It is history now when we had to prepare critical appreciations of prose and poetry for our ISCE and ISC exams. But the habit I guess has remained.

Whenever I read a book and the book has impressed me, I feel merely reading is not enough. I devote some time thinking about it, thinking about the plot, the important characters and ultimately the questions if any the book is able to raise. And then I paper them down.It helps.
It helps me get close to the book.It helps me understand the writer just a fathom deeper. And most importantly I am able to reproduce the book in its essence whenever required, which I believe is our motive behind reading books (apart from the entertainment value of course!!).

The best critical appreciations that I think I've written are for Atlas Shrugged and The Old Man And The Sea.The Alchemist has been dealt with in a very concise manner. Eleven Minutes, I felt has language of such high value that I at this stage have not enough literary quotient to comment on it. Nevertheless I tried my hands.

However a sincere request to all of you is that it would be better that you read the novel before going through these critical appreciations that I have written.The reason being the same that you don't want to know the climax scene of a movie before going to the theater to see it.A book is written after much pains and all due respect must be given to, doing full justice with the writer and more importantly, literature.

I hope you enjoy whatever I've written.Any comments and suggestions towards improvement of my work are welcome and a sincere effort will be made to incorporate them in my writings.