The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky My Rating: 5 of 5 Stars I finished reading this book at precisely 0205 hours a week ago. The night still lay majestically over the impending dawn, and in its blackened stillness, swayed the echoes of this imperious book. The walls of my room, at once, turned into a … More Book Review – The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880)
Cry, Heart But Never Break by Glenn Ringtved My Rating: 5 of 5 Stars Even to the most-learned men and women, few things are as scary, swamping and tearing as death. Like an end, that ultimate exit, beyond which everything becomes void and nothing remains to return, it hovers over us like a spying cloud, … More Book Review: Cry, Heart But Never Break by Glenn Ringtved (2001)
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi My Rating: 5 of 5 Stars [Originally appeared here (with edits)] It has been a few days since I turned the last page of this book. But the numbness reappears the instant I allow the pages to unfold in my memory. The silence which suddenly parts to let … More Book Review: When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi (2016)
Blindness by José Saramago My Rating: 5 of 5 stars Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder. What an irony that a book which holds, loss, filth, loot, stomp, cruelty, disorientation, putrefaction, injustice, helplessness, murder, rape, misery, nakedness, abandonment, death and unimaginable suffering in its bosom, left me with a climactic emotion of … More Book Review: Blindness by José Saramago (1995)
It is Diwali. Or Diwali eve. Or Diwali weekend. And I am, all at once, in a pensive, nostalgic mood. Some happy occasions trigger memories that assume an ominous cloak of beauty and transform everything around them into a messenger of times bygone. Last year, my mamma was with me, here, celebrating. This year, she … More The All-Season Antidote
It’s not a belated birthday wish. It’s a continuing one. Breathing in the Proustian air is one of my most favorite stress-busters since the time I have been introduced to it. An air so rich yet so clear, it permeates into my lungs with its slight, caressing bend, filling me with a sense of beauty … More HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MARCEL PROUST!
For a bibliophile who fell in love with Joyce’s vast, exploratory, swashbuckling devil-may-care attitudinal writing last year, this is a first anniversary of sorts. Ulysses was, is and I am certain would be, a book to read and drive rebirths, to re-read. Should I say I loved the book because I understood it, I would … More Its Bloomsday!
It’s a bit premature that I am releasing an opinion from my thought cannon on Jorge Luis Borges. After all, I am in the midst of reading only my first Borges. But it appears that I am well acquainted with him. How do I say? Like how it doesn’t matter how long but how much … More Remembering the Borgean Legerdemain
It doesn’t happen with everybody; rare is this phenomenon. That every time I come across your name, a surge of hope washes me over is unique to you, for me; for I have loved very few people which such reverence, even fewer, for this long. It is almost ten years since I first came across … More HAPPY BIRTHDAY, RAFA!
We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves by Karen Jay Fowler My Rating: 4 of 5 stars In everyone’s life, there are people who stay and people who go and people who are taken against their will. Who do you remember the most? I asked myself. Those who make part of my primary circle of existence … More Book Review: We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves by Karen Jay Fowler (2014)
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