The Rebelle blog

Should we be apologetic for what we read? Could it be embarrassing to admit that some of us do read YA fiction because some of it offers great advice on life! It was with such thoughts when I read this article  on why reading fiction has become more important than ever. On Kindle, I have had access to some great fiction books that I would have otherwise not read as paperbacks. One among them is Love in the Present Tense by Catherine Ryan Hyde whose another book, Pay it Forward was made into a movie. The reasons for explaining our literature choices are more important these days is because all of us get labelled and categorized by our literary tastes in a book club. On Goodreads, when I see a healthy mix of fiction, non-fiction, history and sociology books it makes me realise this variation in our reading is essential for our thinking caps to grow and expand so as to behave sensibly in public. The moral code for behaviour is set pretty hard for people who read a multitude of su...

It's difficult to get off a book from my head once I decide I like it too much. Case in point, my latest read from Gayle Forman. Yes, Young Adult literature. I might have mentioned this somewhere else, perhaps to a friend, but I missed out reading YA fiction during my teens. I was big on classics and all the serious reading. My companion was Daddy, of course. He and me scouted for books, read them, discussed them, impassioned with love for literature. Aah! There goes my train into the past again. So, I have an exam on coming sunday, in two days. I should be studying. But I keep going back to Shakespeare, Lulu, Willem and the beautiful Paris streets and cafe houses. Does it ever happen that we read about a place extensively and hence visit it, get familiar with it even without actually being there? I think it does with me. Especially happens with Dickens' London, and the Paris French quarters. It doesn't help much that owing to understanding urban planning and architec...