It has been a while since I did a bookish tag on my blog and that is when I stumbled upon the A-Z bookish questions tag on Youtube. The tag is pretty simple. I get to answer questions that begin with each letter of the alphabet.
My mind went completely blank and I somehow couldn’t remember even the last book I read. Sigh. Thankfully Goodreads came to my rescue.
A-Z Bookish questions Tag
Otherwise I am sure I never would have these bookish questions for another ten days. So let us get on with this okay?
Author you’ve read the most books from:
I just headed to Goodreads and checked out my most read authors who unsurprisingly turned to be Sidney Sheldon, followed by Jeffrey Archer. I had a phase when I read only their books. Glad I came out of it and became more open to other authors.
Best Sequel Ever:
I usually don’t read series. But I think the last series that I read completely and enjoyed was the Clifton Chronicles by Jeffrey Archer.
Of late I am picking E books over physical books. I moved thrice in the last few years and I lost so many books in the process. And I am now afraid to start collecting again.
Fictional Character You Probably Would Have Actually Dated In High School:
I had a crush on Cross De Lena from The Last Done by Mario Puzo. I am afraid no one would remember the Mafia Don anymore. (Hint: He is like the Godfather).
I found this gem out of accident and I ended up reading the whole series. I think everyone should give it a chance The Little Lady Agency by Hester Browne.
Important Moment in your Reading Life:
I think finding about Goodreads about 5 years ago must be it. I had been blogging for a while then but still I wanted a place to find more books.
I rarely read Fantasy and Sci-fi. I am not averse to them, but I don’t feel inclined to pick them up easily.
Longest Book You’ve Read:
I think it should be ‘Gone with the Wind’ by Margret Mitchell. I have ‘IT’ by Stephen King on my TBR for a long time now but the mere size of it is intimidating me.
Major book hangover because of:
I usually have a hangover for most of the books. I typically take half the day off before I start another one. Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood gave me a major book hangover. I think I took 2-3 days to recover and then I jumped into watching the Netflix adaptation.
Number of Bookcases You Own:
I have 3 book shelves currently, each at a different city that I call home. But as I said I lost quite a number of books and I have almost stopped buying physical books.
I love Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson and not a week goes by without me quoting something from his comics. I have so many of them that I love and am sharing here some of my favorites.
Reality continues to ruin my life.
It’s not denial. I’m just selective about the reality I accept.
I’m killing time while I wait for life to shower me with meaning and happiness
Series You Started And Need To Finish(all books are out in series):
I don’t read books as a series, usually. On the rare occasion I do, I make sure all of the books in the series are already published. You know, waiting is for suckers. (Sorry, but not sorry)
Three of your All-Time Favorite Books:
As any book worm would, I am gonna whine that this is a hardest thing I have ever done, not literally. Yet I told you I would answer all the questions, so here I go:
The last book I bought was The Unexpected Everything by Morgan Matson, which turned to be too long for my taste.
ZZZ-snatcher book (last book that kept you up WAY late)
I stayed up all night reading They both die at the end by Adam Silvera. But I am not sure if it was the last book that kept me up, I am just looking through Goodreads list for the answers. I am just guessing, so let me be please.
Pin me!
Let us chat
Can you answer these A-z Bookish questions Tag? What do you think about my answers? What is your worst bookish habit? Let us chat.
As many other bookworms I know I started obsessing about books right from my childhood. I can not remember how and when I started reading books in English, and as it is not my mother tongue the books that were available at home were very limited. This meant I had to make do with books that my much much older cousins had on their shelves.
But this also meant I never got to read books that were meant to be as a middle grader or a teen. I know it is not a big deal and I may have not lost much. That is what I thought until I read a few of those middle grader books that everyone loved but me.
Five Books I Wish I Had Read As A Middle Grader
Let us talk about some of those books, shall we?
5. A Wrinkle in time by Madeleine L’Engle
I didn’t read this book until I turned 27, and that might be the reason that I didn’t enjoy it at all. I kinda tried to ignore the strong religious undertone and even then the plot was kinda over simplified, character super unrelatable and dialogue repetitive.
4. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
When I started this book I never knew it was a middle grader book. Soon I was sucked into the period trouble and bigger bust goal of the twelve year old Margaret. I liked her relationship with God, but I was sad that I was not able to connect with the characters, again may be due to the age difference.
3. A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket
I am yet to find a reader saying they don’t like this one. I had to read this before I could watch the Netflix version starred by Neil Harris Patrick. In fact I didn’t even know about the book before I saw the ad for the show. Of course, I liked it but it was obvious that I was not among the target audience. I loved the show though.
2. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
I was probably 25 and I enjoyed it enough to continue reading the series. I didn’t dislike it, rather it seemed to be again repetitive and sorta preachy. And that seems to be the theme for all the books of that age, I guess. Again I might have loved it if and when I was 8 – 10 years.
(Does anyone else think the Netflix version is too sad and less endearing?)
1. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Oh I love Little Women and I am not gonna complain about it. Except for the fact that if I had met the March sisters especially Jo and Laurie when I were a pre teen, they would have been my heroes. Well that didn’t happen and I hate that I missed it.
I am kinda sure I would have loved these book if I read them when I was supposed to have read them. While I didn’t hate them, I could not fall in love with them and that maybe attributed to my ‘older’ age. Sigh. Well, I tried right?
Do you have any such regrets related to your reading choices? When did you start reading? Tell me some books that you missed reading when you were younger and did you regret reading them now? Let us chat.
There was a time when I was not particularly interested in reading first person narratives and drop the books like it was infected if I find an ‘I’ in an active voice sentence in the first paragraph. That was a long time ago when I was about 8-10 years old. But then, I started trusting the first person narrators and even liking a few a lot – until I came across an unreliable narrator.
