The Top 5 Books And Most Memorable Literary Events For 2007

The year is coming to a close and what a remarkable year it has been for the literary scene.

With the released of the much-anticipated last book of the Harry Potter saga, 2007 saw the magic of author J.K. Rowling. A record-breaking 11 million copies were sold on the first day in the United States and Britain and on that day, millions of children and adults read or flipped through the 607-page tome to find out the hero's fate. It was also the year that saw the world's most expensive fairy tales - The Tales of Beedle The Bard. A book of fairy tales created, handwritten and illustrated by author J.K. Rowling, The Tales of Beedle The Bard was bought by online bookstore Amazon for a record $1.95 million pounds at a Sotheby's auction.

Besides the frenzy generated by Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, 2007 was also a year of controversies with both J.K. Rowling, with her outing of Dumbledore as gay, and Philip Pullman, the author of the award-winning His Dark Materials trilogy, whose first book has been adapted into a movie - The Golden Compass, coming under attack by Christian evangelicals in United States for being unsuitable for children and promoting atheism.

2007 also saw the sad passing of Norman Mailer of renal failure at age 84. The literary icon and two-times winner of the prestigious Pulitzer Prize, with The Armies of the Night in 1968 and The Executioner's Song in 1979, was noted for his acerbic wit, biting prose and as an antagonist of the feminist movement.

It was also a year of achievement for Irish author Anne Enright who won the Man Booker Prize award. Her 272-page tome, the Gathering which chronicles the disintegration of an Irish family, pipped five other contenders and hot favorites like British writer Ian McEwan and New Zealander Lloyd Jones for the award, netting her $52,500 pounds.

And in closing what had also been a wonderful and remarkable year of blogging adventure for me, here, with the last post of 2007, are the top five books that i have enjoyed reading :

TOP FIVE BOOKS OF 2007
1. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
After his stunning bestseller, The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini returns with a beautiful, riveting and haunting novel that confirms his place as one of the most talented literary writers today. Propelled by the same superb instinct for storytelling that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, A Thousand Splendid Suns is an incredible chronicle of thirty years of Afghan history and the story of two women, Mariam and Laila, born a generation apart and brought together by war, by loss and by fate.

It is a deeply moving story of faith, family, friendship and the salvation to be found in love. As Mariam and Laila endure the ever escalating dangers around them, they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other which will alter the course of not just their own lives but of the next generation. A stunning accomplishment, A Thousand Splendid Suns is a haunting, heartbreaking, compelling story of an unforgiving time, an unlikely friendship and an indestructible love.

2. The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon
From the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, comes a compelling novel of alternate history, a gripping whodunit and a love story with 1940s vibes. A what-if, the story is set in a present-day alternate reality in Sitka, Alaska, a safe haven for Jewish refugees after World War II and the collapse of Israel, and after nearly 60 years, the Federal District of Sitka is about to revert to American rule.

Into this setting comes Chabon's hero, Meyer Landsman, a drunken rogue cop, who wakes up one day to find a dead body next to him. Poignant, lyrical, hard-boiled and funny all at once, The Yiddish Policemen's Union's central murder mystery has its roots in the Biblical tale of the Messiah, who would one day lead God's chosen people to the promised land. With elements of an international terrorist thriller complicated by religious conspiracies, it is a haunting account of alternate history and demonstrates the power of a good story.

3. The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas
Voted as one of the best young writers in UK, Scarlett Thomas's narrative is a breathless one, a combination of postmodern philosophy, physics and spine-tingling science fiction, that propels you relentlessly like a bullet train. About a smart young woman, Ariel Manto, who stumbles upon a rare book by an obscure 19th century Victorian scientist at a secondhand bookshop and through the book, discovers the secret to accessing the "Troposphere", a universe of the collective unconscious and the ability to leap into the minds and bodies of other living beings.

This book is the literary equivalent of the science fiction movie, The Matrix, and is a rollicking adventure story with ideas about sub-atomic particles, existence and reality. A delirious valentine to the pleasures of reading.

4. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
Composed of 108 short chapters, based on the beads in a traditional Indian prayer necklace, this beautifully written and heartfelt memoir comes across as scenes in a movie. Plagued with despair after a nasty divorce, the author made the difficult choice of leaving behind all the trappings of modern America and embarked on a soul-searching journey on the aspects of her nature amid three different cultures.

Exploring her competing urges for earthly delights and divine transcendence, Gilbert first savored Italy's buffet of delights - the world's best pizza and free-flowing wine, then spiritual rigor and seeking communion with the divine at a sacred ashram in India and followed finally by the seeking of balance between the two in Bali, where she studies with a merry medicine man and plunges into a charged love affair. Eat, Pray, Love is down-to-earth, honest, conveys infectious rapture and delight and recalls anguish with touching candor. It is a sprawling travelogue of soul-searching and self-discovery.

5. The City Of Joy by Dominique LaPierre
The last spot in my list is for a book that is at least twenty years old and into my seventh reading. Dominique LaPierre's heart-wrenching account of the lives of the poorest of the poor in one of Calcutta's most devastating slums, Anand Nagar - "The City of Joy"- touches at a visceral level.

From the dedication of Polish priest, Steven Kovalski, to Hasari Pal, an inhabitant of the slum, to American physician Max Loeb, the book is a searing vision of the struggle for survival of the poor. It is a story of hope and love amid all the devastating realities of poverty, desperation and death and is a testament to the majesty of the human spirit, unbowed by the most wretched of circumstances. City of Joy epitomized the philosophy of the Christopher Award it won in 1986 - "It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness."

*Related posts :
- J.K.Rowling Under Attack
- The World's Most Expensive Fairy Tales
- Turmoil In The Kingdom of The Golden Compass
- Winner Of The Man Booker Prize 2007

Christmas - A Time For Saints.

