by Blogger ItchingtoWrite
[box]Blogger itchingtowrite @ The Reading Corner lists her favourite works of Romance from the written world, most of them works of fiction that were released in 2012. Have you read these books yet? [/box]
Love makes the world go round. It manifests itself in many forms and places, and none of us fail to be touched by this one emotion that can make one see magic in a simple everyday situation.
Love makes one do strange things which one wouldn’t have otherwise done. It is love that makes one give up that last bit of chocolate or share an ice cream or wait for ages for the beloved to turn up even though it is beyond the appointed hour or even makes one attend a boring lecture just so that one can feast upon the object of affection for the entire lecture hour.
People have been fooled by promises of love. Yet this is one emotion that never fails to move the mightiest.
As an avid reader of fiction, I have come across various expressions of love and romance in books. Some of my favourites would be these books from 2012. However, I also would like to cheat and put the legendary Gone with the Wind as my top favourite as nothing surpasses that.
Gone with the Wind
Tomorrow I will think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day.
When Margaret Mitchell ended her book with these words, she intended them to become famous last words in the true sense. She intended to keep the 
readers guessing and tearing their hair out in trying to reconcile within themselves as to what became of the lovers after the hero left the scene.
This epic novel tells the tale of the coming of age of Scarlett O’ Hara, the girl who was not beautiful but had an effect on men when she took notice of them.
The story is written in the backdrop of civil war in America. On the one hand there are soldiers enlisting to save their country, on the other hand we have speculators like Rhett making a fortune out of others; misfortune. Scarlett is the girl who despite all odds continues to fight her way to survive. From a little girl of sixteen when everything can become all right with a nice dress and some make up, she becomes a woman of purpose. She saves her family from death; she survives by fair means and foul and emerges the strongest of all. The story is long, vivid and poignant and a definite page-turner. This anniversary edition brought back memories of the first time when I read it many years ago, in a very vivid and nostalgic fashion.
Scarlett is fiery, she is annoying, she is foolish, she is an oddity and she is a girl after my own heart. Why me? Remove me from here and put yourself in this place and you will feel the same way.
She misses the obvious. She is in love with an idea or a habit and she doesn’t see what we readers can see. And then there is the most foolish act of hers – she refuses to fall in love with the handsome, suave, dependable rouge – Rhett Butler – the stuff dreams are made of.
Scarlett believes she loves Ashley Wilkes and she continues to love him in spite of the fact that he loves Melanie, marries her and becomes a father and is very, very boring.
Scarlett marries twice, becomes a widow twice and ultimately, Rhett, who intended to have her one way or another, marries her. They have a baby named Bonnie. Rhett dotes on Bonnie and spoils her silly.
Under unfortunate circumstances, baby Bonnie dies. A great rift forms between Scarlett and Rhett that widens further following Melanie’s death. Rhett believes that Scarlett would no longer want him now that Ashley was available, and leaves his home.
The book ends with Scarlett dreaming of love that eluded her for so long and promises to herself that she will find a way to get Rhett back tomorrow.
The ending left readers wondering what would happen to Scarlett and Rhett.
Title – Gone with the Wind
Author – Margaret Mitchell
Publisher – Pan (celebrating 75 years)
Tea for Two and a Piece of Cake
Does life give second chances?
According to me it does give second and more chances. It is only a matter of grabbing them when you should and making the most of the little that it offers.
Nisha is at that stage of life where the world seems to revolve around her kids. When her husband of eight years, Samir, walks out of her life, she is determined not to fall apart. She refuses all offers of money and walks out of her comfortable martial home to settle in her father’s flat.
She tackles her immediate problems one step at a time and when her old friend Akash appears at her doorstep one day, life seems to take a turn for the better.
Using his business acumen, he gifts her a catering business and generates enough word of mouth leads for her to earn a sizeable profit by the end of three months.
Nisha’s life seems to be back on track until Akash gets a transfer to Pondicherry.
At this juncture, Akash proposes to her and Nisha is in a dilemma. Marriage is something she has done before and is probably done with. Will she shed that baggage and face her new life head on? On what terms?
The story is divided into two parts, before Nisha’s divorce and after. It opens with that phone call which shatters her world and then moves in flashback with the aid of her journal. The story flows smoothly and I found it difficult to reconcile the Samir she was dating with the Samir she got married to. Surprising but not impossible. And it would touch the core of those people who are grappling with the same problems in their life – a husband who is indifferent and totally different from what he was before marriage.
I admire the grit Nisha showed and her devotion to her kids in spite of all odds.
A lesson to be learnt here for all those who are feeling despair in their life.
