Curious book in London

Finally I got my hands on this book- 'The Curious Incident of the dog in the night-time' and read it in one go. Before reading, I had no clue as to what the book was about. I just knew that it was well appreciated by people whose opinions I value in these literary matters. And I loved it. It reminded me of 'Catcher in the rye', another book that I loved reading. Both are quite different yet similar in some ways. For one, both have the protagonists as narrators and these protagonists are not 'normal' per se. And the books are filled with their opinions about things.

I read this book in the unlikeliest of places. Sitting in the French Consulate in London, I started reading this book. I only had to read a few pages to discover that the narrator was living somewhere in England and that he had been to France and also that he hated France. And there I was waiting for a visa to go to France. All in all, the book is a must-read if only to realise how there could be a simple view of the seemingly complicated things around us.

Yesterday, I did spend a good deal of time walking around a small part of London between Victoria and Kensington. I had been once before to central London (have been many times at Heathrow but thats not exactly the London you would want to visit) and wanted to blog about it then but never got down to it. The best memory of the previous visit was sitting high up on Trafalgar Square and watching the traffic whiz by at 2am on as saturday night. And this time, it suddenly struck me as to what exactly I was doing. I was walking in London! I would have been easily passed over as yet another South-asian origin Londoner. I was being a part of that same London that I have read about in innumerable stories and saw in so many movies. Half of the road names seemed familiar though I was in those places for the first time. I would have come across them in some story obviously ranging from the 'Umbrella Man' of Roald Dahl to various Jeffery Archer novels. Looking at the high profile shops- Armani to Harrods made me think that the world isnt such a big place afterall :D. Spent some time going around the famous 'National History Museum' which was right opposite the consulate. got drenched by the popular 'London rain' wherein you would find quite many people walking around in black suits and holding black umbrellas.

Another city that I remember most from novels is Paris. Will be visiting it some day, perhaps sooner than you think ;).