About

The Short (Snappy) Version:

Literature and narrative art aficionado. Alice, Lewis Carroll, and Sherlock Holmes enthusiast. Anne Fadiman, John Crowley, and Jorge Luis Borges Devotee. List-Maker. Sentence Constructor. Book Collector. Reader.

I read Alexander McCall Smith’s novels; memorise W. H. Auden’s poetry; swear by Michael Dirda’s reviews and criticism; and live by Murray Gell-Mann’s biography.

The Long (Boring) Version:

Scrapbooks, footnotes, almanacs, letters, diaries, questionnaires, marginalia, memos, alphabets…how I love them. Pasolini once called himself a “pasticheur.” I think I am an annotator. The story exists for the scribbled notes in the margin.

— Robert Phelps in a letter to James Salter

I am best described as a reader. Naturally, an Annotation is intended to be a lively record of and commentary on my reading. Reading, of course, is a very general term and I mean it in exactly that sense.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

“The question is ,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

I used to believe the world could be read, if not always understood or made sense of. While not so sure now, I still feel reading is distinct from understanding: anything and everything, when written down, becomes artifice and that is the intuitive principle on which my reading operates. To read, therefore, is to interpret not understand. Some of my own obsessions–Books, Narratives, Movies, Music, Mathematical and Borgesian ideas, and the principle of Human Choices–will constitute the central motifs of this blog.

For those who find the title odd, my first post, Basking in Curiosity, and the epigraph at the beginning of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose may provide a certain degree of enlightenment.

You can also find me on goodreads, Twitter, and Quora.

P.S: I used to blog at http://naturallyamanuscript.blogspot.com/ prior to abandoning the effort and starting all over again.