Read Matsuo Basho Create your own poetry. On this day of Spring! It’s April 17th, when we celebrate International Haiku Day worldwide because this form of ancient Japanese poetry is that awesome. If you are nerdy about poetry, then I expect your social feeds to be full of haiku memes, forwards, and jokes. On this day, haiku gets a lot of love in the world. So, What’s A Haiku? For those who are not familiar, haiku…
Top Reads
We are three months into 2021 and it’s time to take stock of things in life. COVID-19 is still here, Europe is going back into sporadic lockdowns and we are still asking–WHEN WILL THIS END? But it’s not all gloom and doom. On the personal front, with a new job where I sometimes get paid to write (yay!), a kid back in school and my first shot of COVID vaccine around the corner, I would…
Heyer’s flawed yet deeply engaging regency romances are my personal palette cleanser. They are my go-to novels as I take a break from intense books or when trying to change genres. Language and character development satisfies the literary snob in me, while the plot line is fluffy enough to entertain over-worked, hassled mom who doesn’t have the time for complex storylines. About Frederica Frederica does not differ from her other works – predictable yet fun.…
End of the year is a time for cheer and celebrations; it’s also time to catalog another year of our life. What you achieved (staying alive and not catching COVID), places you travelled to (nowhere, because COVID), things you ate (loads of home-cooked meals, because COVID) and books read (loads, coz what else were you gonna to do because COVID!!) So here are my obligatory ten-books-of-the-year list that literally nobody asked for. It was hard…
The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place series caught my attention by its lovely cover jacket and an intriguing premise — a young governess hired to educate three children who appeared to be raised by wolves. While I rarely wade into children’s books, I have to say this was a joyful discovery. In The Mysterious Howling, the first book in the series, a very young Penelope Lumley of Swanburne Academy finds employment at Ashton Place. She is to…
Thomas Cromwell Finds A Sympathetic Portrayal in ‘Wolf Hall’ In Wolf Hall, Mantel takes us back in history when Henry VIII was shaking the very foundation of the Church in his bid to marry Anne Boleyn. Fun times, huh? Historians and storytellers have already written much about one of the most reformative and turbulent periods of the Tudor rule that it is challenging for a writer to leave their own mark and bring some freshness…
Le Carrè’s brooding spy thriller is slow in execution but big in substance. At a few hundred pages it’s a quick read with a plot engaging in its simplicity. Plot Summary Alec Leamas is an aging British intelligence officer who has recently led the Berlin division during the height of the cold war. His network has slowly collapsed over time because of one person — Mundt, the leader of East Germany’s intelligence operations. The novel opens with…
Megha Majumdar’s debut novel A Burning is literally setting the world ablaze with its rave reviews. The praise is so universal that I hesitated a bit before opening its pages. What if it did not live up to the hype, or worse, what if it mishandled the geopolitics that dominate today’s India? I need not have worried. Through the stories of Jivan, Lovely, and PT Sir, Majumdar weaves an intricate human drama that touches on a myriad…
