There is nothing more satisfying than reading a book while sipping a hot cup of tea.
I have been facing a major blogging block but now the review pile has grown so big that I must really start writing or else... Val Gielgud and Holt Marvell are new authors for me. Little information is available on the duo except that both worked at the BBC, Marvell's real name was Eric Mashwitz, … Continue reading Friday’s Forgotten Books: Two Books by Val Gielgud and Holt Marvell
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 … Continue reading Top Ten (+4) Tuesdays: New Authors 2021
2021 is not ending on a good note and my last read of the year too was pretty grim in places. The Andamans are a group of islands in the Bay of Bengal off the eastern coast of India. Separated from mainland India, they are still home to the indigenous people who have been here … Continue reading Last Read of 2021: In Andamans: The Indian Bastille by Bejoy Kumar Sinha (1939)
Pigeons on the grass, that is how certain modern minds regarded people, while they strove to expose that which was senseless and apparently coincidental in human existence, to portray man as free of God, then to leave him fluttering about free in the void, senseless, valueless, free, and menaced by snares, prey to the butcher, … Continue reading #GermanLitMonth: Pigeons on the Grass by Wolfgang Koeppen (1951)
An officer who is prepared to die first can demand total loyalty, only he can take his men into the jaws of death. They are Goering's golden boys, the pride of the Luftwaffe, Germany's crack paratroopers known as the Green Devils. When the novel opens, we find a unit rearing to go to their next … Continue reading #GermanLitMonth: Eagles of the Reich by Will Berthold (1957)
The German Literature month has given me a wonderful opportunity to read three authors who had long been on my wishlist. Splinter by Sebastian Fitzek (2009) 'Back to the default position?' said Marc. 'A total reset?' Marc Lucas is a psychiatrist who has enough problems of his own. A few months prior to the beginning … Continue reading #GermanLitMonth: Three Crime Novels
Because sometimes there are stories -even in an atheistic world - that do not end with the passing of the protagonist. Hermann Goring, Heinrich Himmler, Rudolf Hess... I think all of us have heard of these names. Then there were others whom I encountered for the first time: Hans Frank, Baldur von Schirach, Martin Bormann, … Continue reading FFB & #GermanLitMonth: My Father’s Keeper: The Children of Nazi Leaders – An Intimate History of Damage and Denial
" There's good stuff in all the Mildmays. And bad stuff too. Either win the V.C. or commit murder." @ebay Jane Carstairs has been through a lot. At the age of 21 while she was all rich and comfortable, her father lost everything on certain dubious speculations. In what was termed a fit of insanity … Continue reading Friday’s Forgotten Book: Miss Jessica’s Stick by Aylmer Hunter (1942)
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 … Continue reading #Germanlitmonth: Babylon Berlin by Volker Kutscher (2007)
I am in love with old, dusty books but sometimes am seduced by shiny new books. Here are brief notes on such books, all barring one read this year: Asylum by Madeleine Roux (2013) I must admit that this novel is not meant for somebody of my age. Had I been a young teenager, I'd … Continue reading New Books
a hot cup of pleasure 