Sid

This book was a mixed bag of sorts. On the one hand, the authors recognise that bullshit is high art, spread through fake news factories and hammering away at our critical facilities through volume and confirmation bias alone.
On the other hand, Calling Bullshit treats itself as high art. It contains gems such as “you must treat others with kindness because the power you've gained is tremendous, and there's no need to be too high and mighty”. I could also express the book in pamphlet form for what it's worth - without losing an iota of coherency - in its current state, it simply felt bloated.
I'm afraid I have to disagree with the author's treatment of the topic - to give out one line of a rebuttal, he prefers pages of exposition. Given the book's title, it's ironic that I could make a strong case against the book itself as to how bullshit cloaks itself in a veneer of volume and intellect. Studies showing ‘females could run faster than males in 2156' are refuted as bullshit because ‘by this logic, 100-meter races could be run in negative time by 2536', and the core argument that females might run faster than males in the future is never addressed by the authors.
I could even argue that the book's climax, in which the authors show how ‘well, actually...' person is different from the ‘bullshit denier', is simply what the authors do all along. Well-intentioned claims that the wage pay gap exists because recommendations for women mention their communication abilities more than their intelligence are downplayed in the book just because some tweets misquoted the original study. Examples like these make for extremely frustrating reading.
This book feels like an introductory primer for tackling misinformation, which is okay for most, I guess, but not for me.

R.K. Narayan is one of those rare writers who can make the personalities of his characters exude through the pages, without describing any of their physical features, and heck, even the environment around them.
You have no idea what year it is at any given moment, which places the novel takes place in, and how much time passes between the events. Indeed, Guide, like most of Narayan's work, is timeless - taking place in a time and era of his choosing, with the reader and the character both going through their motions dispassionately. Colonialism, the Partition, politics, sports - all of these might as well not exist for the protagonist, and I found myself liking the novel more and more as it went along.
For him, fate is more or less destined, and we are just Shakespeare's actors taking part in a play. Existentialism, absurdism, nihilism - all philosophies are toyed with and thrown out quickly and methodically. Raju makes his own beliefs, and labels are just that - labels.
I never said, “I don't know.” Not in my nature, I suppose. If I were inclined to say, “I don't know what you're talking about,” my life would have taken a different turn.
You would think that Raju would cynically utter them often reserved for nostalgic baby boomers. Still, Raju speaks them in a dispassionately passionate tone - one that is truly enlightened. He might be a fraudster, but he has the wisdom that actual saints would do well to learn.
The ambiguous ending and the misogyny that was never explicitly addressed made me not as absorbed in the novel as I wanted to be. Still, I can see the praise for Guide, and it is deserving of its status as one of the Indian classics.

What does your soul look like?
This masterpiece novella can be interpreted in many ways – as a symbol of isolation and/or depression, as a literal example of speciesism and so on and so forth. When I started reading this literary piece, I was quickly drawn into Gregor's minuscule world which slowly turns upside-down and larger than he could have imagined.

The ending, while expected, left me with a sense of hollowness – because as the cover blurb states, ‘Kafka is important to us because his predicament is the predicament of modern man.' The story of Gregor is heart-breaking beyond words – the shallow veneer of his ‘happy' existence is cruelly left exposed and Gregor is left gasping for air, as well as the fact that his sister Grete backstabs him – it can be argued that the deuteragonist of the story is so critical to rationalizing the story that she might as well be labelled as the co-protagonist. The subtextual metamorphosis that Grete undergoes, I would argue, is more important than Gregory's own – but that is the beauty of the novella – you can interpret it in many different ways and all of them would be equally valid.
A masterpiece of prose, visual imagery, allegorical storytelling and subtexts, The Metamorphosis truly lived up to its reputation as one of the best short works in modern literature. Another one of those ‘classics' that doesn't disappoint.

(strong 8/10)
What can be said about this novel that hasn't been said already? I am ashamed to say that the first time I heard about Kafka was through Murakami (Kafka On The Shore) and not due to any of his hitherto unknown literary accomplishments. We had a copy in our family since decades – so naturally one day the urge struck me to pick it up, and I did.

