Neha's Notebook

1. Always seek happiness and never remain sad. 2. Confess and speak your heart honestly – don’t worry about what people will think. 3. Don’t judge people, because they might be carrying their own hurts and they might be trying to help you. 4. When you stop chasing love, you get love. 5. (The act of seeing something) To see something is to get possessed by it. 6. Human beings are full of contradictions. 7. Books are magic!

Zest. Gusto. How rarely one hears these words used. How rarely do we see people living, or for that matter, creating by them. Yet if I were asked about the most important items in a writer’s make-up, the things that shape his material and rush him along the road to where he wants to go, I could only warn him to look at his zest, see to his gusto. If you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. For the first thing a writer should be is - excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms. • Life is short, misery sure, mortality certain. But on the way in your work, why not carry those two inflated pig bladders labeled zest and gusto.

The Kid Who Came From Space by Ross Welford Imagine entering a spaceship, getting knocked out, and waking up to find yourself in interstellar space, gazillion miles away from Earth, surrounded by stars. The Kid Who Came From Space is a heartwarming, and slightly creepy, tale of science-fiction in which two boys are thrown into an unplanned adventure far away from their home on Earth. They are accompanied by an alien named Hellyann who calls herself a “Hearter.” On her planet, a Hearter is someone who “has feelings” while most of her fellow creatures, who don’t have feelings, are called “Hunters.” The central part of the story revolves around a boy Ethan and his friend Iggy, who find themselves rolling in an unplanned journey to an alien planet to save Tammy, Ethan’s twin sister.   Just when all the efforts of earthlings to find Tammy were unsuccessful, Ethan and Iggy had come across a hairy creature prowling the beach in their small village. She told them that...

A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen When it comes to physiology, no wonder, men and women are designed differently, each with their own unique characteristics and features. The true power, however, doesn’t lie in the body, rather in the mind. But it usually takes a brutal awakening to arrive at this conclusion. So was the case with 19th century married Victorian women. These women were considered weaker than men, but were expected to be morally superior, dutiful, and loyal towards men in their families. These women remained reserved to their domestic lives, and had little control over their finances. In such cases, it became difficult for them to leave a marriage in case they felt violated or hurt. A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen is one of the most famous playwrights of the 1880s. The play depicts the story of awakening of a 19th century middle-class household woman in Norway. In most schools and colleges around the world, this play is a compulsory part of the educa...

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa The greatest risk in loving someone is that it always comes with the possibility of heartbreak. And heartbreak, hurts. Heartbreak is a passage that leads to one’s metamorphosis, and a person is changed forever. Days At the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa is a beautiful story of heartbreak, love, loss, and change. Looked from another perspective, it is also about the cathartic power of books. When I read this book, it stirred within me, a colorful palette of feelings and emotions. The first feeling I had when I read the book can be described with the word “vellichor.” Vellichor is an invented word that means “the strange wistfulness of secondhand bookstores.” In this novel, the protagonist named Takako is invited by her uncle to his secondhand bookshop in the Tokyo town of Jimbocho. He invited her on the accord that she was dumped by her boyfriend and colleague, and so she had to resign from her job to not get...

A Writer's Diary by Virginia Woolf As I sifted through the paraphernalia of Virginia Woolf’s diary, I caught a glimpse into the mind and life of a writer. I peered into the vast lair of her restless mind and collected bits and bobs to accommodate in my own writing process. Some days, her diary bubbles with enthusiasm while other days she is feeling dark, depressed, and melancholic, often resting in her bed for days and days, reading a book and enjoying her favourite coffee, cigarettes, and biscuits with her husband Leonard. “If one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy,” she wrote in her diary. She also wrote about her nature walks, tea times, excursions on London city streets, her observations of people around her, and newspaper reviews of her books. She liked to read a lot. Woolf started writing diary in her young thirties and wrote till 1941. Her last diary entry dates to four days before she died of ...

Art Matters: Because Your Imagination Can Change the World by Neil Gaiman Writers are artists who tootle along the tendrils in their brain to unearth stories that will stir their heart, and the hearts of people who read them. Equipped with a paintbucket consisting only of twenty-six letters, and just a sprinkling of punctuation marks, they construct new worlds and scenarios that immerse and absorb readers’ attention; a healthy distraction from everyday frenzy. “Art Matters: Because your imagination can change the world” by Neil Gaiman is a non-fiction book that describes the significance of making good art. Although the book is mainly about writers, its insights are also valid for other kind of artists as well, such as dancers, musicians, actors, painters, etc. Featuring expressive illustrations by Chris Riddell, the book is divided into three parts: Importance of libraries, making a chair, and making good art. Libraries, he says, are like safe havens that enable us to l...

