The Sunday Salon: Springing forward sleepily

Hello blog! I'm still here. I know I've neglected you for a while, but I've been busy for the past two weeks and away during the weekends, that I've only now got to sit at my desk to blog. Of course, I should also mention that my blogging mojo has been absent plus it doesn't help that I haven't been reading much so the whole point of blogging about books becomes a little difficult when there is no book to talk about. But I try to be here when I can and I hope it will be more often now than before.

It's a beautiful Spring weather here today with a real feel of 64 degrees. After the long freezing winter, this warm weather is super welcoming. I cannot wait to get our patio ready for a good amount of lounging, reading, and knitting this Spring. We did a lot of work on our backyard last year towards the end of Summer so we haven't been able to reap those benefits yet. We still have our flower and vegetable garden to work on so we are looking forward to getting those started soon.

The husband and I were in DC last weekend to visit some friends and family. We had a jolly good time there and spent the road trip listening to the Game of Thrones audiobook. (Funnily, by the end of the trip and seven hours of driving later, we had only finished listening to the equivalent of the first episode.) Yesterday, we went to Raleigh to visit our close friends who just welcomed their newborn a few days ago. I haven't been around too many babies, so it always amazes me how tiny they are and how we all started there one day and ended up here today several stone sizes later.

Did you all spring your clocks forward? My computer and phone have switched but the other clocks are all sitting in the old time zone. I can never understand how this jumping forward and backward in time can be a good thing. Why not just choose the middle ground and stay there without changing clocks. It's honestly very tiring for a week while my body sleepily syncs up.

I haven't been reading anything, though I have three audiobooks in progress - Jo Nesbø's The Snowman (I now totally get the allure of his books), Shilpi Somaya Gowda's The Secret Daughter (lovely so far) and the A Game of Thrones with the husband. I do have a few good books checked out from the library for my Armchair travel - Celestine Hitiura Vaite's Frangipani (Tahiti), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus (Nigeria), and Willow Wilson's Alif the Unseen, which has a Middle-Eastern feel but is really fantasy so it may not qualify for my reading. I'm going to sample these books and read the one that's turning out to be hardest to put down.

The Free by Willy Vlautin

Even with mortgaging their house they fell behind on those payments, and then his wife had to quit working to take care of Ginnie. They began to drown. Now after four years he was left with a total bill of nearly seventy-five thousand dollars.

Leroy Kervin is an Iraq war veteran who returned from the war in a coma and had to be admitted to a group home to be taken care of. Seven years later, he woke up with a clear mind. Suspicious of the clarity and believing it to be a trick, he decides to commit suicide. Freddie McCall finds him severely injured and takes him to the hospital, where he visits him often. But Freddie has issues of his own - a friend leaving for the prison has moved a marijuana garden to his basement and Freddie is worried about being found out. His routine is awfully similar day after day - work at the group home at night and a paint company at day, with just a brief two hour stop at home between jobs. Pauline Hawkins works at the hospital where Leroy is being treated, and while she takes amazing care of her patients, her own life has nothing major to look forward to. She lives alone with her rabbit Donna, and spends most nights watching TV and some days visiting her mentally ill father.

The Free is an amazing book - very fast to read, with a very engrossing plot. Even though the lives of the characters were significantly different from mine, I found myself warming up to them and really liking them. They all had very real problems - problems that are sometimes subtle and oftentimes tend to get buried under the carpet. Leroy has been in and out of coma and has returned from the war a very different man. After his attempt to commit suicide, he flits in and out of consciousness. His dreams follow a long sequence where he is running with his girlfriend from military people, who are killing people with strange green/purple marks on their body. His dreams are clearly a manifestation of the life that he has been leading post-war, in that the taints of war never leave you and leave indelible marks on your person.