The Trial is quite the surreal novel, truth be told. We are told that there is a person called Josef K., who is arrested for no apparent reason at all – he is a pretentious banker and is quite a vapid person – but one who has committed no wrong. When does his case start? Why is he presumed guilty in the first place? When will his ‘advocate' actually start doing work? Above all, does the work he's doing for the case have any influence on the outcome? Or is this work all just for nothing?

This novel is eerily reminiscent of today's convoluted legal system, what with its endless hierarchy, siloization, the ‘guilty-until-presumed-innocence', show trials, and little to no effect of evidence on the case. In one scene, Josef meets a fellow client of his advocate – who is made to sleep in the attic of his advocate's house and forced to read Latin – in order to ‘appreciate what the advocate is doing for his client'. It is utterly depressing to wade through, all the more so when you realize that it has been more than a century since the novel was penned – and all the obstacles to justice are still there, as it is.

While somewhat slow at parts, and not at all helped by the confusing and abrupt ending (from which various conclusions can be drawn, none of them clearing your confusion in the least), The Trial is a masterpiece which has to be read to be believed.

(2.5, rounded up to 3)
This was supposed to be a primer on maps and geography first, and how it relates to history later. What should have been a compelling read is reduced to short paragraphs of text which look like they have been lifted straight from Wikipedia, which is not a compliment.

Two glaring flaws jump at you once you finish this book. The first being that Marshall's treatment is superficial at best and unconvincing at worst - I sometimes felt that even the author wasn't convinced that rivers and mountains have influenced history to the extent that he describes. Secondly, Marshall is an unabashed neoliberal - his beliefs are that Latin America is in dire straits because they had socialism, colonialism happened and we should all get over it, and trust for American hegemony is very much implicit within the text.

All in all, the book is a decent introductory read if you are a novice on geopolitics, but if one is already aware of what is going on in the world and wanted to know the ground reality, as I did, then this book is not a good starting point. There are some good things to be said about the book but the consistently glossing over details and the pretending that Australia doesn't exist does it no favours.

The final chapter, where Marshall states that humanity is so divided that we cannot contemplate travelling the universe as representatives of mankind but will still think of ourselves as Indians, Americans, Russians or Chinese – is a sobering one. This is the only place where he made me believe in the prisoners of geography argument – and better late than never, I suppose.

Max Tegmark says that there are three stages of any significant physical or mathematical theory - first its insignificance (Einstein's famous papers on special relativity languished for years in relative obscurity before he was propelled to fame), then its controversy (Everett and parallel universes, or even Schrödinger and his equation), and finally acceptance - as much as quantum physics doesn't make ‘sense', it is at more or less a consensus to which an alternative has yet to be found.

This piece is a study of the author's own theory, which I would say is stuck between the first and the second stages (above). To many, it is simply a way of life that math more or less explains the universe and/or multiverse - why, though? Tegmark's simple but highly controversial answer, to which he devoted the book, is that we, as in the entirety of everything there was, is and ever will be, are self-aware parts of a mathematical structure.

To put it even more dramatically, Tegmark says that time is an illusion, and we might as well be living in a Mandelbrot set fractal for all we know. Segregating reality into four parts with humans being in one corner of the lowest level is a sobering thought, to say the least. However, he repeatedly hammers the point that we might be the luckiest creatures in existence, as the existence of a particular reality is not a guarantee for the existence of sentient intelligence as well.

Sprinkled with personal anecdotes which only humanise the staggering conclusions, this is a book meant to be absorbed, not devoured. Reading it in a day might not do it justice, as this has no Math whatsoever, but is still technical enough to get the point across - so you are free to ruminate on the possible conclusions.

I am excited to see where Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH) is going to go, notwithstanding it being proven or disproven (although I would bet on the former). There are very few books that I have read that rekindle my interest in the world around me (such as Asimov, Feynman and Penrose), and this is one of those. A must-read.

Even though the name and the cover blurb might give you the feeling that you're about to read Frankenstein fanfiction (and you might not be half-wrong), this was astounding in its scope and boldness. Taking place in two time periods – the 19th and the 21st centuries – Winterson narrates the tale of a behind-the-scenes story of the writing of Frankenstein (in the former), the rise of AI and sex-bots (in the latter), and manages to merge the disparate aspects so beautifully that you feel as if you're not reading glorified fanfiction.

