Book Reviews

British murder mystery novels are my go-to comfort reads. There is something very genteel about them. There is no gore or loud action or twists and turns. The plot peels off in oniony layers, there is suspense but it’s never scary. As a reader, you can sip a cup of tea and breeze through a novel and engage your mind pleasantly for a few hours. Michael Innes’s Death at President’s lodging is the quintessential ‘closed…

Located across the narrow Straits of Gibraltar, Morocco has been Europe’s gateway to Africa. For many years ruled by both France & Spain, the free Morocco of today asserts its Islamic & Berber heritage. I recommend the following books for your first time Morocco travels.  These will help plan your trip and familiarize yourself with the rich and conflicted history of this small country in North Africa. Fodor’s Travel : Essential Morocco From the multicultural…

I know what you are thinking, “Yet another mediocre fantasy-fiction trilogy? Do we really need more magical worlds?”! No, we don’t need more mediocre trilogies (this is anything but that). And yes, we always need more magical worlds! The City of Brass was one of my top reads in 2018. The 2019 sequel The Kingdom of Copper cemented my love for The Daevabad Trilogy. And I can’t wait for the third book – Empire of…

The Review The Awakening is the story of Edna Pontellier, a terribly bored housewife. She has unquestioningly followed the path defined for her sex. She married young, went on to have two beautiful children and at the ripe young age of twenty-eight, she discovered that she does not have anything to live for. That is until she meets Robert LeBraun, the handsome and kind son of their lodge owner at Grand Isle. She begins to…

Winters are the perfect time to curl up in a stuffy chair and grab a glass of hot chocolate (or wine) and lose yourself in the pages of a good whodunnit. My personal favorite mystery novels are the ones with a closed room murder in a lavish country house somewhere, a fixed number of suspects and lots of motive! So basically, every other novel by Agatha Christie ? Since I am a big fan of…

As part of my Around the World in Books Reading Challenge, my pick for Albania was the Man Booker International Prize winning novel by Ismail Kadare.  The General of the Dead Army is a dark and depressing work of fiction. It chronicles the journey of an Italian general who goes to Albania with an important mission. He and a  priest travel across Albania exhuming bodies of dead Italian soldiers who died fighting in Albania during…

Spend this thanksgiving weekend cooking and binge watching the Harry Potter movies. At the end of the seventh movie, I decided to re-read the books. Although I have re-read all seven books several times, it really amazes me that these are still as engaging as when I first started with the series. In this post I will attempt to analyze the first book and why it works. After all, fantasy fiction genre has a lot…

Winter is here. As temperatures plummet across the northern hemisphere and people scurry inside warm houses, it is the perfect time to settle into that recliner, grab a cup of hot cocoa and read a book. What else are you going to do?   (Yes, you can always binge watch Netflix, but is that what you really want to do with your life? What I read is  determined by how my day was, what I am…