Josna Rege

Posts Tagged ‘Reading’

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Reflections on A-to-Z 2025: Books I Have Loved

In Notes, Stories on May 5, 2025 at 2:55 pm

My theme for this year’s A-to-Z April Challenge was Books, in particular, books I have loved over the years. I had intended to make each of the posts brief, and insisted that they were not going to be reviews. Instead, they would be idiosyncratic, anecdotal accounts of my personal experience with each chosen book.

Well, I failed spectacularly when it came to keeping my posts brief. And although I tried to keep my teacherly persona from taking over, I failed in that regard as well! I think I have to own who I am, as a writer and as a person–long-winded, meandering, digressive, and highly opinionated. I also failed to anticipate the extent to which I would have to re-read my chosen books in order to write the posts. As a result, my April was completely taken over, and involved many, many long nights. Nevertheless, I had a lot of fun. And most of all, the Challenge got me writing regularly again, which was my main goal this year.

Here is a hyperlinked list of this month’s entries. Below it I will list the fellow-bloggers whom I followed regularly during the month and who followed me in return, sending me encouraging comments and sharing their own reading experiences.

Blogging from A to Z in 2025: My Theme and Your Suggestions

A is for Alice (and Other Ambiguous Adventures)
B is for Black Beauty
Clear Light of Day
David Copperfield
Emma and Efuru
The Family from One End Street
Gora and The Grapes of Wrath
Houses: Howards End and A House for Mr. Biswas
Iru: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve
July’s People
Klara and the Sun
The Little Grey Men, Lucky Jim, Life After Life
The Mahabharata (and everything else)
No-No Boy
The Overstory
Perelandra, Poetic Justice, Praisesong for the Widow
The Quiet American
The Railway Children
The Summer Book and Shikasta
Tintin in Tibet
The Upanishads
Vanity Fair and The Vegetarian
Wise Children
Xala
Yuganta
Zeitoun

The participating blogs I followed the most regularly throughout the month were The Curry Apple Orchard, Finding Eliza, Tao Talk, A Year with Trees, The Multicolored Diary
, Madly-in-Verse, How Would You Know, A Kings, galeriaredelius, Panorama of the Mountains, and Temenos of the Blessing Light. Their themes were, respectively, an Australian’s year in England in the Swinging Sixties; special dates in the family tree; an A to Z of garden plants; an Abecedarium of Indian trees; women’s epics; a deep dive into Indian textiles (particularly in sarees); an idiosyncratic (and inspired) autobiography; hilarious personal stories; songs featuring precious metals; an alphabet of short films; and meditations on rare and wonderful words. Each one of them was underpinned by encyclopedic knowledge on the subject, and lured the reader down a magical rabbit hole, from which this reader extracted herself with difficulty, only because the next post was waiting to be written. To my fellow Challenge bloggers: I so appreciated the generosity and regularity of your comments, and apologize for the many posts of yours that I missed. I hope to return to them over the next few months.

I identified the most with Linda’s posts in The Curry Apple Orchard, because I was in London during the same period as her fictionalized “Will”, and recognized with delight the places, music, fashions, politics, and general zeitgeist. My most delightful new discovery was Fatima’s A Year With Trees, since her loving and detailed descriptions of Indian trees, along with childhood memories evoked by them, resonate deeply with mine and also because her tastes in reading overlapped so much with my own. I also very much enjoyed my regular back-and-forths with Lisa of Tao Talk, and am delighted that she shared a post of mine on her blog.

In addition to the participating bloggers, I received a number of other very welcome comments from friends, some who are bloggers and others who subscribe to my blog by email or read it on Facebook. The bloggers were Yamini MacLean of Doses of Wild Yam, Anne Katzeff of ASK Design Blog, and Josie Holford of Rattlebag and Rhubarb. Thank you! Yamini, I think you commented on every single one of my posts! I look forward to returning to read and comment on yours now that this time-consuming Challenge is over. The other friends who commented were Anna, Barbara, Cynthia, Gail, Hayat, Kim, Maureen, Michael, Norah, Parmita, Pennie, Piya, Sartaz, Shailja, Shoba, and Thakshala. Thank you kindly, kindred spirits all!