Mary and Percy Shelley are merged to form the trans protagonist Ry Shelley; Lord Byron becomes a flamboyant entrepreneur called Ron Lord, and so on – only the tragic Dr Frankenstein remains the same. The juxtaposition of characters should not have worked so well, but here we are.

To give you an idea of the sheer scope of the novel, some issues that Frankissstein tackles with aplomb are - feminism in the Victorian era compared to the modern era; how different the lives of cis and trans people are (the refrain ‘What are you' in the 21st century used for Ry is surprising, but considering many people are of this mind-set, not that unexpected); the debate on the value of a woman as more than her body (Ron Lord's USP for his sex-bots is that ‘they don't say no'); and the age-old debate on automation, AI and Luddites. All of this takes place in paragraphs which are so densely packed with witty information that you have to read some twice before it strikes you how good Winterson is as an author and as a conveyor of ideas.

This is one of those stories with a premise that is as outrageous as it sounds, but it works so well that you cannot help but wait to reread it. Would highly recommend.

PV Narasimha Rao. The only Indian PM (till date) who has completed a full term with a minority mandate. The PM who is not credited for the economic reforms (‘liberalization') of 1991, which occurred under his term in office. The PM blamed for corruption (bribing of MPs), communalism (his connivance in the demolition of the Babri Masjid is suspected to this day) and collapsing under US pressure (the nuclear tests that failed to happen in 1995/96, his last years in office, occurred in 1999, under Vajpayee). The man who was vilified by all sides of the political spectrum - left, right, and centre. What made him the political conundrum that he was? Was it avarice, cowardice or both?

In this no-holds-barred biography, the author lays bare Rao's entire political philosophy (if it can be called so) - and how it was shaped. How his failed stint as CM of the united Andhra state in the '70s convinced him that he had to be a pragmatic socialist, and how his stint as Cabinet minister for a dozen or so Ministries under various PMs convinced him (for better or for worse) exactly how much sycophancy was needed to thrive within the corridors of Delhi. Why he insisted on giving credit to Manmohan for the (presently) much-lauded economic reforms, why his experiments with the PDS (popularly known as the ‘Ration Card' system) mostly ended in failure, and how the Babri Masjid demolition took place even when he was (falsely) convinced that there was no chance it would happen.

It is remarkable to witness how little the Indian public knew of this giant of Indian politics before this book's release, and how his political career was destroyed by none other than the Congress - the party to which he devoted effectively his entire life. Treated both as the villain and the hero, as an independent and a sycophant, this biography doesn't eulogize Rao - it just gives credit where it is due. And that is a necessity in these fractured political times.

Neither dense enough to be an actual ‘history of the world' level work, but neither light enough that you can dismiss it out of hand.

This book's fundamental argument is that poverty is not due to rapacious investors always on the hunt for more money to line their pockets, but instead due to a lack of such investors and institutions. Pretty bold argument, I have to admit. How does Mr. Ferguson back it up?

TL;DR, he doesn't. He mentions an isolated tribe in South America that is used to subsistence farming and hunting-gathering, and when they roamed out to make contact with the ‘civilized' world for the first time in history, they became a tribe of beggars. I failed to realize how this argument of money creation made any sense, and it is passages like these which frustrated me immensely, which do not make any sense even in context.

This argument is never directly (or indirectly) answered in what was supposed to be a ‘complete history' of the financial world. In my opinion, the title is very misleading - the book is simply an elaborate history of the biggest bubbles and bursts of the financial world - including the Spanish defeat of the Mayan empires causing a crash in gold/silver prices in the 16th and 17th centuries, the Latin American defaults of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Great Depression of 1929, and the so-called ‘second depression' of 2007-08. Mr. Ferguson credits the existence of institutions such as hedge funds and the Federal Reserve (US) for exacerbating such crises, which doesn't necessarily help his argument of the existence of such vast amounts of virtual layers of money somehow helping the common man's survival. In the course of describing such crises, he writes up the only good parts of the book - where you can actually see the modern-day forms of bonds, equities, hedge funds and insurance claims being formed.

Above all, you are supposed to learn something new from a book which totes itself as a history book. The only things one can take away from the book is that property is not a risk-free investment, you should have a diversified portfolio in order to make more money, saving/spending in excess is bad, and that the stock market runs on human whims, so never take it too seriously. All of which I already knew.

