Archive | November, 2011

Italy in Books – Reading Challenge 2011
Paperback: 355 pages
Genre: Travel memoir
Publisher: Booksurge Publishing 2008
Source: Sent to me by another blogger Maggie of Normandy Life via Bookmooch
First Sentence : Prologue ‘for almost fifteen years, March has signified not only the coming of spring, but my husband Al’s and my pilgrimage to Italy.’
Quote From Amazon.com : Ms. Husak’s memoir of travels to Italy with her husband will appeal to those who love travel in general and Italy in particular.
My Opinion: Suited to the first time…

There’s little joy left in the kingdom of Caux: the evil King Nightshade rules with terrible tyranny and the law of the land is poison or be poisoned. Worse, eleven-year-old Ivy’s uncle, a famous healer, has disappeared, and Ivy sets out to find him, joined by a young taster named Rowan. But these are corrupt times, and the children—enemies of the realm—are not alone. What exactly do Ivy and Rowan’s pursuers want? Is it Ivy’s prized red bettle, which, unlike any other gemstone in Caux, appears—impossibly—to be hollow? Is it…

            Book Name: Not Totally UnbelievableAuthor: Vibhuti Bhandarkar- Vibhuti Bhandarkar was born and brought up in Mumbai, India. A graphic designer and copywriter by profession, Vibhuti is a passionate and prolific writer. She discovered blogging in 2006 and found it to be a fantastic tool for honing her creative writing skills. A doting mother to an extremely naughty two-year old son, Vibhuti has not let go off her pen and keeps her MoJo intact. Numerous accolades and awards from fellow bloggers and writers from around the…

                       In Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, I didn’t found anything special while watching the movie but as soon as the movie ended, it did something to me. I was lost in the movie for a month and some scenes and the message delivered by the movie still knocks me. There are some works which doesn’t seem wonderful when you actually experience them, but when they are gone, you begin thinking about the effect that the work…

The blurb at the back of the book reads,
Frosted Glass comprises one story cycle consisting of fourteen stories and one poem cycle consisting of twenty-one poems.The stories, set in Kolkata, bring to the fore the darkness lurking in the human psyche and bare the baser instincts. The stories, compactly written and marked by insightful dialogues that raise contemporary issues like man-woman relationships and its strains, morals and ethics, environmental degradation, class inequality, rapid and mass-scale unmindful urbanisation, are devoid of sentimentalization. The result is they remain focused and move…

A young Israeli student who has a fetish for Violent porn comes across a strange video on the Internet. His interest is piqued and forwards the video to his Friend. This inadvertently triggers a motion of events.

Troy King spends his days pushing paper for a government intelligence agency.  Loaded by his personal failures, he is full of life when he comes across the video and CIA’s interest in the video. He owes to get to the bottom of it.

Tech savvy David Arbuthnot moves from England to the US…

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Kalpana Chawla
India’s First Woman Astronaut
Written by Dilip M Salwi
Published by Rupa & Co. under the Charitavali series.
Reviewed by sandhya.
On 1st February, 2003, as the world watched in disbelief, the spacecraft Columbia turned into a fireball and disintegrated in the sky, 16 minutes away from a safe touchdown after a fortnight in space. All 7 astronauts aboard were killed. Among them was 41 year old Kalpana Chawla, born in India on 17th March 1962, and who had joined NASA as a full astronaut in 1998.…

Title: Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi Author: Steve Inskeep Publisher: Penguin Viking ISBN: 9780670086078Genre: Non-Fiction Pages: 284Source: Publisher Rating: 5/5
Instant City chronicles the life of Karachi – of a city in Pakistan that seems to be the only metropolis and yet the dichotomy lies in it being so backward at times, that even its people fail to recognize it. Karachi has been transformed a lot since the India-Pakistan partition and in many ways that most people fail to see. Steve Inskeep brilliantly writes and captures the essence…

                           3 hours of incessant reading and I finished this 176 pages book “As long as I love you.. I will let you hurt me” by Nikhil Mahajan. This is the second book by the author and the growth in Nikhil Mahajan can be seen. He used to write his personal diary. One day a friend of his read it and recommended him to convert it into a book. With no aim of being a writer, he became one…

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by the Irish Novelist, John Boyne is a very moving and heart rendering story of a nine year old boy ‘Bruno’. The story is set in 1942 during the period of World War II.
Bruno lives in Berlin with his parents and sister, Gretel. His father is a high ranking officer in Army. One day, Bruno returns home only to find that things were being packed as they were moving to some other place. Bruno feels devastated by this news and shows his displeasure…