WHAT I BOUGHT TODAY ...

FICTION opens up our emotional spectrum and makes us aware of emotions we didn’t know we had. It grips us with the questions it asks, the people and situations it creates, the complexity of emotions it stirs, all without giving us cut-and-dried answers or solutions to the ills of the world. And yet we learn, somehow or rather. Good novels engage us and seize our imaginations, they make us experience the emotions of the characters as if they were our own. Reading gives us breadth and clarity of vision and insight. Good books do these. There’re lots of lessons we can learn from a lifetime of reading. After all, wasn’t it Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) who once said that reading is like falling into a deep ravine from which we can never, ever climb out?

Fiction
Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon (2005) / Dean Bakopoulos
Theft: A Love Story (2006) / Peter Carey
A Long Way Down (2005) / Nick Hornby
Until I Find You (2005) / John Irving
A Fine Balance (1995) / Rohinton Mistry
The Poe Shadow (2006) / Matthew Pearl