I was born a Hindu, but I shall not die a Hindu.

People know that Ambedkar ‘bowed before Gandhi's superior popularity' and had to ‘surrender' and sign the Poona Pact in 1932, which effectively ended the concept of Reserved Electorates, as envisioned by him - meaning that the system of dual representation for the Depressed Classes (or the Scheduled Castes, as they are now called), that Ambedkar had envisioned as a means of upliftment, effectively died a premature death. Arundhati Roy, S. Anand, and Ambedkar demolish this argument to smithereens, and express in no unclear terms that Gandhiji's fast unto death was a method of blackmail, and that Gandhiji was not so ‘radical' as the nation was made to believe. That, alone, is worth the read.

In this manifesto against caste (yes, the Marx comparison that most people assign to this is very apt), Ambedkar speaks with the logic of a pragmatist, who believes that the caste system was founded as a method of segregation, not so different from the racial segregation practiced in the West (and in some ways, he argues, even worse). He believes that the caste system pollutes even religious conversions - in some ways, Ambedkar says, the Muslim and the Sikh religions grew caste systems because of mass conversions of the downtrodden Hindu populace looking to escape their chains. He believes that the methods adopted by ‘moderate' reformers such as the Arya Samaj (and even its more radical offshoots, such as the Jat Pat Todak Mandal), such as inter-dining and inter-marriages between castes, were always doomed to fail. Above all, he believes that the system of pandits should be made on the basis of merit, not on birth - and the number of pandits ‘passing out' each year should have a fixed quota.

Writing this masterpiece now would be ahead of its time. Writing it in 1936? No wonder it remained as just a speech manuscript, which Ambedkar had to print with his own money. Gandhiji also started an argument from his own magazine, Harijan, which started an intellectual clash that is responsible for much of Ambedkar's maligned image. Because, who, after all, would dare to argue with the Mahatma?

The Outlook, a magazine of some renown, carried out a poll in June-August 2012, which asked readers and scholars - who, according to you, is the greatest Indian, after Mahatma Gandhi? Ambedkar won by an overwhelming margin. If you read Annihilation Of Caste, you'll understand why. One of the most important Indian pieces of literature ever written.

You know the feeling that you get when you're done reading a book on the subject and realize how it changed your understanding of the field dramatically? Such as Feynman's Lectures on Physics, A Brief History of Time, or The Emperor's New Mind? This magnificent treatise on cancer is just what the subject needed - a meticulous, no-holds-barred treatment that reveals a plethora of information on cancer, and our ancient, never-ending war with it - a constantly shape-shifting enemy whose root is ourselves.
Mukherjee describes in eye-watering detail how our understanding of cancer has changed in around four thousand years, and how the landscape of the ‘War Against Cancer' has undergone multiple paradigm shifts - from the witch-doctors who thought the best cure for the then-unnamed disease was crab soup; to current efforts, which are a mixture of chemotherapy and targeted drugs, some of which can almost erase certain cancers from its roots.
Absolutely no detail is withheld from the reader - the politics, the money, the legal battles over potential cures and clinical trials, the innumerable doctors involved, the patients whose lives were altered with the onset of the disease, and how each potential drug worked (or why it stopped working).
Mukherjee also focuses on how patients embrace their sickness as the new normal, and how some patients accept death easier than doctors - his work is, above all, a testimony to the tenacity and resilience of the human spirit.
In conclusion, although this might not be the most readable book, it is definitely one of the most sobering books I have ever encountered. A must-read.

I was always curious as to why I was named so - my mother tells me that my father started reading this book two to three months before I was born. He finished it a week before my birth - and it made such an impression that I was named Siddhartha after the book's central character. This book, for this reason, has a permanent place in our bookshelf. I picked it up on a whim, and was absolutely blown away. This book is truly timeless - Hesse expresses simple and pure ideas with magnificent elegance.

