Gopal's bookshelf: all

Gopal's bookshelf: all en-US Wed, 09 Apr 2025 04:18:11 -0700 60 Gopal's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Lost Children Archive 40245130
A mother and father set out with their two children, a boy and a girl, driving from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. Their destination: Apacheria, the place the Apaches once called home.

Why Apaches? asks the ten-year-old son. Because they were the last of something, answers his father.

In their car, they play games and sing along to music. But on the radio, there is news about an "immigration crisis": thousands of kids trying to cross the southwestern border into the United States, but getting detained--or lost in the desert along the way.

As the family drives--through Virginia to Tennessee, across Oklahoma and Texas--we sense they are on the brink of a crisis of their own. A fissure is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet. They are led, inexorably, to a grand, harrowing adventure--both in the desert landscape and within the chambers of their own imaginations.

Told through several compelling voices, blending texts, sounds, and images, Lost Children Archive is an astonishing feat of literary virtuosity. It is a richly engaging story of how we document our experiences, and how we remember the things that matter to us the most. With urgency and empathy, it takes us deep into the lives of one remarkable family as it probes the nature of justice and equality today.]]> 385 Valeria Luiselli 0525520619 Gopal 0 3.75 2019 Lost Children Archive

author: Valeria Luiselli
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/09
shelves: currently-reading, audio-books
review:

]]> The Sharp Knife of Memory 23258329 Now in English, The Sharp Knife of Memory is a searing memoir that will resonate worldwide as it explores the nature of memory and gives a firsthand account of the arrival of women’s political independence in India. That Indian women often face incredible suffering is known, but that they can fight back and emerge winners is exemplified in the life of Koteswaramma.]]> 160 Kondapalli Koteswaramma 9383074884 Gopal 0 to-read 4.39 2012 The Sharp Knife of Memory

author: Kondapalli Koteswaramma
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference]]> 210319458 While acknowledging the potential of some AI, such as ChatGPT, AI Snake Oil uncovers rampant misleading claims about the capabilities of AI and describes the serious harms AI is already causing in how it's being built, marketed, and used in areas such as education, medicine, hiring, banking, insurance, and criminal justice. The book explains the crucial differences between types of AI, why organizations are falling for AI snake oil, why AI can't fix social media, why AI isn't an existential risk, and why we should be far more worried about what people will do with AI than about anything AI will do on its own. The book also warns of the dangers of a world where AI continues to be controlled by largely unaccountable big tech companies.
By revealing AI's limits and real risks, AI Snake Oil will help you make better decisions about whether and how to use AI at work and home.]]> 360 Arvind Narayanan 069124913X Gopal 0 to-read 3.87 2024 AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference

AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference

author: Arvind Narayanan
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown Indian]]> 216567502
Researched for close to a decade, in this book, we meet an unforgettable cast of a rickshaw driver in Chandni Chowk who ends up tragically dead in a terrorist blast; a doctor who gets arrested for pre-natal sex determination; a gau rakshak whose sister elopes with Syeda’s son; and policemen who delight in beating young Muslim men.

In the end, things comes to a grotesque full circle for Syeda. Her life is upturned for the umpteenth time during the Delhi riots of 2020. But displacement, tragedy and hardships are the things she is used to �� being poor and Muslim and a woman. Written with empathy and deep insight, this book is a portal to a harsh world hidden away from elite Indians. It is the story of untold millions and a searing account of urban life in New India.]]> 369 Neha Dixit 9353455030 Gopal 5 4.64 The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown Indian

The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown Indian

author: Neha Dixit
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.64
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/08
date added: 2025/03/08
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review:

]]> I, Krishnadevaraya 34833783 Ra. Ki.’s hero is like any other young man his age—his romantic attachments overshadowing everything else in his life—until his minister and mentor, Appaji, reminds him that his duty ought to take precedence over his love life.
Coming to the throne under difficult circumstances, Krishnadevaraya had to wage a relentless battle to preserve the Vijayanagar empire. Circumstances prevented him from marrying the woman he loved or pursuing literature, his true passion. Overcoming all of this, Krishnadevaraya went on to become the greatest emperor of the Vijayanagar empire.
I, Krishnadevaraya takes you into the inner world of the emperor, providing a vivid picture of his thinking, his insecurities and his decision-making. Ably translated by Suganthy Krishnamachari, I, Krishnadevaraya is a fascinating look at one of India’s greatest kings.]]> 373 Ra. Ki. Rangarajan Gopal 0 to-read 3.92 2011

author: Ra. Ki. Rangarajan
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Knowing 75315416 480 Tanya Talaga 1443467502 Gopal 4 audio-books 4.52 2024

author: Tanya Talaga
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/18
date added: 2025/02/18
shelves: audio-books
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People]]> 199534697 A surprising and beautiful meditation on the color blue—and its fascinating role in Black history and culture—from National Book Award winner Imani Perry

Throughout history, the concept of Blackness has been remarkably intertwined with another color: blue. In daily life, it is evoked in countless ways. Blue skies and blue water offer hope for that which lies beyond the current conditions. But blue is also the color of deep melancholy and heartache, echoing Louis Armstrong’s question, “What did I do to be so Black and blue?�� In this book, celebrated author Imani Perry uses the world’s favorite color as a springboard for a riveting emotional, cultural, and spiritual journey—an examination of race and Blackness that transcends politics or ideology.

Perry traces both blue and Blackness from their earliest roots to their many embodiments of contemporary culture, drawing deeply from her own life as well as art and history: The dyed indigo cloths of West Africa that were traded for human life in the 16th century. The mixture of awe and aversion in the old-fashioned characterization of dark-skinned people as “Blue Black.�� The fundamentally American art form of blues music, sitting at the crossroads of pain and pleasure. The blue flowers Perry plants to honor a loved one gone too soon.

Poignant, spellbinding, and utterly original, Black in Blues is a brilliant new work that could only have come from the mind of one of our greatest writers and thinkers. Attuned to the harrowing and the sublime aspects of the human experience, it is every bit as vivid, rich, and striking as blue itself.]]> 256 Imani Perry 0062977393 Gopal 5 4.34 2025 Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People

Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People

author: Imani Perry
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/08
date added: 2025/02/08
shelves:
review:

]]> Tongueless 201477373 A gripping psychological thriller that sheds light on the current political situation in Hong Kong.

Tongueless follows two rival teachers at a secondary school in Hong Kong who are instructed to switch from teaching in Cantonese to Mandarin—or lose their jobs. Apolitical and focusing on surviving and thriving in their professional environment, Wai and Ling each approach the challenge differently. Wai, awkward and unpopular, becomes obsessed with Mandarin learning; Ling, knowing how to please her superiors and colleagues, thinks she can tactfully dodge the Mandarin challenge by deploying her social savviness. Wai eventually crumples under the pressure and dies by suicide, leaving her colleague Ling to face seismic political and cultural change alone as she considers how far she will go to survive such a ruthlessly competitive work environment.

Sharp, darkly humorous, and politically pointed, Tongueless presciently engages with important issues facing Hong Kong today during which so much of the city’s uniqueness—especially its language—is at risk of being erased.]]> 285 Lau Yee-Wa Gopal 0 currently-reading 3.70 2024 Tongueless

author: Lau Yee-Wa
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/06
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Feared: Conversations with Eleven Political Prisoners]]> 223442908 "The first night in jail is reputed to be the hardest. After that, you learn how to survive, though many prisoners carry lifelong scars."

The Feared brings together interviews conducted by Neeta Kolhatkar with eleven political prisoners, and in some cases, their loved ones, in which she highlights the interviewees�� everyday lives within the walls of multiple prisons across India. In doing so, she calls urgent attention to the grave injustices meted out to the thousands of undertrials dissent in the political life of India today.

During long discussions, sometimes taking place over multiple meetings, Kolhatkar unearths personal anecdotes from the time her interviewees were incarcerated, bringing into focus the human face of prison inmates, while also detailing the wretched conditions relating to space, hygiene, medical attention, and food that they experienced.

Apart from being an urgent call to action for prison reforms, The Feared is thus also an account of hope and strength, narrating unique stories of survival and solidarity, and the unexpected bonds and relationships formed in prison.]]> 270 Neeta Kolhatkar 8198200398 Gopal 5 4.75 The Feared: Conversations with Eleven Political Prisoners

The Feared: Conversations with Eleven Political Prisoners

author: Neeta Kolhatkar
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.75
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/01
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Rama Bhima Soma: Cultural Investigations into Modern Karnataka]]> 223317403 About the Book
CULTURAL ENQUIRY AND LITERARY EXPLORATION, A HISTORY OF POLITICAL ACTIVISM AND OF SOCIAL AND CULTURAL MOVEMENTS—THIS IS A COMPLEX, NUANCED AND OPEN-MINDED INVESTIGATION INTO MODERN KARNATAKA.
Karnataka is one of India’s most diverse states, as rich in literary and cultural traditions as it is in democratic struggles and political churns. The twentieth century witnessed the birth of a modern Kannada renaissance, accompanied by the emergence of a powerful social conscience. One young man’s desire to explore this vibrant historical backyard, born out of a feeling of being linguistically unmoored, compounded by worries over an increasingly opaque political direction, leads to an ambitious—no, audacious—attempt to unpack the region’s social and cultural histories.
Rama Bhima Soma is an enterprise of translation and rediscovery, packed with stories and conversations. The life and times of legends like Kuvempu and Shivaram Karanth; the fall of Socialism and the rise of the Hindu Right; the intellectual ruminations of U.R. Ananthamurthy, D.R. Nagaraj and M.M. Kalburgi; the wildly popular television serials of T.N. Seetharam and the community-centred one-woman theatre shows of Du Saraswathi; a brief history of Naxalism in Karnataka and glimpses of other complicated legacies of the 1970s�� Left—the book explores a dizzyingly wide sweep of Karnataka’s contemporary history, seeking, above all, to forge new connections and begin fresh conversations.
Marshalling a diverse range of literary and scholarly resources, framed through biographical sketches and immersive reportage, Srikar Raghavan’s genre-bending work of narrative non-fiction reanimates some pivotal moments in the making of modern Karnataka. The result is a sizzling dish of ideas rescued from the deep freeze of historical amnesia. ‌‌‌‌‌‌‌��

About the Author
Born in Bangalore and brought up in Mysore, Srikar wrote this book while living in a small village named Parkala in South Canara. Something of that inward trajectory has permeated these pages, he believes. An inveterate bookworm, Srikar fancies himself more of a reader than a writer. He also loves to trek, travel and fiddle around on a guitar.]]> 677 Srikar Raghavan Gopal 3 4.33 Rama Bhima Soma: Cultural Investigations into Modern Karnataka

Rama Bhima Soma: Cultural Investigations into Modern Karnataka

author: Srikar Raghavan
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.33
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/31
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Other Rivers: A Chinese Education]]> 199347135
More than twenty years after teaching English to China’s first boom generation at a small college in Sichuan Province, Peter Hessler returned to Sichuan to teach the next generation. At the same time, Hessler and his wife enrolled their twin daughters in a local state-run elementary school, where they were the only Westerners in a student body of about two thousand. Over the years, Hessler had kept in close contact with more than a hundred of his former students, who were now in their forties. By reconnecting with these individuals—members of China’s “Reform generation�� —while teaching current undergrads, Hessler was able to gain a unique perspective on China's incredible transformation over the past quarter-century.