Title – Tea for Two and a Piece of Cake
Author – Preeti Shenoy
Price – Rs 125
Publisher- Randomhouse
Urban Shots The Love Collection
Love collection Is a collection of 31 magical stories with a common thread of love, strung together by Sneh Thakur, based on the initiative of Grey Oak with Landmark. Twenty seven authors write about various aspects of love in this collection.
The stories encompass the navrasas of love if I were to paint a lyrical picture of them. They cover excitement, anticipation, pertinent questions, betrayal, coquettery, star-struck love, love that just happens by chance, separation, finding lost love and other such emotions of love.
Some of the stories that affected me deeply are,
‘Strangers’: He is deeply drawn towards the stranger. He cannot believe his luck when she invites him over to her home one day and then many more days. Where will it all end? A very haunting tale of the supernatural.
‘High Time’: Hilarious play of words and expressions that turn the tables over the aunt who was pestering the family for the hand of the eligible son for 
her extremely eligible daughter.
‘A Simple Question’: The story starts with a simple question…when was the last time you felt that? It is not often that a story becomes reality. All depends on the storyteller.
‘32 B’: The girl plays the ancient game of leading on the lover. The twist in the end is funny and unexpected.
‘Closure’: A very practical end to a relationship that was heading nowhere. In the days of social media and mobile phone, unfriending and deleting the contact number signifies everything.
‘Love is Blind’: A strange sort of love which no one believes in.
‘You’re Mine”: A poignant tale of love that believes in the moment, despite the uncertainty of the future, or rather the certainty of the future.
A lovely collection worth reading, especially since one can identify with the stories because they are all set in the present times.
Title – Urban Shots The Love Collection
Price – Rs 199
Publisher – Grey Oak Westland
You Never Know When You’ll Get Lucky
A fast paced romantic chick-lit comedy, the types you get only in the books that are not published in India.
The language and the use of slangs were what I could identify with, and not too far removed from what we normally use (read those of the baby boomers) to make me feel alienated and most importantly, old.
The book opens on a hilarious setting with Kajal trying hard to escape from her childhood friend(sic) who is the potential husband for her matchmaking mom and her best friend. In a desperate bid to escape from Bunty, she hides under the table and encounters a pair of legs belonging to a dashing man (she hopes) with a rich baritone voice. As luck would have it, a fork falls and Baritone bends and she finds herself gazing into the eyes of this handsome and delicious looking man…Dhir, she later comes to know.
Kajal works for an ad agency and is mentally sick of doing minor POPs for seedy clients like Mishraji who launches one product after another using the face of a chori (a girl) irrespective of the product category.
Kajal has taken a strong decision that she needs to make it in her career and for that she needs to take a bold step and first ask for a better role. In a first of its kind, she gets to pitch for a new condom brand.
Just her luck that she needs to go to Mumbai and just her luck that she bumps into Dhir yet again, leading to a few memorably spent days in his apartment stranded due to the Mumbai floods.
Kajal returns to Delhi with a brilliantly thought out campaign for the condom and gets immersed into her work, her relationship with Dhir receding to a long distance one.
Will this star crossed pair survive the travails of long distance relationship, using just emails and phone calls?
Let us find out and as we do, we will also come across a variety of characters that make this a completely hilarious and fast-paced tale…like Debu the famous lech, her set of friends, and of course the notorious Bunty.
Title – You Never Know When You’ll Get Lucky
Author – Priya Narendra
Price – Rs 150
Publisher – Fingerprint
Just Married Please Excuse
A very sweet account of married life, this story left me wistful and sentimental and longing for more.
The best aspect is that it could have been anyone’s story. Yours, mine, Yashodhara’s. I was nodding all the way and feeling happy that there are others whose life looks like mine full of crazy and baseless quarrels and funny incidents like the discovery of the exorbitant price of the land they wanted to buy which prompted them to beat a hasty retreat. Sounds very familiar!
That there are other women who think that the only person to blame is the husband….’Yes, it is always his fault’ left me giggling and happy. Wow! I am
not the only one who thinks like this!
Yashodhara, also known as Y, is a quick tempered lady who gets married too soon, in her opinion, to Vijay who is a nice guy but suffers from foot-in-the-mouth disease and Florence Nightingale instincts. In fact that very talent actually made Y take the final step of marriage in their relationship.
Add to the general mix their friend Vivi and her husband who rather totally comprised their social circle in Mumbai, who were neither much older than Y nor were having kids – hence they were the ideal match for Y and Vijay’s social life needs.