On the other side, Freddie is thiscloseto losing his house, thanks to his mounting bills and two not very high paying jobs. He is dedicated, however, to his work and never once complains about his abysmal state. Every person he comes across worries about his ill health, but Freddie brushes the concerns off and is ever so helpful to them. When his friend starts to harvest marijuana in his basement, he is worried, but the money he gets for complying helps pay off his bills. His daily cause of sadness however is that he sees very little of his daughters after they were taken away by his wife when they split. Pauline has similar problems. When a girl is brought to the hospital with abscesses in her leg after heavy drug use, Pauline takes an instant fancy to the girl and helps her through the ordeal. She identifies a lot with this girl - both alone, both craving human connection but making all the wrong choices. But the girl doesn't really want to be helped. No matter how much she admits that her situation is bad, she keeps going back to it.

Willy Vlautin tells a great character story. There is not one place in the book where he tells what his character is feeling or worrying about. His lets his narration and his story give us a measure of his characters' emotions. The reader knows everything about the characters through their actions. This literary device worked really well because it places the reader directly in the shoes of the character and depending on the kind of person you are, you will have your own conclusions about each character. You may empathize with them or pity them. Moreover, he doesn't pass judgment on his characters' actions - they do what they can, whether it is right or wrong. Most of the times, their circumstance drives them to do certain things, but he tells it very matter-of-factly that we do not question it.

This isn't a book that masks problems and tries to give everyone a happy ending. The problems are real, no matter how profound. What I loved about this book is that the issues that the characters face could very well be faced by any number of people I see everyday. They are not the problems that get debated about in council meetings or the Congress or even in the news. These are generally the invisible problems of the world that everyone seems to have. Vlautin tells their story so profoundly in The Free that their problems become our problems too.


I received this book for free for review from the publisher via TLC Book Tours.

The Sunday Salon: A binge-watching week

Good morning Saloners! I have been very under the weather all of last week. It didn't help that work was busier than usual and happened to be the one week when I couldn't afford to take time off. I did work just a half day on Friday so that helped quite a bit and I'm hoping for a better week this time.

This week, the husband and I have been watching Game of Thrones on HBO Go. We have caught up with Seasons 1 and 2 and just started watching Season 3. All I can say is, What's wrong with you George Martin? Why do you kill off the good people and leave the world in bad hands. I'm nursing the hope that when the series finally ends, the trends will revert, but with George Martin, who knows. There are some characters like Joffrey Baratheon that drive me insane, so much so that I would love to obliterate him from the books completely. And then there are characters like Tyrion Lannister and Jon Snow who make watching this show worth every dime. I really cannot wait to start reading these books - maybe next year is what I keep telling myself.

On the other hand, the return of The Walking Dead hasn't given me much thrill yet. The first two episodes have been very slow, and much as I always credit this show with its amazing character development, there's only so much of teen Carl's angst or creepy Lizzie's actions you can stretch out. I guess I feel the slow pacing acutely because I watched all the episodes until Season 4's mid-season finale, back-to-back, and suddenly, now I'm having to wait for the next episode. I think I prefer binge-watching shows. They keep the excitement running and get rid of the between-episode lulls. But then you are done with the show in a month and then what?

Next weekend, we are heading to DC to meet some relatives. It's also the husband's birthday the same weekend, plus my best friends are expecting their first. So much goodness to look forward to. The winter is also mostly over here - sure some days are still cold, but the other day, there was a beautiful whiff of spring air that had me skipping all the way to work. I've been thinking about our first vegetable garden and need to start planting something soon. On the knitting side, I've been wrapping up a cowl that I'll probably not use until next winter but I'm excited to start making shawls and stoles now. As for reading, I picked up Willy Vlautin's The Free couple of days ago, and this book is seriously amazing. I've heard a few of you rave about it already and I'm glad that I have it to read. What's happening in your corner?

The Isolation Door by Anish Majumdar

When you carry the weight of being wrong around wherever you go, it gets tempting to just add to the load.

Niladri, aka Neil Kapoor, watches despairingly as his mom is taken away for schizophrenia treatment. Even when he visits her just before she leaves, his mother is obsessed with her looks and how awful she will look on screen. Occasionally, motherly instincts jump out from her but not often enough. He is angry at his dad because she has to go away again. But it comes to a boil when he finds full unused bottles of medicines hidden away by his dad - apparently he hasn't been giving her her medications.