In the late 1990s, almost all of Hessler's students were the first member of their extended families to become educated. Their parents were subsistence farmers who could offer little guidance as their children entered a brand-new world. By 2019, when Hessler arrived at Sichuan University, he found a very different China and a new kind of student—an only child whose schooling was the object of intense focus from a much more ambitious and sophisticated cohort of parents. Hessler’s new students have a sense of irony about the regime but mostly navigate its restrictions with equanimity, and embrace the astonishing new opportunities China’s boom affords. But the pressures of this system of extreme “meritocracy�� at scale can be gruesome, even for much younger children, including his own daughters, who give him and his wife an intimate view into the experience at their local school.

In Peter Hessler’s hands, China’s education system is the perfect vehicle for examining what’s happened to the country, where it’s going, and what we can learn from it, for good and ill. At a time when anti-Chinese rhetoric in America has grown blunter and uglier, Other Rivers is a tremendous, indeed an essential gift, a work of enormous human empathy that rejects cheap stereotypes and shows us China from the inside out and the bottom up, using as a measuring stick this most universally relatable set of experiences. As both a window onto China and a distant mirror onto America and its own education system, Other Rivers is a classic, a book of tremendous value and compelling human interest.]]> 464 Peter Hessler 0593655338 Gopal 5 city-stories 4.44 2024 Other Rivers: A Chinese Education

author: Peter Hessler
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/19
date added: 2025/01/19
shelves: city-stories
review:

]]> <![CDATA[I Am on the Hit List: A Journalist's Murder and the Rise of Autocracy in India]]> 201750923
When Gauri Lankesh, an outspoken journalist in the South Indian city of Bangalore, was assassinated in September 2017 outside her home, it wasn’t just a loss to her close-knit community of writers and activists—the shock reverberated nationwide, making headlines and sparking mass protests. Why was she targeted, and who was behind it? Following the case to its stunning, unsettling conclusion, Rollo Romig uncovers a world of political extremists, fearless writers, organized crime, and shadowy religious groups.

I Am on the Hit List is an epic narrative that moves between a historic booksellers�� district and brand-new high rises funded by IT wealth, to a secretive ashram in Goa and the kitchens of an international vegetarian restaurant chain, boldly interrogating whether we can break the cycle of polarization and bloodshed inspiring political murder across the globe.]]> 400 Rollo Romig 0143135287 Gopal 5 indian-fiction
The author seems to have interviewed hundreds of people and sifted through books, reports, police records, and FIRs to piece together a compelling narrative. Along the way, he also explores a few seemingly unrelated stories, the legend of St. Thomas, the doubting apostle, and the infamous Saravana Bhavan murder case. While these detours may feel out of place at first, they ultimately help illuminate the deeper ways in which we, as Indians, think, act, and inflict violence on each other.

What emerges is not just the unravelling of a single case (and related cases), a very balanced biography of Gauri Lankesh that is a revealing portrait of Karnataka politics over the past 50 years, the press, ideologies, allegiances, and the ever-present undercurrent of violence.

A must-read.

]]> 4.26 2024 I Am on the Hit List: A Journalist's Murder and the Rise of Autocracy in India

I Am on the Hit List: A Journalist's Murder and the Rise of Autocracy in India

author: Rollo Romig
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/14
date added: 2025/01/14
shelves: indian-fiction
review:
Making sense of political violence and murders in India is no easy task. While all politics is inherently local, it's a complex Chowchow bath - a messy blend of village, district, state, national, and even international ripples that shape events on the ground. Perhaps that's why it took an outsider, someone from another continent, to patiently peel back the layers of this intricate story and reach the core of this particular police case.

The author seems to have interviewed hundreds of people and sifted through books, reports, police records, and FIRs to piece together a compelling narrative. Along the way, he also explores a few seemingly unrelated stories, the legend of St. Thomas, the doubting apostle, and the infamous Saravana Bhavan murder case. While these detours may feel out of place at first, they ultimately help illuminate the deeper ways in which we, as Indians, think, act, and inflict violence on each other.

What emerges is not just the unravelling of a single case (and related cases), a very balanced biography of Gauri Lankesh that is a revealing portrait of Karnataka politics over the past 50 years, the press, ideologies, allegiances, and the ever-present undercurrent of violence.

A must-read.

]]> <![CDATA[What the Chicken Knows: A New Appreciation of the World's Most Familiar Bird]]> 208145504 A charming and eye-opening exploration of the special relationship between humans and chickens from Sy Montgomery, “one of our finest chroniclers of the natural world�� (The New York Times).

For more than two decades, Sy Montgomery—whose The Soul of an Octopus was a National Book Award finalist—has kept a flock of chickens in her backyard. Each chicken has an individual personality (outgoing or shy, loud or quiet, reckless or cautious) and connects with Sy in her own way.

In this short, delightful book, Sy takes us inside the flock and reveals all the things that make chickens such remarkable only hours after leaving the egg, they are able to walk, run, and peck; relationships are important to them and the average chicken can recognize more than one hundred other chickens; they remember the past and anticipate the future; and they communicate specific information through at least twenty-four distinct calls. Visitors to her home are astonished by all this, but for Sy what’s more astonishing is how little most people know about chickens, especially considering there are about twenty percent more chickens on earth than people.

With a winning combination of personal narrative and science, What the Chicken Knows is exactly the kind of book that has made Sy Montgomery such a beloved and popular author.]]> 91 Sy Montgomery Gopal 0 to-read 3.84 2024 What the Chicken Knows: A New Appreciation of the World's Most Familiar Bird

What the Chicken Knows: A New Appreciation of the World's Most Familiar Bird

author: Sy Montgomery
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Agony of Eros 34848070 An argument that love requires the courage to accept self-negation for the sake of discovering the Other.

Byung-Chul Han is one of the most widely read philosophers in Europe today, a member of the new generation of German thinkers that includes Markus Gabriel and Armen Avanessian. In The Agony of Eros, a bestseller in Germany, Han considers the threat to love and desire in today's society. For Han, love requires the courage to accept self-negation for the sake of discovering the Other. In a world of fetishized individualism and technologically mediated social interaction, it is the Other that is eradicated, not the self. In today's increasingly narcissistic society, we have come to look for love and desire within the “inferno of the same.��

Han offers a survey of the threats to Eros, drawing on a wide range of sources—Lars von Trier's film Melancholia, Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, Fifty Shades of Grey, Michel Foucault (providing a scathing critique of Foucault's valorization of power), Martin Buber, Hegel, Baudrillard, Flaubert, Barthes, Plato, and others. Han considers the “pornographication�� of society, and shows how pornography profanes eros; addresses capitalism's leveling of essential differences; and discusses the politics of eros in today's “burnout society.�� To be dead to love, Han argues, is to be dead to thought itself.

Concise in its expression but unsparing in its insight, The Agony of Eros is an important and provocative entry in Han's ongoing analysis of contemporary society.

This remarkable essay, an intellectual experience of the first order, affords one of the best ways to gain full awareness of and join in one of the most pressing struggles of the day: the defense, that is to say—as Rimbaud desired it—the “reinvention�� of love.—from the foreword by Alain Badiou]]> 76 Byung-Chul Han Gopal 3 3.99 2017 The Agony of Eros

author: Byung-Chul Han
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/09
date added: 2025/01/09
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power]]> 37133029 Exploring how neoliberalism has discovered the productive force of the psyche

Byung-Chul Han, a star of German philosophy, continues his passionate critique of neoliberalism, trenchantly describing a regime of technological domination that, in contrast to Foucault’s biopower, has discovered the productive force of the psyche. In the course of discussing all the facets of neoliberal psychopolitics fueling our contemporary crisis of freedom, Han elaborates an analytical framework that provides an original theory of Big Data and a lucid phenomenology of emotion. But this provocative essay proposes counter models too, presenting a wealth of ideas and surprising alternatives at every turn.

]]> 96 Byung-Chul Han 1784785784 Gopal 5 audio-books 4.10 2014 Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power

author: Byung-Chul Han
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/08
date added: 2025/01/08
shelves: audio-books
review:

]]> The Silk Road: A New History 13687103 In The Silk Road, Valerie Hansen describes the remarkable archeological finds that revolutionize our understanding of these trade routes. For centuries, key records remained hidden-sometimes deliberately buried by bureaucrats for safe keeping. But the sands of the Taklamakan Desert have revealed fascinating material, sometimes preserved by illiterate locals who recycled official documents to make insoles for shoes or garments for the dead. Hansen explores seven oases along the road, from Xi'an to Samarkand, where merchants, envoys, pilgrims, and travelers mixed in cosmopolitan communities, tolerant of religions from Buddhism to Zoroastrianism. There was no single, continuous road, but a chain of markets that traded between east and west. China and the Roman Empire had very little direct trade. China's main partners were the peoples of modern-day Iran, whose tombs in China reveal much about their Zoroastrian beliefs. Silk was not the most important good on the road; paper, invented in China before Julius Caesar was born, had a bigger impact in Europe, while metals, spices, and glass were just as important as silk. Perhaps most significant of all was the road's transmission of ideas, technologies, and artistic motifs.
The Silk Road is a fascinating story of archeological discovery, cultural transmission, and the intricate chains across Central Asia and China.]]> 320 Valerie Hansen 0195159314 Gopal 4 audio-books 3.75 2012 The Silk Road: A New History

author: Valerie Hansen
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/05
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves: audio-books
review:
I picked this book because it had a chapter called Dunhuang and Mogao Caves, which I had recently visited and loved. Also, I love cities and life in urban centres, and this provided a different way to look at this old trade route. While the book seems to be part of some ongoing debate in the Western world among academics about the nature and size of the Silk Road, for a regular reader from Asia, it is a decent introduction to the places.
]]> <![CDATA[Malayali Memorial | മലയാളി മെമ്മോറിയല്‍]]> 63339911 120 Unni R 9354828965 Gopal 4 malayalam 3.24 2022

author: Unni R
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.24
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/06
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves: malayalam
review:

