Edith Wharton: The Age of Innocence

One Word Summary: Dilettante

Synopsis: A man marries one woman, but he loves another.

Rate: 3 canvas-backs

Recommendations: This is a helpful book if you want to think great thoughts. It's wonderful if you like to feel frustrated and powerless. It's also nice if you're into rules, and even better if you enjoy debates on whether the society is going to pot. It's also really well written.

Questions:

1. Before they are married Archer fantasizes about 'awakening' May. During their courtship he is at some pains to educate and inform her tastes, but he abandons the task even before the wedding. How is his behaviour towards May mirror to his unconsumated love for Countess Olenska?


2. When I was a child my mother told me that May manipulated Archer to acheive her own ends, she implied that it was a bad thing for May to do. Is May a sneak or a product of her time? Was it wrong of her?


3. Somewhere in the novel Archer complains to Countess Olenska "I don't Understand You!", and she growls back, "Yet you understand her!" Do you understand either of them? What ideas do these two women represent? Why does he love one and scorn the other? Why does he stick with one and forsake the other?


4. Is society going to pot? Would you like to live in Old New York? Visit?


5. Food Food Food! What is canvas-back? How does May's image as Diana the Virgin Godess jive with her food loving tribe?

Rohinton Minstry: A Fine Balance

One Word Summary: Eunuch, cut out my heart
More Words: The author supplies the despair, and the reader must provide the hope. This is a very good tale. The opening quote from Balzac's Le Pere Goriot is appropriate.

"Holding this book in your hand, sinking back in your soft armchair, you
will say to yourself: perhaps it will amuse me. And after you have read this
story of great misfortunes, you will no doubt dine well, blaming the author for
your own insensitivity, accusing him of wild exaggeration and flights of fancy.
But rest assured: this tragedy is not a fiction. All is true."

Synopsis: The birth and decline of an unlikely friendship between four lonely people trying to survive the Indira Gandhi administration in 1975. Or the fabulous adventures of two country mice in the city by the sea, with short appearances from the widow, the student, and the hair collector.
Rate: 5 tears
Other Books To Read: The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth, and The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

Quotes:

"Why does everybody have to choose the railway tracks only for dying?"
grumbled another. "No consideration for people like us. Murder, Suicide,
Naxalite-terrorist killing, police-custody death - everything ends up delaying
the trains. What is wrong with poison or tall buildings or knives?"