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…
Around the World
The Things they Carried is an astounding book that leaves no doubt in your mind on the true nature of war. There is no glory and it’s horror has endless depths. It can’t be an easy thing to write personal war stories – especially painful, gut-wrenching, embarrassing, shameful ones. But that’s what Tim O’Brien does in this semi-autobiographical collection of snippets from Vietnam War. He digs into his war wounds and slices them open and…
Only Wodehouse can make a story about the occupants of a stuffy English Country House and a silver cow creamer entertaining. PG Wodehouse’s novels brings all the charms of the English humor to your home and the adventures of young, spoilt Bertie Wooster and his butler, Jeeves form the icing on the proverbial cake in his collection. The Code of the Woosters takes Bertie and Jeeves to the residence of is Sir Watkyn Basset in…
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…
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…
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…
“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…
