I really like Matt Haig’s Reasons to Stay Alive, and Notes on a Nervous Planet on similar themes. I also love his work of fiction, midnight library being my recent favourite. But this book just didn’t totally hit me the same. Maybe I have just read quite a few similar books to this, but this seemed to me to just be retreading already well-worn territory.
Some parts are really interesting but the book has a LOT of white space as most entries are very short. The writing is very palatable and the book can be easily read within a few hours.
The way I like to read this book is when I’m feeling down I’ll pickup this book and randomly flip through, untill a page pops up and I would read it, it has something positive and I usually feel better.
One of the most beautiful books I have ever seen, beautiful illustrations by Chris Riddell (scroll down for them)
I cannot even begin to describe how much of fan I’m of Neil Gaiman’s writting. This beautiful novella is a beautiful female lead retelling of a blend of The Sleeping Beauty & Snow White and Seven Dwarves.
The writing is simple and beautiful and paints a very vivid picture, though it gives only a glimpse in the lives of the characters. I personally craved more character development basically, something more from the story. Love love love everything about it till here.
Definitely recommended to kids/bedtime reading parents or people who are looking for a short escape with beautiful illustrations & Gaiman’s signature writing style.
A thrillingly reimagined fairy tale from the truly magical combination of author Neil Gaiman and illustrator Chris Riddell – weaving together a sort-of Snow White and an almost Sleeping Beauty with a thread of dark magic, which will hold readers spellbound from start to finish.
On the eve of her wedding, a young queen sets out to rescue a princess from an enchantment. She casts aside her fine wedding clothes, takes her chain mail and her sword and follows her brave dwarf retainers into the tunnels under the mountain towards the sleeping kingdom. This queen will decide her own future – and the princess who needs rescuing is not quite what she seems. Twisting together the familiar and the new, this perfectly delicious, captivating and darkly funny tale shows its creators at the peak of their talents.
Lavishly produced, packed with glorious Chris Riddell illustrations enhanced with metallic ink, this is a spectacular and magical gift.
** Some spoilers ahead** and why i didn’t totally love this book!
I thought it’s a Queer book but it’s not. I loved the ending twist for the sleeping beauty with the whole idea of everything is not as it looks and but why do snow white has to leave her life behind to be free, girl you can just go back to your kingdom and say no to your wedding and just be the queen if you don’t want to get married, as it seems from the earlier pages.
I love when a book high fantasy themes meet a with mordern day issue.
This book is definitely one of those, selling souls, galactic pandemics, meets the prejudice and dangers faced by trans women. And these themes could have made this a grim, weighty novel, the story is infused with so much love, and a sense that there is meaning and value in life, that it left me with tears and laughter.
Shizuka Satomi made a deal with the devil: to escape damnation, she must entice seven other violin prodigies to trade their souls for success. She has already delivered six.
When Katrina Nguyen, a young transgender runaway, catches Shizuka’s ear with her wild talent, Shizuka can almost feel the curse lifting. She’s found her final candidate.
But in a donut shop off a bustling highway in the San Gabriel Valley, Shizuka meets Lan Tran, retired starship captain, interstellar refugee, and mother of four. Shizuka doesn’t have time for crushes or coffee dates, what with her very soul on the line, but Lan’s kind smile and eyes like stars might just redefine a soul’s worth.
As the lives of these three women become entangled by chance and fate, a story of magic, identity, curses, and hope begins, and a family worth crossing the universe for is found.
Hygge is about an atmosphere and an experience, rather than about things. It is about being with the people we love. A feeling of home. A feeling that we are safe, that we are shielded from the world and allow ourselves to let our guard down. A feeling we all crave lifelong, and Danes might know how!
Recently read this amazing little book about why Danes are considered the most happiest people, I was deeply fascinated by how hygge-fundamentalists the whole society is it is seen as part of the national identity and culture and I couldn’t stop wondering why we don’t talk about it so much, give it preference in our everyday lives. May be because we are still very far from the basic amenities for a huge part of our population.
The four editions of the World Happiness Report which have been published so far are packed with evidence of the link between relationships and happiness. Family and friends and close personal relationships with loved adults explain the greatest variation in happiness. Except in the very poorest countries, happiness varies more with the quality of our relationships than with wealth.
