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 …
Book Reviews
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 …
In high school, I only read the Charles & Mary Lamb version of Shakespeare’s works. While it served as a good introduction to the essential plots and themes, it failed to capture the true beauty of the language. I never formally studied Shakespeare, and my only attempt at reading his original works was as a fourteen-year-old, grasping at dusty shelves to retrieve a heavy copy of The Complete Original Works of Shakespeare at my grandparents’ …