Tag: Books

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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

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Who Knows What: The Paradoxes of human behaviour

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Harvard psychologist, one of the world’s greatest thinkers, and cognitive scientist, Steven Pinker, in When Everyone Knows that Everyone Knows, explores common knowledge- a concept deriving from game theory that describes the state in which not only does everyone knows something, but everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows. This idea according to Pinker “illuminates many enigmas of our public affairs and personal lives” and constitutes “a keystone in understanding the social world”. Pinker shows us how we think about each other’s thoughts, ad infinitum, it sounds impossible, but we do it all the same. This awareness which we … Continue reading Who Knows What: The Paradoxes of human behaviour

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Old spies are more dangerous

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The 9th book in the series behind slow horses, an Apple original series now streaming on Apple TV+. Jackson Lamb and the bad spies of Slough House are caught in a deadly battle between MI5’s secret past and its murky future in this gripping heart breaking and hilarious thriller by Mick Herron, with a degree in English from Balliol College, Oxford. The Slow Horses are MI5 officers who have been put out to grass at Slough House, a drab office building in central London. Foremost among the team of boozers, good for nothing, and walking wounded is their boss, Jackson Lamb, … Continue reading Old spies are more dangerous

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Sex worker who makes a Faustian pact with the tycoon

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A woman meets a man on a train in Copenhagen and agrees to visit him in London, While she sits out a two-week Covid quarantine in his apartment, she begins to tell her story. Years ago and desperate for money, she sold herself to a stranger called T. She becomes his captive, holed up in a swanky apartment for total control of her body and severed from the outside world, in exchange for any material possession she desires. In the bed between them lay a large kitchen knife and the promise of an iconic death. She aborted the treacherous game … Continue reading Sex worker who makes a Faustian pact with the tycoon