Here's my selection of the best of the books I read this year. Links are to reviews on this site. The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton—one of the most enjoyable books I read this year. Set in New Zealand in the 1860s with multiple narrators, the narrative keeps looping in on itself. A man arrives in …
Author: suroor alikhan
I have always been an avid reader. I read across genres and try and find books by writers from countries around the world. One of the things I love is talking to fellow readers about books!
One World, Many Stories: Sharing Books from the Challenge
We finally held our reading event at the ICV Arcade last Wednesday (19 November)—on the one day that the Geneva public transport system decided to go on strike! I was worried that people wouldn’t come, what with no buses or trams running, and traffic jams because more people were taking their cars. But we had …
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The Goldfinch: Donna Tartt
Published by Abacus, 2013, 880 pages.Review by Karen Moir The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt is a captivating 800 page chronicle of the life of Theodore Decker. It begins when a young boy is rocked by suicide bomb in Metropolitan Museum of Art that takes his mother’s life and replaces her with a yearning for the …
The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken: Tarquin Hall
Published by Simon & Schuster, 2012, 341 pages. How can anyone resist this title? I would have bought this book even if I hadn’t already known this series of detective novels set in Delhi. The book’s main character is Vish Puri, India’s Most Private Investigator, who is often helped—against his wishes—by his mother (the formidable …
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The Riches of Al-Fahim’s Biography
From Rags to Riches—A Story of Abu Dhabi: Mohammed Al-FahimPublished by CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 1995, 192 pages. Review by Lesley O’DowdMohammed Al-Fahim’s biography, From Rags to Riches was first published in 1995. By the time he wrote this illuminating story, Al-Fahim was an eminent, highly respected Emirati businessman in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. As he …
Shady Characters—Ampersands, Interrobangs and other Typographical Curiosities: Keith Houston
Published by Particular Books / Penguin, 2013, 252 pages. Writing and typeface are things we take for granted, almost as if the letters, punctuation signs and symbols we use have always been around. So it’s good to have someone remind us that behind these characters is a long and interesting history. Keith Houston picks a …
On a Lighter Note… The Things that People Use for Bookmarks
What do you use as bookmarks? As someone with a large collection of bookmarks, I am fairly traditional about what I use to mark my place in a book. But according to AbeBooks, people use all kinds of things, including a baby's tooth, a diamond ring and a marriage certificate from 1879! Read on...
The Danger of a Single Story
I have been meaning to put this on for a while because I think everyone will enjoy it! "It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. There is a word, an Igbo word, that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world, and it is …
The Book of Night Women: Marlon James
Published by Riverhead Books, 2009, 415 pages. A haunting, brutal story about slavery in Jamaica in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, The Book of Night Women tells the story of Lilith, and of Montpelier, the plantation she grows up on. The story is told in Patois, from Lilith’s point of view. This is …
Night Vision: Kendall Hippolyte
Published by Peepal Tree Press / TriQuarterly Books, 2005, 67 pages. The blurb on the back of this collection of poems from Kendall Hippolyte, a Santa Lucian poet, says “He writes in sonnets and villanelles, in idiomatic dramatic monologues that capture the rhythm of Caribbean speech, blues and rap”. This juxtaposition of the formal and …
Talking About Books 