Bhamini Ravishankar's Blog

My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Today is the 30th of June. The day Greece is supposed to default on its debt. While the country is in news for all the wrong reasons, book-lovers ought to ignore doomsday-prophecies of the stodgy monetary sort and pick up this utterly enthralling, humorous and compassionate page-turner that portrays a Greece of a different kind.

Gerald Durrell is ten when his eccentric family comprising his mother and elder siblings Larry, Leslie and Margo decide to move to the Greek island of Corfu to escape the inclement English weather. Their adventures there for the next five years, including riotous accounts of the people they meet (Spiro Hakiapoulos, taxi-driver and majordomo rolled in one; Dr. Theodore Stephanides, mate to little Gerald's natural-history-crazy soul; the bird-crazy Kralefsky - to mention only a few), as well as the endless cavalcade of pets that call the shots in the harum-scarum household make for an unputdownable read.

The affectionate and moving detail with which every bird, leaf, beast, fish and flower have been described in "My Family and other Animals" ought to make us step out of our human-centric world and begin acknowledging that there's more to this planet than meets our myopic eyes.



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Windmills of the Gods by Sidney Sheldon

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Superb read, minus the nail-biting moments the first read was replete with. Great action and detailing. An angel who is a devil, and a devil who isn't a devil. An imperfectly perfect heroine. Plenty of places where you need to jettison disbelief and soldier on because of the thrill and raciness round the corner. A book that's more a movie than a book; all that was missing was the popcorn.
p.s.: Palokunta in Finnish is fire brigade, did you know?



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Reading is like yoga. Well, almost. (No calories burnt). Because of "Fortnight before Dawn" there was no time to do anything more than skim newspapers and magazines. Now I'm on a reading tour: the languid, leisurely, smell-the-flowers kind. The read a para, close the eyes and cogitate kind. Pillaging my shelves I've begun on a couple of old lovelies...

Something interesting happened the other day. I heard they were calling for entrees to a first-novel contest and I decided to send in my baby "Fortnight before Dawn". Wondering whether self-published ebooks were eligible, I wrote to the organizers of the contest. The lady at the other end said they weren't. Although disappointed, I wasn't surprised. And then she added something that I found to be a refreshing take on things. She wrote, "Never mind, at least people are reading it right?"

Instantly, my disappointment went poof. She was right! Wasn't that why I had put my precious debut-bundle up on Kindle in the first place? Because I knew, as a first-time author, that I would have to grit my teeth and twiddle my thumbs, waiting and watching, as my manuscript got shunted from one publishing house to the next for months and years without any one ( almost) ever getting to read a line of it?

At least this way my book gets read. Nothing, and nothing can be more important than that...

Broke the ice and made three friends. So let me see what they are reading and reviewing. From there I hope to join a few groups and participate in a discussion or two...
They say finishing a book—the writing of it, that is—is like finishing a relationship. There's a vacuum and the mind, refusing to look forward, insists on harking back. Not my story. I seem to be bursting with ideas. Should I translate my work into another language? Should I start writing a new book? Or should I wait a year and read all the stuff I haven't touched since more than a year because writing gobbled up all my free time?
Lets see lets see lets see

Well then yes, I am looking for friends on Goodreads whose work I can read, rate, remark upon and discuss. But where are they? How do I find these kindred souls? I can't look for them on my FB or mail contact lists since I know of no one who has written a book.

Oh wait, there are a couple. But after them, who?

I guess, as in every other thing and every other where, I'll find my way around this marvellous place too one of these days. Till then...