2022 was not a great year for reading. The Un-Book Club did not perform very well and my reading dropped to 7 books.
The Story of a Goat
This is my second Perumal Murugan book and for the second time I marvel at how deeply he is connected to the village life in Tamil Nadu. This is no outsider looking in. There are no revelations or epiphanies, just life lived, not observed. When a book is translated from one language to another, often a some of the essence, the beauty of the writing is lost. Even with all that, this book brings alive the village, its people, and its animals. It adopts the unique perspective of a goat and keeps it real.
Child of the Flower Song People
This is the story of an indigenous Nahua woman from Mexico. It is the story of colonialism and its impacts on the colonized. This is a story of the importance of culture and the struggle to preserve it. This is a story told through stunning artwork.
White Nights
I have been wanting to read this story for years and finally mustered the courage to pick it up. Why courage – because books by old school Russian writers tend to be long slow treatises. It took me a couple of attempts to get through Anna Karenina and I am still not sure if I finished it.
This strange characters in the romance lend themselves well to my imagination – the lonely girl, her strict, blind grandmother, her mysterious lover and our hopeless protagonist. While I have not been entirely as hopeless, I have been in our protagonist’s shoes. I found it easy to identify with the dreamer in him, the one who made friends with houses and streets, because it’s too hard staying friends with people. The writing, as expected was exquisite but laborious and I had to make serious efforts to plod through even the parts I found relatable and the pieces I thought very beautifully penned.
Notes on Grief
I don’t know why I picked this up, but I did. It called to me, and I answered. The book is beautifully written, but it did not resonate with me as my own trysts with grief have been different.
Last Night at the Telegraph Club
A very enjoyable and strangely relatable book. This intersectional book touches on multiple topics and does so with skill and sensitivity. The book manages not never lose sight of the plot. The sub-plots serve a purpose. The descriptions are authentic and well researched. On the flip side, the book played into several stereotypes even as the protagonists strived to make their difference seen. What I found relatable was the inability of the protagonist to fit. Her liking different things than her friends. I’ve struggled with this too. Overall, it’s a well-paced book that takes on multiple difficult threads and weaves them to tell a coherent tale.
Shawshank Redemption
Written by the master of horror, this isn’t a horror in the traditional sense; it dives into the horrors of prison life instead. It does it without bogging you down and leaving you too depressed to continue. The book maintains a steady pace. Even when nothing really happens, the story keeps moving. The end is upbeat. Instead of spelling it out for the reader, it leaves the reader with hope and a sense of sunshine.
The Satarpur Moonstone
The second (and my second book) in the Perveen Mistry mystery series. I found it less impressive than its predecessor. When the setting has moved from familiar Bombay to feudal India, some of the charm was lost for me. It is an unhurried tale of princely intrigue and not an unhinged historical thriller. As the book progresses, instead of a slow burn we get an easy breezy Raj time story. The book is not hard to get through, but it lacks that tingling feeling.
Half the Story 