Ash Talks Books

  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 ...

On Twitter, I stumbled upon this link promoting the Netflix Original Series 'Thirteen Reasons Why' based on the Young Adult book by Jay Asher. Now I'm not a subscriber of Netflix, but the Kindle edition of the book costs Rs.249.85, which sounds well worth it, if you ask me, based on the storyline, which sounds promising. I'm yet to read it. The tagline for the story is "You can't stop the future, you can't rewind the past, the only way to learn the secret is to press play'. It got a 4/5 rating on Goodreads and was originally published in 2007 by RazorBill, a YA imprint of Penguin Books. In July 2011, the paperback edition was # 1 on the NYT Bestseller list. It's about Hannah who commits suicide because she is carrying a heavy burden caused by an inability to speak up. So she carries dark secrets in her heart and stumbles through life as everyone takes advantage of her, deceives her and betrays her trust time after time until she takes her ...

I’ve been a regular consumer of the Wimpy Kid series.  Sometimes I get sick of reading books with too many words in them. So it helps to have pictures. Haha. I may be 40, but I can think like a kid, all right. So I was really thrilled with the Wimpy Kid Series when it came out. Now there are so many copycat series, but he’s the original dude and you’ve got to give him credit for that.   So when I saw the ebook of Diary of a wimpykid- Double Down by Jeff Kinney , I grabbed it. I think kids with mental illness should read this book. Or ‘normal’ kids should read it to understand kids with mental illness. Because the first few pages describe the symptoms of a kid with schizophrenia. But it’s all creative and fun and the mental illness word hasn’t been dangled to put people off.    Adults too can read it to figure out what it’s all about. Back in 2013, when I was in Bangalore, I went to Crossword all bright-eyed and bushy tailed to pick up Double Dork Diar...