Review: 5 Stars In the end, it is all about conditioning. Right and wrong, it has a reference point. Apart from certain universal moral values, all sets of ideologies differentiate and draw a line.  And because it is so deeply enmeshed within the skeleton of the so-called universal moral values, it feels inherently wrong when […]

Read More Book Review: ‘The Help’ by Kathryn Stockett

Review: 4 stars Discovering a new book is like discovering a new joint to eat, only better. Because in the worst case, suffering from bad writing is better than an upset stomach. So even though desi Chinese sometimes upsets my stomach, I was eager to try out this collection of short stories in ‘The Paper […]

Read More Book Review: ‘The Paper Menagerie & other stories’

Review: 5 stars I encountered my Margo Roth Spiegelman when I was in 9th standard. She was not only an image that I had created in my mind – she was also pretty much fictive. Ladies & gentlemen, I was head-over-heels in love with Hermione Granger, and if you had encountered me then, I would […]

Read More Book Review: ‘Paper Towns’

Review: 4 stars Reading ‘The Hunger Games’ made me realize that there are actually two kinds of heroes in any story: Rebels and Survivors. Often, rebels are perceived to be better because they refuse to accept the status quo, have a greater sense of what’s right and wrong, and they just cannot stand the oppressive […]

Read More Book Review: ‘The Hunger Games’

Review: 2 stars The funny thing is, triffids most certainly do not have their day in ‘The day of the triffids’ by John Wyndham. They are most certainly afterthoughts in a novel that was meant to be specifically about them. The literal and nearly-complete blindness of humanity and the ways in which they deal with […]

Read More Book Review: ‘The day of the triffids’

Review: 5 star The difference between Isaac Asimov and Arthur Clarke has always been that of the fantastic and the possible. And I must admit that I am mighty partial towards fantastic, though Asimov would be hurt by my assertion regarding his work. Clarke had always skirted closer to reality, whereas Asimov had pushed the […]

Read More Book Review: ‘2001: A Space Odessey’

Review: 4 stars Orson Scott Card can truly be called the father of ‘Modern YA literature’. Let’s not be pedantic about the perils of pulpy paperbacks – that stuff sells. And even though you swear on your stars that you can’t stand that trope, you love reading it. The stuff that screams action on every […]

Read More Book Review: ‘Ender’s Game’

Review: 3 stars Salman Rushdie is a notorious name-dropper, or I must be simply unaware about the major chunk of literature that he enjoys and sometimes reveres. If this is the popular culture out there, then I must be the ostrich with my head in the ground. Or I can always say that it is […]

Read More Book Review: ‘Imaginary Homelands’

Review: 4 stars Let me tell you from the very outset, Genghis Khan was not a Muslim who perpetrated various acts of violence against the people of India. Furthermore, he even failed to mount a conquest on India as he found the weather to be too hot. Genghis Khan was a Mongol and a shaman […]

Read More Book Review: ‘Genghis Khan and the making of the Modern World’

Review: 4 stars 1984 is terrifying, bleak, intricate, detailed and downright depressing,Fahrenheit 451 is lyrical. Before reading this classic by Ray Bradbury, my approach to dystopian novels was something as follows: gingerly open the first page, read few more, shut the book and pick it up after 6 months or so. I hated Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World , […]

Read More Book Review: ‘Fahrenheit 451’