In Buddhist mythology, Siddhartha Gautama is a man who realises that the world is meaningless, if lived either fully in desire or asceticism - after achieving enlightenment, he becomes the Buddha, and spreads the concept of a ‘middle path'. Hesse takes this concept even further, and separates Siddhartha and Gautama - in his work, Siddhartha is the son of a Brahmin who longs to rise above his mortal shell, and Gautama (stylized as Goutama) is the Buddha, who has already achieved enlightenment by the time Siddhartha steps to find out meaning in his life.

The journey of Siddhartha never stops - whether sinning, repenting or at peace with himself, Siddhartha never ceases to be static. And yet he would not trade these experiences for anything in the world - because they are what has moulded him. Learning that money, love, cowardice and avarice exist - and learning to experience them, while rising above them, is what Siddhartha learns through the course of the novel.

In a sense, Siddhartha is the ultimate existentialist. He loves everyone and everything, warts and all, simply because they are - thus freeing himself from both human and material attachments, and achieving enlightenment. He can be easily dismissed as something to be read about, absorbed and dismissed, because of his philosophy's seeming naïveté.

However, the central theme of Siddhartha is not the protagonist's teachings per se, but his unwavering belief that introspection and self-taught lessons are always better than what a teacher may impart, because secondhand knowledge can be dangerous. And that is a belief that is as valid in a utopia, as it is in ours. This, and other such concepts scattered around the work, makes the book stay with you long after you've read it.

In the present political scenario, the word Fascist is thrown around like candy - a person whose views we disagree with is labelled as one (sometimes even used outside politics), and hence the impact of the word is reduced by a large amount. Albright, having lived through truly fascist regimes, examines in detail which people or governments should be assigned the label, and makes a strong case for democracy in the process.

The book deals with a brief introduction of the fascist regimes of the 20th century, such as Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy - and then proceeds to examine how democracy was systemically undermined in today's fascist-like regimes in Russia, Hungary, Turkey, North Korea and Venezuela. The book's ending chapters deal with the US - as a case study in how supposed bastions of democracy are getting battered by relentless attacks on their institutions by their own leaders.

Albright comes across a true-blue diplomat - unlike her fellow Democrat colleagues, when asked to give a direct answer on whether Trump is a fascist, she answers along the lines of ‘no, but...'. Although she accepts the fact that democracy has its own share of problems, and often gets undermined by red tape, accountability, and listening to fringe concerns - she asks the reader whether they have grown too impatient in demanding to be told ‘where to march', and whether citizens have grown so cynical that they want their leaders to subvert democratic institutions altogether.

The author describes herself as an ‘optimist, who worries a lot'. We have a lot to worry (and introspect about), true. Chauvinism and jingoism seem to be the torchbearers of the present age, what with the constant cries of ‘insert your country here first!', and Islamophobia, antisemitism, and racism on an unprecedented rise. The wearily optimistic tone of Albright's prose made me think, however, that maybe democracy is not completely on the wane after all - for that alone, this is an amazing read. If one is even slightly interested in politics, this is worth the time put in.

This book's rating was only due to Murakami's excellent descriptions of terror/fear, and the book's potential. 2 stars otherwise.
The gist of the plot is that an American tourist hires a guide to walk him through Tokyo's red-light district - and the guide realizes that his client is not all he is cracked up to be, and he might be the serial killer terrorizing the city. What follows are ruminations on Japanese society à la Fight Club, and a threadbare plot about everything and nothing that is surprisingly banal despite its rather gory descriptions.
Murakami tries hard, he really does. The descriptions of Tokyo are vivid, and some tangents on why Japanese society is the way it is does manage to grab you - but the pacing is all over the place ( extremely frenetic in some parts and slow as molasses in the others), and the length was too short, making the last quarter of the book seem like Murakami's attempt to cram a full book's worth of material in those pages, which unsurprisingly doesn't work.
If you can handle uneven pacing and gruesome digressions on morality, then go for it - it's worth the read. Not worth the time in any other case.

