And The Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini

The book is a collection of different stories from perspectives of different characters in nine chapters through a war ravaged Afghanistan across generations and continents. The plot begins in the year 1952 in Afghanistan, when a ten year old boy is separated from his little sister, as his father reluctantly gives away his daughter to a wealthy childless couple. This separation which devastates the boy, is the heart of the entire book. The story then rolls over to a war torn Kabul and exodus and how land gets grabbed by war criminals and plight of refugees returning back. It moves across Paris, Greek island of Tinos and United States. It unfolds with sibling love and proceeds on to define complex relationships between children and aging parents.

The author has managed to create powerful and complicated characters and situations and is definitely a must read. In a scale of 10 we give it 8.  

Dreamed Beloved: You by Ann Keniston

     Dreamed Beloved: you

cast out your voice, repeat

your dying with new flourishes. By now

you’re expert at coming back.

Or seem to be

though it’s I who summoned you

so you’d refuse to grant me access

to your actual self. I made you my ventriloquist, my conduit

to what’s beyond the grave to help me hold

what in life I never held you with.

(I was polite,

stand-offish just before you left me here

because I thought you wanted that.)

And now: it’s time to call my bluff, release us both.

I know you can because

you always saw me

as I am, or was until you died.

                                 .... by Ann Keniston

Her (2013) Movie review.

Theodore Twombly is a letter writer. He is facing divorce from his wife and is reluctant to let her go. He dwells in memories of their days together as he goes about his life with a broken heart trying to fill up the hole with online chats till one day he buys an operating system. The operating system is a highly intelligent super brain and names itself Samantha. It is so designed that it has a voice and a personality that evolves as it learns. He falls in love with it (Her).  Samantha, the operating software which has super brain but no body, wants to experience life the more she learns about Theodore.

Written and directed by Spike Jonze, ‘Her’ is a wonderful movie and would make you remember the movie, ‘You’ve got mail’ where two internet pals enjoy relationship talking through email, but otherwise it is so different in that the two cannot meet.

Set in future with a bit of science fiction, Her is the best romantic movie of 2013 and brings into perspective how we define our relationships and bonding in this age of growing social media and internet.  We give it a 9.5 in a scale of ten- definitely a must watch.

Liebesgedicht by Ellen Bryant Voigt.

Liebesgedicht

I love you as my other self, as the other

self of the tree is not the pale tree

in the flat hand of the river, but the earth

that holds, is held by, the root of the tree.

This is how the earth loves the river,

and why its least fold solicits each

impulsive stream until the gathered water

makes of earth a passage to the sea.

I’d like to draw a lesson from this figure,

and find some comfort in the way the larger

world rings with such dependencies.

But if I see ourselves in earth and water,

I also see one taken from the other,

the rivening wind loosed against the tree.

.. by Ellen Bryant Voigt.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz: Book review.

The book is a collection of stories of a Dominican family across three generations. The story about Abelard (1944–1946), the grandfather, the first generation, is mostly about the nasty rule of Rafael Trujillo and it's impact on our lead family at the end of which the daughter is orphaned and lost.

The second generation story is about the daughter, Hypatía Belicia Cabral, who is later on discovered and rescued from a very horrible life by her immediate surviving relative, La Inca, a cousin of her father. This part is more about Hypatía's need for being loved and her affair with a gangster who already is married to Rafael Trujillo's sister. This part too ends in tragedy and Hypatia emigrates to Paterson, New Jersey. 

The third generation story is about the life of Hypatia's son Oscar de León, and daughter Lolla as they live in Paterson, New Jersey. Hypatia was deserted by their father and she works all sorts of jobs to keep the family going.. Oscar is obese and is obsessed with science fiction, cartoons, reading, and role-playing games. His one goal is to write a science fiction epic. But the real problem with him is that he is unable to enter into a relationship with a girl, any girl. His elder sister Lolla wants to run away and her relationship with her mother, who is dying of cancer, gets deteriorated till she actually runs away. 

Junot Diaz starts with the third generation and then takes one backwards and forwards using all sort of american english and spanish and slang.

Winner of Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2008 and National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 2007, the book is definitely a must read. It's a well researched and well documented book as it took full seven years for Junot Diaz to write this book. In a scale of 10 we give it a 9.5.

Love Poem For Naming by Corrie Williamson

Love Poem for Naming

Find the word for it, the nightly sound

of breath

beside me. Call it a hand

run up and down a length

of taut-skinned tree bark,

poplar, maybe.

Arrowed shape

the old shipmakers

harvested for masts.

Or possibly call it the rustle in the dry

wheat that grew wild through

our back field,

where I built nests when I was small

as I imagined the speechless animals

did, flag leaves

brittle, shush-saying over my head.

Hidden there

just long enough

for my mother to worry. Come to the porch,

dishtowel on her shoulder,

casting

my name over the afternoon.

Keen and honest

as the iron

bell in the garden. I would

explode from the chaff,

grassy-haired,

a wild grouse. Most nights:

his back.

The moon

turns its white face between the blinds.

If I woke him,

demanded, The moon,

name it, would he say

a bowl of gold butter

on our breakfast table.

The upended shell of earth’s silver

turtle twin. No,

I’d reply.

An ivory viking longship, tipping

into black sea. Your shoulder

blades’

parenthetical. No, this: your body

is the boat, its fine,

slumbered rigging -

that drumming in the keel.

                         ... by Corrie Williamson