Miss Wisey Pants

Safe Harbour  - This story is as cheesy as this title is. "I should've known better" was the thought it left me with. It's a story that lacks depth and imagination whatsoever. It reminds you of an average Indian movie straight from the 90s when mushy happy endings was the key ingredient of a successful family movie.  Its a story of two broken-hearted strangers who come into each other's lives perchance. It doesn't take too long before one becomes the Safe Harbour for the other. Throw a couple pf extremely predictable plot twists into the mix and you have a love story waiting for its climax. Only the wait is too long & dreary. The author, Danielle Steel, seems to be unsure of getting her point across in one go. So she repeats what her characters are going through several times in the story. The feelings of the characters in the story would be reiterated so many times (and sometimes the words to describe those feelings would also be exactly the same) that it...

 "It is hope, not despair, that undoes us all" The Tea Rose - Cliché-ridden, full of implausible co-incidences and popcorn-worthy twists that keep you on edge through & through. Some books are destined to be turned into a movie. The Tea Rose is definitely one of those. The whole time I was reading this book, I kept wondering how is it that it's not a movie yet! And the fact that it's the first of a trilogy and there are two more of its kind definitely makes for a lucrative cheap thrill. Perhaps one day somebody would make a movie based on this book. This is a story of two childhood sweethearts - Joe & Fiona - brutally separated by the sudden & unfortunate turn of events in their lives. While Joe ends up getting tricked into marrying a pampered, rich dame, Fiona moves continents after losing not just the love of her life but her entire family to a merciless bane.  (I had to make it rhyme somehow!)   Our hero grapples with nothing but hard-luck after the tra...

 " We cannot help but be interested in the stories of people that history pushes aside so thoughtlessly." Pachinko is a hauntingly-beautiful tale of a family mired in geopolitical war between (then)Korea & Japan.  It follows four generations of the family seeking to build their own identity in a country that refuses to acknowledge their humanity. Filthy, lazy and criminals became synonyms to a "Korean" for a Japanese. Pachinko, an infamous arcade parlor business, was the only chance a Korean had in Japan to rise to some success. The author, Min Jin Lee, traces the lives of her characters along the historical shifts. The writing is fast paced covering a lot of historical details in the length of the book. For this reason, it was difficult for me to build a connect with the characters, of which the book has many! Except for one or two, the book doesn't dwell on any other characters for long and some seem to disappear unceremoniously, which left me wondering wh...

" We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows." Anxious people was a quick & an easy read. The story doesn't revolve around one person, rather it revolves around one situation where several people find themselves stuck with each other in a crisis that turns out to be a blessing in disguise for all of them.  The book, teetering on the edge of a self-help drama, makes for a soothing read. The characters are well-meaning, good-intentioned human beings who have been dealing with life one day at a time until that one day when all their realisations and epiphanies in life come crashing down on them. I think the author's heart is at the right place and the book even manages to find some depth here & there and if you're a sucker for good quotes like me, you'd find plenty gems worth remembering. For me, however, the book was way too sappy and unre...

  " Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace. " The Bell Jar, to the say the least, was a profound read. It was difficult for me to pick just one quote from the book for the intro. But if I tried to add anymore, I'd simply be rewriting the entire book in this post. Every word, every sentence you read in this book has a purpose. I fail to understand why I didn't chance upon this book sooner.  In this book, Sylvia Plath chronicles the slow descend of her alter-ego, Esther Greenwood, into depression. Esther is successful, smart, talented and beautiful, yet adrift. Somewhere in the book Esther says "I was supposed to be having the time of my life". But she finds herself incapable of doing so. Ironically enough, she isn't sad. She just feels empty, like a shell. She wants to do so many thing...

"Lord our God, hear my prayer, the prayer of my heart. Bless the largeness inside me, no matter how I fear it. Bless my reed pens and my inks. Bless the words I write. May they be beautiful in your sight. May they be visible to eyes not yet born. When I am dust, sing these words over my bones: she was a voice." The Book of Longings is author Sue Monk Kidd's narrative of Jesus's fictional wife Ana. I thought the concept was fascinating! We all know that all the scriptures and holy sermons have always pronounced that Jesus was unmarried. But SMK questions this belief and conjures up a story about Jesus's wife. What if he did have a wife whom he loved and was devoted to? There's no record of Jesus from the age of twelve until the age of thirty. The author has, very artfully, woven a story around this unrecorded period of his life.  The novel envisions Jesus as a human, not as a God. A stonemason who emerges as a social prophet and a Messiah who announced the comi...

