Rushed

By Bryan Harmon

Nowadays I don’t read anything and everything, like I used to in the days when there was no internet. I used to borrow from the school library and the community library, read prefaces, copyright details, read a magazine article as soon as I sit in a car, pick up from table tops and read in lobbies, friend’s homes, notices on the back doors of hotel rooms and whatever I could lay my hands and eyes on. Internet sort of changed my reading habit, that and coming and staying in a city. Now I am more informed and I like contemporary classics more than classic classics. What greatness I found in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, I cannot fathom 20 years after reading it.

With internet you can read reviews of books never heard of and pick them up. It opened a universe, a milky way – a never ending, life-long attachment to all things lovely to read. Then came e-books. First it was reading free-books on my mobile, just to see if it’s possible to read books online/ on a tab. And then finally I got my own Kindle Paper White (thanks to special someone). Free books galore and at the click of a button!

I could choose from the titles and I chose a simple book, again just to check if it’s possible to read an e-book in a book-reader – minus the smell of new book, turning pages and dog-earring. I guess the fact that I chose this book made it all possible. ‘Rushed’ was my first fully read book on Kindle and I love them both. Started a new reading journey..

I like Rushed because it’s a breeze to read. It’s very descriptive and vivid. You can almost see what’s really happening – it’s a science/ weird-happenings fiction – so if the narrative is not fluent then you can really miss the plot. Well not with Bryan Harmon’s language skills. It’s like if ‘Inception’ was a book, it better be a vivid read right? In this book, Eric, an o-so-ordinary school teacher wakes up from a dream and all he wants to do is get up and go somewhere. After 3 consecutive days he follows his dream to get into an adventure so bizzare, you can’t just put the book down.

And it’s not just the story but Harmon writes English like I have never read before – as fluent as some of us speak our mother tongue, only better. An example: Eric sees a hen in the room and he knows that it’s different and Harmon describes the movement of the hen thus: It didn’t hold its head up as it walked, surveying the room in lively jerks. Instead it looked as if it were hanging its head in a curiously forlorn manner – get the picture?

It’s a must read.

Introduction

Sometimes I look for a book review which is different from anything I would have read or heard.
Different from what a book critic would write. A review which should be from a reader who read the book not because of the story but because of the author, the history, that important aspect that was relatable, the amazing-ness of the whole idea and various other reasons.

What are those reasons that makes a book unique? If its a 'My Name is Red' its the story, the unique time and place, the amazing-ness of the writer and the way in which it is written. A 'Gone With the Wind' where there is a heroine and the saga narrated so well and the irony of the whole story and the recent award winning 'White Tiger' for its readability, its un-put-downable quality inspite of its various faults and weaknesses.

The idea of this blog is to take out that uniqueness.

To talk about books that make it to the list of 'contemporary classics'.

Welcome to ira-reviews-books.blogspot.com (due to want of a better names pls :))