#Germanlitmonth: Babylon Berlin by Volker Kutscher (2007)

He understood that there were different versions of the truth. Every police officer knew that, with each trial it was experienced afresh. The war is fresh in people's memory and mourning; the monarchy has been reduced to porn pin-ups; Hitler is "that strange bird with a Charlie Chaplin moustache"; Himmler and his dreaded SS are …

The Purple Roomby Mauro Casiraghi

The Purple Room by Mauro CasiraghiMy rating: 3 of 5 stars "We left the courtroom in silence. Without saying a word, we each knew what was going through the other’s mind. Every moment of our life together, from the day we first met, until the exact moment when it all ended. It was the inventory …

Tuesday Night Bloggers: 1222 by Anne Holt

Though Scandinavian mysteries were the rage a few years ago (Perhaps still are for all I know), I didn't really find the couple of books that I read very appealing.Then I heard about 1222 by Norwegian author Anne Holt and how it was a homage to Agatha Christie and so was excited enough to borrow …

GLM: Part of the Solution by Ulrich Peltzer

Ulrich Peltzer (born 1956) is one of the most famous of contemporary writers in Germany. A student of philosophy and social psychology, he is now (according to wikipedia) a full-time author.His first novel Teil der Lösung, translated in English as Part of the Solution begins in the summer of 2003. The bright sunny weather is ideal for …

23 March: A Remembrance in Books

Today is 23 March. A day when we remember the martyrdom of Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, and Sukhdev, three young men who laid down their lives for the freedom of India. I thought this would be an appropriate occasion to talk about books related to them that I read recently.Professor S. Irfan Habib's To Make the …

Short Notes: Two Books on Greek Literature

The Iliad is the first extant book of European Literature. Part of an oral tradition of poetry, it is supposed to have been composed by a blind,wandering minstrel named Homer who is also considered to be the writer of that other great Greek Epic, the Odyssey. Over the years both these books have influenced writers …

Being Sindhis in India: Rita Kothari’s The Burden of Refuge

The Partition of India in 1947 was one of the darkest hours in the history of the sub-continent. As communal forces gained strength and boundaries were re-drawn according to religion, tens of thousands of people found themselves on the wrong side of the borders. People had to leave behind their homes, families, friends, means of …

Overlooked Film: Butterfly On a Wheel

Todd Mason at his blog, Sweet Freedom, has an interesting weekly feature: Forgotten or Overlooked Films#. This week, I too have taken the plunge and posted a review of a movie that I saw a couple of years ago. Head over to Todd's blog and see the other posts.Neil Randall(Gerald Butler) is really living it …

Death of a Detective: Pablo De Santis’ The Paris Enigma

Books always contain secrets. We leave things between their pages and forget about them: lottery tickets, newspaper clippings, a postcard we've just received. But there are also flowers, leaves that attracted us with their shapes, or insects trapped in a paragraph's snare.Renato Craig, the famous detective of Buenos Aires, and one amongst the elite group …

Two Under the Tuscan Sun

After Cozies, the genre in mysteries that I like best is the Academic mystery. I greatly enjoy the unfolding of the plot as the characters set about to solve a mythological/ historical/ literary puzzle while going over old records, journals, letters, and try to connect point A to point J. (A -J, it rhymes you see).I …