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Thanks to the Guardian Newspaper UK for the link.
“Matthew Pearl is the author of The Dante Club, a literary thriller about a group of 19th-century Harvard scholars secretly working on a translation of The Divine Comedy who are forced out of hiding by a series of gruesome murders modelled on Dante’s Inferno.”
Read the complete article with commentary.
Life in Death
What simply makes Tuesdays with Morrie a winner is the fact that it’s nonfiction, that it happened in real life. When I was reading about Mitch Albom’s conversations with his former professor, Morrie, I ultimately thought about how these actual tête-à-têtes occurred in real life. This makes the whole plot all the more magical, because usually, when a tearjerker comes out in the market, I always think of cheesy writing styles and melodramatic scenes that seem exaggerated and not too different from any average soap opera. And although some scenes are melodramatic, they are only rightly so, for in truth, death is a tragic affair. Albom was able to capture Morrie’s courage and strength as his body deteriorated gradually. Tuesdays with Morrie does not intend to be dramatic, it just is. And that sets it apart from all the tearjerkers that Nicholas Sparks and Judith McNaught have to offer. Reading this book made me rethink about my priorities, and hours after closing the book for the final time, I was still pondering about its theme. Certainly, it left a deep imprint on me, as it showed how a person’s life is not measured by his age, but by the number of things he has fulfilled and done in such a transitory world. Morrie’s life, and death, showed us one thing: how a person could have a lifetime in such a short while.
Curiosity Saves the Cat
I opened this book with doubt and reluctance, for I am naturally not a fan of tender stories that tug at your heartstrings with their dramatic flair and saccharine verbiage. But The Curious Incident of the Dog gives you none of that, and this quality of the book- that light, funny, and innocent atmosphere- makes the story of Christopher even more heart-rending. The point of view of the story makes the book uniquely special. It is chronicled and narrated by Christopher, an autistic teenager who is intent on finding out the murderer of his neighbor’s dog. The story was narrated cleanly and simply, which adds to the fact that all Christopher writes is the truth. All that is deemed to be chronicled are only those that he observed with his very eyes, and those that he felt and learned. The objectivity of the way Christopher feels and thinks provokes such emotion in me because I could see how different he is from normal people. The book opened me to the idea of what sets autistic people from the rest of the world. The author was able to show that Christopher does not have a different world, but a different way of seeing the world. The world for him should be a fruit of logic and objectivity. This accounts for the fact that throughout the novel, there are bits and pieces of trivia, as Christopher is fond of showing people that life is like a math equation. The readers are not let in on his world, because he has no separate, delusional world, but he lets readers people to see with new eyes, with his eyes. Surprisingly, as his curiosity compels him to find out who killed the dog and make the pieces fit, he realizes the cold brutality of his discovery, not just about Mrs. Shear’s pet, but also about his own life. Uncovering the truth though, is only half of the whole experience. It is actually about how Christopher, an autistic child, reacts to and faces the truths laid bare before him that make this novel a staple in every bookworm’s personal collection.