The moon is beautiful, isn’t it ? Instead of “I love you”, Natsume Soseki said “The moon is beautiful”. When the author, Natsume Soseki, was a teacher, he told his student translated “I love you” into Japanese, he just translated it word-for-word, “I love you”. Since Japanese people don’t say that often, he told the…
Read more The Moon Is Beautiful – Romance Is A Bonus Book Review
The show starts with vivid color and a certain sterility as a teenager waits to perform ballet during the COVID years. The mother, our protagonist waits in the car as restrictions prevent anyone from being in the audience. The girl walks off, throwing away her place in the competition and runs away from home to…
Read more Twenty Five, Twenty One – Trip Down Nostalgia Lane
Early in October, my friend asked me to watch this movie. I said it was impossible that a Kannada movie would screen in theaters near me. I did look it up and it was running at a theater a few miles away. Then, a chance conversation with a neighbor had me at the theater this…
This docu-series has been on my watchlist for over a year now. I finally caught up on it over the weekend. The four plus hour long series traces five girls as they grow up under the spotlight. The youngest child is four and the older ones in high school. They are chosen to go to…
Like most other fans of Bridgerton Season One, I had March 25th marked on my calendar. I sat down last night after dinner intent on at least watching one episode and then savoring the episodes over the week. Instead I ended up walking up to bed at 3:30 am, my head so full of thoughts.…
This year has been a hard year, not necessarily because of the fear and anxiety that epitomized 2020 but because there was a dawning realization that CoVID is here to stay and we will be living with it for a long time. January started with the insurrection of the Capitol by a mob that believed…
After what feels like eons, I binge-watched a show. Never Have I Ever season two dropped on Netflix this past week. I am a sucker for young adult stories – books, films, shows and, magazines. It gives me a peek into what it could be like for my daughters growing up in this country. That…
About twenty-three years ago, I created my first personal email account. It was an account that I shared with my best friend. It was also an account that saw a lot of emails go back and forth with “pen pals”, people we did not know. There were no smartphones, no way to scan and send…
I started following the author Samira Ahmed on Twitter a while back when her book was yet to be published. I followed her through the preview of her cover art and the eventual publication date. The premise of the book is that of a teen figuring out her place in the world amid islamophobia and…
I picked The Mothers by Brit Bennett when it scrolled past me in my library’s newly added digital titles collection. Late one night, I started the book after the kids were in bed and stayed up until past 1:00 AM to finish it. I sat back in my chair letting the feelings wash over me…
Read more The Mothers By Brit Bennett – Stunning Prose, Nuanced Storytelling
Link to my review here.
Read more Before We Visit The Goddess by Chitra Divakaruni – Review
Head over to my review blog for the review.
I grabbed Nikita Lalwani’s Gifted from my local library’s fall sale. The cover appealed to me and I checked the blurb at the back and it resonated. I added it to my list of books to read as I research setting my story partly in India and partly in the US. I read the book…
I started What She Left Behind by Ellen Marie Wiseman after dinner. I settled in, a throw over my lap, the baby monitor humming by my side. The story hooked me, reeled me in and kept the pace up. When the monitor awoke with angry cries, I pleaded with my spouse to pick her up.…
Read more What She Left Behind – Cross generational tale well told
Review of the book The Girl on the Train is here.
“I am not the girl I used to be. I am no longer desirable, I’m off-putting in some way. It’s not just that I’ve put on weight, or that my face is puffy from the drinking and the lack of sleep; it’s as if people can see the damage written all over me, can see…
Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. This is a recurring line in the book and sort of encapsulates what the book was for me. It is that kind of book that if I read the second and third time, various sentences will pop out, loaded with meaning based on whatever my personal circumstance is…
The story starts with a description of the Lowland and somehow you feel desolation fill within you. The story ebbs and flows with the two brothers and their wife. As the chapters alternate between the characters and flip back and forth in time, you are caught in it. By the time the novel reaches its…
The clock showed 2:00 AM. I sat back and closed my eyes for a few minutes before I went to bed. I had just finished reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. I loved the book. It was a fast read considering the technical and business nature of most chapters. It is a book that…
I closed the book a little after midnight yesterday. My heart was heavy and sleep eluded me. I started the book A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry after I found it in my bookshelf this past Friday. The cover was muted. I read the book in stages. At bedtime. In the evening absent mindedly watching the girls.…
It was a quiet uneventful Sunday evening. Tired of bugging K to talk with me, I stormed off to find a book to read. It has been a a long time since I curled up with a book in hand and did not lift my face up till it was done. Scanning the rows of…
Lakshmi Iyer 