Reality Check

Doing a critic on a book is considered difficult and it is awfully true. One begins to ponder on the book one reads and often finds that his concentration while reading is often not enough to do that. However, when it comes down to picking one book over the other, it becomes easy.
Guess that arises out of personal taste, while writing about needs more -you ought to see if your personal taste is really good enough.
Sounds silly? well, maybe it is. But think about it, you have a bestseller on your hands and you are really struggling to complete it. you find it utterly out of taste and yet the whole intellectual world and also the masters of criticism have embraced it. The urban man (or is it now the ubersexual man?) might say i give a damn, my taste alone matters. Sounds good, but then it still nags you - "what in the book made so many like it?"
It is alright to say that "this is me" and period. But, if one is to continue on the path of personal development, one has to think and the problem rises.
Let's take an example -
"The monk who sold the Ferrari" and "The Alchemist"
The latter, i managed to read twice and i still like it, while the former, i just closed it shut halfway through for life yesterday night.
Both are big sellers and the monk got the author of Alchemist saying - " A captivating story that teaches as it delights". But there seems to be the problem, it teaches and as per me, does so more than delighting. Both books talk along a similar premise and both have adopted fiction as the medium. The Alchemist is a fine book because of its subtlety while the monk goes ahead teaching and in doing so bores you with its garrulous explanations on the good of a system while completely forgetting the system. The alchemist does not preach, it just draws a line (guide line) while the monk goes ahead and makes a road, what more, it almost makes the road a one way with thousands of traffic restrictions. Maybe the road does contain all the restrictions and diversions, but then if a book is to titillate the mind, it has to allow the reader to expand on the concepts. Otherwise, it ceases to be a book of literature, fiction (or whatever you want to call it) and becomes a text book and that is the last thing that thinking man wants.

When there are such distinctions and the modern man talking about being so frank still manages to make them both bestsellers, one wonders, how frank we actually are.
Does it then simply mean that people picked up the books and made them bestsellers for that period based on a comparison of the books in the period? Sounds very dishonest, a modern man who says "this is me", "I am Frank", should not be typically doing it.

It seems like i am prattling, maybe, but what i find difficult to understand is - how is it that two books talking the same at such different levels, still be doing so almost equally good. These books do not even have the advantage that movies have... like one could take a real strong movie on prostitution and make it a hit while another could do a sleaze of the same and still rake in the moolah. 'coz there still exists such different target categories. but in books like this, one can rarely except the same....

Am i going wrong somewhere... i don't think so, I guess as ever books are sold more based on the talk on them rather than their actual content. There have been books that have become a major hit and people who have read them twice are still wondering what they read. That is the reality check. People are still in the clutches of fame (direct or indirect) and they just are interested in saying i too read that...

Would this change.. i am sure that it wont, at least not in my life time...

The need to write

So much to say and never found what to do with all of those words in my mind. The sheer inactivity, the inability to use the words put me under a pressure that suffocates me to the edge of life. Though, there it stops, Never pushing me over the edge.

It is like the Damocles sword, hanging right there. Kill me, kill me not... may be it is weighing out the options.

Sure enough though, it has learnt the trick from my own self. It was i who held the words at the tip of the tongue not knowing what to do and now it, in turn waddles me between life and death.

And with this war of patience waging hot, me completely at its mercy, i heard people speaking of blogs, and i thought - "Hmmm, now that seems to be a way out. I could write them words there for people to see.. and maybe then i would suffocate less".

So here goes... my blog, my words that shall slay the evil trying to suffocate me - hopefully.