Miss Wisey Pants

"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...

  "She remembered Nana saying once that each snowflake was a sigh heaved by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. That all the sighs drifted up the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke into tiny pieces that fell silently on the people below. As a reminder of how people like us suffer, she'd said. How quietly we endure all that falls upon us." Endurance is what comes to the mind when one reads A Thousand Splendid Suns. It's a gut-wrenching account of two women connected by an obstinate thread of fate, violence and destiny. Although they are years apart, they find each other thrown together in the merciless rut of destiny where time stands still but sufferings continue to grow.  Mariam was once a wide-eyed little girl full of naive hopes & dreams. Cared for by a woeful mother, she lived from one day to the other desperate to see her father. A father for whom paying weekly visits to his illegitimate daughter was enough to fulfil his fatherly duties towards her ...

  "Wasn’t that the point of the book? For women to realise, We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I’d thought." The Help was nothing like I had imagined it to be. This title was sitting on my want-to-read list since forever. And now I'm reeling with the effects of its hangover. This book was an absolute delight. It got me hooked so much so that I stopped caring where my phone was, started pushing everything else just to get a few more minutes with the book and forgot all about my sleep schedule for the next few days! The Help is a story of three women - Aibileen, Mini & Skeeter - cautious but strong. The three of them set off on a mission to make the voices of the black women of Jackson, Mississippi heard, albeit anonymously. These black women, who were hired as help, raised white babies like their own, cooked food for white families with love, tended to their sick with warmth and took care of their homes with utmost sincerity. And ...

  " Love makes a place in your life, it makes a place for itself in your bed. Invisibly, it makes a place in your body, rerouting all your blood vessels, throbbing right alongside your heart. When it’s gone, nothing is whole again ." I'm not a fan of love stories and I did not quite know what exactly I was getting into when I picked up this book, but once I started reading it I didn't really have a choice. Have you ever had a friend (or even an acquaintance for that matter) who has a habit of bringing up their childhood friends, whom you've never ever heard of before, by their first name in conversations with you? And there you are left wondering whether this was some person you were supposed to know until finally your friend understands your predicament & unapologetically decides to give you some context! This book is like that friend. Right from page one it starts talking to you...about everything under the sun as if you've known them for long. At first,...

"Isolation offered its own form of companionship: the reliable silence of her rooms, the steadfast tranquility of the evenings. The promise that she would find things where she put them, that there would be no interruption, no surprise. It greeted her at the end of each day and lay still with her at night." That's pretty much the tone of this novel. The Lowland happened to me by accident - one I have no qualms about. While vacating my beloved flat in Gurugram last month, I chanced upon this novel on an abandoned bookshelf in the living room I shared with my flatmates. Since there was nobody to claim it, I decided to make it mine!  The Lowland is a story of an ordinary Bengali family torn by the Naxal movement back in the 1960s when life, supposedly, used to be simpler. It narrates the story of two brothers who, inseparable as kids, grew up to be polar opposites of each other. While the elder one, Subhash, moves to the US to build his own identity, the younger one, Udayan,...

“ When I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don’t you do the same ?” That's Marie Laure for you. One of our protagonists. She's plainly a victim of her circumstances. At a young age, she loses her eyesight. Her father is her world. He's a gentle soul whose world revolves around "ma cherie" as he fondly calls his daughter. He builds for her a safe haven, one where her eyesight can't be a deterrence to her.  All the light we cannot see tells us the story of a father & a daughter, a brother & a sister and two friends, all of these relations afflicted by one single tyrant - the war. It's a story of love, trust & loyalty. Of hope amid darkness and belief amid hopelessness. Above all of this, it's a story of survival.  It's the offset of World War - II, David LeBlanc is forced to flee his home in Paris to safeguard h...

I had been trying to get my hands on this book for a couple of years now. The first time I bought the kindle version of this book, I felt betrayed when I found out that it was actually the comic version of the book. It's hard copy is obviously easier to find but is quite expensive for some reason. Perhaps cause it turned out to be a movie blockbuster. Then I struck gold (or so I thought) when I finally bought the right version recently. I even flaunted this on my insta story and couldn't wait to gobble it all up! The story, like any other decent suspense thriller, is quite riveting. There was, however, quite a lot of beating around the bush introducing all the main characters of the plot, their background stories, their personalities and what have you! I found myself getting a bit impatient wondering where is the mystery in all this. But when all the introductions were done and the protagonists' prowess had been successfully displayed, the heart of the matter finally emerge...