The Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows movies had a lot to live up to when it came to fan expectations. For the book readers, who had been on the journey much longer than the movie fans, it was the final closing chapter of the Harry Potter series. At that point in 2011, no one knew that Rowling would have an equally hard time letting go of the characters and would end up writing a…

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 No Strings Attached was released, Natalie Portman was riding high on the success of Black Swan, and predictably everyone was going gaga over her role in this movie. Catching the movie six months after, it doesn’t look so hot. Let’s talk about the storyline: two people keep bumping into each other and finally hook up for no strings attached sex agreement stating if one of them falls in love agreement ends. Obviously, we all know where…

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…