]]> <![CDATA[How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding]]> 60747385 ��
“Mr. Green has written a book of rigorous—and refreshing—honesty.”—Tunku Varadarajan, Wall Street Journal
��
The nineteenth century saw European empires build vast transport networks to maximize their profits from trade, and it saw Christian missionaries spread printing across Asia to bring Bibles to the colonized. The unintended consequence was an Asian communications the maritime public sphere expanded from Istanbul to Yokohama. From all corners of the continent, curious individuals confronted the challenges of studying each other’s cultures by using the infrastructure of empire for their own exploratory ends. Whether in Japanese or Persian, Bengali or Arabic, they wrote travelogues, histories, and phrasebooks to chart the vastly different regions that European geographers labeled “Asia.��
��
Yet comprehension does not always keep pace with connection. Far from flowing smoothly, inter-Asian understanding faced obstacles of many kinds, especially on a landmass with so many scripts and languages. Here is the dramatic story of cross-cultural knowledge on the world’s largest continent, exposing the roots of enduring fractures in Asian unity.]]> 472 Nile Green 030025704X Gopal 4 audio-books 3.61 2022 How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding

How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding

author: Nile Green
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/30
date added: 2024/12/30
shelves: audio-books
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity]]> 217482349 **A Financial Times What to Read in 2025 pick**

'A brave and magnificent book, and a vital as elegant as it is witty, as erudite as it is wise, and as stylish as it is scholarly. Manu Pillai is fast becoming one of India's most accomplished and impressively wide-ranging historians' William Dalrymple

When European missionaries arrived in India in the sixteenth century, they entered a world both fascinating and bewildering. Hinduism, as they saw it, was a pagan a worship of devils and monsters by a people who burned women alive, performed outlandish rites and fed children to crocodiles. But it quickly became clear that Hindu ‘idolatry�� was far more layered and complex than European stereotypes allowed, surprisingly even sharing certain impulses with Christianity.

Nonetheless, missionaries became a threatening force as European power grew in India. Western ways of thinking gained further ascendancy during the British while interest in Hindu thought influenced Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire in Europe, Orientalism and colonial rule pressed Hindus to reimagine their religion. In fact, in resisting foreign authority, they often adopted the missionaries�� own tools and strategies. It is this encounter, Manu S. Pillai argues, that has given Hinduism its present shape, also contributing to the birth of an aggressive Hindu nationalism.

Gods, Guns and Missionaries surveys these remarkable dynamics with an arresting cast of characters �� maharajahs, poets, gun-wielding revolutionaries, politicians, polemicists, philosophers and clergymen. Lucid, ambitious, and provocative, it is at once a political history, an examination of the mutual impact of Hindu culture and Christianity upon each other, and a study of the forces that have prepared the ground for politics in India today. Turning away from simplistic ideas on religious evolution and European imperialism, the past as it appears here is more complicated �� and infinitely richer �� than previous narratives allow.]]> 859 Manu S. Pillai 0141993502 Gopal 3 4.07 Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity

Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity

author: Manu S. Pillai
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.07
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/25
date added: 2024/12/25
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden: Two Sisters Separated by China's Civil War]]> 58999178
Jun and Hong were scions of a once great southern Chinese family. Each other’s best friend, they grew up in the 1930s during the final days of Old China before the tumult of the twentieth century brought political revolution, violence, and a fractured national identity. By a quirk of timing,��at the end of the Chinese Civil War, Jun ended up on an island under Nationalist control, and then settled in Taiwan, married a Nationalist general, and lived among fellow exiles at odds with everything the new Communist regime stood for on the mainland. Hong found herself an ocean away on the mainland, forced to publicly disavow both her own family background and her sister’s decision to abandon the party. A doctor by training, to overcome the suspicion created by her family circumstances, Hong endured two waves of “re-education�� and internal exile, forced to work in some of the most desperately poor, remote areas of the country.

Ambitious, determined, and resourceful, both women faced morally fraught decisions as they forged careers and families in the midst of political and social upheaval. Jun established one of U.S.-allied Taiwan’s most important trading companies. Hong became one of the most celebrated doctors in China, appearing on national media and honored for her dedication to medicine. Niece to both sisters,��linguist and East Asian scholar Zhuqing��Li tells her aunts�� story for the first time, honoring her family’s history with sympathy and grace. Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden is a window into the lives of women in twentieth-century China, a time of traumatic change and unparalleled resilience. In this riveting and deeply personal account, Li confronts the��bitter political rivals of��mainland China and Taiwan with elegance and unique insight, while celebrating her aunts�� remarkable legacies.]]> 368 Zhuqing Li 0393541770 Gopal 5 audio-books 4.17 2022 Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden: Two Sisters Separated by China's Civil War

Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden: Two Sisters Separated by China's Civil War

author: Zhuqing Li
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/24
date added: 2024/12/24
shelves: audio-books
review:

]]> <![CDATA[ഭാസ്കരപട്ടേലരു�� എന്റ�� ജീവിതവും [Bhaskarapattelarum Ente Jeevithavum]]]> 7761875 56 സക്കറി�� Gopal 5 3.91 1988 ഭാസ്കരപട്ടേലരും എന്റെ ജീവിതവും [Bhaskarapattelarum Ente Jeevithavum]

ഭാസ്കരപട്ടേലരും എന്റെ ജീവിതവും [Bhaskarapattelarum Ente Jeevithavum]

author: സക്കറി��
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1988
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/02
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves:
review:

]]> Orienting: An Indian in Japan 58691736 287 Pallavi Aiyar 9354227872 Gopal 5 4.06

author: Pallavi Aiyar
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.06
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/01
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Watershed: How We Destroyed India's Water and How We Can Save It]]> 61125908 0 Mridula Ramesh 9391028683 Gopal 4 4.45

Watershed: How We Destroyed India's Water and How We Can Save It

author: Mridula Ramesh
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.45
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/30
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves:
review:
The subcontinent is large and it’s not an easy task to dig deep into its complex water story. However, this book tries and succeeds to give a great introduction across a vast geographical region. Makes you want to know more and borrow into several rabbit holes this book exposes.
]]> The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao 195448999 Mumbai, in the early 90s. The Ram Janmabhoomi movement is at its peak, and the Babri Masjid has just fallen. Decades later, in a corner of the metropolis, a retired postman living alone in a dilapidated room tries to recall those months of madness and how they changed everyone he knew.
This is the story of Rameshwar Shinde and Ravinarayan Kumar, a young woman called Janaki, and the neighbours they live with, in the shadows of towers. It is a story of families torn apart by bigotry, an unmissable retelling of the epic Ramayana set at a time when blood mixed with the grime of Mumbai's streets. A tale more pertinent than ever, in a country once again teetering on the edge.]]> 320 Lindsay Pereira 9357082476 Gopal 5 city-stories 3.82 The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao

author: Lindsay Pereira
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.82
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/01
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves: city-stories
review:

]]> James 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

Brimming with nuanced humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim's agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first-century American literature.

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett Gopal 5 audio-books 4.46 2024 James

author: Percival Everett
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/01
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves: audio-books
review:

]]> <![CDATA[ആവിലായില�� സൂര്യോദയ�� | Aavilayile Sooryodayam]]> 23524192
ജീവിതത്തില്�� തന്നെത്തേടിയെത്തിയതെല്ലാ�� സ്വീകരിക്കാന്�� മട�� കാട്ടാതിരുന്�� ഗോവിന്ദന്റ�� മകന്�� പ്രഭാകരന്�� വളര്‍ന്നത് പൈതൃകത്തിന്റ�� പാപഭാര�� പേറുന്�� മനസ്സുമായാണ്. മന്ത്രിപുത്രനെന്�� നിലയിലുള്ള സുഖസൗകര്യങ്ങള്�� ത്യജിച്ച�� ഉടുതുണ�� മാത്രം ധരിച്ച�� അയാള്�� ദേശാടനത്തിനിറങ്ങ��. എന്നാല്�� വിധിയുടെ കുളമ്പടിയൊച്�� അയാളെയും പിന്തുടരുന്നുണ്ടായിരുന്ന��.

എം.മുകുന്ദന്റ�� അതിപ്രശസ്തമാ�� നോവല്�� ആവിലായില�� സൂര്യോദയ�� പറയുന്നത�� ആവിലായില�� രണ്ട�� തലമുറകളുടെ പാപത്തിന്റെയും പാപബോധത്തിന്റെയു�� കഥയാണ്. ജനിച്ച�� വളര്‍ന്ന ചുറ്റുപാടുകളും കണ്ട കാഴ്ചകളു�� മയ്യഴിപ്പുഴയുട�� തീരങ്ങളിലു�� ദൈവത്തിന്റ�� വികൃതികളിലുമെന്ന പോലെ ഇതിലും കഥാപരിസരമാകുന്നു.]]> 204 M. Mukundan 8171305873 Gopal 5 3.41 1970 ആവിലായിലെ സൂര്യോദയം | Aavilayile Sooryodayam

ആവിലായിലെ സൂര്യോദയം | Aavilayile Sooryodayam

author: M. Mukundan
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.41
book published: 1970
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/01
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[India in the Persianate Age, 1000��1765]]> 44128461 ��
Richard M. Eaton tells this extraordinary story with relish and originality, as he traces the rise of Persianate culture, a many-faceted transregional world connected by ever-widening networks across much of Asia. Introduced to India in the eleventh century by dynasties based in eastern Afghanistan, this culture would become progressively indigenized in the time of the great Mughals (sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries). Eaton brilliantly elaborates the complex encounter between India's Sanskrit culture—an equally rich and transregional complex that continued to flourish and grow throughout this period—and Persian culture, which helped shape the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughal Empire, and a host of regional states. This long-term process of cultural interaction is profoundly reflected in the languages, literatures, cuisines, attires, religions, styles of rulership and warfare, science, art, music, and architecture—and more—of South Asia.

