The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

“A White Tiger keeps no friends. It’s too dangerous.”

“Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you’ll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks (no boy remembers his schooling like the one who was taken out of school, let me assure you) …..bits of All India Radio news bulletins, things that drop into your mind, like lizards from the ceiling, in the half hour before falling asleep–all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with.”

BOOK

Balaram, a boy struggling to get out of the “darkness”, the life that by birth is obliged to live. He presents himself both as a murderer and entrepreneur. There are moments that you like him, that you pity him, that you dislike him, yet through reading his story you can not hate him , even as he becomes a murderer all you see is a tiger trying to survive in an unfair world.

PHOTO

http://thesecretlifeofobjects.wordpress.com/category/india/

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Moonlight Sonata by Yiannis Ritsos

 

Kavouri , Athens, Greece

 

“I know that each one of us travels to love alone,
alone to faith and to death.
I know it. I’ve tried it. It doesn’t help.
Let me come with you.”

 

The Poem

An unique poem from the Greek poet Yiannis Ritsos, considered one of the five great Greek poets of the twentieth century.

The ravages of time, loneliness, freedom , love and death.

You can read the poem in this following link  http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poem/item/2678

The Photo

I took this photo near the seaside in Athens at Kavouri 2 years ago…..  a rare rainy day

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Sun also Rises / Fiesta

Whenever I see a photo of a bullfighter (or Spain for that matter ) there is only one writer that comes in mind and he is one I love a lot …. Hemingway and the book the “Sun also Rises” were actually responsible for me traveling to Pamplona.

“Oh Jake,” Brett said, “We could have had such a damned good time together.”
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly, pressing Brett against me.
Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

Book

A book about a “lost generation” that lived through the First World War. A group of people that fight their own demons in search of life. It is the hardest of times that force people to reevaluate their ways and it is never easy.    

There is a great analysis in this link of Cummings study guide

 

Photo

1. July 12th, 2012 during the famous festival of ‘the running of the bulls’, the Feria de San Fermín in Pamplona, Navarre, Spain by Antalya Nall-Cain
2. Here’s Pfeiffer, Hemingway and Hadley together in Pamplona

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Le club des Incorrigibles Optimistes

One book came in mind seeing this photo..   Jean-Michel Guenassia, Le club des Incorrigibles Optimistes

“Now days we speak to each other without saying nothing at all”

Book

Michel is  a boy in the 60’s in Paris. Amateur photographer and high school student from a strict family of retail shop owners. He spends his days in Balto cafe, plays baby-foot and meets a group of eastern people playing chess in a bar that are frequent Kessel et Sartre. … an adolescent growing up in the 60s in Paris

Photo

French writers in the Cafe de Flore; Jean-Paul Sartre at right
Source: Paris Under the Occupation

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Cemetary of forgotten books

I can almost see Daniel searching in this library for His Book …

Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind ….

“Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.”

The Book

The Cemetery of forgotten books is where Daniel (the main character of the book) starts his adventure. His father takes him to a secret place that turns out to be a huge library of forgotten books that are guarded from the rest of the world. Anyone who enters this secret place can take one book and he has to protect it for life. Daniel chooses The Shadow of the Wind by Julián Carax.

The Photo

Cincinnati Public Library
The Main Library has occupied a prominent position in downtown Cincinnati since 1874, when a new building was constructed on the west side of Vine Street between Sixth and Seventh Streets. Labeled the most magnificent public library building in the country, the library featured one element similar to today’s library: a towering atrium with a skylight ceiling.

http://www.cincinnatilibrary.org/main/building.asp