For those not familiar with American history, the term Pioneers is used to describe the explorers who moved westwards in search of land and riches from the heavily populated East. Writers like Willa Cather wrote novels and stories to capture the trials and tribulations of this period of exploration. Most of the westward expansion was by settlers who worked on railways which were being built to connect mining towns. Any pioneer’s town population was often…
Book Reviews
The Corner Shop has a lovely cover and that is probably the nicest thing to say about it. Elizabeth Cadell wrote light romantic comedies in the Britain and her books were fairly popular, so I feel bad about dissing it. When I picked it up I was looking for something similar to the likes of E.F. Benson or Monica Dashwood – light, sharp and witty notes on the quiet country life. Which is why I…
As I was just a few weeks away from my trip to India and Istanbul, I was itching to read something to get me into the spirit of things. I started with Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul, but the book wasn’t it. His Istanbul is black and white, always cold, and inhabited by jinns. I don’t know what it is with Pamuk and me. I love his writing; the prose is poetic, but I can never seem…
“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?…
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…
