Book Reviews - Comfortably Numb

Comfortably Numb

Sheila Kumar's Storehouse

Books: Tribute to PG Wodehouse

THREE CHARACTERS AT BLANDINGS CASTLE I ABSOLUTELY LOVE: • Lord Emsworth. The barmy old ninth Earl is a veritable delight. • Angus McAllister. The castle`s Head Gardner, with his radical views on hollyhocks and yews, has some side-splitting face-offs with Lord Emsworth. • Rupert Baxter. Can one love Baxter? Well, you definitely love that he…

Book review: One More Croissant for the Road by Felicity Cloake

ONE MORE CROISSANT FOR THE ROAD by Felicity Cloake. HarperCollinsUK. 2019 release. As if the title wasn’t one big pull in itself, this witty travelogue features one famous and popular French recipe at the close of every chapter. The omelette soufflé, ratatouille, clafoutis, quiche Lorraine, madeleines, they are all in here. Which led to my…

Book review: Jakarta Tails by Pallavi Aiyar

Feline fables Soyabean and Tofu, the feline fascinators we last met in Beijing, have relocated to Jakarta now It`s no use me telling you about Soyabean and Tofu`s adventures in Jakarta without filling you a bit on their origin story. The two felines, Soyabean who rejoices in a deep orange colour and Tofu who is…

Book review: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

My Wednesday Review this week is of an old favourite which has attained cult status amongst certain sections of the reading populace. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. First the backstory. John Kennedy Toole wrote this uproariously funny story in the early Sixties, met with rejection after rejection from publishers everywhere, and eventually committed suicide…

Book review: The Anger of Saintly Men by Anubha Yadav

THE ANGER OF SAINTLY MEN by Anubha Yadav, Bee Books. These boys` lives. Anubha Yadav`s first work of fiction is a raw coming- of- age tale of three brothers, Saurabh (Sonu), Anurag (Anu) and Vikram (Vicky) Singh. It contains all the pleasures and the not inconsiderable pain of adolescence, leavened with a vein of…

Book review: Cages by Aabid Surti

The story is a straight one. A heroine who is unafraid to express her sexual desires; the patriarchal straitjacket of male control; the strength of sisterhood. These then are the central themes in Aabid Surti’s book which was published almost fifty years ago, and has been re-released now…which makes Surti a ‘woke’ author long before…

Book review: The Last Queen by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

The Last Queen by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. HarperCollins Books. As someone who has liked everything Divakaruni has written, in varying degrees though, I found this account of Rani Jindan Kaur, the last queen of Punjab, favourite wife of Maharaja Ranjit Singh the Lion of Punjab, mother to the last king of Punjab the hapless…

Book review: Four Seasons in Rome by Anthony Doerr

Four Seasons in Rome by Anthony Doerr. HarperCollins UK. 2007 release. Taking up two disparate strands, that of rearing newborn twins and of spending a year in the Eternal City, Anthony Doerr, Pulitzer-prize winning author of All The Light We Cannot See, gives us a most charming travelogue-memoir. He`s funny about his boys: The boys…

Book review: Destination Wedding by Diksha Basu

This is more a brief take than review. There`s nothing as delightful as light-done-right, a dictum I`ve tried to follow when writing both `No Strings Attached` and `Our Start-up Affair.` Diksha Basu`s DESTINATION WEDDING (Bloomsbury Books) gets that light-done-right down pat. The story sends up the Big Fat Indian Wedding in the most gentle manner…

Book review: The Secret Life of Debbie G by Vibha Batra and Kalyani Ganapathy

Savage retribution So, the trope is a time-tested and popular one: young adult (16yo, in this case) finds herself once too often at the receiving end of bullying/sneering/scoffing from the self-appointed elite set, and decides to turn avenger, get her back on them in a manner calculated to hit and hurt, hard. This well- written…