Siddhartha Golu
A brilliant backstory to the global phenomena that shook the world to its core and ultimately, for better or for worse, shifted the entire political spectrum in many countries. This Pulitzer-prize winning book deserves all the acclaims it gets. Mostly when people talk about terrorists and Jihad, they only discuss the result - the bombings, the beheadings, the hijackings - but very few people care about going into the details of how these attacks happened in the first place. Although it remains a big mystery to me, Lawrence manages to shine some lights on some of the key figures in this global Jihad and what ultimately motivated them to take on this deadly course. A page-turner for sure and a must-read for anyone who is as ignorant about Jihad as I was till sometime ago.
Dull in the beginning, but it picked up the pace around halfway through the book. Many people had recommended this to me claiming it was a more accurate representation of our current world than Orwell's “1984”. I agree with them to an extent, however it did not leave quite the impression that Orwell's masterpiece had on my mind.
The School of Life - a massively popular YouTube channel - used to be this source of solace in some turbulent times of my college life. It is not something that you'd think would be cheerful and uplifting - a quick glance at some of the most popular videos of theirs would include titles such as ‘Why we go cold on our partners,' ‘Why you will marry the wrong person' etc. The honest yet straightforward manner in which the narrator calmly tells us that even though it might feel like this is the worst possible time of your life, it is not usually so - it was a comforting thought - to feel and accept that things are fucked up and move on with quiet resignation.
Alain De Botton is the founder of the said channel as well as the author of this book.
The Course of Love is Alain's critique of what's wrong with the society's current perspective of love and marriages. Romanticism - the idea that the briefest of glances of some stranger is the formulation of a satisfying relationship, the idea of soul-mates and the happily ever after - is one of the most mistakenly understood facets of life. The story revolves around two fictional characters who meet each other at work, fall in love, get married, have children and go through the whole process of frustrations and resignations and disappointments that constitutes a married life. Through this fictional story, Alain gives us some of the most profound insights into how love and relationships work in real life - quite unlike how they happen in stories. He writes in one of the passages -
“Our understanding of love has been hijacked and beguiled by its first distractingly moving moments. We have allowed our love stories to end way too early. We seem to know far too much about how love starts, and recklessly little about how it might continue”.
“At the heart of a sulk lies a confusing mixture of intense anger and an equally intense desire not to communicate what one is angry about. The sulker both desperately needs the other person to understand and yet remains utterly committed to doing nothing to help them do so. The very need to explain forms the kernel of the insult: if the partner requires an explanation, he or she is clearly not worthy of one. We should add: it is a privilege to be the recipient of a sulk; it means the other person respects and trusts us enough to think we should understand their unspoken hurt. It is one of the odder gifts of love”.
I loved this book! I haven't read any novel by Ursula K. Le Guin, but after this beautiful collection of essays by the author, I am really looking forward to read her other works. She has a simple yet incredible style, something which penetrates the heart of its readers. In the first chapter itself entitled “Introducing Myself,” she is at her best, attacking the prevalent patriarchy of the current time with fierce wit. She writes,
I am a man. Now you may think I've made some kind of silly mistake about gender, or maybe that I'm trying to fool you, because my first name ends in a, and I own three bras, and I've been pregnant five times, and other things like that that you might have noticed, little details.......Women are a very recent invention. I predate the invention of women by decades. Well, if you insist on pedantic accuracy, women have been invented several times in widely varying localities, but the inventors just didn't know how to sell the product. Their distribution techniques were rudimentary and their market research was nil, and so of course the concept just didn't get off the ground. Even with a genius behind it an invention has to find its market, and it seemed like for a long time the idea of women just didn't make it to the bottom line.
Huge heavy things come and stand on granite and the granite just stays there and doesn't react and doesn't give way and doesn't adapt and doesn't oblige and when the huge heavy things walk away the granite is there just the same as it was before, just exactly the same, admirably. To change granite you have to blow it up.
But when people walk on me you can see exactly where they put their feet, and when huge heavy things come and stand on me I yield and react and respond and give way and adapt and accept. No explosives are called for. No admiration is called for. I have my own nature and am true to it just as much as granite or even diamond is, but it is not a hard nature, or upstanding, or gemlike. You can't chip it. It's deeply impressionable. It's squashy.
Although it gets repetitive a bit in the middle, the gist of the book can be summarized as - Do deep work instead of the shallow. You have to actively work on your habits to keep yourself from spiraling into the distraction laden life that the current online culture has inculcated. All this sounds like common advice and a touch of self-help vibe in the title of this book may make you skeptical to pick it up, but the advices and strategies Cal Newport suggests is applicable to everyone in the 21st century. If you can't make it through the entire book, read at least few of his blog posts on Cal Newport: Blog .
Update from my 2nd reading:
A kind friend gifted me the hardcover version of this book. It was a sublime experience - to be able to hold the narrative in your hands, flip through the insanity and come out of the house with a greater understanding of human beings.
Original note:
This is probably the strangest book I've ever read. One of those cult favourites where you'll either passionately love the book, or vehemently hate it. Everything depends upon how much are you willing to invest - when you have to read the words upside down or sometimes vertically, when there are pages after pages after pages of incomprehensible texts, when you lose control of story at every step of the way and wonder what's really happening, are the characters losing their minds or is it you - you have to remember that this is just a book. Nothing more, nothing less. Otherwise, you'll end up like me, obsessing over every tiny detail, wondering at midnight whether the emptiness and coldness you feel is just because the temperature is low or are there other factors in play.