The welfare state/govt there is really good (not perfect, but good) at reducing extreme unhappiness. I mean they have Universal and free health care, free university education and relatively generous unemployment benefits go a long way towards reducing unhappiness. Of course, if you can’t afford to eat or struggling to make ends meet money is of the utmost importance but once the basic needs are done some we tend to invest towards happiness. The Danes look for happiness in different ways though in food, good lighting, good company. According to the book the people would rather ride a bike than get an expensive car. Hygge is appreciating the simple pleasures in life and can be achieved with less money, the author has given the example of board games and cooking with friends which I quite like.
As an Indian reader somethings were defined very far from what I can do but we can always find something apt for own environment but I would definitely suggest reading this book to everyone especially people like me who are always overwhelmed by the amount of things they take on, but a must read 4/5🦋
The Christmas season is here and if you’re looking to get something for that book lover in your life I’ve got you covered.
I have included things of variable price range and most things are gender neutral and good for all ages, you can also get them as stocking stuffers or secret santa.
Scented candles
Scented candles are a beautiful way to unwind or set the mood for the perfect reading time.
Mugs / cups
Here’s a wonderful gift idea that won’t break the bank, you can also fill inexpensive coffee mugs with yummy things like: biscotti, chocolate, instant coffee, flavoured teas etc. The book lover in your life will surely use it while reading their favourite books.
Fuzzy socks
This festive accessory is rising in popularity for good reason—it makes the perfect (cheap) pampering present for anyone on your list (including yourself!).
Metal Bookmarks
Every bookmark that you use, grows on to you and becomes a personal accompaniment and what better than one which can be kept for forever. Bookmarks are definitely a must have accessory for the readers and trust me they can never have enough of them.
Bookish bags
Be it a backpack, a tote bag with art or quotes from their favourite books or recently I have been seeing a lot of handbags/clutches shaped like a book. I know that your book lover friend is going to like them
Bookish Jwellery / pins
Something minimal like a book shaped pendant, a bracelet with their favourite book quote, cuffs or even enamel pins to enhance their outfits or bags. This is a safe bet that they are definitely going to use.
Special editions
Everyone likes to made feel special and spoilt and what better way to show your love to the bookworm in your life by giving them a special edition of their favourite book, it can be a first edition, a leather bound one or cloth bound if they are vegan or any other special edition. They release plenty during the festival times and usually they have a variable price range.
Subscription for a Book Box
A book subscription box usually contains one book and numerous items relating to the book and/or genre of that box. The extra items for book boxes are usually art prints, bookmarks, candles, jewellery, tea, tote bags, and other small but fun gift items. There are innumerable of them catering to different age groups, genres and price ranges. A gift they would definitely cherish.
E-reader
Marketed as ‘READ ANYTIME, ANYWHERE’ devices, On the bus, on your break, in your bed—never be without a book, they can carry thousands of books in light weight device, easy on eyes unlike your laptop or iPad. This is something a reader would definitely adore for a long time.
An enchanting seventeenth-century epic of grand passion and adventure, this debut novel tells the captivating story of one of India’s most legendary and controversial empresses — a woman whose brilliance and determination trumped myriad obstacles, and whose love shaped the course of the Mughal empire.
She came into the world in the year 1577, to the howling accompaniment of a ferocious winter storm. As the daughter of starving refugees fleeing violent persecution in Persia, her fateful birth in a roadside tent sparked a miraculous reversal of family fortune, culminating in her father’s introduction to the court of Emperor Akbar. She is called Mehrunnisa, the Sun of Women. This is her story.
Growing up on the fringes of Emperor Akbar’s opulent palace grounds, Mehrunnisa blossoms into a sapphire-eyed child blessed with a precocious intelligence, luminous beauty, and a powerful ambition far surpassing the bounds of her family’s station. Mehrunnisa first encounters young Prince Salim on his wedding day. In that instant, even as a royal gala swirls around her in celebration of the future emperor’s first marriage, Mehrunnisa foresees the path of her own destiny. One day, she decides with uncompromising surety, she too will become Salim’s wife. She is all of eight years old — and wholly unaware of the great price she and her family will pay for this dream.
