I have mixed feelings about this book having just finished it yesterday. I had expectations from this book. I expected it to be the story of the American dream, like in the movies – the hero will rise above himself to be a bigger and better person. Clearly, I was obviously mistaken. This is about real life and real life is not the like the movies. Read More…
Book Reviews
Guest post by Kapil Sood, Writer-at-large, Shades of Words Often in our lives, we commit mistakes that leave us in overwhelming guilt. In the absence of a suiting redemption, we end up living our lives under the burden of this guilt. Khaled Hosseini’s debut novel The Kite Runner is about how this guilt and later a desperate attempt at redemption drives the life of Amir. With Afghanistan in turmoil as the background, it is a…
Assorted tales of comic fiction – edited by Peter Haining I always appreciate an entertaining or thought-provoking story-line and I got plenty of those as I read the ‘The Flying Sorcerers’. A motley collection of humorous fantasy fiction tales with a mix of both science fiction and the supernatural. What makes the book really special is: A) It has the earlier works of some of the best names in the business – Terry Pratchett, Arthur…
The Blind Assassin book is my pick for Canada for Around the World! I always have very high expectations from award-winning books and I am usually not disappointed. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood was an exception. The novel traces the story of Iris & Laura Chase, two sisters born into a rich but fading household in a small industrial town in Canada. Our narrator is Iris Chase, the elder sister who unravels her life…
Piece of Cake qualifies to be neither a great piece of literature nor a thought-provoking book, but it makes it to our web pages simply because reading it was ”fun’. Classic chick-lit, it follows the trials and tribulations of a 29-year-old business school graduate, Minal Sharma, in a cutthroat multinational food corporation. Running parallel to the core story is her need to find the ‘man’ of her life before her mom dumps the HT Matrimonial…
Imagine you were in a fairy tale….. What would you do if you realized it was in your hands to change the course of the story? What would you do if you realized the characters in the fairy tale were real people and did not want to be a part of the story? Terry Pratchett’s ‘Witches Abroad’ does it all and in a very entertaining manner. Three witches, Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg and Magrat, one…
It’s almost outrageous that I should consider reviewing the literary work of someone as globally renowned and acknowledged as Rabindranath Tagore. But our goal is to write about things we feel are worth sharing, so here goes an attempt to explain my first experience with Tagore. Mystic Moods is a compilation of 10 short stories, more or less centered on the inherent darkness in the minds and hearts of all humans. The stories reflect some social evils…
“Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood. Worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.” No book review of Angela’s Ashes is complete without quoting these opening lines, because in them lies the promise of an engaging and poignant story. Frank McCourt’s memoir of his childhood takes you to the damp slums of Limerick where you look in the houses of the poorest of the poor. The descriptions of the living…
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