I am back..

.. and blogging shall resume later tonight or tomorrow at the latest.

Will mention a few books I am currently reading or just finished reading in the meantime.

While on vacation I read Janet Browne's Darwin's Origin of Species: A Biography, part of the Books That Changed the World series. However, I will defer blogging about the book and about evolution in general, because although the book, a short one, was enjoyable and educative, I thought it read more like a bio of Darwin's life and events that led to his writing the book than an exposition of the concepts he laid out in the book. The book did provide a good historical perspective and a good intro to some of the other people before and during Darwin's lifetime that framed ideas that complemented and sometimes countered some of Darwin's (r)evolutionary ideas.

As blogged earlier, I had started reading Javier Marias's The Man of Feeling. However, even in translation, his writing is very stylistic and needs a lot of concentration, and I will get back to it later - hopefully later this month itself. He is definitely a very talented and exquisite author but one cannot skim through his writing during a vacation - need to drink deeply from this fountain!

Last night I started reading Making Love by Jean-Philippe Toussaint and translated from the French into English by Linda Coverdale (Review). I am only about 6-8 pages into the book but if a French movie could be put into words, this novel accomplishes it very well. set against the backdrop of beautiful play of reflected neon light and shadows in a Tokyo hotel room, it is sexy and sensuous while at the same time nostalgic, tearful, and languorous -- .quite a delectable start to the book delineating the dalliances between a man and a woman in the last throes of love - their 'affair' (how I hate that word!) spinning out to an inevitable break-up (likely an ominous tragic one), while continuing to flirt with desire and longing and simultaneously remembering their first time together.

Its too long but if this were a movie the tag line would be these lines from the book (& included on the book flap):

We were in fact so fragile and emotionally disoriented that the other's absence was probably the only the that could still bring us together, whereas being with each other would only accelerate the breakup in progress and make our parting official.

or better still...these lines:

..breaking up, I was beginning to realize, was more a state of being than an action, more a period of mourning than a death agony.

Anyways....blogging will resume tomorrow. In the next few days, I may upload a few pictures of the very beautiful place I went to (and maybe ask readers - the few that exist - to take guesses at where I spent the last 8 days.)