Showing posts with label book review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label book review. Show all posts

The Gameworld Trilogy [4/5]

Take a book, Sambo, a blank book. Yes, any book will do, as long as it's empty. Now make up a good fantasy plot, with the grandioseness of, if not the complexity of, say the Lord of the Rings - a nice good true-to-fantasy Good versus Evil plot. It's all up to you, however, to decide who's good and who's not, and when, but the plot has to be flawless. Then you create some lovely characters. Humans and human-forms first, if you really ask me. You can make the monsters and the aliens any way you like, but the humans should be well-formed characters. Characters one can identify with. Then you create a lot more characters, but this time, making them delightfully absurd. How, you ask? Well, for example, you can have a three-headed bartender, for one. How about a frog swathing in self-pity. Or maybe a James-Bond-ish dwarf. Anything sufficiently absurd or counterpointish would do. Now, think of all the fantasy books you've read. I know you haven't read many, but the few you have, will have to do. Mull them all over and plant tiny tantalizing references in your story. Adopt a playful narrative style if you can. Now, now, what've you got?

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Ponniyin Selvan: The First Floods [ 0/5 ]

You don't get good Tamil books in Bangalore, and I've always picked some whenever I go to Tambiland. Last time, unusually, I picked up something in English - a translated version of Kalki's Ponniyin Selvan (a 5-part novel in Tamil about the Chola dynasty, set in 10th Century Tamil Nadu - arguably, the popularest Tamil novel ever). Gulti had asked me to pick it up for one of his friends. Girish, did you tell me you'd read a bit of a pathetic translation of Ponniyin Selvan? Was it by one Karthik Narayan by any chance? It must be, because it's the only one I found on the stands. And because it fits your description well.