]]> 512 Richard M. Eaton 0520325125 Gopal 5 4.27 2019 India in the Persianate Age, 1000–1765

author: Richard M. Eaton
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/11
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[This Land We Call Home: The Story of a Family, Caste, Conversions and Modern India]]> 210623360 This Land We Call Home, Nusrat F. Jafri traces the roots of her nomadic forebears, who belonged to one such ‘criminal�� tribe, the Bhantus from Rajasthan, through the lens of caste and religious conversions over the last century.

This affecting memoir explores religious and multicultural identities and delves into the profound concepts of nation-building and belonging. Nusrat’s family’s conversion to Christianity as a response to Brahmanical gatekeeping highlights their struggle for acceptance.

The family found acceptance in the church, alongside a sense of community, theology, songs and carnivals, and quality education for the children in missionary schools. Parallelly, we see the family’s experiences during Gandhi’s return in 1915, the Partition, the two World Wars, the Emergency and the prime ministers�� assassinations.

In a way, this is a story like and unlike the stories all of us carry within us; the inherited weight of who we are and where we come from, our tiny little freedoms and our everyday struggles and, mostly, the intricate jumble of our collective ancestry. Nusrat pays homages to her foremothers, the first feminists, and her forefathers, the ones who tried hard to fit into a caste society only to be spat out, and eventually chose alternative faiths in pursuit of acceptance.]]> 320 Nusrat F. Jafri 9357082972 Gopal 4 4.51 This Land We Call Home: The Story of a Family, Caste, Conversions and Modern India

This Land We Call Home: The Story of a Family, Caste, Conversions and Modern India

author: Nusrat F. Jafri
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.51
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/01
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves:
review:

]]> Butter 200776812 The cult Japanese bestseller about a female gourmet cook and serial killer and the journalist intent on cracking her case, inspired by a true story.

There are two things that I can simply not tolerate: feminists and margarine.

Gourmet cook Manako Kajii sits in Tokyo Detention Center convicted of the serial murders of lonely businessmen, who she is said to have seduced with her delicious home cooking. The case has captured the nation’s imagination but Kajii refuses to speak with the press, entertaining no visitors. That is, until journalist Rika Machida writes a letter asking for her recipe for beef stew and Kajii can’t resist writing back.

Rika, the only woman in her news office, works late each night, rarely cooking more than ramen. As the visits unfold between her and the steely Kajii, they are closer to a masterclass in food than journalistic research. Rika hopes this gastronomic exchange will help her soften Kajii but it seems that she might be the one changing. With each meal she eats, something is awakening in her body, might she and Kaji have more in common than she once thought?

Inspired by the real case of the convicted con woman and serial killer, "The Konkatsu Killer," Asako Yuzuki’s Butter is a vivid, unsettling exploration of misogyny, obsession, romance and the transgressive pleasures of food in Japan.]]> 464 Asako Yuzuki 0063236400 Gopal 5 favorites 3.50 2017 Butter

author: Asako Yuzuki
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/01
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> The Machine is Learning 51063911 Longlisted for the JCB Prize for Literature
Top 10 fiction books of 2020, The Hindu

Saransh works at a life insurance company, as part of the Special Projects Group (SPG). Their current project is the development of an Artificial Intelligence system that will leave 552 branch-level employees redundant overnight. Because of site-specific customizations, however, the system needs to collect information from the company's various branches. Thus begins a cycle in which Saransh travels across the country, interviewing the very people that his machine will replace soon. Meanwhile, Saransh's conscientious ex-journalist girlfriend Jyoti repeatedly questions his complicity in the impending destruction of hundreds of lives.

The Machine is Learning is a novel about twenty-first-century workplaces, love and the impact of technology in all of our lives. It interrogates a world order that accommodates guilt but offers no truly ethical course correction.]]> 256 Tanuj Solanki 9389109299 Gopal 4 3.97 2020 The Machine is Learning

author: Tanuj Solanki
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/01
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves:
review:

]]> ಋಷ್ಯಶೃಂಗ [Rushyashrunga] 55118162 ಕೆಲವ�� ಕಲ್ಪಗಳ ಹಿಂದ�� ನಿನ್�� ಬಗ್ಗ�� ಓದಿದ ನೆನಪ��. ನಿನ್�� ತಲೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಕೊಂಬಿತ್ತೆಂದು ಒಂದು ಕತ��. ಜಿಂಕೆಗ�� ಹುಟ್ಟಿದ್ದಕ್ಕ�� ಹೀಗೆಂದ�� ವ್ಯಾಖ್ಯೆ. ಬರಕ್ಕೀಡಾಗಿ ಕಂಗೆಟ್�� ನಾಡಿಗೆ ಮಳ�� ತಂದೆಯೆಂದ�� ಉಪಾಖ್ಯಾನ. ಜಗತ್‌ಸೃಷ್ಟಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ಹೆಣ್ಣೆಂಬ ವಿಲಿಂಗಿಯುಂಟೆಂದ�� ನೀನು ಕಂಡಿದ್ದಿಲ್ಲವೆಂದು ಇನ್ನ�� ಒಂದು ಕತ��. ದಶರಥ�� ಪುತ್ರಕಾಮೇಷ್ಠಿಯ ಅಧ್ವರ್ಯು ನೀನಾಗಿದ್ದೆಯೆಂದ�� ಇನ್ನೆಲ್ಲ�� ಉಲ್ಲೇಖ. ಶೃಂಗೇರ��-ಕಿಗ್ಗಗ�� ಸ್ಥಳಪುರಾಣದಲ್ಲಿ ನಿನ್�� ಪ್ರಸ್ತಾಪ... ಹೀಗೆ, ಹತ್ತಾರ�� ಕಾಲದೇಶಗಳ ಪುರಾಣದಲ್ಲಿ ಅಷ್ಟಿಷ್ಟ�� ಓದರಿತಿದ್�� ನಿನ್ನನ್ನ�� ಹೀಗಿನ್ನೊಂದಾಗ�� ಕಂಡೇನೆಂದುಕೊಂಡಿರಲಿಲ್ಲ. ನಿಜಕ್ಕ�� ಬೆರಗಾಯಿತ��.
ಮರುಳ ನೀನು. ಹುಚ್ಚಾಪಟ್ಟ��. ಎಣಿಕೆಗ�� ಸಿಗದವನ��. ನಿಲುಕಿಗೆಟುಕದವನ��. ಇಕ�� ಇಕ��- ಇನ್ನೇನ�� ಹಿಡಿದೇಬಿಟ್ಟೇನೆಂದುಕೊಂಡರ�� ಮೀನಿನಂತೆ... ಅಲ್ಲಲ್�� ಸೊಳ್ಳೆಯಂತೆ ನುಣುಚಿಕೊಂಡವನ��. ಏನೆಂದು ತಿಳಿಯದ, ತಿಳಿಸಿಯೂ ತಿಳಿಯಗೊಡ��- ತಿಳಿಯಾಗದ ಕೊಳದಂತಿರುವ, �� ನಿನ್�� ಕತೆಯೇನ�� ಮಾರಾ��?
ಮರುಳಿಗ�� ಮೆಥಡುಂಟೆಂದ�� ಅಂದಕೊಂಡವನು ನಾನು. ಹಾಗಂದುಕೊಂಡ ಮೂಢನ�� ನಾನಿರಬಹುದು. ನಿನ್�� ಹೊಸಕತೆಯನ್ನ�� ಓದಿದಾಗ ನಿನಗೊಂದು ನಿಗದಿಯ ಮೆಥಡ�� ಇಲ್ಲವೆಂದ�� ಅನಿಸಿಬಿಟ್ಟಿತಲ್��, ಗುರೂ, ಇದಕ್ಕೇನನ್ನಲಿ? ಕಂಗೆಟ್ಟೆ. ಕೆಲವೊಮ್ಮ�� ಕಂಗಾಲಾದೆ. ಇಷ್ಟಿದ್ದ��, ನಾನೆಣಿಸಿ�� ನಿಗದ�� ನಿಖರತೆಯೆಲ್�� ನಿನ್ನಂಥವರಿಗಲ್ಲವೆಂಬುದ��, ಕಡೆಗ��, ನನಗೆ ನಾನೇ ಅಂದುಕೊಂಡ ಮೆಥಡ��. ಆದರೂ, ರಿಷಿ... ನಿನಗೊಂದು ಬಂ�� ಬೇಕಿತ್ತು. ಘಟನೆಯಿಂದ ಘಟನೆಗೆ, ಪಾತ್ರದಿಂ�� ಪಾತ್ರಕ್ಕ��, ಕಥನದಿಂ�� ಕಥನಕ್ಕ�� ಲಂಘಿಸು�� ನಿನಗೊಂದು ಒಟ್ಟಾದ ಬಂ�� ಬೇಕಿತ್ತು. ಒನ್ನಮೂನೆ ಒಗ್ಗಟ್ಟು. ಅದ�� ಮಿಸ್ಸಾಯಿತೆಂದರೆ ನಿನ್�� ನಿಜದ ಕತೆಯೇನೆಂಬುದು ನನ್ನನ್ನು ಕಾಡು�� ಶಾಶ್ವತಸತ್ಯವೇನೋ.. ಅಥವಾ, ಶಾಶ್ವತ`ಸದ್ಯ'ವೇ?
ಇರಲಿ. �� ಬೆಂಗಳೂರು ನಿನ್ನನ್ನ�� ಕಾಡಿರುವಷ್ಟ��- ಬಹುಶ�� ಇನ್ನ�� ಹೆಚ್ಚು, ನನ್ನನ್ನು ಕೆಣಕಿರುವುದ�� ಹೌದು. ಆದರೆ, ಇನ್ನ�� ಮದುವೆಗಣಿಯಾಗದ ಅವಸ್ಥೆಯಲ್ಲಿರುವ ನೀನು, ನಿನ್ನಂಥವರು ಕಾಣು�� ಶಹ��, ಶಾಹರಿಕತೆ ನನ್ನಲ್ಲಿ ಬೆರಗ�� ಹುಟ್ಟಿಸುತ್ತದ��. ಉದ್ಯೋಗದೊಡನ�� ದುಡ್ಡು ಕೊಡು�� ಊರ�� ಜೀವನಕ್ಕೊಂದ�� ಕ್ರಮವನ್ನ�� ಕೊಡುತ್ತದೆನ್ನುವ ನಿನ್�� ಮಾತಿಗೆ ಸಲಾಮ��. ಇಷ್ಟಿದ್ದ��, `ಇದ�� ಅರ್ಥವಾಗದ ಯಕ್ಷಿಣ��' ಅಂತನ್ನುವುದ�� ನಿನ್ನದ�� ಇನ್ನೊಂದು ಮಾತು. ಇಲ್ಲಿನ ಬದುಕನ್ನು ಜೇನುಗೂಡು, ರೇಶ್ಮೆಗೂಡುಗಳಂತ�� ಗ್ರಹಿಸಿರುವುದ�� ಇಷ್ಟವಾ�� ಇನ್ನೊಂದು ಸಂಗತ��. ಏನ�� ಇರಲಿ, ನಿನ್�� ಗ್ರಹಿಕ�� ನಿನ್�� ಕಾಣ್ಕೆ. ಆದರೆ, ನಿನ್�� ನೋಟವನ್ನು ಸಾರ್ವತ್ರಿಕ-ಸಾರ್ವಕಾಲಿಕ ಸಂಗತಿಯೆಂಬಂತೆ ಬನ್ನಣೆಗಿಡುತ್ತೀಯಲ್ಲ, ಅದ�� ಇಷ್ಟವಗದಿದ್ದರ��, ನಿನ್�� ಎದೆಗಾರಿಕೆಗ�� ಜೈಯಿ. ವಯಸ್ಸಿಗೆ ತಕ್ಕ ಲಂಪಟತನಕ್ಕೆ ಚೌಕಟ್ಟ�� ಹಾಕು�� ನಿನ್�� ಹುಂಬತನಕ್ಕೆ ತುಸು ಇರುಸುಮುರುಸಾಯಿತಾದರೂ ಇದ�� ನಿನ್�� ಮೆಥಡೆಂದು ಸುಮ್ಮನಾಗಿದ್ದೇನ��.
ಇನ್ನ��, ನಿನ್�� ಋಷ್ಯಶೃಂಗ-ತೆ�� ಬಗ್ಗ�� ಕಡೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಹೇಳಿದ್ದು ಮನಸ್ಸು ನಾಟಿತು. ಬಹುಶ��, ಇದ�� ನಮ್ಮೆಲ್ಲ�� ಋಷ್ಯಶೃಂಗ-ತೆಯೂ ಹೌದು. `ವಿ ಸ್ಟಾರ್ಟ್ ಕನ್ಸೂಮಿಂಗ್ ವಾಟೆವರ�� ಕಮ್ಸ�� ಇನ�� ಅವರ್ ವೇ...' ಅನ್ನುವ ಮಾತಿ�� ಹಿಂದೆಯ��, ಪರಾವರ್ತಿ�� ರಿಫ್ಲೆಕ್ಸಿನಂತೆ ಅನಿಸಿದ್ದ��- `ವಾಟ್ ಇಫ�� ಇಟ�� ಕನ್ಸೂಮ್ಸ�� ದಿ ಸೆಲ್ಫ್?' ಅನ್ನೋದ��. ಹೋಪ್ ದಟ�� ವೋಂಟ�� ಹ್ಯಾಪನ��. ಅಂಡ್, ಯೂ ವೋಂಟ�� ಲೆಟ್ ದಟ�� ಹ್ಯಾಪನ��.
ಒಂದಷ್ಟ�� ಚಿಯರುಗಳು.
- ನಾಗರಾಜ ವಸ್ತಾರೆ]]> 136 Harish Hagalavadi 9384908606 Gopal 4 3.42 ಋಷ್ಯಶೃಂಗ [Rushyashrunga]

