Book Reviews - Comfortably Numb

Comfortably Numb

Sheila Kumar's Storehouse

Book review: Sikkim by Andrew Duff

SIKKIM: Requiem for a Himalayan Kingdom by Andrew Duff. Random House India Books. 2015 release. Duff tells the sad and sorry tale of this beautiful little mountainous habitat, the name of which ironically enough, translates to `happy home.`It is indeed, the stuff of a political potboiler but alas, a true story. This account begins with…

Book review: The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell

The Bookseller`s Tale Shaun Bythell, a Scotsman of slightly curmudgeonly nature and a deep and abiding love of books, buys a bookstore in Wigtown and sets about making it arguably the most popular bookshop on the Scottish isle. In between trips hither and thither to look at book collections and buy as he sees…

Book review: Life in the Garden by Penelope Lively

This is a book less about gardening methods, types of plants and the like, and more about literary characters and their gardens, imagined as well as real. Get out there and dig, weed, prune, plant, when stuck with whatever was being written, advises the author who apparently is very adept at both writing as well…

Book review: This Land Is Our Land by Suketu Mehta

Meanwhile, migrants elsewhere….. Suketu Mehta`s THIS LAND IS OUR LAND is the intelligent combination of the personal, where Mehta talks of many members of his clan migrating to the US, and the professional, where he traces the troubled route of people braving some almost insurmountable odds to make a happy place for themselves in a…

Book review: How I Became A Tree by Sumana Roy

So enjoyed what I term the Matryoshka Tree book, Sumana Roy`s HOW I BECAME A TREE (Aleph Books). The book, which focuses on tree-love, aims for that intersection between the spot a tree stands in and the spot a human stands in, and reveals the Matryoshka effect as it segues from tree story to tree…

Book review: Behind the Wall by Colin Thubron

Just when the first lockdown was enforced, I started on one of my fave travel writer Colin Thubron`s 1988 China travelogue, Behind the Wall. And I only just finished reading it. It`s not an easy book to read, and it`s even more difficult to review. Oh, Thubron is at the top of his game…

Book review: Memory of Light by Ruth Vanita

A poignant passion A febrile strand of melancholia runs through the story, adding heft to a tale rich with detail, feeling and emotion In corona times, along comes a book that is best read slowly, leisurely, a meditative reflection on a found, lost, then recaptured love. Sumptuously descriptive, this love story has stately Lucknow, the…

Book review: Revolutionary Ride by Lois Pryce

Revolutionary Ride by Lois Pryce. Hachette india. About halfway into this book, an account of the author`s foray into Iran in 2011 on her motorcycle, I realised the book was less travelogue and more a political account of modern-day Iran. However, I had no grouse with that because Pryce stays on-point all through, and the…

Book review: Hurree Jamset Ram Singh in the Billy Bunter books

I wonder if anyone else on here was as conflicted about the character Hurree Jamset Ram Singh of the Billy Bunter books, he of the supposedly sage and incomprehensible pronouncements like “the wishfulness of the jug that goes to the well is terrific.“ Apart from the confusion regarding that name, which inferred the character was…

Book review: My Father`s Garden by Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar

And once in a rarish while, along comes a book, the contents of which are seamlessly compatible with its jacket pic. Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar`s MY FATHER`S GARDEN (Speaking Tiger Books) is one such book. The reader`s eye is caught and held first by the sumptuous illustration on the cover. And once they start to read…