“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.” ― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair Isn’t that a beautiful start? I fell head over heels in love with the novel the minute I read that opening sentence. However, as it often happens, it was easier to fall in love than to stay in love. So, What’s It About?…
Book Reviews
Over the past one year, there are some books that I read and meant to blog about. However, they made so little an impression on me, either good or bad, that I never got around to reviewing them. I thought I would just mention them in a single blog post. Death At the Bar by Ngaio Marsh Marsh was a New Zealand writer, heavily inspired by Agatha Christie. I have read reviews of her works…
Someone at a Distance is a heartbreaking story of an ordinary upper middle class British family is so gripping. I have read no other work by Dorothy Whipple, so am not aware of her style of narrative. I enjoyed this from a literary point of view, but I found the book oddly regressive to feminism. Let me start with the plot, which, as the blurb shows, is ‘deceptively simple’. The Norths are a happy, self-contained family…
British humor has its own identity; wry, genteel, steeped in sarcasm, slightly tongue-in-cheek. All writers have their own style, but there is something inherently similar in the language and narrative. I always find similarities between Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and PG Wodehouse with their mostly country house settings, caricaturized protagonists and situational humor. I also measure every other British humorist against them, which probably doesn’t help my reading at all, as it happened with Miss Mapp by…
When I started reading From the Holy Mountain by William Dalrymple, I struggled to put things in context as it covered the history and the current existence of Christian monasteries in the countries of Turkey. I figured to make sense of it all, I needed to read the history of Turkey – Wikipedia wasn’t going to be enough. I chanced upon “A Traveller’s History of Turkey” in the library. This book is a cliff notes version…
The plot is based a decade or more after the French revolution and the Age of Terror, just after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. The story follows a young medical student, Daniel Connor into the bedlam of Paris. Paris then, is the beating heart of Europe – the scientific, cultural and political center. As the city is coming to terms with the new regime, students from all over Europe are travelling to Paris to make their…
It takes a truly talented mind to take the day to day life of a country house wife and convert it into a journal of light satire and human observation. It is a little wonder why The Diary of a Provincial Lady was a bestseller when it was published in 1933 and why the reprints are still so popular. To be honest, when I got through the first fifty pages or so, I wasn’t entirely…
I had recently returned from a visit to Washington, and one of my friends suggested I might like Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. It was to Washington DC what Da Vinci Code was to Paris. Now, I am always a sucker for thrillers that are geographically centered, as it satisfies both my love of mysteries and traveling. So I gave it a shot. The Lost Symbol has the usual Dan Brown trademarks — Robert Langdon…
