I have only of late finished 'Animal Farm' and '1984' by George Orwell. The ending of both I found strangely sad with Orwell's not-so-subtle-hint that the 'masses' will continue on in their struggles no matter who is in power and never 'rise up'. Nonetheless, I'm pleased with finally understanding the popular reference to 'war is peace', as well as scared shitless with Orwell's creepy predictions for the future, a lot of which has come true. And all this time I thought Tolkien and Pratchett were the only inventive geniuses in creating a believable world out of mist!

Reversed Benglish: I am wondering these days about my delayed admittance to the Western(English) literature and if there are going to be repercussions.
Along the years, when my contemporaries were reading Enid Blyton, I was reading Satyajit Ray's 'Feluda'.
They were immersed in 'Nancy Drew' series and I was gobbling up on 'Teen Goenda' series.
But unlike 'Nancy Drew', I never caught up with Blyton and now her books are out of print.
Though we probably read all the fairy tales (Little Mermaid, Sleeping Beauty etc) and classics (Frankenstein, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Odyssey, David Copperfield etc) at roughly the same time, I had only read them translated in Bengali and to this day haven't read them in English (except Copperfield).
And when girls at 13 were crying their eyes out with 'Love Story', I was still sitting with my own box of tissues and a thicker 'Pother Pachali'. I drenched the pages of 'Love Story' about a decade later than I should have.
Even my introduction to Jane Austen (my all time favourite author) was shamefully late...in my late teens.
We only matched our timings with Sidney Sheldon and he is just not as good as before.
Alternatively had I live in Bangladesh longer than I had or continued in a Bengali-medium school, I would have probably finished all of the novels by Sunil/Shirshendu/Bonkim eons ago instead of trudging through some of them in my undergrad years in Canada, sitting at various corners of the Robarts Library.
The dichotomy is pressing on me.
Translations of one into another (Bengali to English, vice versa) would just not cut it. I want to experience the best of both worlds in their original form, feel the words on my tongue, juggles the phrases in my brain.... But I wonder of I'll have enough time to catch up/finish them all before my eyes completely give up and wander off to be squelched underfoot by Beatrix (gawd what a horrible image, consequently the only image I caught of the 'Kill Bill' movies)!

And I haven't got hold of Huxley's 'Brave New World' yet!
('A Suitable boy' is coming along nicely though...only 700 more pages to go. Seth is quite the master.)

Update: excellent book- 'A Suitable Boy'....reminded me of Sunil's pseudopolitical novels. I'm not sure if I would have made the same choices as Lata, but its quite understanble why she made them. She is not the only one either- predictibilty and security is probably top of the list of requirement for many girls. More on that later.