The intrepid A-to-Z Challenge organizers, half of whom somehow found the time to visit and comment on my blog over the course of the month, asked us about our favorite comments over the course of the month. One or two of my favorites were too personal to post, but here are just three of the many I loved:

From Shailja, on David Copperfield:
An abridged version of David Copperfield was my Standard Seven set book. Your post awakens so many memories! Including a playground dotted with 12 year olds impersonating Uriah Heep.

From Michael, who inspired me to finish reading and write on The Overstory:
Came across this book when looking for a new book on my WP Book site (prior to cancelling my subscription – Brologarchy) that was recommending Richard Power’s latest Playground. When I was looking on Alibris to purchase it, I saw the Overstory title and purchased it instead. Reading it straight through was definitely advantageous. The weaving of the story of the eight characters was only more or less successful. The Root, Trunk, Crown, Seed was less clear. Maybe someone else can enlighten on this aspect. Despite all this the writing was compelling, often taking me back to my own tree/forest experiences (sights, sounds, smells and textures underfoot).

From Fatima on The Railway Children: 

I read this book a couple of years ago and really loved it. As an adult, I could understand how difficult life grown ups can have and how they hide it from young ones. And also appreciate the innocence of children and childhood in general, how even after vaguely understanding difficult times in parents life, how resilient children are and how amazing their coping mechanisms are. I hope I made sense about what I said… It’s a similar kind of book to The Secret Garden or A Little Princess, meant for kids but equally good read for adults. Thanks for sharing about this book.

What did I learn this month? With encouragement from Kristin of Finding Eliza, I learned how to use the block system on WordPress. I also learned that despite (or perhaps because of) having retired, it seems to be taking me longer to write these posts, and that I tend to go down too many internet rabbit holes in the process.

Thank you to the organizers of the A-to-Z Challenge! I hope to join again in 2026 for a tenth year—if I can come up with a way to write shorter, pithier posts, the discipline to write them in advance, and the patience to hold them until next April.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

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Blogging from A to Z in 2025: My Theme and Your Suggestions

In Notes on March 19, 2025 at 2:31 pm

Dear Readers, after a period of indecision, it is decided: Tell Me Another will participate in this April’s Blogging from A to Z Challenge and the theme will be Books.

There are a lot of books in the world, you may rightly declare. What kinds of books do I have in mind? On what basis will I choose them? Once chosen, how and what do I propose to write about them? Good questions. Let’s hope that my responses will provide answers to me as well as to you.

To start with I have made a list of books I like whose titles begin with each letter of the alphabet (see below). Some letters have only one or two titles under them, others six or seven. I haven’t yet decided whether or not I will choose just one book for each letter. You’ll see, too, that in several cases there are two or three works by the same author. I’ll probably focus on one and just mention the other(s) in passing.

A quick scan of the list reveals that most but not all of them are fiction and only a handful are non-fiction. Most, but not all, of the works of fiction are novels. Two or three works fall into a category all their own. 

Of my preliminary list, most were written for adults, but there are a good number of children’s books as well, ones that I loved in my own childhood. Most were written in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but there are several nineteenth-century works and a couple of much older outliers. Most were written in English, but a few of them were originally written in other languages—Bengali, French, Korean, Marathi, Swedish, Latin, Sanskrit.

What were my the principles of selection? Only that I had read and liked the books. Well, to be honest, there was one exception, a book I only chose because its title started with a difficult letter. However, in that case I did know and like its author, and promise to have read it by the time I get to the letter X.

Now to the hardest question: how do I propose to write these posts? What kind of animal will they be? I haven’t decided. I do know that they will not fit the book review genre in any traditional sense. They won’t be plot summaries, either. They will have nothing to offer students looking for last-minute material for a book report. They won’t be consistent in length, or style, or form. However, I do hope that they will be fun to read.

Will my posts be the unashamed ravings of a fan who has shut down all her critical faculties? Possibly, in one or two cases. They will be personal, idiosyncratic, digressive, and—new for me—as short as I can make them. This last will be the hardest to achieve, so please cut me some slack. I typically have to write for a while in order to discover what it is that I want to say.

So here’s my preliminary list. Please write to me with the titles you would like me to discuss, especially for those letters which have a number of titles under them.

