Page 13 - Books

Suvarnabhumi's legacies

It's not often that current news echoes one's reading of events of more than 800 years ago.

Yesterday's page turners

Fashions change, and it's difficult to pinpoint why many critically acclaimed and commercially successful writers fall off the literary map while others soldier on

Every unhappy family…

Summer in Baden-Baden is a reconstruction of the great and enigmatic Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky's life based on his second wife Anna's diary

Books for our times

Ms Atwood quotes science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin to remind us that freedom 'is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one'

Audio books: Reinventing the art of story-telling in the time of lockdown

Audio books score over kindle and e-books as they permit passive listening and allow you to soak in the stories even as you multi-task at home

Her voice amid lurking danger: Reflections on some feminist crime novels

It goes without saying that not all of the female crime novelists come out as feminists, and that some male writers can do feminist crime novels quite well.

The adventures of Wyndham and Surrender-not

A few years ago, most pleasingly as it has turned out, have come the historical crime novels situated in India

As reality becomes surreal...

The fear is not only about the virus but also how humans respond to the challenge

Biographies and bias

A biographer can never get it even half-right. I mean, the facts may well all be there. But the truth? Now that's a different thing altogether

A unique book discusses Krishna and Vrindavan in contemporary times

Hawley draws a contrast between Krishna in Vrindavan and Krishna in later years, for instance, at the Kurukshetra battlefield advising Arjuna on the ways of the world or even later in Dwaraka

Rural students spend more in books, uniform, stationery than urban: Survey

Among those who were enrolled, drop-out rate was as high as 10 per cent at primary level, 17.5 per cent at upper primary/middle, and 19.8 per cent at secondary level, the survey added.

The best of 2019 from a voracious and eclectic reader's bookshelf

Though the author of Hindutva, savarkar was "hardly a practicing Hindu in the religious sense"

Le Carre's moral compass

The perfect metaphor for the moral ambiguities that Le Carre explores is caught in Smiley's relationship with his wife, Lady Anne

Reading the CEOs

The Right also thinks so, which is why I despise intellectuals from both sides. They think smugness is the perfect substitute for wisdom and the State is the panacea for all ills

A rapid reader for 2019

It's been a fruitful year for scholars. A couple of works of history stand out

John le Carre's is an unremarkable novel about spies in the time of Brexit

This is not a novel of quality. This review is a call for the master

How racism infects science

Racism, and its handmaiden, "race science", have made a stunning comeback in the 21st century

Arundhati, Rushdie make it to BBC's 100 'Novels That Shaped Our World' list

The list has been collated by a panel of writers, curators and critics to select the 100 English language 'Novels That Shaped Our World'

A set of essays imagines a South Asia without jingoistic policy discourses

This book questions disciplinary boundaries that scholars are afraid to transgress even when they know that the impertinence would be rewarding

The case for book publishing monopolies

A monopoly is highly volume dependent and volumes need more variety, not less