I know. I sound paranoid. But this is exactly what the author intended.
On surface, House of Leaves is a book about a house which expands on the inside while remaining unchanged on the outside, the vast empty space consisting of nothing but darkness accompanied by a vicious and nerve-wrecking growl. But it is so much more than that. This is the story of a famous photojournalist who is retiring from his life to fix his broken marriage in a quiet, suburb place. What he gets instead is a haunted house which initially intrigues his interest, but later on consumes him completely with its idiosyncrasies. How the paranoia creeps into his wife and his friends, threatening to break their entire relations. Eventually, it becomes a tale of how love redeems him and brings them closer than ever. All this sounds like a normal story, except the way Mark presents it makes it special. You find footnotes to footnotes of a book inside the book, with narrator consistently interrupting the flow with his own, fucked up life, slowly spiralling out of control from reality.
I'm glad I picked it up. The only letdown was that I read it on kindle, ‘cause I couldn't afford the paperback version at this time. But, this is a book that is meant to be read on paper. I will surely revisit it once I have the paperback in my collection.
———————————————————
This is also available on my website
This is the 3rd book of the Russian author that I've read and now, he has easily become one of my favorite authors! This was such a passionate tale of an individual who's sick of the society and its laws, and often at the expense of being self-contradictory, this paradoxical narrator goes on to explain the importance of suffering in life. The first part might feel like a rant of someone depressed, but bear with it and you will be rewarded, although I should warn you - this is not something you pick up if you want to read an uplifting book. One of the most depressing, but strangely beautiful books I've ever read.
Absurdist classic - that's certainly the best way to describe this book! Kurt beautifully interweaves humor with brutal realities of war, which is aided by the strange storyline of the book. Through the Tralfamadorian philosophy, he points the flaws in us Earthlings' way of living the life. As one of the characters say in the book -
“That's one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.”
I received a copy of this book from the author in exchange for an honest review. Blemishing the Odds is the story of Raghav, a boy in his teenage years working his way through the tumultuous life of a typical teenager. Every one of us has gone through these things at some point in our lives - the ups and downs of high school years, those silly dramas with your friends, the first crush which you presume to be “love” in your naivety, the endless teasings and much more.
This book is intended to be a light read, and so you have to treat it like that. Please don't expect to gain any “literary merit,” and ignore the few grammatical mistakes spread here and there. Also, I was occasionally put off by the writing style of conveying certain emotional situations in a matter-of-fact way, but considering it's the debut work by the author; you can overlook these shortcomings and just enjoy the story. It's a commendable effort by the young author, and I wish him all the success in the world!
This was a fun read. Or I should say listen. The audiobook is narrated by the author himself and he is no stranger to comedic scenarios. His narration shows that he's a stand-up comedian - the word “bozo” absolutely cracked up me every time he used it! I'd recommend this one just because of the narrator, although subject matter is no less interesting.
“Open your eyes and see what you can with them, before they close forever”
What a journey! What an incredible, heartbreaking, beautiful and bittersweet journey! Poetry disguised as prose - the phrase that comes to mind while reading this book. Strangely, I felt the same while reading The Book Thief, another beautiful story set in those grim years of World War II. What is it about wars that is so fascinating to authors - maybe the atrocities that are committed, the inevitable doom that casts its shadow over both the perpetrators and the victims, or maybe how despite living in the worst of times imaginable to them, people manage to survive but however brave they are, war leaves a black hole in their hearts that can never be filled.
All the characters are incredibly well-written, especially Marie-Laure LeBlanc, who I think is probably the most beautiful character ever written. The disruptive non-linear narration only adds to the beauty where chapters flow into one another forming a giant interwoven web of stories that manage to shake you from the core.
I'll leave you all with a quote from the book -
“You know the greatest lesson of history? It's that history is whatever the victors say it is. That's the lesson. Whoever wins, that's who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest. Of course we do. Name me a person or a nation who does not. The trick is figuring out where your interests are.”
What an emotional roller-coaster ride! The story revolves around the bloody week of partitioning into India and Pakistan and how barbaric mutilations were the norm during that time. Khushwant Singh brilliantly uses hypocrisy and morality to show how fickle the human mind is and how easily it can be persuaded into different directions. Though the book lacks coherence in certain segments, it builds up to a crescendo as the story unfolds - the last few pages, especially the last segment is tragically beautiful. A must-read for sure!!
The book essentially revolves around the Dam Project and as Mr. Shibu has an extensive background in hydroelectric projects, he was able to give us a concrete description of everything technical - and that's where, I think, he went wrong. The disconnected storylines had little to offer in terms of their stories - even though we were supplied with a lot of information. I couldn't connect with any of the characters, though I enjoyed their back-stories. Also, the declining level of grammar was the most irritating part and the book wanted a strong editing. It would've been so much better had the author concentrated on developing the characters and their stories instead of focusing on explaining the nitty-gritty technical details.
Nevertheless, this was a debut work of the author and I congratulate him on this achievement. Kudos for his commendable efforts!
Disclaimer: I was given a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.