Knowing absolutely nothing about quantum electrodynamics (the theory of photon interaction with matter), one can still make sense of the the book - and that is Feynman's true genius, in a way.
In a nutshell, QED is (at present) the nearest step to a Grand Unified Theory, the utopian theory which will explain the universe in the form of formulae that are so short that they can be inscribed on your shirt. It explains almost everything that we notice in our day-to-day lives - ranging from why you see your image in a mirror, to more esoteric effects such as predicting which particles arise during extremely high-energy collisions (such as in the Large Hadron Collider).
It is a marvel to witness a genius at work. Without any Math whatsoever, Feynman explains the theory while not leaving out any detail - where it works, where it doesn't work, and how our understanding of Physics is still pitiful, because every answer that we find brings a whole lot of questions to the fore.
The fourth chapter is on our understanding of Physics so far, and where QED fits in - it is a tonal mess, especially when compared to the succinct previous chapters, and it is the only time I felt disgruntled when reading the book.
TL;DR - an amazing read to reinvigorate interest in Physics/science, or to ignite the spark of interest that was never there in the first place. Either way, it is a must-read for the inquisitive mind.

Anyone who is familiar with Internet culture has either heard of xkcd, or either encountered one of the webtoon's inimitable comics. Randall Munroe's famous style has spawned a huge variety of comics on science, technology and philosophy, and has helped to make daily webcomics great again.
Right from its inception, xkcd and Munroe were asked to answer a variety of hypothetical scenarios by its readers - ranging from the curious (‘What would happen if a bullet as dense as a neutron star was fired into the Earth?') to the slightly macabre (‘What if the Earth was made entirely of protons and the moon entirely of electrons?'). Munroe started answering these absurd questions with a ton of Math and physics - that is, to say, seriously. The series of QnA was spun-off into a separate section of the site and was termed ‘What If' - this book is simply the entire section in print form, plus previously unseen questions.
Not everything in the book is about anarchy and destruction though - that is reserved for the second half of the book. The first half of the book is comprised of innocuous questions, mostly relating to lightning, time travel, and astronomy.
Even if you're not interested in computation and weird thought experiments, this book is a must-read, if only as a testimony to human imagination. Mind-blowing doesn't even begin to cover it. This is a work of art, and deserves to have space on every bookshelf.

(3.5, rounded up to 4 stars)
TL;DR - This is a mind-bending piece of fiction. One of the most surreal books I've ever read, or maybe will. Must-read if you're tired of linear plots and reliable narrators.
On the surface, Wittgenstein's Mistress is a very shallow piece of literature - a narrator who may or may not be the last person on Earth, and is looking to find other humans. There's not even a semblance of a plot. The protagonist is the definition of unreliable. The plot has no structure. Neither does it have a pacing.
Then why should you read it?
Precisely because of all of the things above. Because there is no plot, we are free to listen to Kate's musings on the relation between Shakespeare and Greece, on how Dostoyevsky cried after coming to the US, and much more supposedly meaningless trivia. Because the narrator is unreliable, it makes a cat-and-mouse game for the reader to remember which strand of plot is about to be rendered into incoherent fragments in the next few sentences. Because there is no structure, you are free to lose your train of thought and come back to it, and you'll realize that you've missed nothing, since nothing has happened in the first place! Because there's no pacing, you are free to ponder on Kate's absolute misery on being the last person on Earth, and to realize that the trivia is there for a reason (no spoilers).
Avant-garde doesn't even begin to cover it. This is one of the few original novels of our lifetime - and I can see why it was rejected a staggering fifty-four times. For me, I'll never look at literature the same way again. This is the very antithesis of what a novel is supposed to be - but then again, I suppose, that's the point.

This book is probably one of the most unique books I will ever read. Writers spend most of their careers on writing about the living, both real and fictional - so reading about cadavers (the scientific term for corpses) was an eye-opening experience, in more ways than one.
Cadavers have been awkward to read and write about - understandably, people don't want to think about what happens to people after they're dead, because that inevitably leads to the sometimes distressing thought of one's own mortality.
But this book breaks all such inhibitions and throws them out of the window. If you're squeamish, don't expect this to be a clean and cheerful ride. Mary Roach makes you realise, by the end of the book, about how cadavers are used everywhere - ranging from good (crash testing) and neutral (bullet impact testing), to the controversial (testing if Jesus was really crucified, by crucifying cadavers). The descriptions are, to put it diplomatically, anatomically accurate.
‘Tis not a completely nihilistic ride though. The author's tales of embarrassment and mortification are laugh-out-loud (a phrase which I would never imagine saying for a book about the deceased), and the author makes you think about topics which you would normally never think about - such as dissection, who should be given responsibility over the remains, and human head transplants.
TL;DR - a unique and immensely readable work, describing the heavy topic of the deceased with the depth and breadth it deserves - sometimes morbid, sometimes hilarious, but always entertaining. A must read if you have a strong stomach, and can think about your own mortality without dissolving into a mess.

