I remember having a conversation with a friend about the challenges faced by each generation. “Our grandparents had to work hard – physically,” I said. “My grandmother has so many stories of how difficult it was to make dosa batter and things like that. Our parents had financial difficulties, more than anything else. What about […]
Pegasus
What a mixed bag of emotions! Pegasus was wonderfully imagined. I loved the ideas of feather-tip fingers, strong human hands and flexible wrists, being bound to the pegasi of the sweet green land… Beautiful! There was a kind of raw beauty that reached out and touched me, page after page. The beauty of the Caves […]
The Joy Luck Club
Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club fits so perfectly under the heading ‘unusual’. It’s unusual in every way. The language is unusual. The structure is unusual. The name is unusual. I love the idea of stories of motherhood, and I love stories that do not have a simplistic conclusion. Each story in this collection is […]
On Two Feet and Wings
I’m a slow reader. Despite the fact that I love reading, I take my time over books. Sometimes, I take weeks to finish a book, even one I enjoy. On Two Feet and Wings was not like that. I would never have expected a book based on a true story to have transported me into a […]
Indian Summer
As I read Indian Summer by Pratima Mitchell, I kept oscillating between approval and disgust. There were parts that were so real that they reached out to me and made me think, “That’s exactly, perfectly captured!” And there were parts that were so real that they made me curl my lip and think, “Why do […]
Animal Farm
Animal Farm is the kind of book that I could read over and over again. It was written in just a few months and it’s less than a hundred pages long. I was revolted and fascinated by it the first time I read it and I’m revolted and fascinated even now as I teach it. What […]
Chalkline
I recently read Neil Gaiman’s views on escapism: I hear the term bandied about as if it’s a bad thing. As if “escapist” fiction is a cheap opiate used by the muddled and the foolish and the deluded, and the only fiction that is worthy, for adults or for children, is mimetic fiction, mirroring the […]
The Children’s Hour
I picked up the DVD about nine years ago because I saw Audrey Hepburn’s picture on the cover. I like Hepburn. I knew I would like the film. I did not know how much it would haunt me, though. The Children’s Hour is one of those very few movies whose story I have retold time and […]
Running Wild
I don’t usually like thick hardbound books. They are daunting and, usually, boring. As soon as I make that statement, though, I realise how many exceptions there are. Running Wild is one of them. It has pages and pages of description, but not once was I bored. Morpurgo, at the end of the book, talks of […]
Swarada Datar
Where does the beauty of dance lie? When it comes to Bharatanatyam, particularly the Pandanallur style, surely it’s in the lines, the perfect geometry and the crisp, precise body movements. Whatever else may have been lacking, the geometry in Swarada’s dance was certainly perfect. Her performance was excellent. It’s rare for me to use a […]
Sophie’s Lucky
The perfect children’s book is not one that you read and say, “Oh, I would have loved it so much if I had read it when I was seven!” The perfect children’s book is one that you read and say, “What a truly delightful book!” And that’s what I feel when I read Sophie’s Lucky, or, […]
The Prince and Other Modern Fables
Prose poetry at its most beautiful. I never thought I could enjoy stories like this so much. Every story is so rich, so intricate, so charming! It’s supposed to be for children and adults alike, but I wonder how much I would have taken in had I read it as a child. Reading it now, […]
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
Perhaps it was the right to time to reread this book and realise that Roald Dahl, genius beyond compare, never intended to be a writer. In the last-but-one story, he talks about how he happened to get a lucky break and things did not stop after that. He also writes about a little notebook in […]
Treason
The year is 1539. King Henry VIII is King of England. All three of his wives, Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn and Jane Seymour are dead. He has three children: Mary, Elizabeth and the long-awaited heir to his throne, Edward. Henry has broken away from the Church of Rome because the Pope would not allow […]
How Green Was My Valley
I read the book when I was eleven or so. It was among the very few books that made me feel I was too young to tackle that kind of emotion. I remember thinking that I would be able to feel everything better when I was older and did not need to look up words […]
Mr. Popper’s Penguins
Perhaps Peppy created “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper corn.” Because Peppy, Mr. Popper’s personal assistant, takes particular pleasure in paraphrasing paragraphs to produce passages that permit plentiful pronunciations of /p/. What a delightful movie! Why is it, though, that I cannot watch a movie with animals in it without wincing inwardly at […]
Dragonfly
Some pacy books are formulaic, and this one is one of them.Prince must marry Princess – it’s a political alliance. Prince and Princess hate each other; they have all kinds of adventures; then they love each other; then they get married.This fits in exactly. Yet, Dragonfly warmed me. There are some books that, like Disney movies, touch […]
Asylum
For once, the amount of time I’ve taken to read this says nothing about the book. I remember reading Bloom of Youth. I was faintly unhappy with it. I then somehow ended up reading Grandmother’s Footsteps and was so bored with it that I decided never to read Rachel Anderson again. Thankfully, despite what the proverb says, […]
The Pursuit of Happyness
Yes, I know I ought to have watched this long ago. Yes, I know that practically everyone has already watched this. But it moved me to tears, and I cannot not write about it. The story of a struggle against all odds is always touching, but what truly moved me was love. When is it […]
The Haunting of Hiram
Yesterday, when MJ Shubhra asked me to recommend books at the ‘Book Club’ show, I was tongue-tied, somehow. I could think of nothing. On my desk lay an Eva Ibbotson, so I said ‘Eva Ibbotson’. My favourite by her remains Journey to the River Sea, but I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by her. The Haunting of […]