10 Beautiful Names from Literature

What's in a name? Why of course everything - that's what evoked the image of the person and what he or she would act like. 

Have you ever read a book and fallen in love with a character? Sure, so many times, right?

But falling in love with a name? I have. Here are my favourite names, tell me yours. 

1. Florentino Ariza - From Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez). What's not to like about a man who dedicates his life to his love? But there's something so romantic and enigatic about the name, isn't it?

2. Shekure - From My Name is Red (Orhan Pamuk). Derived from sugar, this has to be one of the most beautiful names I have ever come across. 

3. Desdemona - From Othello (Shakespeare). Though I am not abig fan of the character, I honestly found her very whiny and too submissive, you have to agree the name is beautiful.

4. Atticus Finch - From To Kill A Mockingbord (Harper Lee). You hear the name and immediately imagine the person who comes alive through Harper Lee’s amazing book. 

5. Matilda  - From Matilda (Roald Dahl). How can you not love this precocious little child. Along with Dahl’s magical writing we are introduced to the world of Matilda who loves to read and learn, her family who are drowning in TV shows and Miss Honey who finally becomes her companion.

6. Hermione Granger - From Harry Potter (J.K. Rowling). I think we will all agree that Harry Potter books are a treasure trove of brilliant names. Take Hagrid for example, or Sirius Black, or Dumbledore, or even Bellatrix Lestrange. Each one is better than the next, but there is something about Hermione Granger

7. Cosette - From Les Miserables (Victor Hugo). Cosette is a moment of peace and pause in this whirlwind of a novel. if you have not read, you should. I must have learnt more of the French Revolution from this book than in my history books for sure. 

8. Leopold Bloom - From Ulysses (James Joyce). This novel was so audacious - like reflecting the universe in a drop, and the protagonist whose meandering walks around Dublin really strung together this delicate story has such a pretty name.

9. Clarissa Dalloway - From Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf). By far one of my favorite books and characters, and a lovely name only helps the cause. So fragile, so frivolous and so shallow, that's her,  you feel sympathy and anger towards her at the same time.

10. Miss Havisham - From Great Expectations (Charles Dickens). The picture of quiet fortitude and never ending despair rolled into one. Miss Havisham will leave you with that lump in your throat, any number of times you read the book, and such a lyrical name.

What are yours?

My Most Ambitious TBR for 2022

I read Crime And Punishment a long time ago and had made up my mind that I will be returning to Dostoevsky and read his two other greats The Idiot and Brothers Karamazov some time in my life. 

However both of these are pretty heavy and dense reads and I never thought I will get through either - much like War and Peace. Last year I read The Idiot in one and half months. Honestly, it was difficult in the beginning and the challenge was to keep attentively reading for a long time as my life does not allow me to have long stretches of undisturbed time when I can concentrate on a serious subject, but I did get through it and it was a really good experience. 

I am guilty of having kept a reading plan - how many chapters I will finish over how many days. I am not proud of it. This year my goal is to get to Brothers Karamazov and I have begun but have not gone through much of it, honestly. 

I have decided to read some classics this year and this one is the first of many (fingers crossed) to come. Dosteovsky’s style is such that you cannot skim through pages, you really need to immerse yourself in the characters and their situations in life. The very poignant sense of doom from the very beginning, his very Christian sense of crime and subsequent burden on the conscience is not easy to navigate through. Some might say that men like Myshkin (The Idiot) and Alyosha (Brothers Karamazov) are from a different age and are not relevant any more, but somehow I feel that while their view of society and the way people should conduct themselves have changed, the very basic human emotions and moral conflicts are still the same. 

The translation by Constance Gardner doesn’t make the job easier. Should I read a different translation? Am I just procrastinating? Only time will tell.