Book Reviews - Comfortably Numb

Comfortably Numb

Sheila Kumar's Storehouse

Book review: All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

This is more a brief take than review. All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. HarperCollins. Anthony Doerr is a celebrated writer who has written other very moving stories but All The Light We Cannot See (2014) stands one level above all of them. This story, of a few lives tightly intertwined in the days of…

Book review: River of My Blood by Selina Hossain and Dangle by Sutapa Basu

Here are a couple of books that deal with the human condition, in times of the war without and the war within themselves. The jury may still be out regarding the real winners of the conflict but there can be no doubting the intensity of and the passion involved in the struggle, in both cases….

Book review: My Grandmother Sends Her Regards & Apologises by Fredrik Backman

A funny-wise tale ‘Every seven-year-old deserves a superhero.’ If that line isn’t enough to reel you in, ‘My Grandmother Sends Her Regards & Apologises’ has plenty of quirky characters and whimsical fairy tales which work just as well, in this book by Fredrik Backman. The story is of Elsa, a ‘different’ seven-year-old, a Gryffindor…

Book review: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by J K Rowling, John Tiffany and Jack Thorne

As the breathless blurbs go: he’s back! After 19 years! And so are Ron and Hermione! And Hagrid, Snape, Cedric Diggory and Dumbledore, (don’t ask), Moaning Myrtle and oh, quite a few of the Hogwarts lot we have come to know and like. It’s a new adventure, it contains all the requisite dangers, and…

Book review: One Last Drink at Guapa by Saleem Haddad

If being gay is complicated, being gay in West Asia is even more so. This book is an ode to disillusionment — personal, political, national — yet written in prose that soars and tugs at the emotions. Haddad’s hero Rasa is back in his unnamed country after doing his undergraduate studies in the U.S., full…

Book review: The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson

This is more a brief take than review. Twenty years after he wrote the definitive book on Great Britain, Notes From A Small Island, purportedly the most successful travel book ever( 2.5 million copies sold to date), Bill Bryson is back, funny bone a-tingling, pen and notebook in hand, keen powers of observation intact. But…

Book review: Love, Loss and What We Ate by Padma Lakshmi

A tasteful tell-all If Padma Lakshmi’s memoir is more memory and less food, it does not matter. Warmth and honesty infuses this candid account of her life and times; it is, quite literally, an answer to everything you wanted to know about her but didn’t know who to ask. As the whole reading world…

Book review: Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld

Eligible: A Biased Review Eligible is American author Curtis Sittenfeld’s re-telling of that much loved classic Pride and Prejudice. To take on a work, any work of Jane Austen (even when commissioned to do so, as part of the Austen Project) is one brave thing to do, and inevitably, for every two people who liked Eligible, four…

Book review: The Ivory Throne by Manu S Pillai

Pride and prejudice Once upon a time in god`s own country, there lived two cousins. Plucked from their peaceful childhood home in their preteens, they were adopted by a royal house and soon enough became the senior and the junior maharanis. Eventually, they married and the race to produce the next ruler of the house…

Book review: Mythbreaker, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw and the Story of Indian Biotech by Seema Singh

This well-written biography with its catchy title, gives readers a cogent answer to the question, who is Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, as well as its corollary, what is Biocon all about. Actually, it leans more towards tracking of the business rather than delving too deeply into the personality traits of its founder but then, the…