The Isolation Door follows Neil as he navigates the complex web of negative human emotions around him. After his mother has been taken away, his father is utterly tormented by her absence and occasionally spends nights in the parking lot outside her ward. He isn't willing to pay Neil to study theater, nor does he seem to show any interest in his life. His mother's sister is convinced that his father is responsible for her plight and tries to gently nudge Neil towards issuing an official complaint against his dad.

Thanks to his aunt, he pays his way into theater school. Right from the first day, he gets in with three other students, each having his/her own personal issues. Tim is very dominant and abusive with his girlfriend Emily, but deep inside, he has his share of insecure feelings. Emily is a very timid submissive girl whose very personality screams frailty, but Neil likes her. Quince has some unrequited feelings for Tim, and is often a tough nut to crack, having made an almost impenetrable shell around herself.

The Isolation Door is a very dark read. Though it is a very fast-paced book, it is definitely not a book to read if you are looking for a quick read. There are several layers to this book, just as there is with human personalities. The cast of characters in this book suffer from some ailment or the other. The narration is laced with an undercurrent of mental issues - depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, among others.

Despite its well exploration of the dark sides of the human personality, The Isolation Door does not establish great portrayals of its characters. I couldn't care either way about any of the characters nor see any depth to their personalities. I thought some characters were a bit laughable or unreal. The characterizations did go well with the theme of the book however - there is a deep void within the book that strips out the characters to their bare minimums but I would have enjoyed some more depth to their actions.

Ultimately, I liked this book but couldn't get very invested into it. It being fast-paced helped keep the plot moving - there was enough of a suspense to keep me coming back. The prologue was by far my favorite part of the book - Neil's mom dangling herself out of the window to get her husband to do something her way, would forever leave an impressionable picture on little Neil's mind. There is so much that is wrong with that picture that it is horrifying sometimes, and seriously screams for help. But it is clear that things did get very wrong eventually.


I received this book for free for review from the publisher via TLC Book Tours.

The Sunday Salon: An epic saga affair

It has been a while since I did a Sunday Salon. I would like to say that I was busier than usual, but really, there was nothing major happening for me to report. I've been reading some, listening some, watching some, and knitting some, for the most of the past few weeks. Just as with every beginning of the year so far, my reading has been going very slow. I know it will pick up soon, if the past years were any indication.

The husband and I started watching Game of Thrones this past week. We are late to the bandwagon but not having any major TV to watch right now, we decided to start watching it. I'm a little more hooked into the show now than when I first started watching it. I don't really watch too many epic sagas - since almost every character has some meaty story arc, it takes me a while to remember everyone. I have to read a few recaps before I get the story straight. But, I LOVE reading epic sagas. There is usually a lot to love in them - strong characters with everyone getting a lot of page presence; a wide variety of emotions and motifs - happiness, sadness, triumph, disappointment, betrayals, complicated relationships, and others; a lot of growing up, coming of age, and decay into nothingness; engrossing plots; and cliffhangers. You can't really agree or disagree with anything. Stuff happens, just like in life, so move on. Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings are the only two sagas I remember reading. And after watching a few episodes of Game of Thrones, I'm finally convinced about reading the books. But Holy Mygodly, how much sex and curses this show has! (And I'm remembering not to get attached to any character, I know how Martin loves to kill them all.)

Much as I like reading epic sagas, I'm also picky about them. Most epic sagas tend to be fantasy-driven and not all fantasy worlds appeal to me. I almost detest reading anything supernatural, and the fantasy needs to be appetizing and not gross. It's usually a thin line and a very subjective experience. So it takes me longer to pick an epic series and dive in - I usually need some strong impetus to get there.

Last week, we got hit by a big snowstorm, like much of the US East. That was our big one for the season, and the biggest in the last few years. I worked from home two days last week and loved watching out my office window at all the happy kids sledding in the snow. We have a lot of slopes in this part of the country and the kids had so much fun picking a hill. While the roads and driveways are cleared, there is still a lot of snow everywhere else and it's not going to go anywhere anytime soon. After checking the weather forecasts, this does seem to be the last snow of the season, and it has been slightly warmer since. So are y'all ready for Spring?