doesn't let that come in the way of the story. In his foreword to The Guide, Michael Gorra mentions the contrast between Naipaul and Narayan. In trying to come up with a reasoning behind R.K.Narayan's style of writing, Michael Gorra also mentions an interesting anecdote of how two of Anita Desai's students (one of which was an Indian) when given a writing assignment submitted stories both involving a kitchen, yet were very different in the manner in which they approached it - the Indian student skipped all details of what the kitchen looked like, while the others account was very detail oriented. The Indian explained his lack of details with the rationale that every Indian knows what a kitchen looks like, so there wasn't any need to explain it again. While this may not explain why R.K. Narayan avoids details, it is an interesting observation none the less.

Another thing that stands out in The Guide is that loose ends are left untied. We never find out about what happens to Rosie/Nalini, except that she is famous or her husband "Marco". I expected her to be brought back into the story in the end, but that doesn't happen; Narayan keeps Raju the focus of the story the whole time. While The Guide is the R.K. Narayan's first book that I've read, I was a little intrigued by the title of some of his other books - The Vendor of Sweets, The Financial Expert, The English Teacher, all of which seem to involve characters and a job they have, in many ways similar to the Guide. They are already on my reading list!