Word: novels
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Graduates from India's prestigious technology universities get good jobs, make great money and are eagerly sought-after marriage partners. But according to Chetan Bhagat's charming debut novel Five Point Someone: What Not to Do at IIT, they end up in a Faustian bargain: students at the seven India Institutes of Technology sacrifice their youth for the sake of a successful adulthood...
...Travelers usually stop overnight in the Shi'a enclave of Kargil?a fragment of Muslim Central Asia that somehow materialized in India. From there, a mountainous wonderland unfolds. The road wanders past Lamayuru monastery (looming amid somber peaks that belong on the cover of some fantasy novel), skirts Alchi monastery (with its incomparable 12th century frescoes), and then it's on to Leh, where the crumbling royal palace towers over rooftop pizza restaurants. More monasteries dot the surrounding valley, along with turquoise lakes and rows of whitewashed Buddhist chortens...
LIFESTYLE: A graphic novel imagines black secession; the mango marries the nectarine...
Thursday next is a detective in charge of solving crimes that happen in books. Which is to say, she literally goes into books and solves crimes there. If, say, somebody were to kidnap Jane Eyre out of Jane Eyre (which happened in The Eyre Affair, the first Thursday Next novel), Thursday would be on the case. This is what the British call silliness, and people generally find it either dismal or delightful. If you're in the latter camp, prepare to be delighted by Jasper Fforde's Something Rotten (Viking; 385 pages), the fourth book in the Next series...
This time Thursday is operating in the real world, pursuing a malevolent fictional character named Yorrick Kaine, who has managed to escape his native novel and is trying to become dictator of Britain. The narrative involves the Cheshire cat, cloned Neanderthals, Thursday's 2-year-old son (who is named, inevitably, Friday), time travel, Beowulf and Hamlet. We are also treated to the edifying spectacle of a hostile takeover of Hamlet by the characters of The Merry Wives of Windsor. Fun, but Fforde's cheerfulness is relentless. Genuine pathos can be found in the interplay between the world of fiction...