author: Harish Hagalavadi
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.42
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/02
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Braided River: A Journey along the Brahmaputra]]> 57827286
In The Braided River, journalist Samrat Choudhury sets out to follow its braided course from the edge of Tibet where it enters India down to where it meets the Ganga at a spot marked by the biggest red-light district in Bangladesh. Along the way, he meets suspicious Indian spies, gets packed off on the back of a cement truck by soldiers, visits a shelter home for baby rhino and elephant orphans in Kaziranga, and hops from river island to riverside town meeting the locals. The tales of these encounters spice up a story that weaves in the history of the emergence of the border between India and China in Arunachal Pradesh, the formation of the Assamese identity �� a matter of great contemporary relevance owing to the National Register of Citizens and the Citizenship (Amendment) Act �� and the ecological challenges posed by proposed dams.

This is a genre-bending book that touches upon several hot-button issues �� environmental, military, and political �� as it blends travel, memoir, and history with the present.

According to the author Samrat Choudhury, ‘This book is primarily a travelogue following the Brahmaputra, from the McMahon Line in Arunachal Pradesh at the edge of Tibet on the disputed India-China border down to its confluence with the Ganga near the fabled ghat of Goalando in Bangladesh. It is a journey through places, times, and issues along the way…sometimes serious, sometimes hilarious, occasionally adventurous, and often illuminating.’]]> 424 Samrat Choudhury 9390327598 Gopal 4 travel 4.12 The Braided River: A Journey along the Brahmaputra

The Braided River: A Journey along the Brahmaputra

author: Samrat Choudhury
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.12
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/01
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves: travel
review:

]]> <![CDATA[In Two Chinas: Memoirs of a Diplomat]]> 7001314 0 K.M. Panikkar 0830500138 Gopal 5 4.33

author: K.M. Panikkar
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.33
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/06
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves:
review:

]]> The Hungry Ghosts 12846205 ��
The novel centres around Shivan Rassiah, the beloved grandson, who is of mixed Tamil and Sinhalese lineage, and who also—to his grandmother’s dismay—grows from beautiful boy to striking gay man. As the novel opens in the present day, Shivan, now living in Canada, is preparing to travel back to Colombo, Sri Lanka, to rescue his elderly and ailing grandmother, to remove her from the home—now fallen into disrepair—that is her pride, and bring her to Toronto to live our her final days. But throughout the night and into the early morning hours of his departure, Shivan grapples with his own insatiable hunger and is haunted by unrelenting ghosts of his own creation.
��
The Hungry Ghosts is a beautifully written, dazzling story of family, wealth and the long reach of the past. It shows how racial, political and sexual differences can tear apart both a country and the human heart—not just once, but many times, until the ghosts are fed and freed.]]> 384 Shyam Selvadurai 0385670664 Gopal 5 favorites 3.83 2012 The Hungry Ghosts

author: Shyam Selvadurai
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/20
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves: favorites
review:

]]> Cochin: Fame and Fables 217297597 New book 103 M K Das 8119626478 Gopal 4 city-stories 4.50

author: M K Das
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.50
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/25
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves: city-stories
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Final Farewell: Understanding the Last Rites and Rituals of India's Major Faiths]]> 199665181
With compassion and sensitivity, Minakshi Dewan explores the many ways in which some of the country's major faiths treat the this includes avoidance of human remains, believed by some to be spiritual pollutants; the worship of bodies at the pyre; professional mourners hired to wail loudly for the dead; and musicians devoted to celebrating life at funerals.

Based on thorough research, keen observation, personal interviews, The Final Farewell is a reminder to honour those who came before, and to work towards a better world to leave behind.]]> 354 Minakshi Dewan 9356994765 Gopal 4 4.27 The Final Farewell: Understanding the Last Rites and Rituals of India's Major Faiths

The Final Farewell: Understanding the Last Rites and Rituals of India's Major Faiths

author: Minakshi Dewan
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.27
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/14
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves:
review:

]]> I Am Not Sidney Poitier 6080748

An irresistible comic novel from the master storyteller Percival Everett, and an irreverent take on race, class, and identity in America

I was, in life, to be a gambler, a risk-taker, a swashbuckler, a knight. I accepted, then and there, my place in the world. I was a fighter of windmills. I was a chaser of whales. I was Not Sidney Poitier.

Not Sidney Poitier is an amiable young man in an absurd country. The sudden death of his mother orphans him at age eleven, leaving him with an unfortunate name, an uncanny resemblance to the famous actor, and, perhaps more fortunate, a staggering number of shares in the Turner Broadcasting Corporation.

Percival Everett’s hilarious new novel follows Not Sidney’s tumultuous life, as the social hierarchy scrambles to balance his skin color with his fabulous wealth. Maturing under the less-than watchful eye of his adopted foster father, Ted Turner, Not gets arrested in rural Georgia for driving while black, sparks a dinnertable explosion at the home of his manipulative girlfriend, and sleuths a murder case in Smut Eye, Alabama, all while navigating the recurrent communication problem: “What’s your name?�� a kid would ask. “Not Sidney,�� I would say. “Okay, then what is it?��

]]> 234 Percival Everett 1555975275 Gopal 5 audio-books 3.97 2009 I Am Not Sidney Poitier

author: Percival Everett
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/13
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves: audio-books
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900]]> 327488 "information age." A provocative history, The Shock of the Old provides an entirely new way of looking historically at the relationship between invention and innovation.]]> 288 David Edgerton 0195322835 Gopal 4 3.53 2006 The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900

The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900

author: David Edgerton
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/09
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Blue Machine: How the Ocean Works]]> 123979539 446 Helen Czerski 1324006714 Gopal 5 science 4.17 2023

author: Helen Czerski
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/14
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves: science
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Sacred Sins: Devadasis in Contemporary India]]> 198298801
In 2008, journalist Arun Ezhuthachan decided to investigate whether the banned dance bars of Mangaluru would continue illegally. What he stumbled upon, however, was an intricate web of old beliefs and new-age oppression - the modern devadasi. Young girls were dedicated to temples, only to end up as mistresses of upper-caste men and abandoned once they were older.

Speaking to locals, NGOs and the devadasis themselves, Arun began to follow the whispered clues to these forsaken women in all corners of India. In rural Karnataka, he meets devadasis clinging to their faith despite intense exploitation; in Kolkata, daughters sold into sex work by their families find no way out; in Vrindavan, ostracized widows congregate to serve God, only to encounter devious predators; and in Puri, the last surviving devadasi reminisces about her time serving Lord Jagannath.

Revealing how the oppression of women continues to be veiled by religion, this explosive journalistic account brings to light an India ridden with casteism, patriarchy and abject poverty. The heart-wrenching stories and shocking revelations of Sacred Sins will leave you dismayed, appalled and blazing for change.]]> 215 Arun Ezhuthachan 9357312587 Gopal 4 travel 4.47 Sacred Sins: Devadasis in Contemporary India

Sacred Sins: Devadasis in Contemporary India

author: Arun Ezhuthachan
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.47
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/14
date added: 2024/12/19
shelves: travel
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality]]> 61192833 A groundbreaking exploration of gendered oppression—its origins, its histories, our attempts to understand it, and our efforts to combat it

For centuries, societies have treated male domination as natural to the human species. But how would our understanding of gender inequality—our imagined past and contested present—look if we didn’t assume that men have always ruled over women, if we saw inequality as something more fragile that has had to be constantly remade and reasserted?

