Crammed together: Nine Books

My to-be-reviewed pile for 2022 is long and toppling over. Before I forget all about the books, here are just a couple of lines about nine of them. So in no particular order: Death of a Hollow Man (1987): I had enjoyed Caroline Graham's The Killings at Badger's Drift, the first in her Inspector Barnaby's …

Classics Club #A1: Dasa Kumara Charitam by Dandin

Sanskrit is one of the most ancient languages of the world. I am in awe of the power of its words as manifested in the innumerable mantrs, strotas, and raags. It is a matter of regret for me that in school I never tried to learn the language properly and now can only rely on …

Forgotten Books: Five Mysteries by Rhode, Rinehart, Jackson, and Vine

Very brief descriptions of five mysteries read at the fag-end of this year.The Murders in Praed Street by John Rhode (1928)A book which begins extremely well as a man receives a call from a hospital to come and identify a body. He reaches there only to be told that no such call had been made …

‘The Issue itself": Present Day Germany and the Nazi Past in The Reader

Sometime I think that dealing with the Nazi past was not the reason for the generational conflict that drove the student movement, but merely the form it took. Parental expectations, from which every generation must free itself, were nullified by the fact that these parents had failed to measure up during the Third Reich, or after it …