"That day, I tell myself that even if I am not getting anything in this life, I will go to school. I will finish my primary and secondary and university schooling and become teacher because I don’t just want to be having any kind voice... I want a louding voice." The title if this book was reason enough for me to read the book.   This is the story of Adunni - 14 year old, precocious, wise beyond her years and driven. Born and raised in a small village, Ikati, in Nigeria, she's always yearned for only one thing in life - education. Something that's beyond her reach because she's a girl. After her mother, who was also her strongest ally, passes away Adunni finds herself unmoored in life. Her father, unscrupulously, marries her off to a man triple her age in exchange for a bride's price that would be enough to see him and his two sons off  comfortably  for months to come. Adunni somehow manages to flee from her husband's torments only to find herself in a lif...

" ...But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy. We can't tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on. " The Midnight Library, for me, was a perfect segue from "Man's search for Meaning". At the risk of sounding absurd, I might go so far as to say that my choice of reading these two books, in that order, felt like a preordained plan by destiny. This book speaks of life at length - the choices we make, the regrets that follow from the choices we do not make and the vicious cycle that sets into motion because of all the could-haves, the should-haves and the would-haves!  'The Midnight Library' revolves around the concept of parallel lives or multiverses...

"It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life - daily and hourly. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answers to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual." I've never felt this unsure about writing a review for a book. I'd go so far as to say that this book is like Bible, it doesn't warrant a review. It's beyond that. I'd rather try to write a testimonial here. For once, I thought of just posting all the beautiful lines from the book verbatim. I think I've dog-eared almost every page of this book. For it had so many things I'd want to go back to over & over again! In his memoir, the author and psychiatrist, Victor E. Frankl, narrates his own experience from the Nazi death camps and talks about man...

"In the world outside of the monastery, nobody looks after you. The ducks swallow the worms, and the foxes kill the ducks, and the men shoot the foxes, and the devil hunts the men." Such is life anyhow. This story just reinforces this over and over again. In my honest opinion, The Pillars of the Earth is a story of Kingsbridge, the cursed town I would've fled early on had I ever had the misfortune of inhabiting it. Our protagonists, however, had the nerves of steel to brave one setback after another and yet stay loyal to the ill-fated land!  Among the protagonists, we have the foolishly naive and ambitious Prior of Kingsbridge, Philip, who is kind-hearted but a righteous leader; Jack, the builder, who's simple-minded and probably the most practical of all the characters in the story. Jack & Philip, both, have a common dream - to build a cathedral in Kingsbridge, which would be the largest cathedral in the whole of England and they dedicate their lives toward fulfi...

"The war would end. We would all go home.  Wouldn't we ?" That's war. An endless cycle of wait, hope & despair. I feel like no matter how much one reads about war, it's never enough. No amount of writing or reading could ever cover the enormity of the inhumanity, the raw emotions that bled free and the desperate longing for families and love that the victims of the wars felt. On top of this, the futility of it all drives one mad with rage. While the crucial questions about the "value" of a war are still unanswered, imagine the plight of those who end up becoming a pawn in the pitiless game of power politics. Salt to the Sea raises those questions in the mind of its readers.  There's a quote from the book that stuck with me long after: " What had human beings become? Did war make us evil or did it just activate an evil already lurking within us? " Every word you read in this book would make you question every thread of your being. It...

"When people were happy they were slow to quarrel and committed fewer crimes. It was in the miserable depths of winter that men strangled their wives and knifed their rivals, and it was in the hungry spring that women stole from their neighbors to feed their children." When I began reading this book, I wondered in my head if I had made a mistake picking this for my next read. The sheer size of the book was a deterrent. I wasn't sure if I'd remember any of the characters introduced early on in the story by the time I reach the second half of the story. To my surprise, my doubts faded away pretty soon.  The Evening & the Morning is a page-turner. I tore through the 900 pages in no time. The protagonists are interesting and full of substance. Edgar the builder, Ragna the Norman nobleman's daughter and Aldred the Ambitious Monk - all three always forge on with persistence and indefatigable spirit even in the face of evil and oppression. Their quick-wittedness and ...

"I fought, I struggled, I obeyed, I compromised, I rebelled, I surrendered, but above all, and at last, I think, I found myself. I found the truth that is me. I lived the life given to me as a woman with all honesty, true to my instincts and faithful to my impulses, eager and yearning, but always true to myself. Always." There are books you don't just read, but books you have long conversations with. Ahalya's Awakening was one such gem. I immersed myself in it, read and re-read chapters to uncover the meanings they so beautifully hid. But most of all, I devoured it!  The book tells us the story of Ahalya, born a Princess, married to be a Rishika, but destined to be every bit a human first. As a young girl, she had to fight with her family for her right to seek education and not simply be married off to the best suitor meant to be her destiny. She stood her ground even when all the odds were pitted against her. As she grew older, she kept evolving and surprising hersel...