In The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality, award-winning science journalist Angela Saini explores the roots of what we call patriarchy, uncovering a complex history of how it first became embedded in societies and spread across the globe from prehistory into the present. She travels to the world’s earliest known human settlements, analyzes the latest research findings in science and archaeology, and traces cultural and political histories from the Americas to Asia.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, philosophers, historians, anthropologists, and feminists began to actively question what patriarchy meant as part of the attempt to understand the origins of inequality. In our own time, despite the pushback against sexism, abuse, and discrimination, even revolutionary efforts to bring about equality have often ended in failure and backlash. But The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality is a hopeful book—one that reveals a multiplicity to human arrangements that undercuts the old grand narratives and exposes male supremacy as no more, and no less, than an ever-shifting element in systems of control.]]> 256 Angela Saini 0807014540 Gopal 0 currently-reading 3.96 2023 The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality

The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality

author: Angela Saini
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/01
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Upon a Sleepless Isle 52319117 Dense Green forests in Yala, white-sand coasts in Trincomalee, azure waters off the South Coast, Anuradhapura's ancient temples, and cricket. Civil war, political assassinations, internally displaced communities, industrial-scale corruption. All are Sri Lanka. As are smug bureaucrats, nosy neighbours, and stray dogs with serious axes to grind. Through the eyes of Andrew Fidel Fernando, cricket writer par excellence, both a local and a tourist in his home country, Sri Lanka comes alive as he hurtles down hills in Kandy, breathes in the history at the rock fortress of Sigiriya, grapples with the aftermath of war in Jaffna, and has himself evicted from restaurants near Galle. Weaving through all manner of villages, paddy fields, mountains, jungles and marshlands, and pausing for the pests at
grimy guesthouses and the vacationers of luxury hotels, Fernando has the time for every genre of person and wildlife in this chaotic, exquisite, frustrating, bewitching, tumultuous and intoxicating land. Hilariously witty yet wistfully sombre, Upon a Sleepless Isle is the story of a country and a people caught between long historical traditions and global capitalism, resulting in this ingenious paradise.

]]> 195 Andrew Fidel Fernando 1529036070 Gopal 5 4.26 2019 Upon a Sleepless Isle

author: Andrew Fidel Fernando
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/29
date added: 2024/11/29
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste]]> 214241855 About the Book

Challenging Caste reads the violence at Bhima Koregaon as a clash between two worldviews �� one striving to flatten the social hierarchy, the other justifying and perpetuating it. The book deep dives into the songs and the play performed at the Elgar Parishad, controversially critiquing Brahminism and Prime Minister Narendra Modi; furnishes archival records in support of the claim that Govind Gopal, a Mahar, and not Bapuji Buva and Padmavati, a Maratha couple, was linked to the cremation of Chhatrapati Sambhaji; provides a rare glimpse of the world of hate over which Sambhaji Bhide presides; depicts the impact James Laine’s book had on Maharashtra’s anti-Brahmin consciousness; and recreates the scenes as Bhima Koregaon erupted on 1 January 2018.

Following the script laid out by Milind Ekbote and a right-wing think tank, the Pune police and the National Investigating Agency blamed the violence at Bhima Koregaon on a conspiracy hatched between sixteen people�� anti-caste, civil and human rights activists, intellectuals and lawyers �� and the Maoists. This book rips apart the Maoist conspiracy theory and the Urban Naxal narrative. It points out the ironies underlying the State’s charges against the sixteen, and the flimsiness of the evidence that is said to have been planted on their hacked computers. The conspiracy against the sixteen that inflicted untold miseries on their families is retold here in their voices. An unequal social order, the author argues, can only produce a democracy with broken wings �� and a political culture enabling the elite to prey upon the weak.

About the Author

Ajaz Ashraf became an independent journalist a dozen years ago, after tiring of the angularities of media outlets. He writes Monday Blues, a column for mid-day newspaper. His first book was The Hour Before Dawn, a novel not read too widely.]]> 494 Ajaz Ashraf Gopal 5 4.67 Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste

author: Ajaz Ashraf
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.67
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/22
date added: 2024/11/22
shelves:
review:

]]> Brotherless Night 61435475 'A heart-breaking exploration of a family fractured by civil war. This beautiful, nuanced novel follows a young doctor caught within conflicting ideologies as she tries to save lives. I couldn't put this book down' BRIT BENNETT, bestselling author of THE VANISHING HALF

Sixteen-year-old Sashi wants to become a doctor. But over the next decade, as a vicious civil war subsumes Sri Lanka, her dream takes her on a different path as she watches those around her, including her four beloved brothers and their best friend, get swept up in violent political ideologies and their consequences. She must ask herself: is it possible for anyone to move through life without doing harm?

"With immense compassion and deep moral complexity, V. V. Ganeshananthan brings us an achingly moving portrait of individual and societal grief. "I want you to understand," the narrator of BROTHERLESS NIGHT insists, and by the end of this blazingly brilliant novel, we do: that in a world full of turmoil, human connections and shared stories can teach us how - and as importantly, why - to survive" CELESTE NG, bestselling author of LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE

"Stunningly great" Curtis Sittenfeld, bestselling author of RODHAM, via Twitter ]]> 339 V.V. Ganeshananthan 0241997682 Gopal 5 historical-novels 4.54 2023 Brotherless Night

author: V.V. Ganeshananthan
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.54
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/19
date added: 2024/11/19
shelves: historical-novels
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Headstrap: Legends and Lore from the Climbing Sherpas of Darjeeling]]> 210441689
Over the course of a decade, authors Nandini Purandare and Deepa Balsavar conducted a series of interviews with Sherpas from Darjeeling, as well as their family members, descendants, friends, and contemporary climbers. Headstrap weaves a vivid tapestry of this particular Sherpa community, giving them the recognition in mountaineering literature that they deserve.]]> 1 Nandini Purandare Gopal 5 5.00 Headstrap: Legends and Lore from the Climbing Sherpas of Darjeeling

Headstrap: Legends and Lore from the Climbing Sherpas of Darjeeling

author: Nandini Purandare
name: Gopal
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/16
date added: 2024/11/13
shelves:
review:
Fascinating stories that would've been lost forever, preserved in this wonderful book.
]]> Mother India: A Novel 214627952 FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE AWARD-WINNING LEILA

Mother India is the story of two young people living in contemporary Delhi. Plodding away to make a decent living despite a middling education, Mayank is employed in a right-wing content creator's dingy basement studio. Nisha, recently moved to the city from her small town in the hills, works as a salesgirl for expensive Japanese chocolate in an upscale mall.

When Mayank discovers Nisha beaming off her Instagram like a beacon, he is smitten, and the video clip he devises for his studio ends up having significant consequences for them both.

Sparkling and unexpected, Prayaag Akbar's new novel brilliantly captures what it means to be young and alive in today's India.

'Powerful' - Vivek Shanbhag

'Brilliant' - Avni Doshi]]> 144 Prayaag Akbar 9362138123 Gopal 4 3.67 Mother India: A Novel

author: Prayaag Akbar
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.67
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/10
date added: 2024/11/10
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Cooking of Books: A Literary Memoir]]> 195610206 It is not often that an author and his editor strike up a relationship which survives forty years of epistolary exchanges and intellectual sparring.

The strangely enduring and occasionally fractious friendship which developed between the famously outspoken historian Ramachandra Guha and his reticent editor Rukun Advani is the subject of this quite eccentric and thoroughly compelling literary memoir.

It started in Delhi in the early 1980s, when Guha was an unpublished PhD scholar, and Advani a greenhorn editor with Oxford University Press. It blossomed through the 1990s, when Guha grew into a pioneering historian of the environment and of cricket, while also writing his pathbreaking biography of Verrier Elwin. Over these years Advani was Guha’s most constant confidant, his most reliable reader. He encouraged him to craft and refine the literary style for which Guha became internationally known �� narrative histories which have made vast areas of scholarship popular and accessible.

Four decades later, though he no longer publishes his books, Advani remains Guha’s most trusted literary adviser. Yet they also disagree ferociously on politics, human nature, and the shape of their commitment to India. They usually make up �� because it just wouldn’t do to allow such an odd relationship to die.

Built around letters and emails between an outgoing and occasionally combative scholar and a reclusive editor prone to private outbursts of savage sarcasm, this book is never short of the kind of wit, humour, and drollery that has been strangled by contemporary political correctness.]]> 273 Ramachandra Guha 0008670161 Gopal 4 4.26 The Cooking of Books: A Literary Memoir

author: Ramachandra Guha
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.26
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/16
date added: 2024/09/16
shelves:
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]]> Gopallapuram 19841038 144 கி. ராஜநாராயணன�� Gopal 5 4.00

author: கி. ராஜநாராயணன��
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2014/07/27
date added: 2024/08/11
shelves:
review:

]]> In Plain Sight 58118486
Told from the perspective of rookie crime reporter, Rohan, In Plain Sight is a police procedural set in the terrifyingly surreal world of crime and retribution inhabited by the Mumbai police.]]> 264 Mohamed Thaver 935422637X Gopal 5 3.54

author: Mohamed Thaver
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.54
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/10
date added: 2024/08/10
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Indian Ocean in World History (New Oxford World History)]]> 19454300 258 Edward A. Alpers 0199929947 Gopal 5 4.15 2013

The Indian Ocean in World History (New Oxford World History)

author: Edward A. Alpers
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/01
date added: 2024/07/01
shelves:
review:

]]> Puritan Girl, Mohawk Girl 34227721 In this riveting historical fiction narrative, National Book Award Finalist John Demos shares the story of a young Puritan girl and her life-changing experience with the Mohawk people.

