Category: Review
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Fascination with the Mundane
As I watch “The Disciple” – a painfully pessimistic movie in which the protagonist does not go through the typical character arc recommended by most screenplay experts, a friend’s question rings in my ear, “Who wants to read books about losers?”. The protagonist typically follows the character arc of the hero. He is someone who…
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Book Review – Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
Eleanor Oliphant is an office worker with zero social life. She dreads the weekends, waiting for Monday to arrive. Her colleagues laugh at her; she can not carry out even a single conversation without awkward remarks and has not cut her hair for years. At the beginning of the book, she meets the IT person…
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Book Review – The Talented Mr. Ripley – Patricia Highsmith
If you meet Tom Ripley in the street, you will think he is a decent, shy, innocuous young guy. The first few pages make you feel that he is just another young guy who wants to play pranks by making people send cheques for fake income tax claims – cheques that are not even encashed.…
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Book Review – Less Than Zero
Less Than Zero is the slice-of-life narration of four weeks of Clay’s life. Clay is back from his school on vacation to his hometown of Los Angeles. He is part of the artistic elite, the kids of movie directors and actors, kids who drive Porsches and Cadillacs of their own. Kids who should be happy…
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Book Review: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
The Goldfinch is truly a Dickensian novel, as many people have already observed. It is the odyssey of Theo, his coming of age story, and his meeting many oddball characters throughout his life. As in The Secret History, the plot is not the mainstay here, but it is not a plotless novel as many Literary…
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Book Review – The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History” is slow burn as slow burn can be. The characters develop extremely slowly, over pages of back story, descriptions of peculiarities, seeming trivial incidents that do not mean anything, but they add up to something meaningful in the end. I thought that it was a combination of the intellectual leaning…
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Book Review – The Deep Blue Good-By
This is the first of several novels that John Macdonald has written with Travis McGee as a protagonist. Travis, who likes to be called Trav, is a self confessed beach bum, someone who works on special cases only when he runs out of money earned in the earlier case. In the interim, he spends the…
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Book Review – Carrie
Carrie is an interesting first book. Technically, it was not Stephen King’s first book. It was his first published book. He took it up as a challenge from a female friend to write a book where the protagonist was a woman. In one of the interviews, King has said that it have women liberation kind…
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Book Review – Kafka On the Shore
Kafka on the Shore is like a surrealistic painting or a David Lynch movie. There is a plot, there are characters that are occasionally coherent and there are elements of mystery. But, if you are looking at resolution, that too a water tight, Sherlock Holmes kind of a resolution, you are bound to be disappointed.…
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Fabulous Reviews by Leading book bloggers
Some great reviews of my books by popular book bloggers: Anusha of I’ll read anything reviews “Brothers Sen Gogh”. She says, “What I liked the most about this book is the strong based characterisation. Where you can actually understand the person, identify with and relate to. This combined with a powerful story has made the…