Book Reviews - Comfortably Numb

Comfortably Numb

Sheila Kumar's Storehouse

Book review: The Sleepwalker`s Guide to Dancing by Mira Jacob

Family matters The Indian reader should be forgiven for rolling her eyes soon after she starts to read The Sleepwalker`s Guide to Dancing by Mira Jacob (Bloomsbury India). Because the story seems to faithfully check all the little boxes that serve as bullet points for the Diaspora novel. Immigrants transitioning awkwardly, check. Father, white collar…

Book review: The Scatter Here Is Too Great by Bilal Tanweer

The Scatter Here is Too Great by Bilal Tanweer (Random House India). The book has a jacket that instantly compels you to pick it up, to take a closer look at the sepia-tinged picture of some kind of debris on a tarred road. But you have read the back cover and you know that the…

Book review: Noon Tide Toll by Romesh Gunasekera

Noon Tide Toll by Romesh Gunasekera (Penguin Books). If it`s Romesh Gunasekera, you know you are in for a dashed good read, a moving read, and this book is no exception. Using the driver of an old Toyota vanVasantha as his mouthpiece, Gunasekera crafts 14 short stories of Sri Lanka as it is today. Vasantha…

Book review: Being Mortal by Atul Gaiwande

Intimations of mortality Atul Gawande`s Being Mortal (Penguin Books) cuts rather too close to the family bone, so an impersonal review is difficult. To rage or not to rage against the dying light? That is what the author asks in this book. Dr Gawande, author of a set of very thought-provoking books like Complications, Better…

Books: The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley

Threadbare, old and worn, yet priceless. This review is as much personal as professional. This falling-to-bits but very very precious copy of Charles Kingsley`s THE WATER BABIES, belonged to the name on the flyleaf shown in one of…

Book review: Stellar Signs by Manjari Prabhu

Stellar Signs byManjiri Prabhu (Jaico Books). I must admit I picked up the book with some amount of trepidation; me, I`m no fan of whodunits and I don`t repose too much confidence in astrology, either. And this is a book about Sonia Samarth, our desi Nancy Drew, who mixes sound common sense and sharp detection…

Book review: The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher by Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel`s new collection of shorts is provocatively titled The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, (HarperCollins UK) and arguably the story by that name is the best read. There are ten stories, all of them full of what we know as Mantelisms…furniture is described as wilful, someone`s virginity is a wan one, someone leaving Jeddah is…

And Then One Day by Naseeruddin Shah

And Then One Day by Naseeruddin Shah (Penguin Publishers). In which the actor talks of the theatre gods, his surreal experience at a Jerzy Grotowski workshop in Wroclaw, his abiding insecurities, how he can never quite face down all his demons; fearlessly disses his fellow actors (flakes, he calls them once) directors and producers (mountebanks, he…

Book review: Brilliant by Roddy Doyle

Sorry but I have to fall back on the old one: Roddy Doyle`s fable for children Brilliant, is simply brilliant. Or brill, if you will have it. Recession has Ireland firmly in a throttlehold, and the people of Dublin have sunk into a recession-related depression. It`s a cold, clammy fog and almost everyone has gone…

Book review: The Mountain: My Time on Everest by Ed Viesturs and David Roberts

Not a new release but a gem I stumbled on. The book is titled The Mountain (Touchstone Publishers). It further clarifies: My Time On Everest. And then, just in case you were still floundering, there is a tagline that reads: The Irresistible Lure of the World`s Highest Peak. It is written jointly by mountaineer Ed…