Review by Kamakshi BalasubramaniamPublished by Atlantic Books, 2008, 304 pages. Terse and lyrical, Galloway’s novel about the siege of Sarajevo shows with deep poignancy how war shortens lives but expands to the point of unbearable pain each moment lived in anticipation of tragedy. A man’s life consists of fetching drinking water daily for his family …
Desultory reading
The Story of Beautiful Girl: Rachel Simon Review by Usha RamanPublished by Random House, 2011, 252 pages. One of the things about travel is that it affords the opportunity to read—especially when one is on a plane without a personal video screen and movies on demand! A couple of weeks ago on one such flight …
Various Pets Alive and Dead: Marina Lewycka
Review by Joannah CabornPublished by Penguin, 2012, 367 pages One of the best things about this book are the dedications. The first one:“To quietly flowing Don”. The second is a Gogol quote, from Dead Souls (1842):“We live in new times – the age of the hero is past – now is the time of the …
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The Black Sheep: Honoré de Balzac
Review by Kamakshi Balasubramanian Translated from the French by Donald AdamsonPublished by Penguin, this edition published in 1976, 202 pages. Original version published in 1842. More than forty-five years have passed between my first acquaintance with Balzac and this renewal. Of that first work I read (Pere Goriot) I carry a strong impression, mainly of the …
Reading challenge!
My dear reading compatriots: I would like to propose something of a challenge. While I don't know the range of linguistic abilities among us, having never met the majority of you, I wonder if it would be possible for us as a group to undertake the same sort of challenge as BBC's Ann Morgan. Would …
Charles Dickens—A Life: Claire Tomalin
Review by Abbas HassanPublished by Penguin, 2011, 527 pages This is a very readable and sweeping account of Charles Dickens' life. What I found striking about the book was that it presented a very lucid, chatty narrative with trivia about all the books he wrote, the friends he kept (and did not), his habits, his …
With no shadows, Noon: Aatish Taseer
Review by Imran Ali Khan Published by Faber & Faber / Harper Colllins India, 2011, 297 pages. At 7am when your eyes are still adjusting unwillingly to the sun, and you have just stood in a queue to have your bags scanned and your person felt up at the Pune airport, to find the shutters …
Nickle and Dimed—Undercover in Low-Wage USA: Barbara Ehrenreich
Published by Metropolitan Books, 2001, 224 pages. The America of mimimum wage workers is not one that gets a lot of attention in the media. To quote Polly Toynbee’s introduction to this book, it is “a secret continent”. “The barely reported truth about the American dream is that it exists in a country of widespread, …
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Snake Ropes: Jess Richards
Published by Sceptre, 2012 This is a strange and beautifully written tale told by two young women, Mary and Morgan. Mary lives in a community on an island where the islanders trade with the “tall men” who come from the mainland. Boys on the island start to disappear, and Mary suspects the tall men. One …
We Have Never Been Well-Read: Franco Moretti’s Pact with the Devil
This is a useful excerpt from the article you can access via the link below. New ground is better than common ground: not “I haven’t read that yet—let’s discuss something else” but rather “I may never read that, so tell me about it, it sounds interesting.” http://quarterlyconversation.com/we-have-never-been-well-read-franco-morettis-pact-with-the-devil Having now read Andrew Seal's (high-brow and apt to …
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