My TBR pile is growing and I must get to it

I have three books to review in the next few days.

Two of them were sent to me by authors and I've been asked to review the third by an author on KindleUnlimited. Apart from that, I have my own To Be Read pile of books and it's growing by the minute!

Just now, I saw a book that I've added to that pile. It's called 'An atlas of impossible longing', by Anuradha Roy.

What immediately drew me to the book was its comparison to 'Sophie's choice', by The Washington Post. I don't have the slightest clue what the plot is about but I'm sure it's the kind of stuff that great literature is made of, going by the review.

This is an assumption I've made. Let me see if I'm right or wrong when I read the book. Of course, on a side note most great literature is depressing, so one has to be prepared for that.

That's one of the reasons I don't read too much great literature. There's only so much of miserable stuff you can take.

I've listed Sophie's Choice as my favourite modern classic for William Styron's use of language, his narrative style and his ability to suck you into his world. It is a disturbing book, no doubt, but it leaves a mark on you.

But I haven't re-read it, although I bought an e-copy recently. And I haven't read any of his other work.

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Review of 'Magical Women'

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...

My Book Review of 'Bitch Goddess for Dummies'

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...

The Collected Schizophrenias by Esme Weijun Wang - A Book Review

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 ...

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