9/10
A true-blue masterpiece. Engrossing, to the point that I felt a kinship with the unnamed protagonist, and nihilistic to the fact that I thought that Nietzsche developed his theory of anti-nihilism precisely because he anticipated such a piece of media being created.
The TL;DR version is that a woman convinces herself that she needs a year off - away from work, all responsibilities, and relationships. To that extent, she quits her job, stops talking to the little people she is already talking to, and stops focusing at all on anything other than the bare minimum to get by. Between her progressively deranged ramblings, her self-described best friend (who she simultaneously loves and hates) pops in to supply her with news from the outside world (and her own).
If that sounds like a dreary ride, I can assure you it's not. The protagonist's biting inner monologue is every bit as uncomfortable as it is darkly funny; her recollections of her childhood are part victimization and part acceptance to the point of hilarity, and every once in a while, the protagonist also offers some solemn ponderings on the state of the world which stops you in your tracks. My only qualm with the novel lies in the last quarter, which is pretty predictable but is still entirely absorbing.
Overall, My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a fantastic collection of musings on the vagaries of consumerism and late-stage capitalism, with some plot sprinkled on as garnishing.

This collection of short sci-fi stories (almost always dark and depressing) left me with a mixed taste after I finished it.
The titular short story is one of the best sci-fi stories I've ever read, period (tied, for me, with The Last Question by Asimov). It makes HAL, from Kubrick's 2001:A Space Odyssey look like a cuddly teddy bear in comparison. Since all of them are extremely short stories, any detail will just be a spoiler, but let's just say Ellison attention to mental torture is much more unsettling than it has any right to be.
The rest of the stories are all over the place, much to my disappointment, the best amongst them being ‘Delusion of a Dragon Slayer', which describes a person for whom heaven is hell, and the worst being ‘Eyes of Dust', which is just plain boring, and has a premise which intends to shock but just dulls instead.
What struck me after finishing the work though, were three things.
Firstly, Ellison is a magnificent writer, with his writing, prose and his ideas making him a sheer delight to read.
Secondly, Ellison has one of the worst egos I've ever encountered in writing, and his ego practically oozes from every word of the story (along with not-quite-humble remarks in his prefaces to every story, in which he describes himself as a magnificent ‘man of Stature', whatever that means). If egoistic writing is unsuited to your tastes, it's not a bad idea to skip this.
Thirdly, Ellison is also the brand of extreme misogynist that would be labelled as an incel nowadays. If there are any women in the story, you can rest assured that nothing good will happen to them (even considering he writes dark tales, the fates of women in his stories range from bad to horrific). His prefaces are littered with women being treated as objects again and again, and at some point you want to just tell him to get on with the story. His three-page preface to his last story straight up said that his story was based on a woman he met in Vegas (guess what - the woman has a bad ending, and gets a good ending by manipulating the naive man).
So there's a lot of good (prose, ideas, wackiness) and a lot of bad (misogyny, ego). If you can stomach the bad, this is a beautiful sci-fi collection.

(wavering between 4 and 4.5 stars)
Whatever you would imagine from a bildungsroman, this would be the exact antithesis of it. Donna Tartt takes every trope for the introverted main character, and takes perverse pleasure in subverting all of them, with unimaginable results.
Right from the first pages, you know you're in for a wild ride. Five eclectic students studying under an even more eclectic Ancient Greek teacher welcome an introverted student in their midst. The sixth student soon discovers, to his consternation, that the earlier students' hobbies, in an attempt to re-enact an ancient Greek ritual, have taken a turn for the macabre. What follows is a whole lot of gallows humor, mixed with more than a tinge of the surreal.
This masterpiece is extremely hard to review, because the mix of emotions it evokes is mind-bending. The only thing to criticize about the work is that it adopts a very glacial pace in parts - Donna's preference to sprinkling plot in the midst of character exposition, it turns out, is not always for the best.
In spite of all its shortcomings, I would wholeheartedly recommend this book. This is not a book to be rushed through, as this is the furthest thing from a mystery novel, or a ‘whodunnit'. Rather, it is meant to be savored, both for the pleasure you get while reading it (the characters are one of the best I've seen in modern fiction), and for the melancholic aftertaste it leaves you with.

