Sad tiger by Neige Sinno is a memoir about abuse. The author recounts being sexually abused as a child by her stepfather. Years later, she fights back—taking him to court, standing trial, and ultimately seeing him sentenced to prison. But the book’s central question goes far beyond legal justice: did she truly survive the dark […]
Fiction. If you go strictly by star ratings, I ended up with nine absolute five-star books, and three that hovered right on the edge. The year began with McCarthy, and what a beginning that was. From there, I moved on to Proust, though the entire series yielded just one full five-star read for me. Two
I read a lot this year, and it was fun—but I rated the books purely based on how they made me feel. Many of them could easily have ended up on my top list, barring a few misfires. There were also a couple of outright disappointments—Ambilimol and Vinoy Thomas’s attempts at sarcasm come to mind.
Reading 90+ books doesn’t really mean one has a lot of free time. Or rather—more accurately, since nobody has free time anymore—it means having a longer attention span. And that, I think, is the biggest roadblock to old-style reading habits in the modern world. For me, what worked was switching to audio—essentially solving a digital-era
Two books about death—Death and the Gardener by Georgi Gospodinov and Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li—were the highlights of my reading over the past few weeks. Gospodinov looks at his father’s death with a quiet serenity, understanding it as a natural process, yet still searching for ways to live with the pain. The
I have been getting acquainted with the novels of the Canadian writer Andre Alexis over the past two months. His novel Pastoral is the first in a series titled Quincunx. One of the central characters is a priest who arrives in a remote village. As a young boy, he had heard a divine call—(he thought
“School of Night” is the newest (fourth) novel in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Morning Star series.A distinctive feature of this series is that all its books belong to the genre-fiction category. They are supernatural tales told through the perspectives of multiple characters. In The School of Night, for the first time in this series, Knausgaard presents
David Szalay’s Flesh is a novel that tells the life of a man who lived entirely by “going with the flow.” It’s a book I read simply because I had nothing else to read — and finished it in the same spirit. As a schoolboy, the protagonist has a relationship with an older woman —
Reading Proust has been the biggest personal project I set out to complete this year — and I finally managed to finish it on the very last day of October. Effort was never really the concern with a project like this; it was more about how to engage with such an immense text — especially one that often unfolds
In Fosse’s trilogy, how is what matters. The story does not exist merely to say where it is going. László, Bernard, Murnane — all of them are about how. Hunger is how, Stoner is how. In Dostoevsky and Leo (Tolstoy), how is primary. Their where is also magnificent — especially in works like Anna Karenina
When someone says “László,” the first thing that comes to my mind is Sátántangó — that six-and-a-half-hour-long film, one of Béla Tarr’s greatest works. It was when he came to borrow that movie that I first met Pradeep Bhasker, a great lover of books. At that time, I was in a reading slump — I
One Battle After Another is a grand-scale, darkly funny film that skewers American hypocrisy. It’s satire at its sharpest—mocking one of the world’s most powerful yet absurd countries and its chaotic political system. And yet, for all the detestation it attracts (these days even from Indian far-right voices), the U.S. has also nurtured some of