Skillfully blending the textures of historical reality with the rich and sensuous imaginings of a timeless fairy tale, The Twentieth Wife sweeps readers up in the emotional pageant of Salim and Mehrunnisa’s embattled love. First-time novelist Indu Sundaresan charts her heroine’s enthralling journey across the years, from an ill-fated first marriage through motherhood and into a dangerous maze of power struggles and political machinations. Through it all, Mehrunnisa and Salim long with fiery intensity for the true, redemptive love they’ve never known — and their mutual quest ultimately takes them, and the vast empire that hangs in the balance, to places they never dreamed possible.
Shot through with wonder and suspense, The Twentieth Wife is at once a fascinating portrait of one woman’s convention-defying life behind the veil and a transporting saga of the astonishing potency of love.
The Palace of Illusions
A reimagining of the world-famous Indian epic, the Mahabharat—told from the point of view of an amazing woman.
Relevant to today’s war-torn world, The Palace of Illusions takes us back to a time that is half history, half myth, and wholly magical. Narrated by Panchaali, the wife of the legendary Pandavas brothers in the Mahabharat, the novel gives us a new interpretation of this ancient tale.
The novel traces the princess Panchaali’s life, beginning with her birth in fire and following her spirited balancing act as a woman with five husbands who have been cheated out of their father’s kingdom. Panchaali is swept into their quest to reclaim their birthright, remaining at their side through years of exile and a terrible civil war involving all the important kings of India. Meanwhile, we never lose sight of her strategic duels with her mother-in-law, her complicated friendship with the enigmatic Krishna, or her secret attraction to the mysterious man who is her husbands’ most dangerous enemy. Panchaali is a fiery female redefining for us a world of warriors, gods, and the ever-manipulating hands of fate
Legends of Pensam
We are not here without a purpose,’ the shaman explained. ‘Our purpose is to fulfil our destiny…All life is light and shadow.’ Like any other place on earth, the territory of the Adis in the mountains of Arunachal Pradesh is ‘Pensam’—the ‘in-between’ place. Anything can happen here, and everything can be lived, and ‘the narrow boat that we call life sails along somehow in calm or stormy weather’. A mysterious boy who fell from the sky is accepted as a son of the village and grows up to become a respected elder. A young woman wounded in love is healed by a marriage of which she expected little. A mother battles fate and the law for a son she has not seen since she lost him as an infant. A remote hamlet gets a road, but the new world that comes with it threatens upheaval. And as villages become small towns and towns approximate cities, the brave and patient few guard the old ways, negotiating change with memory and remembrance. An intricate web of stories, images and the history of a tribe, The Legends of Pensam is a lyrical and moving tribute to the human spirit. With a poet’s sense for incident and language, Mamang Dai paints a memorable portrait of a land that is at once particular and universal.
Interpreter of Maladies
Navigating between the Indian traditions they’ve inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri’s elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations. In “A Temporary Matter,” published in The New Yorker, a young Indian-American couple faces the heartbreak of a stillborn birth while their Boston neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession. Lahiri writes with deft cultural insight reminiscent of Anita Desai and a nuanced depth that recalls Mavis Gallant.
The Far Field
In the wake of her mother’s death, Shalini, a privileged and restless young woman from Bangalore, sets out for a remote Himalayan village in the troubled northern region of Kashmir. Certain that the loss of her mother is somehow connected to the decade-old disappearance of Bashir Ahmed, a charming Kashmiri salesman who frequented her childhood home, she is determined to confront him. But upon her arrival, Shalini is brought face to face with Kashmir’s politics, as well as the tangled history of the local family that takes her in. And when life in the village turns volatile and old hatreds threaten to erupt into violence, Shalini finds herself forced to make a series of choices that could hold dangerous repercussions for the very people she has come to love.
Bombay Balchão
Bombay was the city everyone came to in the early decades of the nineteenth century: among them, the Goans and the Mangaloreans. Looking for safe harbour, livelihood, and a new place to call home. Communities congregated around churches and markets, sharing lord and land with the native East Indians. The young among them were nudged on to the path of marriage, procreation and godliness, though noble intentions were often ambushed by errant love and plain and simple lust. As in the story of Annette and Benji (and Joe) or Michael and Merlyn (and Ellena).