A
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), by Lewis Carroll
Ambiguous Adventure by Cheikh Hamidou Kane (1961)
Anglo-Saxon Attitudes by Angus Wilson (1956)
Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje (2000)

B
Baluta by Daya Pawar (1978, tr. 2015)
Black Beauty by Anna Sewell (1877)
Bleak House by Charles Dickens (1853)
Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie (2008)
The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (2007)

C
The Children Who Lived in a Barn by Eleanor Graham (1938)
Clear Light of Day by Anita Desai (1980)
Cue for Treason by Geoffrey Trease (1940)

D
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)

E
Efuru by Flora Nwapa (1966)
Emma by Jane Austen (1815)
Every Room in the House Burnin’ by Andrea Levy (1995)

F
The Family from One End Street, by Eve Garnett (1937)
Fire on the Mountain by Anita Desai (1977)
Five Children and It by E. Nesbit (1902)
Friday’s Tunnel by John Verney (1959)

G
Gora by Rabindranath Tagore (1910)
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)

H
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell (2020)
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie (2017)
Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar (2020)
A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul (1961)
Howards End by E. M. Forster (1910)

The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh (2004)

I
I Have Become the Tide by Githa Hariharan (2019)
Iru: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve by Urmilla Deshpande and Thiago Pinto Barbosa (2024)

J
July’s People by Nadine Gordimer (1981)

K
Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
Kindred by Octavia Butler (1979)
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro (2021)

L
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (2013)
The Little Grey Men by BB (1942)
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis (1954)

M

The Mahabharata, traditionally attributed to the sage Vyasa (3rd C BCE to 3rd C CE)
Mara and Dann by Doris Lessing (1999)
The Memoirs of a Survivor by Doris Lessing (1974)
Middlemarch by George Eliot (1872)
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
My Beautiful Laundrette by Hanif Kureishi (1985)

N
Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya (1954)
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1948)
No-No Boy by John Okada (1957)

O
Obasan by Joy Kogawa (1981)

The Overstory by Richard Powers (2018)

P
The Painter of Signs by R. K. Narayan (1976)
Perelandra by C.S. Lewis (1943)
Poetic Justice by Amanda Cross (1970)
Praisesong for the Widow by Paule Marshall (1983)

Q
The Quiet American by Graham Greene (1955)

R
Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta by Doris Lessing (1979)
Regeneration by Pat Barker (1991)
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)
The Return of Faraz Ali by Aamina Ahmad (2022)
Roots and Shadows by Shashi Deshpande (1983)

S
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie (1989)
Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward (2011)
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward (1017)
Small Island by Andrea Levy (2004)
Small Remedies by Shashi Deshpande (2000)
The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin (1987)
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson (1972)

T
Tintin in Tibet by Hergé (1960)
Transmission by Atima Srivastava (1992)
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (1883)

U
Under the Net by Iris Murdoch (1954)

The Upanishads, by many different writers (800-200 BCE)
Utopia by Thomas More (1516)

V
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (1848)
The Vegetarian by Han Kang (2007)
The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle (1969)

W
Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee (1980)
Wise Children by Angela Carter (1991)

X
Xala by Ousmane Sembène (1975)

Y
Yuganta by Irawati Karve (1967)

Z
Zeitoun by Dave Eggers (2009)

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349. A Chair for My Mother

In 1980s, 2010s, Books, Inter/Transnational, parenting, reading, Stories, United States, women & gender, Work on November 7, 2015 at 10:58 am

A-chair-for-my-mother

BK100160AWhen Nikhil and Eric were young, one of our favorite picture books for them was Vera B. Williams’ A Chair for My Mother (1982). It became a Scholastic title as well as a Reading Rainbow book (remember LeVar Burton of PBS’s Reading Rainbow?), and Maureen, who taught kindergarten, must have brought it home as she did all the new and classic Scholastic books she would order to preview for her students. I don’t know who loved it more, the boys or us. We also read and enjoyed Vera Williams’ Cherries and Cherry Pits (1986), which, like all her books, she both wrote and illustrated in her distinctively bold, colorful style. A Chair for My Mother, though, was far and away my favorite.

I won’t spoil it for you by summarizing the plot; do pick up a copy and read it to the children in your life. Just know that its characters are a little girl, her mother, her grandmother, and, of course, the eponymous chair. They don’t have much in the way of possessions; the mother works hard for their living; and the love and warmth of its spare text and lavish illustrations continue to light up American children’s literature through the generations.

hp-2878_4z-1

When I heard of Vera Williams’ death last month, I felt a pang and a deep sadness. I read in her obituary that after her divorce she moved from New York to a houseboat in Vancouver, British Columbia, where, in her late 40s, she began to write and illustrate children’s books. What constitutes the sense of home is personal and elusive, but A Chair for My Mother captures what’s essential. That stage of my life is long gone, but the chair, and all that it stands for, sits squarely in my heart, inviting me to come home.

