Vanshika
I've always believed Hanuman Chalisa to be the “Christmas” of Hinduism. No matter where you find yourself on the spectrum of religious belief, you will probably have chanted Hanuman Chalisa when you experienced eerie or creepy things around you. I have always revered Hanuman Chalisa for its poetic and melodic verses that express deep devotion to Lord Hanuman, and Lord Hanuman's devotion to Shri Ram. This book is very easy to read and has a very lucid narrative style. It offers a detailed reflection on the widely embraced religious hymn, making it highly suitable for any modern reader. After reading it, you are sure to feel a deeper connection whenever you read or listen to the Hanuman Chalisa in the future.
This was fantastic!!! I especially loved how I was transported into the story of these chracters slowly. The story had a tremendous amount of emotional depth and nuance which unfolds at such a brilliant, perfect pace that disovering the intricacies of each chracter feels truly insightful and real. The chracters had several moments with each other that were so touching and moving that i could feel i was there with them right in the middle of this beautiful beautiful piece of writing. Will and Rosie's love for one another is always palpable even when they're absent from each other's lives and that is a true testament to the its-always-been-you trope. This book delivered perfectly on everything i could have asked for after reading the blurb. still can't believe it was a debut novel.
This book is intense, short, and perfect. The narration here has a brilliant, effortlessly flowing, and smooth quality. It has made me very excited about delving into two or three additional works by Gary Indiana. Especially the first half of this book is so Holden Caulfieldy in that it's very bitchy, raw and deeply felt. The voice here has found the perfect balance in being rough around the edges with an emotional sensibility deep within and that just is so incredibly hard to nail. It was nailed in this book and as a result, no single word in this book feels like it can be dropped from the page.
Leave it to Vonnegut to be able to take this huge sweeping look at all levels of society in less than 300 pages. The surprising power of his prose, the haunting beauty of his scenes, his tongue-in-cheek satire, balanced by a thorough sadness, and his sheer unwavering truth all make this book one hell of a literary achievement. honestly, it hit me like a truck.
So it seems that 2022 is the year of re-reads for me . This was the first book I ever bought when I was 16 and I loved it immensly back then. Presently the faults are a bit clearer to me. This book lacks subtlety, the writing is very cliche and so are the dialogues but it's still a good read.
So Insightful. Reading The Year of Magical Thinking was like being inside Joan Didion's heart and mind at the same time. So extraordinarily poignant. The prose is so eloquent. Every single paragraph is equivalent to a punch in the best possible way. I can already see myself reading this again and again.
Just re-read this after 4 years, The characters of this story will always stay with me. On my first reading, I was completely in awe of this book. It was easier for me this time around to see the foreshadowing so it felt a bit obvious and that's the only flaw I guess. Still a book I would recommend to everyone.
I don't know how to review this book. Firstly, I would like to give myself 5 stars for finishing this behemoth even when at the start it felt like a bit of a slog. Every single chapter after I was about 150 pages in made me impatient for just one more chapter. I was left in complete amazement at the incredible talent and intellect required to create a world so intricately detailed that it blew my mind.
My favourite aspect of this book is how character-driven it is. It is also a truly exceptional piece of literature in the sense that it has it all - tales of love, death, trust, betrayal, hope, despair, and faith, all told from multiple povs. Truly exhilarating. Intense in the best possible way.
A brilliant follow up from the first one. The plot was riveting. The action was amazing as usual. I really enjoyed when the characters were forced to govern their kingdom/ seemed so grounded in reality. I had some problems but they were far and few in between.
For now I nap and when I wake up I'll start reading the 3rd book.
The prose was so simple and it made all the world building very easy to digest. Vin and Kell were great main characters. The Action was very vivid and well written. Already started reading the second one.
An immortal masterpiece. Sheer brilliance.