Inspired by Demos’s award-winning novel The Unredeemed Captive, Puritan Girl, Mohawk Girl will captivate a young audience, providing a Native American perspective rather than the Western one typically taught in the classroom.
��
As the armed conflicts between the English colonies in North America and the French settlements raged in the 1700s, a young Puritan girl, Eunice Williams, is kidnapped by Mohawk people and taken to Canada. She is adopted into a new family, a new culture, and a new set of traditions that will define her life. As Eunice spends her days learning the Mohawk language and the roles of women and girls in the community, she gains a deeper understanding of her Mohawk family.�� Although her father and brother try to persuade Eunice to return to Massachusetts, she ultimately chooses to remain with her Mohawk family and settlement.
��
Puritan Girl, Mohawk Girl offers a compelling and rich lesson that is sure to enchant young readers and those who want to deepen their understanding of Native American history.
��]]> 160 John Putnam Demos 1419726048 Gopal 4 audio-books 3.39 2017 Puritan Girl, Mohawk Girl

author: John Putnam Demos
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/05/31
shelves: audio-books
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Maya Nagari: Bombay-Mumbai: A City in Stories]]> 205972369
In the twenty-one stories of this collection, there is the city that labours in the mills and streets, and the city that sips and nibbles in fivestar lounges; the city of Ganapati and Haji Malang and the Virgin Mary; the city that is a sea of people and speaks at least a dozen languages. There are stories translated from Marathi, Urdu, Gujarati, Tamil, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, and stories written originally in English. Among the writers are legends and new voices—Baburao Bagul, Ismat Chughtai, Pu La Deshpande, Urmila Pawar, Mohan Rakesh, Saadat Hasan Manto, Ambai, Jayant Kaikini, Bhupen Khakhar, Cyrus Mistry, Vilas Sarang, Tejaswini ApteRahm and Anuradha Kumar.

Maya Nagari is a majestic book on a majestic city. It will be read and cherished for years.]]> 420 Shanta Gokhale 9354475329 Gopal 5 4.07 Maya Nagari: Bombay-Mumbai: A City in Stories

Maya Nagari: Bombay-Mumbai: A City in Stories

author: Shanta Gokhale
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.07
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/08
date added: 2024/05/30
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This is a very interesting and nuanced selection of stories across languages and time that paints a unique, lived history of the city. A must read if you love Mumbai/Bombay.
]]> Crowfall 18591736
Crowfall unobtrusively follows an eventful year in the lives of a group of friends—a journalist, a teacher, a musician and three painters—in Mumbai. Like the cycle of seasons, love and violence and heartbreak and joy pursue each other. And it is friendship that provides uncompromising solace amidst the ravening pressures of life today in the big city.

Steeped in sensuous detail, Crowfall takes in art and identity, music and communal madness, and the clash of the old and the new to etch a finely nuanced portrait of contemporary Mumbai.

‘Similes, metaphors and extended descriptions . . . hit the mark with fine precision�� —Navshakti]]> 280 Shanta Gokhale 0670086940 Gopal 5 3.87 2013 Crowfall

author: Shanta Gokhale
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/30
date added: 2024/05/30
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No on understands Mumbaikars and Mumbai like Shanta. What a beautifully written book!
]]> <![CDATA[The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class]]> 17802860
In The Tourist ―now with a new introduction framing it as part of a broader contemporary social and cultural analysis―the author examines notions of authenticity, high and low culture, and the construction of social reality around tourism.]]> 280 Dean MacCannell 0520280008 Gopal 0 to-read 3.88 1976 The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class

The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class

author: Dean MacCannell
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1976
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Elegance of the Hedgehog 2967752
We are in the center of Paris, in an elegant apartment building inhabited by bourgeois families. Renée, the concierge, is witness to the lavish but vacuous lives of her numerous employers. Outwardly she conforms to every stereotype of the concierge: fat, cantankerous, addicted to television. Yet, unbeknownst to her employers, Renée is a cultured autodidact who adores art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. With humor and intelligence she scrutinizes the lives of the building's tenants, who for their part are barely aware of her existence.

Then there's Paloma, a twelve-year-old genius. She is the daughter of a tedious parliamentarian, a talented and startlingly lucid child who has decided to end her life on the sixteenth of June, her thirteenth birthday. Until then she will continue behaving as everyone expects her to behave: a mediocre pre-teen high on adolescent subculture, a good but not an outstanding student, an obedient if obstinate daughter.

Paloma and Renée hide both their true talents and their finest qualities from a world they suspect cannot or will not appreciate them. They discover their kindred souls when a wealthy Japanese man named Ozu arrives in the building. Only he is able to gain Paloma's trust and to see through Renée's timeworn disguise to the secret that haunts her. This is a moving, funny, triumphant novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us.]]> 325 Muriel Barbery 1933372605 Gopal 0 to-read 3.76 2006 The Elegance of the Hedgehog

author: Muriel Barbery
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Trees 56269278 309 Percival Everett 164445064X Gopal 4 4.06 2021

author: Percival Everett
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/01
date added: 2024/04/08
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[Boy in the Twilight: Stories of the Hidden China]]> 20758125 Brothers and To Live: thirteen audacious stories that resonate with the beauty, grittiness, and exquisite irony of everyday life in China.
��
Yu Hua’s narrative gifts, populist voice, and inimitable wit have made him one of the most celebrated and best-selling writers in China. These flawlessly crafted stories—unflinching in their honesty, yet balanced with humor and compassion—take us into the small towns and dirt roads that are home to the people who make China run.
��
In the title story, a shopkeeper confronts a child thief and punishes him without mercy. “Victory�� shows a young couple shaken by the husband’s infidelity, scrambling to stake claims to the components of their shared life. “Sweltering Summer�� centers on an awkward young man who shrewdly uses the perks of his government position to court two women at once. Other tales show, by turns, two poor factory workers who spoil their only son, a gang of peasants who bully the village orphan, and a spectacular fistfight outside a refinery bathhouse. With sharp language and a keen eye, Yu Hua explores the line between cruelty and warmth on which modern China is—precariously, joyfully—balanced. Taken together, these stories form a timely snapshot of a nation lit with the deep feeling and ready humor that characterize its people. Already a sensation in Asia, certain to win recognition around the world, Yu Hua, in Boy in the Twilight, showcases the peerless gifts of a writer at the top of his form.]]> 208 Yu Hua 0804171025 Gopal 4 3.77 Boy in the Twilight: Stories of the Hidden China

Boy in the Twilight: Stories of the Hidden China

author: Yu Hua
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.77
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2017/07/09
date added: 2024/02/10
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]]> GOA - A Daughter's Story 1783037 Book by Maria Aurora Couto Maria Aurora Couto 0670049840 Gopal 4 3.43 2004

author: Maria Aurora Couto
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at: 2012/11/25
date added: 2024/01/30
shelves:
review:
Brilliant stories from Goa! A people's history of Goa.
]]> <![CDATA[What a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make]]> 127084539
What a Mushroom Lives For pushes today’s mushroom renaissance in compelling new directions. For centuries, Western science has promoted a human- and animal-centric framework of what counts as action, agency, movement, and behavior. But, as Michael Hathaway shows, the world-making capacities of mushrooms radically challenge this orthodoxy by revealing the lively dynamism of all forms of life.

The book tells the fascinating story of one particularly prized species, the matsutake, and the astonishing ways it is silently yet powerfully shaping worlds, from the Tibetan plateau to the mushrooms�� final destination in Japan. Many Tibetan and Yi people have dedicated their lives to picking and selling this mushroom―a delicacy that drives a multibillion-dollar global trade network and that still grows only in the wild, despite scientists�� intensive efforts to cultivate it in urban labs. But this is far from a simple story of humans exploiting a passive, edible commodity. Rather, the book reveals the complex, symbiotic ways that mushrooms, plants, humans, and other animals interact. It explores how the world looks to the mushrooms, as well as to the people who have grown rich harvesting them.

A surprise-filled journey into science and human culture, this exciting and provocative book shows how fungi shape our planet and our lives in strange, diverse, and often unimaginable ways.]]> 296 Michael J. Hathaway 0691225907 Gopal 5 audio-books 4.40 What a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make

What a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make

author: Michael J. Hathaway
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.40
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/08
date added: 2023/12/20
shelves: audio-books
review:

]]> Touch 20622719 81 Adania Shibli Gopal 5 3.78 2001 Touch

author: Adania Shibli
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2001
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/03
date added: 2023/12/03
shelves:
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]]> Karukku 43990
Karukku broke barriers of tradition in more ways than one. The first autobiography by a Dalit woman writer and a classic of subaltern writing, it is a bold and poignant tale of life outside mainstream Indian thought and function. Revolving around the main theme of caste oppression within the Catholic Church, it portrays the tension between the self and the community, and presents Bama's life as a process of self-reflection and recovery from social and institutional betrayal.]]> 108 Bama 0333931904 Gopal 0 to-read 3.96 1992 Karukku

author: Bama
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/11/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Flying Lies? 123161252
As we publish, an investigation is going on in France on whether there was corruption and illegal kickbacks in the deal, that involves corporate entities including those in the Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group and other groups.

The authors, independent journalists Ravi Nair and Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, have placed on record all sides to the story by interviewing dozens of knowledgeable persons, those supportive of, as well as those opposed to, the Rafale deal to ascertain if public interest has been properly served.

This is hardly the first defence purchase deal to attract considerable public attention and which has raised allegations of corruption and favouritism, it is by far the largest scandal of its kind to have come to light so far.

This the deepest dive into the scandal so far but the full story about the Rafale deal is yet to be told.]]> 593 Ravi Nair Gopal 0 to-read 4.14 Flying Lies?

author: Ravi Nair
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.14
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/11/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[I Want to Destroy Myself: A Memoir]]> 32809159 Malika Amar Shaikh was born to Communist-activist parents—her father, Shahir Amar Shaikh, was a trade-union leader and legendary Marathi folk singer. Brought up amidst the hurly-burly of Maharashtrian politics of the 1960s, and exposed to the best and the brightest in Bombay’s cultural scene, Malika was a cosseted child, drawn to poetry and dance. She was barely out of school when she married Namdeo Dhasal, co-founder of the radical Dalit Panthers, and celebrated ‘poet of the underground�� who transformed Marathi poetry with his incendiary verse.

After the initial days of love, and the birth of their son, the marriage crumbled. Namdeo was an absent husband and father—given to drink, womanizing and violence—and uninterested in his family. And while he would repent his actions and his negligence, and they would make up, he never stopped or reformed. I Want to Destroy Myself is Malika’s searing, angry account of her life with Dhasal.