An unreliable narrator shatters the reader’s trust by contradicting themselves or misrepresenting the facts or even outright lying. Well, they can be doing that out of naivete or guilt. That is for the readers to find and that is exactly why I started looking out for such characters.
I can not recall the first time I read a book with an unreliable narrator but as I grew I no doubt I started loving them. I have read more books with an unreliable narrator in the past three years than all the years before then combined. So here I am presenting with my top ten narrators that all of us have come to love, in no particular order.
My Top Ten Unreliable Narrators
10) Humbert Humbert, Lolita
Humbert Humbert is the first character that pops up on any reader’s mind when anyone says unreliable narrator and correctly so. Humbert Humbert fancies under age girls and he falls for the 12 year old Lolita. He even marries and kills her mother (I don’t think that is a spoiler) just to be with his step daughter.
As if that is not enough to dislike him, he is an unreliable narrator as well. He not only tries to justify his actions, but also tries to convince the reader of the same through flattery. He constantly contradicts himself and makes outrageous promises both to his ward and the reader.
9) Rachel, The Girl on the Train
Rachel’s life is filled with lies, mistrust, depression and alcohol induced blackouts. Sh would live in her past, her dreams or at her drunk state, but her real life. When she suspects a foul play nobody wants to believer, unsurprisingly.
Her obsession with her unknown people and her ex alike add up to her ‘craziness’. What makes Rachel a great unreliable narrator is the fact that she means well, at least most of the times.
8) Pat Peoples, The Silver Linings Playbook
Pat Peoples has just been let out of psych ward and has lots of repressed memories as well. He is emotionally immature and has no concept of negativity.
He does not remember why he is divorced and is hoping that ex will take him back if he proves himself to be good. He is proof that crazy attracts crazy. And to things make worse, Pat is the worst because he spoils the ending of many classic books. He is definitely one of those unreliable narrators.
7) Jack, Room
Five year old Jack has never been out of a shed, where his father had him and his mother trapped even before he was born. But now he is out of his confinement and experiences world for the first time.
With the limited experiences that he has had, he narrates everything as he sees, which may or not be true. It opens the chance for the readers to interpret the events. With the naivete of a young boy’s eyes, Jack thus becomes a classic unreliable narrator.
6) Unnamed narrator, Fight Club
I know I cannot proceed with the list of unreliable narrators without adding Jack from Fight Club. If reading Chuck’s books were difficult his unnamed characters make the reading more difficult and keep it exciting.
After all that Tyler Durden put our narrator through, the narrartor is not able to prove it was Tyler who caused the Mayhem. He spends a quarter of the book trying to do just that and proving him more and more unreliable as time passes, even to us – until the final reveal.
5) Charlie, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Charlie, a freshman in high school, narrates the story in the form of letters to his ‘friend’ and he is taken in by seniors under their wings. He is over emotional yet detached from life as such.
While the story is narrated by him, he blacks out often and has lots of repressed memories making him a perfect choice for unreliable narrator.
4) Nick and Amy Dunne, Gone Girl
I love Gone girl but the two manipulative leads Nick and Amy Dunne made me wonder if everyone around me was lying.
We start by hating Nick and his secrets (and misrepresentations and lies) and want to protect the innocent little Amy, only to find that she is more unreliable and everything we heard from her was a lie as well. If you can read only one book of this list, Gone Girl would be my pick.
Another one from Gillian Flynn (if you can’t tell, she is one of my favorite authors) on the list. Her other books the Grown up and Sharp Objects have unreliable narrators too!
Twenty five years ago, 7 years old Libby Day testifies against her 15 years old brother Ben, for the massacre of their family – their mother and two younger sisters. Ben is convicted for life, partially on Libby’s testimony and partially on the evidences.
Libby is mentally stunted and doesn’t want to remember anything from the day of murders. And just not that, she is selfish, lives on trust fund and would do anything to get money without working – even trying to revisit her past. Well, that is my favorite kinda narrator – totally unreliable.
Alias Grace is one of my best reads of the year and its Netflix adaptation is a huge hit as well. The true crime story based on the 16 years imprisonment of Grace Marks for double homicide of his employer and fellow worker.
While her co-conspirator was hung in public, Grace was sent off the mental asylum for years. In the fictionalized version a psychiatrist tries to see through the web of deception and manipulation spun around and by her to set free. With the number of versions of the event and her own mental status, Grace is definitely one of the top contenders for the best unreliable narrators.
1) Piscine ‘Pi’ Patel, Life of Pi
Pi crosses the mighty ocean alone in a raft except for the company of a man eating mammal, Richard Parker, a tiger. The narrative of the exhaustive 7 month journey makes one wonder how much is true and how much was just a cope up mechanism.
To make matters worse (or better) Pi leaves it to the reader to decide which version one wants to believe in at the end making us doubt everything we just read. No wonder he is on my list of narrators who are unreliable.
Do you like unreliable narrations? Who are your favorite unreliable narrators? Do I have them on my list? Let us chat.
I was hopping around the blogoshpere looking for inspiration to strike me outta somewhere to write a post. Okay I have been saying that for the past two weeks and nothing worked. Until, yes there is an until. Until I saw this tag from Kristina of Books and Dachshunds called I Spy Book.
The rules are really simple and it seems like fun. It has been a while since I did any tags so why not do one for the heck of it, right?
Rules for the I Spy book Tag:
Find a book that contains (either on the cover or in the title) an example for each category. You must have a separate book for all 20, get as creative as you want and do it within five minutes!
I will be trying to use books that are on my read, reviewed or to be read shelves.Here we go.