Chair-for-my-mother-chair

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

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120. I once was lost (and wish I still were)

In 1960s, 1970s, Books, Childhood, Education, Inter/Transnational, Music, Stories on August 18, 2011 at 11:05 pm

from Eleanor Farjeon’s The Little Bookroom, ill. Edward Ardizzone

There was that time in primary school when I became so deeply immersed in a book that I completely forgot myself. If there were sounds in the classroom around me I probably subsumed them into the story. Something snapped me out of my reverie, and I looked around at an empty room. My classmates had all gone out to recess and I had been completely oblivious to the clanging of the bell and the ensuing din of chairs scraping, desk lids slamming, and eight-year-olds bursting out into the playground. Although I did perhaps feel a small pang at the thought that no one had bothered to rouse me, I was complacent about my utter disregard for the here and now. The world of books was just as present to me, and for the most part my book-loving family supported, even encouraged, my dreamy absorption in it.

Moomintroll and Snufkin (illustration by Tove Jansson)

Don’t misunderstand me: I wasn’t an introverted child. I spent many hours outdoors, running, biking, tree-climbing, and generally engaging in feats of derring-do. But once I got my hands on a new or beloved novel, I slipped inside it completely, sloughing off my given identity and inhabiting that of the character—or, more often, characters—with whom I most identified, and that of the narrator as well. Sometimes my identification with the imaginary world went a bit too far, as when I read Crime and Punishment and was stricken with an overwhelming sense of guilt, convinced that it was I who had committed the crime. I couldn’t shake off the feeling for nearly a week. It was like a nightmare that continues to haunt even after one has awakened. Perhaps my periodic tuning-out of the world around me allowed me to re-engage in it all the more fully when I emerged, blinking, into the light of day like Kenneth Grahame’s Mole or Tove Jansson’s Moomin coming out of hibernation.

Ratty and Mole, ill. EH Shepard from guardian.co.uk

Strangely enough, while my absorption in a book was total, my ability to fall asleep during the daytime was non-existent. Every time I began to nod off, the sensation of falling would jerk me awake again. While other children took to their beds for an afternoon siesta, I tossed restlessly until my mother gave up and allowed me to do as I wished. Most often, confined to the house with my friends sleeping or otherwise engaged, what I most wished to do was to sail away to Wild Cat Island with the Swallows and Amazons or be transported to Babylon and ancient Tyre with the children in The Story of the Amulet.

Endpaper, 1931 edition, Swallows and Amazons (rosesbooks.com)

Nowadays, however, I seem to have lost my early ability to escape in this way. Graduate study, which valorized critical detachment over identification, didn’t help. The world is too much with me. I can no longer plunge as deeply into other worlds, but keep getting recalled to the mundane. Scattered and distractable, I long for the concentrated abstraction of my youth.

Ever since I was an undergraduate my habit of procrastination has repeatedly brought me up against a mountain of work that must be completed overnight. In those days, however, I had the knack of taking catnaps on command. Once, in my senior year of college, I had seven final papers to write in three days. I remember telling myself that I could afford only a 17-minute break between papers, and instantly plummeting into sleep for precisely that period of time. Nowadays I don’t trust myself enough to take such risks, and set my alarm every school night during the teaching year, even though I invariably waken just seconds before the alarm goes off. More alarmingly, while I still procrastinate, I seem to have lost the ability to churn out the requisite work under pressure. Once tired, I find it very difficult to focus my mind, however pressing my deadline, however many cups of tea I drink. And once over-tired, I can no longer summon sleep on demand, however desperately I may want to do so.

In recent years there have been many words and workshops dedicated to The Power of Now, to living fully in the moment. But at the risk of wilful misunderstanding, I suggest a different approach. Living constantly in the moment is exhausting. Losing oneself in a book enables deep concentration, frees one from identification with the tyrannical self, liberates the imagination, and opens up myriad worlds. As George Harrison sings in The Inner Light,

Without going out of my door/I can know all things on earth
Without looking out of my window/I can know the ways of heaven.

While that former slave trader John Newton sang ecstatically, “I once was lost, but now am found,” I dream of losing myself again as once I used to do so easily and so often.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

 

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