Tag: Books

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Good writing evokes sensations

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Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, an English literature professor at the University of Oxford, reveals his love of reading with his students, and collating twenty years of teaching, his book Look Closer explores the iconic works of literature that have formed, sustained and entertained him, from timesless classics like Wuthering Heights and Dracula to modern masterpieces like Normal People and The Handmaid’s Tale, as well as children’s books, poetry, plays, short stories, and even comics. Douglas-Fairhurst explains how to slow down, take note and bring a text to life, Look Closer makes clear how literature works and why in these turbulent times, reading … Continue reading Good writing evokes sensations

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Love Triangle

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Lily King’s understands good love stories- their secrets and subtext, their highs and their free falls, suffused with love triangles that even the narrator’s 12-year-old son at some point tells her that he has been invited to be part of a thruple which he declines. His mother, the narrator whose name we are not told until the final lines of the book. In the fall of her senior year of college. She meets two students from her 17th century Lit class: Sam who had coppery brown hair and Yash with a thick black pontytail. Best Friends living off-campus in the elegant … Continue reading Love Triangle

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Do You want to be a filmmaker

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BECOMING A FILMMAKER – THE HARD TRUTH ABOUT MAKING ITIN LONDON By Krish Pinto – London BA Film Graduate. Book available to order on Amazon.It is rare to find a writer with the talent of chronicling a guide andcommentary so successfully and imaginatively as Krish Pinto. Thatknown, I have suggested to him that he might be good writing novelsand maybe a screenplay to go with each one. Krish reacted bystating that AI is ahead of us writers – and can be programmed towrite novels and screenplays for us! However, I thought of this overtwenty five years ago regarding a novelist … Continue reading Do You want to be a filmmaker

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Lyra’s fate…

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Philip Pullman’s use of language of fantasy to illuminate our world and to explore the deepest question of what it means to be alive and awake to all the splendors and horrors around us.  In volume one his follow up triology which referenced John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The next volume depict Lyra at 20, battling anti-liberal forces, and the final volume published this week, those forces are confirmed to be multinational conglomerates that overdevelop erstwhile wholesome communities and even threaten to buy naming rights to Oxford colleges. Lyra Silvertongue was new Eve, Her “Fall” into sin reframed as a victory … Continue reading Lyra’s fate…

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How we end up saying things that relate to an idea rather than experience

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An unnamed 40-year-old, Protagonist writer of Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, who grew up in the South West of England before moving to Ireland, struggle to explain to her lover why she can’t explain how she feels: “ Somethings are resistant to words maybe, and when you start trying to apply them you end up with something else, another thing a theory, I suppose” Claire-Louise Bennett clarify – how easily language falls into pre-formulated phrases that fail to capture our intended meaning- how we “end up saying things that relate to an idea, rather than to the experience itself”. The protagonist’s unorthodox … Continue reading How we end up saying things that relate to an idea rather than experience

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Abandoned by fathers, betrayed by lovers

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Braithwaite’s Cursed Daughters is about intergenerational trauma and female kinship. The Falodun family have been cursed for generations, since an ancestor’s affair with a married man provoked the vengeful wife to declare that the woman and her female descendants would never prosper in love: “men will be like water in their palms.”   Setting her story between 1994 and the present day, Braithwaite braids together the fates of three women bound by the curse. A young woman must shake off a family curse, and widely held belief that she is the reincarnation of her dead cousin in this wickedly funny, brilliantly perceptive … Continue reading Abandoned by fathers, betrayed by lovers

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Pursuit of truth from the other side of the camera

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Werner Herzog, the legendary filmmaker and author’s deeply personal exploration of art, philosophy, and history that unravels one of our most elusive and contested questions: What is truth- and how to find it in out “post-truth” era? We wade through the troubling realm of what we see and read, and wonder what AI might have in store for us. For over half a century, Werner Herzog has challenged, enriched, and expanded our understanding of the truth. His films and books have mixed fiction and non-fiction, documentary and drama, reality and imagination. Herzog definitely goes beyond the appearance of what is … Continue reading Pursuit of truth from the other side of the camera

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Know your hatred and envy to avoid self-deceptions for successful intimacy

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Love’s Labour is a collection of psychoanalysis case studies, is long awaited follow-up of American-born, London-based, Stephen Grosz’s bestselling debut of 2013, The Examined Life,  a series of slender psychoanalytic case histories, which opened the world of the consulting room with vividness.  In Love’s Labour, Grosz, gives us insight into the twists and turns of the patient’s inner lives. The woman who is horrified to find her husband having an affair eventually turns out to have a secret gladness: It’s a get-out-of-jail free card she can now legitimately divorce. After deeper exploration, these patients turn out to be Russian dolls, with … Continue reading Know your hatred and envy to avoid self-deceptions for successful intimacy

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Life outside a rigid hierarchy, amid tradition and modernity

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Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her previous novels Hullaballoo in the Guava Orchard (1998), set in India of her childhood- born in Delhi, The Inheritance of Loss which won the 2006 Booker Prize.  This tale is about Sonia Shah and Sunny Bhatia, whose once-wealthy families connected through their grandparents, are part of the first generation of young Indians to experience migration, travel and life outside a rigid hierarchy, caught in between tradition and modernity, between pleasing parents and pleasing themselves. They fall in love, but are soon parted by self-doubt, pride … Continue reading Life outside a rigid hierarchy, amid tradition and modernity

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Obstacles and indignities that Thatcher encountered

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Charles Moore’s authorized biography of Margaret Thatcher illuminates her early life, rise to power and initial period as prime minister of the woman who transformed Britain and the world in the late twentieth century.  Moore takes us back to Grantham where she lived over her parent grocery shop. As there was no hereditary money, she had to work very hard, even serving at the counter. She knew about perseverance and in attempting to become an MP she lost in two general elections, but did not give up until she secured a safe seat in Finchley. She became the Conservative Party … Continue reading Obstacles and indignities that Thatcher encountered