Lovers and haters, friends and family, married men and determined singles, churchgoers and abstainers, Bombay Balchão is a tangled tale of ordinary lives – of a woman who loses her husband to a dockyard explosion and turns to bootlegging, a teen romance that drowns like a paper boat, a social misfit rescued by his addiction to crosswords, a wife who tries to exorcise the spirit of her dead mother-in-law from her husband, a rebellious young woman who spurns true love for the abandonment of dance. Ordinary, except when seen through their own eyes. Then, it’s legend.
Set in Cavel, a tiny Catholic neighbourhood on Bombay’s D’Lima Street, this delightful debut novel is painted with many shades of history and memory, laughter and melancholy, sunshine and silver rain
This rich and moving novel traces the lives of two black heroines from their close-knit childhood in a small Ohio town, through their sharply divergent paths of womanhood, to their ultimate confrontation and reconciliation.
Nel Wright has chosen to stay in the place where she was born, to marry, raise a family, and become a pillar of the black community. Sula Peace has rejected the life Nel has embraced, escaping to college, and submerging herself in city life. When she returns to her roots, it is as a rebel and a wanton seductress. Eventually, both women must face the consequences of their choices. Together, they create an unforgettable portrait of what it means and costs to be a black woman in America.
The vegetarian by Han King
Before the nightmare, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary life. But when splintering, blood-soaked images start haunting her thoughts, Yeong-hye decides to purge her mind and renounce eating meat. In a country where societal mores are strictly obeyed, Yeong-hye’s decision to embrace a more “plant-like” existence is a shocking act of subversion. And as her passive rebellion manifests in ever more extreme and frightening forms, scandal, abuse, and estrangement begin to send Yeong-hye spiraling deep into the spaces of her fantasy. In a complete metamorphosis of both mind and body, her now dangerous endeavor will take Yeong-hye—impossibly, ecstatically, tragically—far from her once-known self altogether
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
This intense novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about – until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance, one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. Tony Webster thought he’d left all this behind as he built a life for himself, and by now his marriage and family and career have fallen into an amicable divorce and retirement. But he is then presented with a mysterious legacy that obliges him to reconsider a variety of things he thought he’d understood all along, and to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.
A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single sitting, with stunning psychological and emotional depth and sophistication.
Dept. Of speculation by Jenny Offill
Dept. of Speculation is a portrait of a marriage. It is also a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us all.
Jenny Offill’s heroine, referred to in these pages as simply “the wife,” once exchanged love letters with her husband postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. As they confront an array of common catastrophes – a colicky baby, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions – the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. She muses on the consuming, capacious experience of maternal love, and the near total destruction of the self that ensues from it as she confronts the friction between domestic life and the seductions and demands of art.
Never Mind by Edward St. Aubyn
Never Mind, the first installment in Edward St. Aubyn’s wonderful, wry, and profound Patrick Melrose Cycle, follows five-year-old Patrick through a single day, as the Melrose family awaits the arrival of guests. Bright and imaginative, young Patrick struggles daily to contend with the searing cruelty of his father and the resignation of his embattled mother. But on this day he must endure an unprecedented horror—one that splits his world in two. In Never Mind, St. Aubyn renders this vivid tragedy with profound grace and precision, and introduces us to the unforgettable, complex figure of Patrick Melrose.
When Tulsi first meets Madhav, she is irrevocably drawn to his chiselled good looks and charm. Although wary of his many dalliances and the string of broken hearts left in his wake, she is surprised by the intense desire that Madhav arouses in her. And before long, she forsakes her family, her prospective career, her fiancé–all for the love of this inscrutable man. But love can be like poison. And nothing can prepare Tulsi for the heartache and betrayal that lie ahead. Years later, Tulsi escapes to the ancient city of Vrindavan, seeking redemption amidst the cries and prayers of its anguished widows. However, when her past catches up with her, old wounds resurface with dramatic consequences.
Review
It is the kind of book you’ll enjoy if you love beautifully written stories that you and I might interpret in our own ways, a story that might sting but makes you feel something. A kind of story that you might have read in the eyes of many women you have met and know, women who are alive but hardly. A story, parts of which you might have heard as an advisory in hushed voices to young women. A story which is fiction but might be a reality. A beautiful story of a smart young woman who leaves everything behind for love to end up in a emotionally and mentally abusive relationship,filled with gaslighting which ultimately poisons her and everyone she loved. It’s a short story so I’ll not spoil it.
** If you loved ghachar ghochar, this book would be a define recommendation**
drficticity 