Both live in Bangalore and work for the same company and soon go through the motions of what every couple goes. Rental home setting up, check. House hunting, check. Land buying, check. Learning to manage a decent meal. Check. Ultimately settling for a decent home within their meagre budget, check.
So that was in a nutshell the story of their lives until Vijay unexpectedly gets transferred to Mumbai. All of a sudden Y feels uprooted, yet she sacrifices for the sake of the greater good. In herown wise words…sacrifice was what marriage was about. And it sucked!
Out of the blue, Y finds herself pregnant one fine day in her office loo and rushes to Vijay’s cabin to inform him, as of course, it was his fault after all! And she also thinks often later that perhaps he had some vile intentions that made him impregnate her!
Once the baby arrives, Y feels totally depressed and left out as Vijay bonds wholly and obsessively with the baby. Expert that he is in tending to others, he proves to be efficient and quick with the baby, unlike Y, who on one occasion left the soiled diaper wrapped up in the baby’s blanket!
Yashodhara expertly writes about the various incidents that shaped their life and marriage together and weaves a hilarious portrayal of marriage that is built on a foundation of love, understanding and compromise, conveyed aptly by her mother–in-law as….kabhi main man jaati hoon, kabhi woh maan jaate hain… (sometimes I give up, sometime the husband!)
Unputdownable.
Title – Just Married Please Excuse
Author – Yashodhara Lal
Price – Rs 199
Publisher- Harper Collins
Love Stories #1 to 14
If love were to be summarised or described in one word, it would be almost impossible to do so. Because, there are so many aspects to love, so many kinds of love, so many expressions of love and a multiple forms in which love comes in our life.
Annie Zaidi makes an attempt to cover 14 forms of love summarised in one interesting sentence of her title, like, the one that was announced, the one that tumbled out of the balcony, the one that went up in smoke, the one that climbed out of the bucket and more such sentences that ignite the curiosity of the reader.
The stories cover facets of love like obsession, separation by impending death, two people thrown together in a situation and their discovery of love, or a woman’s envisaging a life without a man and accepting the little that he had to offer.
A woman close to retirement thinks of a life without her daily routine. One would think the thought foremost on her mind would be the life without the general distraction of a work place and colleagues, but her thoughts dwell on the fact that she would no longer be taking the daily train to her office. Because it meant she would no longer be able to hear the voice of the mysterious announcer who fascinated her. Such was her desperation and obsession that she almost began stalking him. She took different trains and arrived at a conclusion as to which trains the announcer announced for and even begin to have hopes of finding his identity.
The story that touched me most was ‘The one that ended’. A man discovers that his wife is about to die. In some way this knowledge liberates them as they break inhibitions and demonstrate their love in a public setting.
Title – Love Stories #1 to 14
Author- Annie Zaidi
Price – Rs 350
Publisher – Harper Collins
It’s Your Move, Wordfreak
What happens when a divorce lawyer Alisha Menon with the handle Worddiva meet over Srabbulous on the net with the tree hugger, planet saviour architect Aryan Chawla who goes by the handle Wordfreak?
They get to know each other over challenging games of Scrabble and decide to meet on a blind date with great trepidation, expecting the worst from the other side. What they did not expect was that Aryan would be a handsome catch and Alisha would be as captivating in person as she was in the virtual world. The two realise that the easy friendship they had in the virtual world was manifested in the real world too and both found each other’s company 
enchanting and addictive.
However, both of them have a history of broken families and therefore are extremely wary of commitment. They tiptoe around each other’s feelings, wary of making the wrong move and scaring the other party forever. However family and friends conspire in the right direction and they coax them to arrange family introductions. We have Alisha’s friend Diya the fashionista who is coaching her on date attire and Uncle Sam and Granny who love Alisha, and Alisha’s mom and her boss who are quite charmed by Aryan.
Everything goes smoothly, but the two are still holding back. They need to desperately break free from their prejudices and hang-ups before learning to love and trust freely.
Written in a Mills & Boon manner, with all the interesting parts to boot but with an Indian context, the book is entertaining and keeps one engrossed to the very end. A good light treat but I expected more word plays and was looking forward to some entertaining Scrabble games. However Scrabble is just a backdrop much to my disappointment.
Title – It’s Your Move Wordfreak
Author – Falguni Kothari
Price – Rs 250
Publisher – Rupa
Blogger Itchingtowrite of The Reading Corner is a mother of twins, wife of jet setting workaholic, gossip queen, bookworm, all in one, apart from holding a regular day job of selecting fragrances.
[facebook]Share[/facebook] [retweet]Tweet[/retweet]