I finished this book on kindle and the first thing I did was go and buy a physical book. It was so so beautiful that I needed to hold these pages in my hand. I've never felt that for a book before. It was just pure bliss to read these words. I re-read them. I re-read them again and this went on for 3-4 hours. My copy of Geetanjali will always be with me. Wherever I move 5 years and then 10 years down the line y'know as life happens this will be the first book I always pack. The kind of love that he has written about in this book that's the kind of love I understand and feel for the world around me even though i am an atheist. I hope life never stops surprising me with books like this.
I keep thinking about how to describe this book and the word that comes most to my mind is
“Quiet”. Even after the tragic ending of their romance the disposition of the main character is quiet. Just quietly accepting their fate. I wanted them to get angry and fight harder but of course their acceptance made it that much more heartbreaking. What was expected of them was so ingrained in them that even when they really understood it all, it didn't matter. It's the only way of life they've ever known. I have a lot more to say but the thoughts are very disjointed so I'll spare you
I liked thow this story was told but the ending was massively dissatisfying. Ending is kind of a big part for thrillers no. It fails to answer some really important question and does so not because the authors wanted an ending open to interpretation but they just couldn't tie up all the loose threads neatly. The readability of book this suggested that when i get to the ending i would be excited about all the reveals and all the intresting questions that the author is asking will be answered in a spectacular way but insted what happened was that the author answered all the least intresting questions & left all the intresting ones unanswered.
This book is thoroughly mediocre and merits about 2.5 stars. Around the 150-page mark, I also thought of DNFing it because there is so much telling and not nearly enough showing. This is a literary fiction about intergenerational relationships but the people in it felt so one-dimensional, bland and clichéd. like characters I would expect from YA books. We're told again and again how the Padavano sisters are so close yet all their actions show the exact opposite of that. As an elder sibling, I was particularly pissed at Julia's actions. It almost felt like Napolitano wrote one character and then split her 4 ways. The capacity for empathy for Will has only been bestowed upon Sylvie and not his wife Julia. The capacity to stand up to their mother has only been bestowed upon CeCe and not on Julia/Sylvie. All of the stakes in this are not that deep and could be overcome in about half a second if any of these people had even a passing interest in each other, let alone the kind of all-consuming sisterly love we're told they do. rounding up my rating to three because there were some moments I enjoyed and the prose wasn't half bad.
This one fell a bit short for me when comapared to Henry's other books. This book has some good things going for it sure but I just could never buy in to what this whole book is about in the first place, the break-up, which is just miscommunication. More than half of this book is putting us all through this absolute all-consuming agony and heartache for these two people who so obviously deeply love each other and are both completely shattered and heartbroken. The back and forth between the timelines serves to build on this epic love that spans nine years! And the whole time you are thinking, “What could have possibly happened to tear these two apart?” And then we finally get to the reveal.... and it just didn't add up. Misunderstandings and miscommunication? A four-minute phone call? REALLY? And then just total and complete acceptance? Naaahhhh. I don't buy it. Sorry not sorry, it's just not believable for me. This made the payoff of the ending also not hit like it was supposed to because ofcourse i knew they'd end up together. In the past, They were making all these beautiful promises to each other and when you know how their relationship ends it just makes the promises feel empty. Anyway, I digress Probably someone who is looking for this exact thing in a book will love it but for me it wasn't all that.
The trouble with this book for me was that because of the hype that this book has my expectations were high and this book didn't live up to them. Yeah, the prose is pretty but it is also tedious. This book wants to be a deeply philosophical love story and some scenes were really moving especially during the first part of the book but what was more prevalent than these true moments of beauty were the moments when both the main characters's thoughts were not intriguing at all. There were entire paragraphs that I wanted to skip. At around the 90 per cent mark, I wanted to DNF it because there was a scene after a fight that goes like this
“She wanted to stab him and stab herself and stab her mother and especially to stab Marc; she couldn't stop the images of herself, stabbing and stabbing and stabbing until her hands were soaked with tears and blood. She would do all of it, she thought, and then use the carnage to paint something new, something brilliant, and with Aldo's blood especially— from the vessels of his lovely wounds—she would paint a sky mixed with gold, dotted with constellations.”
