Sheila Kumar - Comfortably Numb

Comfortably Numb

Sheila Kumar's Storehouse

Book review: Different Class by Joanne Harris

Different Class, Joanne Harris. Doubleday Books This is the third in the author`s psychological thrillers but it is a standalone story, and that`s how I read it. Harris had me at Chocolat, years and years ago and though I`ve not always loved her other books in the same way, they always made for an engrossing…

Book review: Scene 75 by Rahi Masoom Raza

On the people who lurked at the edges of the Hindi film industry. Ali Amjad. Harish Rai. Alimullah Khan. Peter the cook who is actually Ramnath. Writers, directors, cooks-turned-scriptwriters — the cast of this novel is made up of eternal hopefuls who land up in the Bombay of the 1970s to live out…

Humour: Fashion sure is an enigma!

From the ramps to the roads I remember my first fashion faux pas like it was yesterday. I was working at the country’s leading women’s magazine. I went up to the editor and asked if I could do a ‘slightly different’ fashion piece. What about, she asked. Why, I said breezily, how fashion is…

Book review: Becoming A Mountain by Stephen Alter

Becoming a Mountain Himalayan Journeys in Search of the Sacred and the Sublime By Stephen Alter (Aleph Publications) Mountains, says Alter, have been endowed through history with nobility, wisdom, omniscience, as well as described as fearsome, treacherous, demonic. Of course, all this is but the expression of human sensibilities towards the natural world. The…

Book review: Gut by Giulia Enders

This is more a brief take than a review of the book. Gut by microbiologist Giulia Enders (Speaking Tiger Books) turned out to be not a run of the mill pick but a very informative read. The style is most reader-friendly, almost light and chatty but the gravitas of the contents is unmissable. The presentation…

Book review: A Legacy of Spies by John le Carre

This is more a brief take than a review of the book. If every bit of the buzz about the latest (and last?) le Carre is only about the fact that that he brings George Smiley back, well, it`s setting up the reader for something of a disappointment. Truth to tell, that’s not the only…

Humour: Where has the word `taken` gone?

Where has the word `taken gone? How the writer has stumbled upon a conspiracy to remove a key word from the English dictionary. Now I don’t for a minute want to ring any alarm bells. I don’t even want to imply that I have stumbled on a Yossarian-like campaign to slowly, inexorably remove words from…

Book review: Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

This is more brief take than review of the book. Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer. Pan Books. The May 1996 Everest disaster where eight people died in a storm that hit the mountain with force, is well documented in print and on celluloid too. Jon Krakauer`s account is very matter- of- fact, shorn of…

Feature: Do men read romance fiction?

Real Men Don’t Read Romantic Novels. Or Do They? I`m a writer, and my stories usually carry more than their fair share of darkness. I don’t know why, that’s just the way they are. Then, I wrote a romance, a light-as-air, sweet-as-rock-candy tale. And when that love story went out into the world a…

Book review: Until the Lions by Karthika Nair

He grew tall, he grew cold: Bheeshma blew into a typhoon, dark and vicious. A world where fools are born as king. …these men Were to remain sons, at best brothers- they could seldom grow into husbands, and never Fathers. Their own kingship, I can foretell, will be steered By possession, loss and carnage, Death…