Christmas - a joyous occasion where millions of people around the world celebrate the joys of love, the wonders of giving and the importance of family. A time of togetherness when children and adults alike, dream of wishes come true. And what would my Christmas wish be?

Like parents around the world, I wish for happy, peaceful and joyous lives for my family and children. But with the way things are in the world now - the crisis in Darfur, strife in Middle East especially Iraq, extreme poverty in many parts of Asia, foreclosures and bankruptcies of millions of people affected by the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the multitudes of people displaced by natural disasters - I also wish for more advocates of peace through non-violent means like Mahatma Gandhi, many more humanitarians like Dr. Muhammad Yunus and Dr. Paul Farmer, freedom fighters like Nelson Mandela but above all else, I wish for more authors of compassion and love like Mother Teresa and Polish priest Stephen Kovalski.

Christmas is a time for remembrance of saints like Mother Teresa.

"To care for the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people that have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone." - Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity

Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu was born on 26 August 1910, in Skopje, Yugoslavia, of Albanian parents. Fascinated by stories of the lives of missionaries and their service at an early age, she left home at age of eighteen and entered the Missionary Order of the Loreto Sisters, taking the name of Teresa in memory of the little Flower of Lisieu, the patron saint of missionaries.

On January 20, 1931, she came to Calcutta, then the largest city of the British Empire after London and served as a teacher at the Loreto convent school in eastern Calcutta. For sixteen years, she taught geography to daughters of the well-to-do in British and Bengali society and although Mother Teresa enjoyed teaching at the school, she was increasingly disturbed by the poverty surrounding her in Calcutta. One day in 1946, on a train journey to Darjeeling, a town on the slopes of the Himalayas, she heard a voice.

God was asking her to leave the comfort of the convent and live among the poorest of the poor in the vast city beyond. In 1950, having obtained permission from the Pope, she started the order of the Missionaries of Charity, a congregation which began as a small order with 13 members in Calcutta. Today it has more than 4,000 nuns running orphanages, AIDS hospices, caring for the poor, the blind, disabled, aged and homeless, and victims of floods, epidemics, and famine and has several thousand charitable foundations throughout India and the world.

In 1952, an incident gave birth to "Nirmal Hriday - the Place of the Pure Heart - Home for Dying Destitutes." It was June 1952 and the time of the monsoons when Mother Teresa stumbled upon an old and dying woman outside the Medical College Hospital in Calcutta. The old woman was hardly breathing and her legs had been gnawed to the bone by rats. Mother Teresa scooped the old woman in her arms and ran into the hospital, depositing the dying woman in a stretcher. "Take that woman away immediately!," an hospital attendant intervened. "There is nothing we can do for her." Mother Teresa took the dying woman and set off to another hospital. Suddenly, she felt the woman's body stiffened and realized that it was too late. "In this city, even the dogs are treated better than human beings," she sighed.

So was born "Nirmal Hriday - the Place of the Pure Heart" - a place for the dying to appear before God in dignity and love. Those brought to the home received medical attention and were given the opportunity to die with dignity, according to the rituals of their faith; Muslims were read the Quran, Hindus received water from the Ganges, and Catholics received the Last Rites. "A beautiful death," she said, "is for people who lived like animals to die like angels — loved and wanted."

Taking in dying destitutes was only a first step for Mother Teresa, for the living too needed care and among the most neglected of the living were the abandoned newborn babies that might be found in a gutter, on a rubbish heap or in the doorway of a church. On February 15, 1953, she founded "Shishu Bhavan - the Children's Home of the Immaculate Heart," and welcomed its first guest, a premature baby wrapped in a piece of newspapers and left on a street pavement. "Shishu Bhavan" was to serve as a haven for thousands of discarded babies, orphans and homeless youth.

After the dying and the abandoned children, Mother Teresa turned her attention to the most wretched of Indian society, the lepers. At Titagarh, a shantytown in an industrial suburb of Calcutta, she constructed on land borrowed from the railway company, a haven to harbour the worst leper cases, bringing them medicine, dressings and words of comfort. She named the hospice, "Shanti Nagar - the City of Peace."

For over forty years, Mother Teresa ministered to the poor, sick, orphaned, the unwanted and dying in Calcutta, and her selfless dedication and compassion for the underprivileged has been widely recognised and acclaimed throughout the world. She has received a number of awards and distinctions, including the Pope John XXIII Peace Prize in 1971 and the Nehru Prize for her promotion of international peace and understanding in 1972. She was also awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her humanitarian efforts.

Mother Teresa passed away on September 5, 1997, nine days after her 87th birthday. At the time of her death, Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity had over 4,000 sisters, an associated brotherhood of 300 members, and over 100,000 lay volunteers, operating 610 missions in 123 countries. Following her death, she was beautified by Pope John Paul II and given the title "Blessed Teresa of Calcutta."

"....but I found the poverty of the West so much more difficult to remove. When I pick up a person from the street, hungry, I give him a plate of rice, a piece of bread, I have satisfied. I have removed that hunger. But a person that is shut out, that feels unwanted, unloved, terrified, the person that has been thrown out from society - that poverty is so hurtable and so much, and I find that very difficult." - Mother Teresa's Nobel Prize speech

*Sources :
- Nobel Prize org.
- Wikipedia
- City Of Joy by Dominique Lapierre

*Author's footnote :
Beginning today right up till Christmas, there will be a series of articles dedicated to humanitarians who have made tremendous contributions to society and these articles - the "Christmas Celebration series", will truly be my Christmas celebrations - the celebration of the human spirit.

*Related post : Christmas - A Time For Humanitarians