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
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
How Reading Mediocre books affects thinking and writing and in turn weakening a solid foundation Malayalam literature always had
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
Adrian Tchaikovsky continues his prolific streak— it feels like every six months there’s something new from him. This time, it’s The Hungry Gods, set in yet another post-apocalyptic world filled with talking animals and birds. Was it as good as Shroud? For me, the answer is no. But with Tchaikovsky, there’s always something fresh to latch onto—some concept,
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
Today again, I bought a few more books. I’ve finished reading 49 books this year. Almost all of my reading is through audio (yes, there are people online who question whether that even counts as “reading”). It has long been my desire to become one of Kerala’s foremost readers. I grew up in a home
It’s that part of the year when I slowly move toward bigger, more serious books—the kind that demand time and patience. Re-reading Proust was a project I’d planned for 2023 but never got around to. Now I’m reading Within a Budding Grove, the second volume of In Search of Lost Time, I knew this, But
Reading is the most prolific activity in my life right now—outside of work. I keep finding exciting new reads, and I’m deeply invested in this. This year has been fantastic in that sense. Same goes for music. 2025, Week 23 Books Finished The Psychology of Secrets — a real page-turner, by Andrew Gold. The author