Deluged With Books Cafe

You know when they say something is too beautiful, too close to the heart it hurts. That is how I see this book. In piercing waves that could be brought only by sharp truth and bittersweet recollection, this book engulfed me. Dusty Answers is nostalgia in its purest form, of memories stirring with fleeting delights and drawn out melancholy. It may be that the wistfulness of the story is what makes it appealing. Its characters remain with you long after you finish it (and I could almost not let go of that last page). It enthralls not with the plot but in the beauty of Lehmann’s prose and how she draws the scenes, the characters and their sentiments. She captures on point those young delightful years of childhood and that seeking sense of belonging in each of us. There are moments, passages that almost feel like the author peeped into my head, picked out my brains and put it down on paper; that kind of creepy feeling because it related so much. Dusty Answer is a coming of ...

Women in Love  follows the lives and loves of the Brangwen sisters, Ursula and Gudrun. Set in a coal mining town surrounded by the pastoral English countryside, it explored divergent reflections about humanity and relationships in the spur of industrialization, which resounds most of D.H. Lawrence's works. If I have to speak how this book affected me, I'd give you an image of a distant train chugging toward the platform I stood on. The rumbling noise perks up my reverie, then becomes insistently louder until the shrill whistle and mayhem of wheels and steam blast on my face rattling my consciousness. There was nothing placid nor ideally romantic about this book. Lawrence writes with intense, charged and sensual gusto. If he meant to express love in this way then in a different abstract plane, I get him. Otherwise, his prose mostly took up the hat of romanticism. I am quite arrested by his interesting vocabulary and considering the ban issues on the author's boo...

By far the more stormy and bittersweet of Austen's books, Sense and Sensibility  kept me torn between the two sisters' acute pain in their leap to romantic love among other things. Bereft of Norland Park in the death of Mr. Dashwood, the second Mrs. Dashwood and her three unmarried daughters moved to a cottage in the far countryside. There they settled into spare comforts and little entertainment for company. With their fall on the social ladder, the Dashwood sisters struggle to find acceptance and in their own ways reach out, though almost futile, to claim their happiness. I could not help but be drawn to the quiet steadfastness of Elinor but at the same time I am swept by the unreserved Marianne who goes after her passions. There is much turmoil of emotions seeping in the story with its sense of realism among the characters, the plot and between the romances. It downplays the idealistic notions and felicity felt mostly in other Austen works. Not all love stories a...

From the famed author who brought us the beloved The Secret Garden, here is a little gem she wrote about a young woman with a most pleasing countenance but who was quite oblivious of her own worth. The Making of a Marchioness  was originally published first followed by The Methods of Lady Walderhurst . Presently, it is titled Emily Fox-Seton as a two-part novel but both stories couldn't be any more different. This one is quite unconventionally sweet albeit gracefully pitying at times. I am quite torn about Emily Fox-Seton, in all honesty, because I am not certain if she's too admirably capable in light of period Britain or too much of a gullible doormat for our modern taste. So let us just succumb to the call of the times, that she was a dear and a well-mannered poor woman who acquired a fine taste and independent means to stand on her own two feet.

The most popular of Daphne du Maurier's works, Rebecca  remains one of the unforgettable stories I have read. It is as if Rebecca herself stretches her long arm from the grave unwilling for anyone to forget her. It begins with our unnamed heroine who meets Mr. de Winter one day in Monte Carlo and after a whirlwind acquaintance and courtship, was swept back to his English home in Cornwall, Manderley. And this is where the mystery starts to unravel. Manderley is a beautiful manor by the coast, surrounded by the scents of flowering gardens. One could imagine how grand it looks for the heroine. Little did she knows the manor itself is like a breathing thing, its walls tainted with memories and shadows. As time passes, old secrets were brought to light and always, always there's a remnant of Rebecca; a painting of a beautiful woman hanging on a wall, a room that is left as it was full of things engraved in the letter R, an old devotion by a lady's maid. In Mr. de Winter ...

Persuasion  is perhaps my favorite novel of Jane Austen. It seems to me we are but a handful on this bandwagon. As much as I adore her other books and its heroines and heroes, it is Anne and her captain who 'pierce my soul'. Eight years has passed since Anne Elliot of Kellynch Hall last saw the naval officer Frederick Wentworth. Eight years ago since she was happily betrothed to him but was persuaded by her friend Lady Russell to break off the engagement for such match is declared unsuitable. Now Frederick returns, a wealthy captain in the navy, and most likely they are to cross paths again. Anne obviously still have feelings for him but will things ever return the way it was between them? Anne Elliot won me over with her grace and subtle elegance, her quiet nature and sensible voice. I find affinity in her character; her inner struggles and heartfelt musings. Austen has captured that fragile mood of anxiety and dread, the tentativeness of things, a thresho...

In North and South we are introduced to Mr. Thornton and Margaret Hale, their story entwined with the turbulent social issues of their time set in the background of the industrial city of Milton. Mr. Thornton rose up on the top spot of my most beloved classic book hero of all time (yes, I'm sorry but kindly move over Mr. Darcy). I admired a lot of his characteristics and even more his subtle change over the course of time since he became acquainted with Margaret Hale. But it sure does make me laugh out loud (and I can't pin down why) in a sort of giddy incredulous way every time Mr. Thornton appears. There's this disarming irony in his contained appearance in contrast to his passionate inner musings. Margaret though is a bit of a slow warm to me. She flits from girl to woman in sporadic times. She's given over to trifling fears and doubts at certain points as if her sympathies and affectations appear half-formed. However, when she shows her calm and power, it a...