Ash Talks Books

According to Wikipedia, “Kintsugi ("golden joinery"), also known as kintsukuroi ("golden repair") is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum, a method similar to the maki-e technique. As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.” Kinstsugi – A novel by Anukrti Upadhyay tells the stories of women who have fractured relationships and try to make something beautiful out of the fragments of their lives. The first chapter is about Haruko, a part-Japanese, part-Korean woman who comes to India to learn traditional meenakari enamel work after completing her program at a design school abroad. She is an apprentice to Madanji, a fourth-generation goldsmith who takes her on as a favour to someone and is unaware of her gender until she arrives.  “Everyone knew that women were not allowed to learn the ...

Why is it that when a woman gets angry, so many people have a problem with it while the stereotype of “the angry young man” is accepted?     Julie Catalano MSW LICSW has explored women’s anger in her audiobook “ The Anger Management Workbook for Women: A 5-Step Guide to Managing Your Emotions and Breaking the Cycle of Anger .” It is narrated by Gabra Zackman .   Julie Catalano provides evidence-based tools to handle anger and tries to remove the taboo around women’s anger.  Women often tend to feel ashamed of themselves after an angry outburst. The audiobook explores the idea that women no longer need to meet “the feminine ideal.”   The causes of anger are explored: disrespectful treatment, unjust situations and unfairness. If you swallow your anger or suppress your anger, you get psychosomatic illnesses. The author references other books like ‘Women and anger’ written in 1993 and ‘The dance of anger’ in 1985, which were groundbreaking in the field.   Stor...

I listened to Mel Robbins' 'Take control of your life: How to silence fear and win the mental game.' I'd bought this on audible for Rs. 49 during their sale. I listened to about 4 hours and 30 minutes of the audiobook, which runs for 10 hours. I decided to listen to the rest of it over upcoming weekends. In the beginning, Mel cautions us not to listen to it in the presence of kids since some of the stories touch upon adult themes and refer to topics such as abuse. Mel takes us through six people's stories. I listened to the first one Dan, who seemed to have it all together but was really driven by the fear that when he would be in his 80s, he would look back on his life and regret the things he hadn't done. So this led him to rush through his days buzzed and wired, not being mindful of the present moment. Dan, 36 years old, is a sports coach, is married and has two children. His parents divorced a few years back. He doesn't seem to have had childhood trauma ...

  This book has been on my TBR since the time it was featured in The New Yorker in 2019.  I bought the Kindle edition recently and read it over 2-3 days. The author Esmé Weijun Wang is an American writer who has written the novel, The Border of Paradise (2016) and The Collected Schizophrenias (2019). She has received the Whiting Award and was named a Best Young American Novelist by Granta magazine.   Wang has been diagnosed with a slew of health issues: schizoaffective disorder— bipolar type, idiopathic peripheral neuropathy, fibromyalgia, complex PTSD, dysautonomia/POTS, chronic Lyme disease, and the extremely rare cotard’s delusion and capgras syndrome.   Wang calls her book “the collected schizophrenias” to include all the diseases that go into this basket, including schizoaffective disorder, schizophrenia, and schizotypal personality disorder. Since she was into psychological research herself, her awareness about these matters ...

Recently, I attended a zoom session on chick lit by the Chennai Lockdown Literary Festival (CLLF). In the session, one of the speakers was Maya Sharma Sriram. I was so impressed with the way she conducted the session and answered the questions that I decided to pick up her chick lit novel, ‘Bitch Goddess for Dummies’ brought out by Rupa Publications in 2012. And I was not disappointed. I’m not sure if I was biased toward the book by the personality I had seen on zoom or not, but I quite enjoy chick lit and have read several chick lit novels in my thirties.   So the novel is about a 27-year-old woman Mira Iyer who decides to transform her personality from good girl to ‘bitch goddess’ to deal with the people in her life. Her mom who is constantly trying to fix her up with some eligible guy so that she can get married and Sanya, the real office bitch who is always cosying up to their bosses and vying for a promotion, are just two of the people in her life causing her angst. So it’s go...

I bought Magical Women by Hachette India on Kindle a few days back. It had been on my TBR for a long time. However, I hadn’t read up on what kind of a collection of stories the book would contain. People who like weird stories, horror, dystopia and sci-fi might enjoy this collection, which has been edited by Sukanya Venkatraghavan. It was published in 2019.   The editor’s note states, “Each story in this collection is unique in its representation of what it means to be magical.”   It may not be everyone’s cup of tea. The book is well written, but some of the themes are a bit disturbing. The first story “ Gul” by Shreya Ila Anasuya has themes of lesbianism. The second story “ Gandaberunda” by S.V. Sujatha is violent and macabre. When I read the third story, ‘Rulebook for Creating a Universe’ by Tashan Mehta, I felt that although I was reading English, I was seeing Greek and Latin. It went totally above my head.   I really enjoyed the fourth story ‘The Demon Hunter’s Dilemm...