The Man who Never was

The Wild Swans At Coole by W.B. Yeats My rating: 3 of 5 stars Poetry is not of the genre which I can claim I have read extensively, or heck even decently. The most memorable poem in my head, is The Solitary Reader by William Wordsworth . That too because of a passionate 10th grade English Tutor. Then there was Gitanjali , the collection of works by Rabindranath Tagore . But those were more spiritual in nature, one's appreciation is more towards the depth of the lyrics rather than its flow. This year, I've been trying to rectify that shortcoming, but Gods it's not as easy as reading prose. With literary fiction, you can usually get hooked on the narration. The premise, the characters, what they do, how they do it, what doing it does to them, does to the story, the twists, the turns, the parables, the subtext, the works. With Poetry, I'm drawing a blank. There is also the case that I might not have chosen necessarily the best work to

The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy My rating: 5 of 5 stars I got interested in reading this book, after a reference to it, in a memoir by a lesser-known author. He himself was dealing with crippling poverty, mental health issues, as well as from the general indifference that the world had to his life. On his second or third suicide attempt in Kanyakumari, after preparing to swallow a bottle of pills, he read the book that he had brought along on the journey. Reading it was a life-changing experience; quite literally. Driving him away from the embrace of death, and giving him the hope to keep living, no matter how difficult life might present itself as. Not that I think about it, I should sit down and write my thoughts on that book, before this one. The book is Visappu Pranayam Unmadam വിശപ്പ് പ്രണയം ഉന്മാദം by Muhammed Abbas, for those of you who are able to read it in the original language. Ivan Ilyich is a quintessential Tolstoy character; a