The Death Relic by Chris Kuzneski
When the back blurb of a book compares the New World of 1545 to the Yucatan Peninsula today, when there is magic and historical fiction involved, you expect magic. You expect to be taken on a crazy ride across two eras and see history battling the present in a thrilling contest. Sadly, the blurb is […]
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
When you hear too much about a book, you know when everyone is calling it a classic; you think, “This is a goddamn phoney book.” And when I started reading it, I thought to myself that this was just another story about just another guy and I’d spent the precious dough on banal things about […]
Ptolemy’s Gate by Jonathan Stroud
This review was first published on June 30, 2016 Rupert Devereaux (let’s think, a Mr David Cameron) is the Prime Minister of Britain, governing it with mediocre talent, lots of dinner parties and his much-conflicted Council. Britain is fighting a war with America, which desperately wants the Brits out (you know who else wants out?) […]
The Golem’s Eye by Jonathan Stroud
Three things This is what broadly happens New characters are introduced; a certain feisty Miss Kitty Jones, part of the Resistance and their leader, Mr Pennyfeather, along with a few other members like Anne, Nick, Fred and Stanley. They make up The Resistance and after having been in the periphery for long, are planning to […]
The Amulet of Samarkand by Jonathan Stroud
Reading fantasy at 22 while pursuing a Master’s in Art — English Literature, is a test in itself. How you react to a largely ‘childish’ book after hammering for two semesters about literary criticism and theory is the best judge of whether the story-seeker, the artist, and the reader in you has survived. Check. Jonathan Stroud’s The […]
A Man’s Head by Georges Simenon
Here’s something about me: I love philosophy, and believe firmly that it needs to be made more mainstream. Philosophy helps root your beliefs into a concrete base. Professor Michael Sandel in his Justice series asked a very interesting question which went something like this: “You are in a mine, in one of those trucks and […]
Fools and Other Stories by Njabulo S. Ndebele
The Test For a long time, I wanted to write about the streets of my childhood, our games of summer and rain, my poverty and my perception of it. I have still not been able to pen down anything without it sounding like a chip on my shoulder I need to get rid of very […]
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
I’ll be honest — I am not (yet) a science fiction aficionado. I have a very limited, can-count-on-my-fingers number of the genre, some short stories and currently only two novels I can think of. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is the second one. (“What can I say? I only read science-fiction books I fall in love […]
Eva Luna by Isabel Allende
Writers and authors, storytellers and what Neil Gaiman calls, ‘those trade-in fictions’, I believe, have a hidden agenda to glorify, not unjustly, our own kind. We love to write and we love to read but above both, we love to write extensively about books, libraries, voracious readers and brilliant story-weavers. It is our way of […]
Tales from the Border by Blackwood
Last month, I acquired a membership to a library in Mumbai; an old, dilapidated building that has volumes and volumes of old books in English, Marathi, Hindi and Gujarati. There were a dozen people sitting there and studying, the lights above the bookshelves had not even been switched on and the dust covered volumes bookshelves […]
