Rough Roads
~ Winter’s Bone ~ Book and Movie ~ Daniel Woodrell’s slim, bleakly powerful novel Winter’s Bone is set in the Ozarks, in a house where the road “has got rough to where you about can’t call it a road no...
Susan
Food Art
My mother has exactly the same breakfast every day. One boiled egg (for protein), 3 olives (for sodium and good fat), and a piece of ham (also protein), with toast on the side. Last fall while she was recovering from...
Good Omens in our future
Good Omens is now a TV series! What a crazy, delightful book! I won’t even attempt to summarize it. Suffice it to say that it involves the Apocalypse, an angel called Aziraphale and a demon called Crowley who are the...
Looking forward to…
Last year we got a new Tana French and a new Robert Galbraith, both of which I had been waiting for impatiently. (If only all my favourite mystery authors would come out with one solidly satisfying book a year). This...
A Hundred Billion Neurons
~ Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey through the World’s Strangest Brains. By Helen Thomson ~ In 1985, neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote a marvellous book: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. He describes some of the more unusual cases...
Empowerment through Erotica
~ Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows, by Balli Kaur Jaswal ~ The first thing to note is that the Punjabi widows of the title live in London, perhaps not one’s first guess at a location for women living heavily circumscribed...
Sharps and Flats
~ Bel Canto ~ the book and film ~ If only Ang Lee had directed the film of Bel Canto. The exquisite novel by Ann Patchett is widely thought to be her best. It is approximately based on the 1996...
The Post Office
For decades our local Bangalore post office remained unchanged, growing more and more decrepit. By 2017 the whitewash had long since faded, there were holes in the roof, and the lighting inside was provided by a few faint bulbs. Most...
Perfect Pitch
~ Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill ~ Although I was born and brought up in a cricket-mad country and have been surrounded by cricket-o-philes for much of my life, I have no particular interest in the sport and can name only...
Suburban Mores
~ Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng ~ This ambitious book tackles race, class and motherhood in an upscale Cleveland suburb. Race: Shaker Heights, the Cleveland suburb where the book is set, is depicted as largely white with a couple...
Working Mom Redux
~ How Hard Can It Be? by Allison Pearson ~ Kate Reddy encapsulated the realities of life for many working women in 2002, when she appeared as the heroine of Allison Pearson’s I Don’t Know How She Does It. (The...
Pondicherry Bikers
Pondi is full of women on scooters and cycles. In other Indian cities too there are plenty of women drivers, but in Pondi it seemed like a quarter to a third of the two-wheelers were driven by women. There are...
Political Women
~ You Think It, I’ll Say It, by Curtis Sittenfeld ~ The most striking story in Curtis Sittenfeld’s short story collection is, unfortunately, not included in the American edition. It’s called The Nominee, and it can be read online. The...
Millenial Angst
~ Conversations with Friends, by Sally Rooney ~ Old-fashioned readers, beware: there are no quotation marks in Conversations with Friends, and text and dialogue flow seamlessly together. Oh, he said.Okay. Well, I’m sorry. I am trying, you know. If there are things I’m doing...
Memory Leaks
~ The Witch Elm, by Tana French ~ From the very first paragraph, Tana French’s latest novel draws you into the inner thoughts of its protagonist. I’ve always considered myself to be, basically, a lucky person. I don’t mean I’m...
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