The Hollow by Agatha Christie There is a subgenre of detective fiction, known as the “closed circle mystery.” It refers to a situation in which for a given crime (usually a murder), there are a limited number of suspects, each with credible means, motive, and opportunity for committing the crime. Most of Agatha Christie novels are “closed circle mysteries,” that her signature detective Hercule Poirot solves during the course of the story. The Hollow too is a closed circle mystery, set in the English country house of a character named Lucy Angkatell, who lives there with her husband Henry and a couple of loyal servants. She is portrayed to be a woman with an overactive mind with which she spins imaginary scenarios, which lends a bizarre feeling to the story from the very start. The minds of the other characters in the book are also shown to be steeped in psychological complexity. However, unlike most detective and mystery novels, this book doesn’t jump into action ...

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins Since the earliest timescale of human evolution, men have been designed to be more aggressive than women. In ancient and medieval history too, it was men who dictated and influenced women’s position and status in the society. Even though, much has changed today, but gender differences, undoubtedly, prevail. The fundamental nature is just the same. It is not a bad thing though, unless, men start to confuse this aggression with power. The purpose of men’s trait of belligerence is protection and embrace. But when they mistake this emotion with power and dominance, that’s when humanity begins to become ravaged with things like power games, emotional disturbance, and psychological warfare. The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins is a psychological thriller that is a paradigm of this, and throws light on how these gender differences can take the form of conflicts and suffering in interpersonal relationships. The book is written in f...

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis The debut novel of Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim, is a satirical campus novel that illustrates the everyday life of England during the 1950s. In 1955, the book won the Somerset Maugham Award for fiction. The chucklesome book portrays the life of a man named Jim Dixon. Dixon is the bespectacled protagonist depicted in the role of a medieval history professor. Considered foolish and dumb by everyone around him, Jim is rambunctious in his own unique way. Since he is on his probation period in a local university, he is unsure whether he’ll be able to continue with the job or not. And so, in his attempt to secure a permanent position in the university, he strives to maintain a good relationship with his senior nudnik professor Welch. In addition, he is required to submit a scholarly article for a magazine. But later in the story, he comes to know that the person he submitted his article to, had published it on his own name. Dixon reacts to the rea...

1984 by George Orwell “If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable - what then?” 1984 by George Orwell portrays a nightmarish world of dystopia, psychological manipulation and reality control. Dystopia refers to an imaginary place where people are unhappy and terrorized. In the dystopian world of the novel 1984, Mr. Orwell depicts what it truly means to live in a world where people spend their lives in fear and above it, they are ignorant of their own fear, so they never try to fight against it. Written in 1948, the book is so defiant in its content that it has been banned several times across various countries, and is still one of the most popular bestsellers. The novel illustrates an imaginary superstate called Oceania. Oceania is controlled by “The Party” called Ingsoc with the mysterious cult leader called “Big Brother.” The streets of the state are daubed with the posters which read in big bold letter...

Diary of a Wimpy Kid - the Long Haul by KINNEY JEFF A super hilarious storybook, Diary of a Wimpy Kid – The Long Haul depicts the account of Greg Heffley’s experiences as he goes on a road trip with his family. The book illustrates a series of instances that are punctuated with a lot of cringey moments, a runaway kid, and a piglet who wouldn’t leave them.   During Greg’s school summer vacation, his mom announces that the entire family will be going on a road trip the next day. There is a total of five members in Greg’s family, including his parents, his elder brother Rodrick and his younger brother Manny. All of them pack their bags, and the next day, they set out on their adventure in their minivan, with a boat towed at the back of it to carry extra luggage. They scoot to their backyard, clear the junk from the boat, shoo away the raccoons hiding inside, clean it up, and then tie it to the back of their minivan, bundling the rest of their luggage in it. At l...

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins Mystery, suspense, gloom and tidbits of romance – these are some of the elements that make an absorbing piece of Gothic fiction. And “The Woman In White” comes with all these elements, packed eloquently in a thrilling storyline. Set between a period of 1849 to 1850, the novel is usually regarded as a “sensation novel,” but it is also epistolary, meaning, it is written in the form of letter-style narratives. The novel introduces the story with a character named Walter Hartright, who is a drawing teacher in London. With the reference of an Italian friend, he joins a job in Cumberland’s Limmeridge House as a drawing teacher. One day before he joins his job, he goes on a walk on the London streets. It is a misty night. All is dark. Suddenly a hand lightly pats on his shoulder. He turns around to find the “woman in white.” She’s dressed in a white gown from head to toe. He helps her get into a cab and go where she needs to go. But l...

Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie Love is a beautiful feeling. It makes the world appear bright and all things sweet. But many a times, love can turn out to be dangerous, especially if it involves a love triangle. Just as in this novel titled, “Death on the Nile” by Agatha Christie. This book reveals the story in which a romance triangle led to three brutal murders one after the other. The chain of events in the story goes like this. A woman named Linnet Ridgeway is the heiress of a wealthy household of England. She is a lovely lady, who has everything – looks, money, fame, a business mind, and what not. This usually makes her the object of people’s envy, enemity and resentment. One day her best friend Jacqueline de Bellefort comes to visit her. Unlike Linnet, Jackie is not rich. Jackie is in love with a man named Simon Doyle. They are planning to get married. But before they do, Jackie visits her friend Linnet to ask her to give Simon a job. However, when Linn...