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 […]
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
“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
In the earlier post, I mentioned that Browne wrote out of his experience of living in Norfolk. Sebald lived in Norwich, and Naipaul in Wiltshire. Sebald’s narrator writes by blending memory with the experience of walking through Suffolk. Naipaul’s narrator does essentially the same thing, though he stays rooted in one place. Later, when I
Although I had written this before, there was a time in my reading life when I avoided Rushdie and Naipaul after seeing them dismissed by Krishnan Nair (he was not really a critic but a literary journalist — which, to be fair, suits many so-called “critics” now as well). Later, however, I read two of
A serious reader does not choose a book in isolation; it is always the sum of the people, times, and experiences they have passed through. That is what some online readers fail to grasp. The offline lives of people we see online—their ripenings, the choices they make, the things they embrace or abandon—cannot be known
Today, I came across a ridiculous post by a so-called poet of Malayalam, offering his take on Cherukad—one of the finest memoirists in our language. This poet attempts to trivialize Cherukad’s legacy with a shallow and dismissive commentary—an effort as superficial as his own poetry. Sadly, this is the sort of noise that thrives in
Meeting Ajai has been a regular part of my life—this time, we met after 2.6 years. He remains one of my top three in Malayalam, not just for his writing, but also for his reading. We talked about Proust, Han Kang’s We Do Not Part, and the contemporary Malayalam novel scene. I’ve been extremely busy
Ever since I began reading Knausgaard—whose work is often categorized as autofiction—I’ve been looking for parallels in other literary traditions, including Malayalam. In my language, few writers come close, but Kamala Das stands out as a possible exception. Her three autobiographical works—Balyakalasmaranakal, Neermathalam Pootha Kalam, and Varshangalkku Munpu—are, of course, semi-fictionalized accounts of her upper-middle-class