Neeraj Chavan

“Because nothing is as good as you can imagine it. No one is as beautiful as she is in your head. Nothing is as exciting as your fantasy.”

“We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it's our job to invent something better.”

“It's creepy, but here we are, the Pilgrims, the crackpots of our time, trying to establish our own alternate reality. To build a world out of rocks and chaos.”

Oh Chuck, how the f**k do you do this? Reviewing a Chuck Palahniuk book is like trying to explain how a rainbow looks like to a blind guy! To begin with it's a story about how a guy fakes choking to death in posh restaurants, just so that he could earn some quick cash and support his mother, who's dying in a hospital. The characters are quite interesting, especially Dr. Paige Marshall and Denny, who collects rocks from the street and treats them as new born babies. The plot is weirdly vague, just like his every other novel. But Chuck still manages to blow off your mind with his masterpiece of a plot twist. Literally, the climax of the novel was just like Chuck putting a shotgun to my head and painting the walls with my brain! The book is so thought-provoking and profoundly charged that it's almost impossible to put it down! It's a plethora of fascinating aphorisms and epigrams.
It's very difficult to explain or review the book. The best you can do it, read and experience it yourself.
As Chuck says in the book, “It's pathetic how we can't live with the things we can't understand. How we need everything labeled and explained and deconstructed.”

It's the best book I've read after Fight Club, in this genre!

Picked up the audiobook as I wanted to read Didion's works for a while now. It's a good memoir of her difficult time when she lost her husband and her daughter was in an induced coma. I respect her telling the story but I guess I kind of expected more depth. It felt very repetitive at times and the medical jargon and terminologies could have been less.

Towards the end chapters, the book managed to get better and focus more on her feelings and emotions during this period of grief but it was too late till then to strike a chord with the reader in me.
Maybe I'll pick up some of her other works.

“It is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.' ‘A melancholy conclusion,' said K. ‘It turns lying into a universal principle.'“

This pretty much sums up this vaguely unconventional novel. Kafka delivers the harsh truths of bureaucracy, existential individualism and mindless formalities of the society in a subtle way, through this weird fable surrounding the life of Josef K. It's not an easy read and sometimes you wonder about what exactly is the narrator trying to convey as ideas seem to contradict like a paradox. It questions the very principles on which our society is based. In my opinion, there's one thing I surely learned from this book, that there's no escaping the authority. Whether you rebel against it or make peace with it, that is totally up to you. Kafka is eccentric, vague, surreal and intellectually fascinating, all at the same time! You should read it with an open mind!

“Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.”“Yes”, I said. “Isn't it pretty to think so?”

A classic tale of unrequited love beautifully set amidst the backdrop of Spain and Paris! Hemingway's way of narration and his elegant style while describing the imagery is unparalleled in the literary sphere. It's literally your ticket to Spain and Paris, right from the comfort of your couch. The whole book revolves around a bunch of folks who've just came out of war and are trying to forget all the misery. There's extravagant wine and liquor flowing throughout the entire book and at times you may find it a bit tedious to read. A fiesta indeed. The characters are well developed. I admire Hemingway's portrayal of Jake Barnes. The protagonist who's wallowing in the angst of his unrequited love for Brett. And yes, what can I say about the lady of this book; Brett Ashley! She is the perfect definition of a ‘femme fatale' You're bound to fall in love with her.

The plot is brilliantly woven with the all the characters. But the pace of the book seems a bit slow, despite it being a short novel. That's the thing about Hemingway. He never compromises with quality just for the sake of wrapping it up. Ernest is always known for providing a rich reading experience to his readers!

The conclude it, it's a great book about a lost generation. It taught me that despite all the boisterous partying and champagne, if you're not in harmony with your inner self, you'll eventually suffer and always be in a pathetic state. And that no matter how terrible the affliction seems, there's always light at the end of the tunnel. There's always hope. For the sun also rises, even after the darkest of nights!

Fyodor takes you on a roller coaster ride with this one. The narrator is a weird character. He amuses you and irritates you at the same time! In the end, he hands you a mirror to your soul. You may either end up hating him or loving him, it all boils down to how you perceived it. As of me, he fascinated me! Maybe I'll read it once again someday, to grasp the esoteric philosophy of Fyodor.