What we are reading

The Week asked some of the colleagues at Republica to share what they are reading - and here is the list that incorporates non-fiction and fiction, from classics to newly published books.[break]



Pedro Paramo: Juan Rulfo



I’ve reread Mexican writer Juan Rulfo’s “Pedro Paramo” (trans. Margaret Sayers Pedan from Spanish, foreword by Susan Sontag), published in 1955. It’s the shortest novel I’ve ever read.



As the first literary exemplar of Magical Realism, Gabriel Garcia Marquez is said to have memorized the novella.



Rulfo’s complex depictions of his country’s urban, suburban and rural dysfunctions in the 1930s have its black negatives in Nepal’s own decades of destabilizations, most especially the 10-year Maoist-state civil war (1996-2006) and its palpable aftermaths to this day.






How Boeing Defied Airbus Challenge: Mohan R Pandey



The book details history and rivalry between world’s two largest airplane manufacturers, American Boeing and European Airbus and it is the one of the best books to peep into the aircraft manufacturing market. Bill Boeing, who founded Boeing Company in 1916, completely dominated the commercial airplane market for nearly four decades until the end of twentieth century. However, Boeing’s market share started shrinking in nineties and Airbus overtook Boeing in 2001 and led every year until Boeing’s comeback in 2006.



The launching of Boeing 777 in 2006 was a turning point for Boeing that successfully countered Airbus’s A340 for being fuel efficient. Airbus’s success in launching A380, the largest aircrafts so far, in 2007 was a giant leap in the aviation history while Boeing is planning to fight back with the launch of small but advance 787.






The Giver: Lois Lowry



I just finished reading “The Giver” by Lois Lowry (1993).



It is a very simple and soft science-fiction book about a utopian community whose members stress on sameness by eliminating emotional depth, color and choices.



Jonas, a twelve-year-old boy, realizes the extremely dysfunctional and oppressive nature of his community when he is assigned the position of “Receiver of Memory.”



Though I don’t read science fiction often, I really enjoyed this book for the simple message it gives – ignorance might be blissful but knowledge is necessary for an overall growth. Lowry stresses on the power of knowledge and the alternatives it creates to empower people to live a holistic life – an important life lesson.






Snow : Orhan Pamuk



I recently read “Snow” by Orhan Pamuk. Pamuk’s 2002 work of fiction, which unfolds with simmering tensions between secularists and religious forces in Turkey, lived up to my expectation, and the hype surrounding it.



The novel catapulted me to the time of the Maoist war. The way two schoolboys, indoctrinated by Muslim fanatics, escort Ka, the protagonist of the novel, for a clandestine meeting with Blue, the dreadful leader of anti-scarf movement in Turkey, reminded me of walking through narrow alleys to reach a Maoist leader during the war. Although I personally disagree with Blue’s religious and political views, I found his personality, and the way he argues, charismatic.



I was fascinated by Blue, rather than the novel’s protagonist, throughout the novel. Ipek, Ka’s love interest, also charmed me by her boldness and mystic personality.



After Snow, I’m flipping through The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy.






The Last Song: Nicholas Sparks



I recently read “The Last Song” by Nicholas Sparks which was published in 2009. A movie has also been made from the book. The movie, however, doesn’t capture the original emotion the book has in it.



It’s about a young girl helping her dad who’s fighting against cancer in his final days. It beautifully expresses the emotions of a teenage girl, hardships a young child has to go through, and also the relationship between parents and children these days. The book may be a light story to read but the underlying moral in it makes it a must-read.






Fountainhead: Ayn Rand



The clique of weaklings, losers and egoists who live for vanity, groping and scheming all the time for power, prestige and lust, are pitted against individuals who challenge prevalent social customs and norms on the grounds of their conviction that a progressive future comes not by following but leading the change. Individualism is key to the novel because individuals, as the writer would have us believe, are at the forefront of any change as the fountainhead of courage and new ideas.



The novel could be called a psychological thriller -- not in any gory sense of the term -- but for its quintessential ability to validate motives and manoeuvres of each characters through interesting dialogues and narration. It is rewarding to discover how the writer gets into the psychology of her characters and brings out the best and worst in them.

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