like yes let's ignore this very obvious sign of her deteriorating mental health because love. bah! gimme a break.
but hey this book has about 10000 5-star reviews so it works for some people! might work for you hence 3 stars
There is no literary joy quite like the joy of an author dropping you into a short story in the middle of a scene engrossing you in the narrative in such a way that most authors are not able to do in pages and pages and pages. I am always in AWE when an author can make me care so deeply about the characters in just a couple of pages. There is an instant connect in a great short story with the narrative that is so soul-satisfying. All the stars in the world.
2.75 rated up.
I picked this up bcs i wanted to read something just light and fluffy but this was too light and fluffy. It was basically a hallmark movie. The whole point of reading a romance book instead of watching a movie is that the character exploration in a book can go much deeper, but this was kind of formulaic. The MCs were both good but i couldn't believe that the most interesting thing that happened to a international taylor swift esque pop-star in her entire life is her car breaking down in small town Kentucky
I really enjoyed this book - finished it in a day. The pacing in this book is immaculate. The plot progresses forward at perfect times. I had enjoyed Kuang's writing in The poppy war but the sequels weren't as good as the first book.
(I finished them only out of curiosity, then put them aside and forgot about them.) Compared to those, Yellowface feels more polished and mature.
In the beginning, you see June as not entirely heartless but you slowly see more and more of her duplictous, self-centered nature and her deceitful manipulations and how she is always prepared with justifications for her actions.
She thought was just exploiting the industry for personal gains but that got me thinking can anyone remain truly principled in a brutally capitalist publishing industry?
the micro aggressions and the dismissive attitude of the main chracter, the spiralling paranoia and instability , the unsparing commentary about the publishing industry - all brilliant.
A remarkable exploration of racial coding. I kept re reading conversations to discover nuances.
Enjoyed Zadie Smith's introduction as well.
Gabrielle zevin's writing is so enjoyable that i never lost interest in Sam and Sadie's worlds - either the real one of their day-to-day existence or the virtual ones they were building even when I'm not really into video games. I really liked Sam and Sadie but I LOVED their friendship and I hated the fact that they weren't friends for a good portion of the book. Them not resolving their misunderstanding can be chalked up to both of them being absolutely workaholics. I grew to love Marx a lot and the chapter that's from his pov is so beautiful. That chapter moved me in a way that I'm always longing to be moved by a character. This is a special book.
The characters of this book were so rich. Their dialogue and banter was pretty much unmatched compared to all the romances I've read. It Was utter perfection. All of it. With everyone
I laughed at this book. Like, actually laughed at some of the dialogue that happened. Nora's characterization and desire to just take care of things. Such big sister energy. But the way Ms. Henry writes it, you get it. You're right there with Nora, nodding and understanding why she would do that for Libby. Charlie. Everything about him was a high. This is my favorite Emily Henry book by far.
The love story was endearing and captivating but felt very high-school. My main gripe with the book is that Lily's (female MC) entire motivation was some dumb high-school drama about being excluded. I wish Lily had more depth and nuance in her character. I understand I might be harsh and that the youtube/influencer game resembles high school as it also focuses on popularity and numbers. I will grant Lily's character that but that fact honestly only made me realize that I didn't really want to read about a protagonist who still bases her self-worth on those shallow social interactions at twenty-eight years old. It probably would have worked better had the author included some scenes about exclusion when Lily was in her early 20s. A story that elevates fleeting encounters and getting approval from people who peaked in high school as the main markers of a life well lived strikes me as a rather hollow tale. I prefer reading about characters with a richer set of life experiences and more substantive relationships that shape who they are becoming. on the other hand, I enjoyed reading about Tobin and the rest of the nerd herd. They are the kind of people I would like to read about more.