Return of the Undead

Ok i kid. I was not reading books i was feeling crafty...........(pun intended)
you wanna see what I have been making ......all nonsense though.........



or




I call this looney loopy lupin.lol

till next
with love

Five year old Danny Torrance has the shining - and the hotel wants to gobble him up

After a big interval huh? Its not that I forgot about my blog, its because I never had the time to read a good book or to watch a good movie (worth writing about). And I would hate to make my friends read abut consumerist trash like d new dress I got or how good d new over over over …… priced new cosmetics range that makes any1 look beautiful lolz. Jokes apart I managed to read my first Stephen King novel. The shining , and yes I watched the movie also. Lost few nights sleep though.
Jack Torrance, a loving dad when he is sober and otherwise a foul tempered alcoholic is on his last chance, a favour from an old friend Al. Fired from his job as a high school teacher, suffering from chronic writers block, and always craving a drink, the recovering alcoholic is given the job of winter caretaker at the Overlook Hotel. Which is completely isolated from the rest of the world during the winter. Wendy, his wife isn’t that happy with the arrangement, but she wants Jack to stay off drinking, keep writing, and get his pride back. So she agrees. But Danny has the shine. He can tell what people are thinking and feeling, and he sees things that regular people don’t see. At five, he doesn’t always understand what he hears and sees, but when is imaginary friend Tony, who often tells him things, comes to him and shows him the Overlook, he understands his family is in danger.At first, everything is fine. Jack is writing, Wendy is relaxing, and Danny is gradually coming round to the idea. And then, strange things start happening. The hotel contains a malignant force, and it wants Danny’s shine. And it will do whatever it has to to get it. Can one small five year old beat the evil spirits of fifty years of history?
There are quite a few things which differentiates this book from a run of the mill horror novel, 1stly you would never realize whether Jack is seriously “taken in” by the ‘evil hotel’, or he is suffering from cabin fever or he is simply a schizophrenic, and the writer never explains much about Danny’s shine, and you would never get to meet a proper ghost, but the hotel itself has a towering presence, deadly secrets and awful history. The so called ghosts seen in the novel are all victims of the hotel. As some critic rightly puts that these ghosts are the tormented souls of murdered children, dead gangsters, drunks, floozies, and petty sinners just like ourselves. King’s choice to portray ordinary protagonists with real-life problems: alcoholism, marital friction, poverty, and failed ambition sets the scene for gut-wrenching terror as the reader follows this familiar family to the precipice of Hell.

Where as the movie, Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film The Shining, one of the most popular and critically praised horror films ever made. The leering visage of Jack Nicholson grinning through a shattered door is one of the most immediately recognizable scenes in cinema, and Nicholson's performance here is one of the most well-remembered out of a very long career.


But there are some very basic problems with the movie, first of all Jack seems very much in the verge of breakdown, from the very beginning and no one is particularly surprised to see him go insane; it's just a question of how long it will take. His son Danny's "imaginary friend" Tony doesn't play even remotely the same role, and the veritable menagerie of ghosts present in the Overlook Hotel of King's book becomes the ghosts of a single family. Too many symbolism, too many “how the good old Americans were butchered by the white” killed the creepiness of the movie in my opinion. The most scary parts of the novel like the elevator, the fire hose, the play ground and last but not the least the hedge animals were some what missing in the movie. In the book the father dies as a victim, in the movie as a villain. And the movie killed off my favourite character from the book, what a shame, but no more hint dropping, by all means watch the movie, and more importantly don’t miss the book, though its 500 pages but it’s an amazing page turner.

Why I don’t and wont write about any “serious” stuff here:

This is no book review . Just some answers. My friends really liked my decision to create a blog, but not necessarily the blog (“thank god, it is at least better than those bunch of psychos, you called friends at different points of time” (?)- according to my best buddy)
So here you go.
“Graphic-novel is an oxymoron kiddo, call them comics. God I thought u were intellectual”,
-Yes I call them graphic novels. Try reading “Maus”, that would shut you up for good.Regarding the second question, no am no intellectual. I just have some kurtas. Lolz.
“You silly girl, why don’t you write about serious things, you were discussing about ethnic cleansing and ended up writing about a thriller”
-I write and analyze so many serious things day long (capitalism, dollar mechanism, Indian export potential, WTO, list goes on and on), so I would write about silly things only for my blog. And that also in this lousy manner. Between I love the way you write dude, why don’t you teach me a thing or two? (the intended “monkey” would understand).
Its very sweet of you people that you reserved this telling-offs for gtalk, ym or phone, but I wont mind if you post also. Love you all. God bless you.