3/10
This was a steaming pile of crap and not much better than the reprehensible stuff I used to binge on AO3 or Fanfiction an eternity ago.
There's so much to unpack regarding this novel, but what would be the point? Every second page has an offensive line of dialogue, some character having fucked up thoughts about the other, and so on. Ninety per cent of the novel is about sex or the lack thereof - which would make sense if it was erotica, but why in the world was this marketed as a thriller? I saw the twist coming from miles away, and the second twist came so out of left field that I'll consider it as being there for the shock value.
What irked me the most was the constant babying - rephrasing sentences a few pages after they were first mentioned grated on me greatly, to the point where I considered dropping this book. I persisted, and to be honest, except for the previously mentioned double twist, there's not much I would have missed.
All in all, there's not much to like in Verity - what with all the horrifying depictions of everything. If you want smut - there are tonnes of better authors you could read (I don't know any, except for E.L. James, but they couldn't be worse than this), and if you want cheap thrills - you could always listen to Sia!

I'm going to break the first rule of fight club, and I'm going to talk about it - because as in the book, Fight Club is just too brilliant an idea not to talk about.
I knew the ending of the book/movie since 2012, from a throwaway Reddit comment. I saw the movie for the first time a few months back, so I already knew the entire plot. I was still blown to smithereens.
The narrator hates his hollow existence. He meets Tyler Durden, a projectionist and waiter who has visions of society being destroyed through destructive anarchy. They both begin to form fight clubs through which they begin to set their plan, Project Mayhem, into motion. If it sounds mind-bending, it's because it most certainly is.
This will remain on my mind for a long time to come. The book holding its own till date, even after the film became a cult classic, is only testimony to Palahniuk's grand vision.

(3.5 stars, rounded down to 3)
‘Notes on a Scandal' was a brutal work, with the term ‘subverted expectations' looking as if it was coined for this book. The only thing letting down this novel is the prose, which is too light and straightforward for the dark subject matter. Granted, the book is meant to be a journal of sorts, but you are left terribly wanting after the novel has ended.
You first think that the book is about Bathsheba (Sheba) - a middle-aged pottery teacher having an affair with a fifteen-year old, and its repercussions.
But what really makes up the meat of the material is the point of view of Barbara, a senior teacher at the school at which Sheba teaches, and whose brutal, pitiful loneliness makes her a vivid character study - she ends up revealing more of her emotions and (sub?)conscious manipulations than she suspects.
This was a book that is a perfect example of ‘what-could-have-been' - it is, nonetheless, an excellent read, full of complex characters and relationships.

After finishing this masterpiece, I was reminded of a film reviewer on Letterboxd who used to say that the interpretation of a piece of media, once it reaches the stage of public consumption, does not solely lie in the hands of the creator. In terms of that, you could make numerous interpretations of this novel, and all of them would fall short of capturing its essence – that's how open to interpretation The Vegetarian is.
Asides from the obvious metaphors of alienation, and stigmatisation when people don't stick to societal norms, there's a study in contrast to how various characters live their lives. Yeong-hye lives in flights of fancy; near the end she feels detached from her mortal shell to the point that she believes she can survive on sunlight. Mr Cheong lives a mundane existence and does not want to overthink his sense of purpose and seeming mediocrity – he just is.
In-hye lives a mundane existence, but she tries to find peace in being a beacon and always being a receiver than a giver. She assists her sister because it is the right thing to do, even when her parents abandon Yeong-hye. I found In-hye's husband the most fascinating, as well as the most repulsive. There is no sympathy you should feel towards his heinous actions – but because humans are predictably irrational, I did so anyway. He makes astounding leaps in logic because he wants to act out on his desires for the worse, but then again – who doesn't?
There's a lot more to talk about for this particular novel from my end, but since it's not even two hundred pages long – I'd strongly advise anyone who's not already read this to devour this whenever they can. Sure, it can be (understandably) divisive – but where's the fun without minimalist and yet seemingly full writing?