Ash Talks Books

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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...

I’d won a coupon to buy this book from Amazon in a contest conducted by @NewAsianWriting on Twitter. @NewAsianWriting also requested me to review the book.   The author Siddhartha Gigoo wrote the short novella of 58 pages in 21 days. It is a poetic description of two lovers who are separated during the lockdown. Their musings are interspersed with the story of a homeless family and the confusion that the children of that family face at some of the events that take place.   The structure and format of the book is a little confusing since it switches from the point of view of the lovers to the perspective of the homeless family. The lovers’ musings are recorded once in the morning and once at night through a stanza for every one of the thirty days.  In between, the homeless family’s confusion is described, too. One has to read it more than once to grasp the story.   The author highlights how the lovers are privileged to be able to think of their love and separation rat...

I read ‘Resilience: Stories of Muslim Women’ by Shubha Menon recently.  The author, who belongs to one of my writing groups, requested a review of the book and also sent me a review copy. The foreword is by Syeda Hameed. Syeda Hameed established the Muslim Women’s Forum in 2001. The author, Shubha Menon, has documented the life of Muslim girls and women of Nizamuddin Basti in Delhi. She discusses the origin of the basti, how it became a magnet for displaced Muslims and goes on to outline “scenes from the medieval ages” in the basti. Sordid realities such as the practice of halala and mutah are discussed, which are used to terrorise women. The author shares the story of Farida, who has five sisters. By the time Farida was sixteen, she was a mother of two and abandoned.  She had been only accorded the status of a domestic servant. Her husband had cruelly divorced her saying “ Log teen bar talaq datein hain, mein tumhein hazaar baar talaq deta hoon.” After a few years, ...

This book ‘Hiraeth’ (Partition Stories from 1947) was sent to me for review by ArtoonsInn Room 9 publications, after my interaction with the author Dr. Shivani Salil on Twitter. I have previously ‘Liked’ the ArtoonsInn page on Facebook and the ‘Room 9 Publications by Artoonsinn’ page also on Facebook. I’m a member of the Artoons Facebook Group. I learn that Dr. Shivani Salil, MD., is a Mumbaiite who always wanted to become a doctor but who was also interested in literature. She belongs to a family of refugees, for whom “the place they called home was not just a geographical zone, but an emotion.” This is her first book. The book is inspired by true events. It is a slim volume of only 143 pages. The book has 24 stories, each named after an Urdu word. The English translation of the Urdu words is also helpfully provided. The titular story Hiraeth( Longing) is about a little girl Paro who is facing the pain of partition. With Diwali around the corner, Taro reminisces abou...

  There are well-travelled people, and then there is Sudha Mahalingam, who is in a league of her own by travelling to 66 countries! Her book ‘The Travel Gods Must be Crazy: Wacky encounters in exotic lands” clearly had to be written because here’s a woman with so many stories and anecdotes to share with the world that they must have come bursting out of her. The title of the book seems to have been derived from one of my favourite movies from my childhood ‘The Gods must be crazy,” which was a hit in the eighties. And after reading the book, you will be quite convinced that the title is suitable. She is clearly a traveller, not a tourist. Each chapter in the book describes a different trip that she has undertaken at some point in her life. Each chapter is independent and the book is a collection of these travel tales (not for the faint-hearted, I might add). She lands up in the Czech Republic without a valid visa and was caught without yellow-fever vaccination in Na...

I must say I loved this book from the very beginning. I liked the sparse writing style and how the author minimizes the use of quoted speech. I cared about the characters and wanted to know what would happen to them. Marianne shows us how an intelligent girl can go down a strange path due to family problems, which by the way, remains a shadowy backstory. Only her troubled relationship with her brother and mom is outlined. The relationship she had with her dad is up for conjecture, but the reader understands it was rather abnormal.  Some readers might be put off by the kinky sex scenes in the book, but I looked upon it as a part of the story of a troubled character with self-esteem issues. It also highlights the lengths to which a person would go for love. Even as Marianne degrades herself in her own eyes, the reader doesn't judge her but only wants her to redeem herself and do better. Connor comes across as a decent human being after he finds himself. On the whole,...

This was the book of the month in one of the book clubs I belong to. Although slow in the beginning, it picked up pace after about 25% of the book was over. There was tension in the story, so as a reader I wanted to know what happened next although I could not connect to the characters very well. I found the minor character Frederick interesting and somewhat of a true leader. The part about the cursed gem 'The Sea of Flames' was interesting. The 'love story' between Verner and Marie Laure seemed very one-sided ( from his side only). The book highlights how war changes the lives of everyone caught in its grip and how powerless they are over their own fate

I’ve loved books since I was a child. I vaguely recall the 'Ladybird' series of books that I read as a child, but the first novel I remember reading was ‘The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage’ by Enid Blyton that my mom brought home for me to read from the library when I was in Class 4. I then finished the children’s books section in library after library in my neighbourhood. Reading has served me well since I now work as an editor. Reading was what filled my hours as a child and kept loneliness at bay. Reading is what helped me find myself at age 40 when I got back to the habit after several years of reading sporadically. I now average about 25 books a year that I track on Goodreads .  I’ve had the opportunity to interact with quite a few authors online and offline. My cause for the Blogchatter #BloggingWithAPurpose campaign is "promoting authors." There is a popular joke in the publishing industry these days that there are more authors than readers. Authors a...

‘The Gurukul Chronicles’ by Smara (Radhika Meghanathan) tells the story of three boys and how their lives intersect— Eklavya of the Nishada hunter tribes, who dreamed of joining the Gurukul meant for Kshatriya princes; Karna or Radheya, he of divine birth who was adopted by a charioteer and who valued truth above all else; and Ashwatthama, a Rishi’s son. All three of them have often been told that they are special but feel isolated; all three of them feel like misfits. All three of them encounter a magical being in the forest at various points in time that reveals their destiny to them. All three of them want more from life than what they are entitled to. The book briefly touches upon the caste system and how the “high born” were privy to advantages that the lower castes were not. The issue of favouritism— of how some teachers are partial to some students— is also touched upon. The boys’ relationship with their gurus, how it changes them and leads to the part t...