Monday, March 13, 2006

Life's KALEIDOSCOPE and my Varied reading

My initial reading pattern actually was not the normal one...most people graduate from comics to nancy drew and famous five to Agatha Christie,mushy novels, Mills and Boon...popular fiction like Grisham, Archer , Sheldon.....Ayn Rand, Richard Bach etc and on to better stuff.

I started off differently....Readers Digest....Russian Childrens Novels, Nancy Drew(Oh i owe Carolyn Keene and i will write a post on this), and then went on to Jeffrey Archer and Ayn Rand and Grisham.Then i read Sheldon a bit...and then Richard Bach and then mushy of the likes of novels Danielle Steel and finally sick of life went on to Mills and Boon(Esp the blue covered Modern Romances....others are extremes they bore too much....they make no sense anyway but what the heck they are so stress releiving you just dont think....and a story just glides through and you fall asleep).
But that was then.....now i am stable at literary stuff mostly Indian Fiction or Literary stuff.

I read Danielle Steel books when in college....till i outgrew her or may be got fed up
Have a few novels of hers unfortunately not my favorites
I mean we friends thought she had a sadism the way she almost always kills the hero in the novel and the second one's characterisation never matches up the way she starts off about the original hero.
Its this thing that irritated the most but also over a time reading the same stuff bores you...i of course intersped reading her with Archer so i got through till i was saturated.
Anyway i read a lot of her books and some of them i think are extremely beautiful......
My favorites are The Ranch, Ghost, Granny Dan, The Promise, ........ and somei cant get the names and many others which i do like .... like say Zoya ,at least as i remember them as liking them a decade ago.......can't remember the finer details.though there is one book i think one should strictly stay off if you dont want to slip into depression.
Its too dark .... its about abuse...its called 'Malice' and its real mood turn off and depressive.

Anyway it is here i was thinking women have a distinct advantage over men with respect to books.Women can happily enjoy detective stories, Science fiction(only genre that i keep off but i know girls who love it), legal thrillers and all the genres by any author and of course sappy stories, romances, sentimental stuff ....unlike men (exceptions are the norm ) who just cannot enjoy most novels by women or women centric books.

I have a few of them still, as most of them were from library..neverthless i was arranging my stuff and things tumbled out.
I had written so beautifully in cursive handwriting a poem from one of her books called Kaledioscope...
I remember the storyline very lightly or rather hardly ...its about 3 sisters or so...what i remember is one of them unfortunately has an unhappy ending and an unhappy life throughout.

KALEIDOSCOPE means a constantly changing set of colors produced by an instrument.

the poem is beautiful and i always remember it esp the last five lines .
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To deepest dusk,
from morning sun
to twilight dreams
fantastic schemes
and lives that go awry
such shining hopes
such sudden twists from
bright to dark
from grim to grand
from joy to sorrow
always waiting for tommorow
and a twist of fate
a ray of hope
with the faintest sleight of hand
the alteration of all of life's schemes
and all its scope..
all with one tiny turn
of life's KALEIDOSCOPE.

Danielle Steel
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



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