Favorite Books

If you are interested in poetry, you should immediately and urgently read 'Geetanjali' by Rabindranath Tagore. Even if you don't get engaged by the poems, you are sure to be inspired by Yeats' introduction to this collection of poems -- Geetanjali.

The poems were originally written in Bengali, and they were translated into English by Tagore himself when he traveled by ship to London (from Kolkotta) around 1908. If you are a romantic, there is no greater romanticism then what you would find in Tagore's lyrics. And this romanticism is at once both spiritual and temporal, and edifying and cleansing.

Geetanjali -- Geeta (song), anjali (offerings) -- is a composition of songs of offering to the spirit, the mind, the intellect and the body. And here is a song ---

"Obstinate are the trammels, but my heart aches when I try to break them.
Freedom is all I want, but to hope for it I feel ashamed.
I am certain that priceless wealth is in thee, and that thou art my best
friend, but I have not the heart to sweep away the tinsel that fills my room
The shroud that covers me is a shroud of dust and death; I hate it, yet
hug it in love.

From Harper Collins:

LULLABIES FOR LITTLE CRIMINALS is the heartbreaking and wholly original debut novel by This American Life contributor Heather O'Neill, about a young girl fighting to preserve her bruised innocence on the feral streets of a big city.

Baby, all of thirteen years old, is lost in the gangly, coltish moment between childhood and the strange pulls and temptations of the adult world. Her mother is dead; her father, Jules, is scarcely more than a child himself, and always on the lookout for his next score. Baby knows that 'chocolate milk' is Jules' slang for heroin, and sees a lot more of that in her house than the real article. But she takes vivid delight in the scrappy bits of happiness and beauty that find their way to her, and moves through the threat of the streets as if she's been choreographed in a dance.