Top Ten (+4) Tuesdays: New Authors 2021

This week in Top Ten Tuesdays hosted @That Artsy Reader Girl, we have been asked to name top ten (or more or less) new authors whom we discovered last year. Well, last year I read a host of new authors from those whom I made a special point to read like Reginald Hill and Shelley …

#DDM ReadingWeeK: Daphne by Justine Picardie (2008)

People are often dismissive of librarians and libraries - as if the words are synonymous with boredom or timidity. But isn't that where the best stories are kept? Hidden away on the library bookshelves, lost and forgotten, waiting, waiting, until someone like me comes along, and wants to borrow them. In her fifties and about …

First Read of 2017: Biography of Bhagat Singh by M.M. Juneja

My last read of 2016 was the Complete Tribunal Proceedings of the Lahore Conspiracy Case that had revolutionary Sukhdev's remarks in the margins. I am glad that the first book that I read in 2017 is about Sukhdev's closest friend: Bhagat Singh.M.M. Juneja's biography of India's most famous martyr doesn't add much to all that …

Other Reads

With the new year approaching, here are short notes on some books read this year.THE INVENTION OF SOLITUDE by PAUL AUSTER (1982)A haunting book which begins as a memoir of the author's father but becomes more than simply a remembrance of a man who 'had left no traces'. Written after the death of his father and …

Bhagat Singh and his Legend (ed) J.S. Grewal

Bhagat Singh is perhaps India's best known revolutionary. For long, he was just seen as a man with a gun in his hand but now slowly people are awakening to the fact that he was a voracious reader and an intelligent thinker who thought deep about the ailments that plagued Indian society.This book is an …

Pulp

Want to write a commercially successful novel? Here are certain guidelines to help you achieve your goal:1. The title of the book should carry a woman's name - and it should be a sexy one, like 'Miss Leela Mohini' or 'Mosdhar Vallibai'.2. Don't worry about the storyline.(!) All you have to do is creatively adapt (love …

Short Reviews: Punjab and the Raj & Martyr as Bridegroom

Writing sometime in 1935, four years after Bhagat Singh and his fellow comrades, Sukhdev and Rajguru, had been hanged to death, the Director of the Intelligence Bureau, Sir Horace Williamson had this to say about the martyr:  “His photograph was on sale in every city and township and for a time rivalled in popularity even …

Trail of Blood: Henning Mankell’s The Man from Beijing

History can never give us exact knowledge of what will happen in the future: rather, it shows us that our ability to prepare ourselves for change is limited. (375)A couple of years ago, Stieg Larson and Scandanavian crime fiction were the flavour of the season. Everybody, but everybody, was talking about them. Finally, I too …

Indian YA: Bombay Rains Bombay Girls

Things were a little tough, a couple of years ago. Seeing me down in the dumps, a young cousin (who is majorly into Indian YA literature) gave me this book in order to cheer me up. Looking at his bright hopeful face, I did not have the heart to tell him that YA was simply …

Tuesday’s Overlooked A/V: We Can’t Turn Back by Aleksander Veljanov

Aleksander Veljanov is a Macedonian born singer associated with the group Deine Lakaien, a band that he co-founded with Ernst Horn in 1985. A former student of film and theatre studies in Munich, Veljanov has a voice much suited to the melancholic undertones of this Dark Wave group. In 2008, Veljenov released one of his …