This book has been sitting on my bookshelf for easily over a decade. Somewhere down the line I outgrew Archer’s storytelling style, and with no genuine sympathy for a politician in jail, I never got around to reading it. For reasons unclear, I finally managed to pick it up and read it through the weekend, and I can confidently give this journal a solid 3 stars. “Prisoners and guards routinely line up outside my cell…
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Happy Month of Horrors! The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampire by Grady Hendrix is a fun gothic novel to dive into in case you are finding October dull and boring. “We’re a book club,” Maryellen said. “What are we supposed to do? Read him to death? Use strong language?” ― Grady Hendrix, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires Desperate Housewives meets The Twilight Zone and it works. In America’s favorite southern…
Gorgeously written, The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh was one of my top reads of 2024 and also my pick for non-choronlogical read for the 52Week Challenge. So much so that there were many moments when I couldn’t quite tell when things were happening. Its a novel without a central plot — told entirely through the fragmented nature of human memory . Evocative and layered, it’s a kind of memory-catcher, where our unreliable narrator pieces…
When the Assad government fell on December 8, 2024, the political nerd in me finally gave in to my ‘What’s this all about?’ bug. A quick online search led me to read the very accessible, informative and eye-opening Burning Country; Syrians in Revolution and War by Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami. How I picked this book When picking up books about areas of conflict, who writes the narrative is extremely important. I try to avoid…
When one thinks of World War II, there is a certain imagery that comes instantly to mind. Like the deathly concentration camps, Dunkirk, D-Day, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima-Nagasaki, the skeletal remains of European cities, etc. Western cinema and Hollywood have done its bit to aggrandize the heroics of the allies and to create a list of top recall in the world’s mind. However, in the stories of grand battles or unimaginable horrors, it is easy to…
Many, many years ago, in Maoist China, two teenage boys are sent to a village for ‘re-education’. The government wants to rid them of their western knowledge and the influence of their intellectual parents. On their arrival, the villagers come to inspect the boys’ belonging to ensure they bring no western or bourgeois objects. Our narrator and his friend Lou, whose story this novel is, find themselves in the odd position of defending their violin.…
