Fortieth book reviewed as part of the 130 Challenge. I like mysteries and thrillers, but this one didn’t impress me much. It might be because Agatha was such a pioneer in this genre that a lot of other writers must have borrowed from her and so, this particular story (the first perhaps, in her famous Hercule Poirot series) appears to be far too familiar.The plot was quite simple. I was even able to guess the most likely culprits. However, as soon as Hercule starts to […]
Nonchalantly haunting
Thirty-ninth book reviewed as part of the 130 Challenge. We are floating through the cold indifference of the Universe with a death sentence dogging us around. Some of us ignore this fact and live life with the expectation that death, though a reality, is an incredibly distant one and we don’t really think much of it. On the other hand, there are those who get too concerned by this fact and spend their lives in mortal fear of being claimed by their end. The there […]
A young adult novel that everyone can read
Thirty-eighth book reviewed as part of the 130 Challenge. People often don’t take the ‘adult’ part of ‘young adult’ seriously (myself included) and that is why we have so much sappy literature in this genre. We can definitely do much better. But despite that expectation, when I saw that ‘Oranges for Christmas’ was about the hard life in Communist East Germany, I thought it was being far too ambitious and I feared that it might turn out to be a drab post-war story. The story […]
The Bombay in Mumbai
Thirty-seventh book reviewed as part of the 130 Challenge. When ‘Bombay’ was changed to ‘Mumbai’ many years back (it’s actually a decade or more, but seems like yesterday), I was a kid. It didn’t really affect me so much, but I used go around correcting people every time they called ‘Mumbai’, ‘Bombay’. I don’t know why I did that, maybe I asserted my sense of belonging to the city by claiming to know the correct name and declaring it to those who didn’t love it enough to care. […]
More like museum of obsession and drudgery
Thirty-sixth book reviewed as part of the 130 Challenge. It’s really difficult to capture the uneasy feeling of longing and desire that one gets when one can’t have their way. Some of us succumb to it and fall prey to obsession, going to great (and sometimes ugly) lengths to get what we want; almost always failing to get it. We all deal with such a heartbreak at least once in a lifetime and it is rare that someone comes out of it unscathed. So why would […]
The wise old economist speaks
Thirty-fifth book reviewed as part of the 130 Challenge. Amartya Sen is the benevolent, wise and knowledgeable grandpa that I never had. He talks of some of the stickiest issues and suggests solutions that sound beguilingly simple, mainly because he explains them in that tone of a wise old man. He talks of secularism, poverty, hunger, gender inequality, the nuclear arms race, the identity of India and the idea of Indian culture. These are quite drab topics to write about, and indeed, to read about. […]
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