Vipula

The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place series caught my attention by its lovely cover jacket and an intriguing premise — a young governess hired to educate three children who appeared to be raised by wolves. While I rarely wade into children’s books, I have to say this was a joyful discovery. In The Mysterious Howling, the first book in the series, a very young Penelope Lumley of Swanburne Academy finds employment at Ashton Place. She is to…

So this is a bit of rant and I usually stay away from really negative reviews, but I just couldn’t get over how appalling I found these books. And I admit I haven’t read only two-thirds of the Meluha Trilogy, but that’s enough to conclude that these are not for me. Before I make a case for why these were not worth my time, the series has been constantly on the best-seller list and is…

Alan Bennett is most famous for his Olivier & Tony Award-winning play, The History Boys, a dramedy on the trials of high school boys heading to college. With The Uncommon Reader he veers into lightweight literary territory, distinct in his charm but low on gravitas. In The Uncommon Reader, we enter the royal household of England, where the Queen has just discovered the joy of reading on a visit to a mobile library. To accept…

I have been writing all my life. Stories, poems, and essays. Scribbles in diaries, haiku games with friends and long, winded letters to loved ones. Every single time emotions overwhelmed the mind, my instinctive reaction was to pick up a pen and paper and just write. Falling in love, falling out of love, failing at work, getting promoted, family feuds, a show that I loved, a book I hated–all of it tumbling onto paper. And…

The pandemic has forced us all indoors, and the best way to avoid the piling house work is to curl up in front of the television. We are surely spoilt for content, and sometimes it is hard to pick up what to watch from the new releases every week. Sometimes it’s easier to just re-watch an old classic. The 1957 movie adaptation of Agatha Christie’s short story “Witness for the Prosecution” ends with the following…

Like much of USA, I have been glued to the television and phone over the last few days. Afraid that this might become an unhealthy habit, I determined that a good distraction was in order. So here I am attempting to do a round-up of all the books I read in the last two months, with the hope I might pick another shortly. Kiddo started school and work picked up pace, so reading was SLOW.…

Sidewalls (Medianaras) is a quirky indie Argentinian movie that explores the explosive and divisive nature of today’s metropolises on our lifestyles. Directed by Gustavo Toretto, the film uses Buenos Aires, as the setting of the general delineation of the human culture. At the center of the movie are two millennials, Marian, an architect and Martin, a web designer, leading lonely lives in the megapolis. It is through their eyes we see the beauty of the architecture…

Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London (Midnight Riot in US) suffers a bit from an identity crisis. It tries to be a fantasy-fiction novel, a police procedural, a London guide, a commentary on race all at the same time, but never quite succeeding. There is so much going on in every single page, that it was often hard to remember how I arrived at a particular point in the story and whether it was significant. The…