Odessa File

I heard a bad news today morning, real bad news, and was depressed and tired at the end of the day. So no study, no work even no novels……am in a mood to sulk. Today, something about a book I have read some two years back. It is “Odessa File”. My favorite Forsyth book, I know it is bit weird choice. People love the jackal, or at least Avenger, but am obsessed with this part holocaust part typical Forsyth type man hunt saga. Ethnic cleansing, according to me is an everlasting symbol of the beast within us. Holocaust is no doubt one of the darkest chapters of humanity, and this book depicts that with excellence. It is fast, thrilling and complex. All starts with a suicide of an elderly German Jew, almost a non entity, and thus begins the whirlwind journey which involves a Mafia-like organization called Odessa, a real-life fugitive known as the "Butcher of Riga", a young German journalist who wants justice for the historically tormented soul, a brilliant, ruthless plot to reestablish the worldwide power of SS mass murderers and to carry out Hitler's chilling "Final Solution." The novel was never burdened with all the details and history unlike Mr. Brown’s latest disaster. And till date it remains my favorite thriller.

" The more you think about illusions, the more they’ll swell up and take on the form. And no longer be an illusion"

Last night while I was waiting for my “chicken paratha” (yup we get such thing in my campus), to get packed I picked up ‘After the quake’ by Haruki Murakami in the next door bookshop. My earlier tryst with the writer was through ‘Kafka on the shore’. The book was magical, where magical realism, metaphor and allegory went hand in hand. A truly unputdownable book according to me. The book narrates two interrelated but distinct stories. The odd chapters depict Kafka a 15 year old in a quest and the even ones tell us about Nakata, a ‘cat finder’. I thought about “Durbin” time and again while reading it though I don’t know why. I strongly feel it is a must read, a bit on the heavier side, but you won’t regret it. It may be the magical surrealism that this book made me remember, a ‘once upon a time friend’, who suggested it and some idiotic incidents with fondness, which is otherwise pretty unlikely. Last but not the least Mr. Anonymous you should not miss this at any cost. This is absolutely your type of book.

WATCHMEN, 4 Down, 8 more to Go, started Foucault's Pendulum

Am through the first 4 issues of Watchmen, and ya am loving it. Its bit dark, violent bit explicit at times, but then that’s the point of it I guess. Who thought super heroes had such gray shades (its almost dark). Ever heard of retired superheroes bithching about each other? Lolz.. Its difficult to decide who is right and who is wrong there. But ya am not gonna tell anything more, it is not being called one of the best graphic novels ever for nothing. You have to read it to know. But regarding a minor let-down, at times it is too dark to read, at a stretch. So I guess it would take more time than expected to finish the series.

In the mean time I was reading Focault’s Pendulum, a gift from my best friend. Started it in an early morning flight from Kolkata but quickly realized this requires more attention and more dedication.

‘ Foucault's Pendulum (original title: Il pendolo di Foucault) is novel a by Italian novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco. It was first published in 1988; the translation into English by William Weaver appeared a year later. Foucault's Pendulum is divided into ten segments represented by the ten Sefiroth. The novel is full of esoteric references to the Kabbalah, alchemy and conspiracy theory, so many that critic and novelist Anthony Burgess suggested that it needed an index. The title of the book refers to an actual pendulum designed by the French physicist Léon Foucault to demonstrate the rotation of the earth, which has symbolic significance within the novel.’ (credit goes to Wiki , as am at page 20 only, too early to comment about a so called ‘masterpiece’).

“When the Light of the Endless was drawn in the form of a straight line in the Void... it was not drawn and extended immediately downwards, indeed it extended slowly — that is to say, at first the Line of Light began to extend and at the very start of its extension in the secret of the Line it was drawn and shaped into a wheel, perfectly circular all around.”- that’s the starting point friends, so you understand it is a real long term project, in between can u suggest something light for a bed time reading?The first quotation was in Hebrew, got the translation from net, even got to know that its Hebrew from Google only, am such ignorant soul.

(once again credit for the images go to Google image and respective websites, am too lazy to scan my own copy. My book cover looks different and better, didn’t get an image of that)