Many months ago, I spied a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s autobiography at my parents’ flat in Goa and I was puzzled because I couldn’t imagine my father ever buying a copy of Kipling’s book, unless forced to! It turns out that it belonged to my grandfather, another avid reader. I decided I must read it… Continue reading Something of Kipling, Sans the Colonialist
A connection on LinkedIn shared a new book by Virginia Woolf published by Times Literary Supplement and I decided that I must buy and read this book of hers. Titled Genius and Ink, Virginia Woolf on How to Read, it is a selection of her essays and criticism for the Times Literary Supplement, to which… Continue reading Discovering Virginia Woolf, The Critic
We have allowed so much technology into our lives, we are hardly conscious of it. From checking our mobile phones for messages from the time we awake, to streaming a film before going to bed, our entire day is lived in a technology bubble or envelope. We have never ever questioned its relevance, nor the… Continue reading Open Sesame… Big Other is Here
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
I have never understood the recent trend (a decade or more) of subtitling book titles, and I suspect it’s the publishers’ tactic of trying to boost book sales. But in the case of William Dalrymple’s recent tome, The Anarchy, the subtitle actually does more justice to the subject: The East India Company, Corporate Violence and… Continue reading The Anarchy: A Cautionary Tale of Capitalism
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
As someone who loves travel, I must say that Olga Tokarczuk’s book, Flights, opened up new vistas in my mind about how to think about it. Part travelogue, part meditation on time and journeys, part historical storytelling, it is hard to even call it a novel, which is what it is. The genre-defying Flights is… Continue reading Travel, In Ways You Never Imagined
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Over a year ago, I had written a post on identity politics as it exists around the world, including in India, and in it I had referred to an excerpt from Francis Fukuyama’s new book, Identity, that I happened to read online on Quillette. I had then said that I would like to read the… Continue reading A Paean to Thymos
