books you may love: dragons, Tana French, and basketball

It's been a wet, cool May so far this year, quite reminiscent of the month KrA and I encountered when we first set foot in Canada exactly 12 years ago. It was mid-May, and about 4 °C in the morning.

In the years that followed, the month of May was mostly hot and humid. Until this year, that is. Two sweltering hot days this month, and it's back to being cold and rainy.

I'm not complaining. The weather is what it is. Unpredictable. Moody. I've gotten better at adapting to its whims and adjusting my plans accordingly.

The desire to write has also been dwindling for me. I find much more solace in silence than in words these days, so it's begun to feel like a chore to get myself to come to the laptop and type words like these.

But, I didn't want to stop without making at least a brief mention of the books I've read lately, especially with one being the end of a trilogy that I enjoyed. So, here we go!

I've been continuing to read the Wings Of Fire series to D.

We recently finished reading Book #7, Winter Turning, which follows an IceWing named Winter who finds out in the previous book that his brother, long believed to be dead, is alive and a prisoner of Scarlet, former Queen of the SkyWings.

This book is from the perspective of Winter, and features Moon, Qibli and Kinkajou, as they help him look for his brother.

The IceWings are a very competitive clan. From birth, the dragonets are ranked from levels one to seven, based on their abilities and achievement. Winter often finds himself pitted against his sister and brother, a competition and comparison that's cruelly stoked by their parents and the broader culture of the IceWings.

The friendship and cooperation that the other dragons exhibit rattle him terribly. He's always at war between his inner self, that believes in kindness and compassion, versus the self that's been nurtured to think competitively and outperform and outshine other dragons.

It's funny that we've been reading this book at the time of watching the NBA Playoffs. The players are so aggressive on court, willing to push and shove each other in the name of the game. Is it humanly possible for them to exhibit kindness and cooperation in other aspects of life?

When the very essence of competing is to ensure that you do better than your opponent, or at the very least you try to keep your opponent from outshining you, how far would you go to achieve that?

In a game like tennis or cricket, one could still argue that winning largely depends on how well you play. But the NBA has become such a physical game it now seems to be less about skillful play and more about who can be more physically intimidating or flop and foul-bait enough to get to the free throw line.

Still makes for entertaining viewing at times, but the dopamine hits of near-constant scoring have gotten to be too much for me. So even though the Western Conference and Eastern Conference teams are playing their finals now, my enthusiasm to watch these games has also declined, although I may make an exception for Game 4 between Spurs and Thunder tonight. 😉

Anyhoo, I digress.

As with all other books in the Wings Of Fires series, Winter Turning too was full of plot twists and turns and exquisite writing and storytelling.

D recently said that he wished he could go back and read the series from the beginning as though he were reading it for the first time with no inkling of how the plots would unfold.

I can empathize with him. He has read the books and the graphic novel versions countless times. This is my first time reading these tales and they make for such engrossing, intelligent reading. Sutherland is a genius, to say the least!

Whenever there's a new Tana French book, life needs to be shoved out of the way to make space and time for the sheer beauty that French's writing is.

The Keeper is the third book in the Cal Hooper series (trilogy, perhaps?), featuring an ex-police detective from Chicago who has moved to rural Ireland, to a village named Ardnakelty.

The trilogy progresses with Hooper being a total noob to the ways of rural Irish life in the first book to becoming thoroughly entrenched in it by the end of the third.

What I really loved about The Keeper were the long conversations the characters have with each other. Something unhurried about these pages and pages of dialogues revealing and also concealing the characters' motives ... it was like stepping into a neighbourhood pub myself and having long conversations about life and love and everything under the sun with people you've known and who've known you for a lifetime.

I had dog-eared several pages from which to share excerpts with you, but the aforementioned lack of enthusiasm to do any writing keeps me from putting in that effort.

Nevertheless, here's one passage that ought to be shared. It'd be criminal to not do so. You'll know why when you read it.

Mart, who's trundling alternate wheelbarrow-loads of split wood to his back door and to Cal's red Pajero, wolf-whistles at him. "Wouldja look at them muscles," he says admiringly. "D'you remember the state of you, when you first got here? A belly on you like Santy, you had, and I could tell by your face you were riddled with the cholesterol. That's what the food in America does to a man. Over here you wouldn't be allowed to sell it as food, most of it; you'd have to label it 'industrial by-product, not for human consumption.' And now look at you. Giving Jean-Claude Van Damme a run for his money."

~ An excerpt from The Keeper by Tana French

High time someone said this truth out loud. I go to the mall, there's no meal for less than 15 bucks, and the quantity is enough to feed three people!

When we know that junk food and processed foods are so harmful to human health, why are they still made available so easily? Unsurprisingly, the answer is always money.

A small bunch of people are making shitloads of money by selling poison to the general public in the name of food, making technology available that converts them into addicts with mushy brains, and then washing their hands off of any responsibility when it comes to the widespread consequences on physical, mental and environmental health of these products and services.

I was pleasantly surprised when the UK made it illegal to sell tobacco to those born in or after 2008. Sure, their reasons may not have been entirely altruistic — keep the pressure off NHS — still it seems to be a move in the right direction.

It's all very well for the manufacturers of these products and services to say that the choice is entirely upon individuals whether or not to eat junk food, whether or not to be on social media.

But how is a human being supposed to be strong enough to make choices that are often counterculture and still remain sane?

The debate is endless, because these industries offer so much employment and other benefits — connectivity, affordable food to stave off hunger, etc. — that to eliminate them would have other harmful consequences.

Well, I suppose we can only make the choices we can, given our life circumstances and our mental fortitude ... and even those are not entirely of our own making, despite what modern-day gurus would like to claim.

All this to say that I absolutely enjoyed The Keeper and I felt sad to bid goodbye to Ardnakelty. I can't wait to see what Tana French writes next.

I made a very conscious effort to read Time To Win, Book #3 in the Play The Game series, a basketball-themed middle-grade trilogy featuring an Indian-origin protagonist in North America, by Amar Shah.

I was terrified of leaving it unread, having done something similar with Christopher Pike's Thirst series. After devouring five books in the series, I didn't get to Book #6 in a long time and now I've forgotten too much of the story thread to pick up the last book without reading the first five again.

I didn't want Play The Game to suffer the same fate at my hands, so I made sure to read a few pages every day.

And what a satisfying conclusion to the trilogy it turned out to be!

Raam is now part of his school's basketball team, but his challenges have only just begun. Learning to play with his erstwhile nemesis entails an arc of its own, and we're treated to this story lavishly, with its usual dose of Indian colours and songs and joie de vivre, thanks to his mom's Bollywood dance studio.

D picked up the first book last week and tore through all three books in the series before I did.

There's much to love in this book — the changing nature of friendships, the desire to succeed, the lure of ambition, the fear of disappointing others — all these themes are simply so relatable and tug at the heartstrings.

Well, I'm glad I was finally able to put down my thoughts on these three gems I read recently.

I don't know how often I'll come back to post here over the next few weeks or months. I'll be sending out this month's missive next Sunday, and after that I'd like to take a pause from writing.

I'd like to step away from this field to see what else could fill my life. Clearing out the old to make way for the new. Perhaps live less in my head and more in the world outside, enjoying the pleasures of summer. Let's see where life takes me henceforth.