Ash Talks Books

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, ...