The unvarnished story of a marriage and of a woman and a writer seeking her space in a man’s world, Malika Amar Shaikh’s autobiography is also a portrait of the Bombay of poets, activists, prostitutes and fighters. There isn’t another memoir in Indian writing as honest and pitiless as this. Published originally in Marathi, it quickly became a sensation and vanished as quickly. Jerry Pinto’s superb translation revives this lost classic and makes it available for the first time in any language other than Marathi.��

]]> 132 Malika Amar Shaikh 9386050986 Gopal 4 4.19 1984 I Want to Destroy Myself: A Memoir

author: Malika Amar Shaikh
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1984
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/27
date added: 2023/11/30
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]]> <![CDATA[H-Pop : The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars]]> 200216070 304 Kunal Purohit 9356995826 Gopal 5 travel 4.14

H-Pop : The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars

author: Kunal Purohit
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.14
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/30
date added: 2023/11/30
shelves: travel
review:
In 2023, a year before the general election, this is a must-read to try and understand the world of Hindi/Hindutva fans and their worldview. The book is about the pawns, the footsoldiers in the fight for the hearts and souls of the people in the Hindi heartland for caste-supremacist Hindutva ideology, using music, poetry, the written world and most of all, the YouTube platform from Google, all of it directed around the electoral process in India.
]]> Halt Station India 23767738
Taking a walk along Indias first rail lines, the author stumbles upon fragments of the past-a clock at Victoria Terminus that offers a rare view of a city, a cannon near Masjid Bunder Station that is worshipped as a god, a watchtower overlooking Sion Station, believed to have housed a witch. Each pit-stop comes with stories of desire and war, ambition and death-by Dockyard Road Station, for instance, author Laurence Sternes beloved, Eliza Draper, followed a sailor into the sea or close to Parel Station, the wife of Indias governor general, Lord Canning found a garden rich in tropical vegetation this, she replicated at Barrackpore.

Drawing from journals, biographies, newspapers and railway archives-and with nostalgic, first-time accounts of those who travelled by Indias earliest trains-the book captures the economic and social revolutions spurred by the countrys first train line. In this, Halt Station India is not just about the railways-it is the story of the growth of Indias business capital and a rare study of a nation.]]> 227 Rajendra B. Aklekar 8129134977 Gopal 5 4.45 2014

author: Rajendra B. Aklekar
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/11/03
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]]> Minor Detail 53653696
Many years later, a woman in Ramallah becomes fascinated to the point of obsession with this 'minor detail' of history.

A haunting meditation on war, violence and memory,��Minor Detail��cuts to the heart of the Palestinian experience of dispossession, life under occupation, and the persistent difficulty of piecing together a narrative in the face of ongoing erasure and disempowerment.]]> 109 Adania Shibli Gopal 5 4.20 2017 Minor Detail

author: Adania Shibli
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/03
date added: 2023/11/03
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[Fire On The Ganges: Life Among the Dead in Banaras]]> 196797761
Banaras, Uttar Pradesh. A place where life and death co-exist in the most unimaginable way. The Doms are a Dalit sub-caste in Banaras designated by tradition to perform the Hindu rite of cremation. They have ownership of the sacred fire without which, it is believed, the Hindu soul will not achieve liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth. Despite this, the community is condemned to the lowest order in caste hierarchy, and its members continue to be treated as 'untouchables'.

Fire on the Ganges is the first attempt to chronicle the everyday realities of the Doms. It plunges into Banaras's historical past, while narrowing its lens to a few spirited characters from the Dom community. Through their tales of struggle and survival, loss and ambition, betrayal and love, it tells the at-times-heartbreaking, at-times-exhilarating story of a community struggling to find a place beyond that accorded to it by ancient tradition.

---

'A book of humanity and intimacy, hope and resilience, Radhika Iyengar has chronicled that which is often overlooked -- the enduring power of the voice. This is oral history at its finest.'

-- AANCHAL MALHOTRA (author of Remnants of a Separation)

'Vividly told and richly detailed, Radhika Iyengar's Fire on the Ganges is an untold story that will shape our collective understanding of India.'

-- SONIA FALEIRO (author of The Good Girls)

'At once sobering and enlivening, Fire on the Ganges is a compelling account of how the Doms both contribute to, and are overlooked by, a "new India" that has lost its lustre. Radhika Iyengar makes her subject spring to life through her eye for detail and her immersion in the world she's writing of.'

-- AMIT CHAUDHURI (author of Sojourn)

'By observing their world with a keen, unflinching eye, Radhika Iyengar is able to render the lives of her subjects with compassion and insight while delivering a story that is both uplifting and heartbreaking. Fire on the Ganges is the work of a first-rate reporter and a gifted writer, whose narrative moves like the river, slow and deep, to the ancient rhythms of Indian life.'

-- DON BELT (Former Senior Editor, National Geographic Magazine)

'You might think of Manikarnika as a place for the dead. This fine book is a reminder that the burning ghats are a place for the living.'

-- AMITAVA KUMAR (author of The Blue Book)

'With admirable elegance and empathy, Radhika Iyengar tells stories of a community that has not been spared caste prejudice despite its traditional "prerogative" of cremating Hindus at the most auspicious ghats along the Ganga.'

-- MANOJ MITTA (author of Caste Pride)

'A worthy illustration of show-don't-tell, Fire on the Ganges leaves you both hopeful and anxious about the possibilities of breaking through the barriers imposed by the caste system for those who are placed at its very bottom...Iyengar's work stands out for its dogged curiosity and immersive storytelling.'

-- SNIGDHA POONAM (author of Dreamers)

'With the narrative drive of a novel, this is a non-fiction book that illuminates a profession, a tradition and a society. An absolutely fascinating read!'

-- TABISH KHAIR (author of The Body by the Shore)

‘Deeply alarming and yet never alarmist, Radhika Iyengar’s Fire on the Ganges is essential reading—wise, sensitive and unsettling.��

-- DAVID HAJDU (author of A Revolution in Three Acts)

'Deeply-reported, thoroughly-researched, with writing that leaves your skin cold, Fire on the Ganges is a book about the hum of life arranged around death.'

-- MANSI CHOKSI (author of The Newlyweds)]]> 352 Radhika Iyengar 9356994668 Gopal 5 4.16 Fire On The Ganges: Life Among the Dead in Banaras

Fire On The Ganges: Life Among the Dead in Banaras

author: Radhika Iyengar
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.16
book published:
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/11/01
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]]> <![CDATA[Many Roads through Paradise: An Anthology of Sri Lankan Literature]]> 61798096 474 Shyam Selvadurai 9351186660 Gopal 5 5.00 2014

Many Roads through Paradise: An Anthology of Sri Lankan Literature

author: Shyam Selvadurai
name: Gopal
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2023/10/04
date added: 2023/10/04
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]]> Gravitation 34427047 Gravitation is a landmark graduate-level textbook that presents Einstein's general theory of relativity and offers a rigorous, full-year course on the physics of gravitation. Upon publication, Science called it "a pedagogic masterpiece," and it has since become a classic, considered essential reading for every serious student and researcher in the field of relativity. This authoritative text has shaped the research of generations of physicists and astronomers, and the book continues to influence the way experts think about the subject.

With an emphasis on geometric interpretation, this masterful and comprehensive book introduces the theory of relativity; describes physical applications, from stars to black holes and gravitational waves; and portrays the field's frontiers. The book also offers a unique, alternating, two-track pathway through the subject. Material focusing on basic physical ideas is designated as Track 1 and formulates an appropriate one-semester graduate-level course. The remaining Track 2 material provides a wealth of advanced topics instructors can draw on for a two-semester course, with Track 1 sections serving as prerequisites.

This must-have reference for students and scholars of relativity includes a new preface by David Kaiser, reflecting on the history of the book's publication and reception, and a new introduction by Charles Misner and Kip Thorne, discussing exciting developments in the field since the book's original publication.

The book teaches students to:
Grasp the laws of physics in flat and curved spacetime
Predict orders of magnitude
Calculate using the principal tools of modern geometry
Understand Einstein's geometric framework for physics
Explore applications, including neutron stars, Schwarzschild and Kerr black holes, gravitational collapse, gravitational waves, cosmology, and so much more]]> 1279 Charles W. Misner 0691177791 Gopal 0 to-read 4.71 1973

author: Charles W. Misner
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.71
book published: 1973
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/09/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Hurricane Season 46041168 A New York Times Notable Book (2020)
A Guardian Best Book of 2020
A Literary Hub Favorite Book of 2020

The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse—by a group of children playing near the irrigation canals—propels the whole village into an investigation of how and why this murder occurred. Rumors and suspicions spread. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering on new details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters that most would write off as utterly irredeemable, forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village.

Like Roberto Bolano’s 2666��or Faulkner’s greatest novels, Hurricane Season takes place in a world filled with mythology and violence—real violence, the kind that seeps into the soil, poisoning everything around: it’s a world that becomes more terrifying and more terrifyingly real the deeper you explore it.]]> 224 Fernanda Melchor 0811228037 Gopal 5 3.93 2017 Hurricane Season

author: Fernanda Melchor
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2017
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/09/24
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]]> <![CDATA[Antharjanam: Memoirs of a Namboodiri Woman]]> 12146987 erstwhile Malabar. Its focus is very deliberately women and young girls.

In the enormous Pakavoor Illam, their hours filled with sombre routine chores of ritual baths and plain clothes, no flowers or jewellery, left to the care of maids, and deprived of parental love, young Namboodiri girls grew up detached from their more privileged brothers. Illness, the rare visits of
traders, beautiful Nair cousins and doctors enlivened an otherwise unbearably dreary life. Told without a trace of self-pity, Devaki Nilayamgode's work is a remarkable feat in personal and social history. The detailed Introduction by J. Devika helps set the context of the work.

Later narratives in the book record the winds of change that brought radical ideas into these dim interiors. The memoirs unfold a variety of experiences that range from changing agricultural practices, indigenous systems of anti-snake-venom treatment, and escoteric patterns of medical practice to
the gradual erosion of the community's wealth and unquestioned social power.]]> 169 Devaki Nilayangode 0198074166 Gopal 5 4.01 2011 Antharjanam: Memoirs of a Namboodiri Woman

Antharjanam: Memoirs of a Namboodiri Woman

author: Devaki Nilayangode
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2011
rating: 5
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date added: 2023/09/24
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]]> Karya 57737641
What follows is chaos and confusion. Who will bear the blame for things going awry, and how might they be set right? The division between castes and communities comes to the fore as the panchayat struggles to pronounce justice.

A poetic work calling for change in our casteist society, Karya unfurls a kaleidoscope of perspectives. Studded with symbols drawn from nature and myth, this small but significant novel unfurls the politics and power embedded within a Dalit community.]]> 176 Aravind Malagatti 0670095788 Gopal 4 3.40 Karya

author: Aravind Malagatti
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.40
book published:
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2023/09/02
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]]> Government Brahmana 22859235
The autobiographical narrative is in the form of a series of episodes from the author's childhood and youth. These episodes function as what G.N. Devy calls epiphanic moments in a caste society.

The author reflects on specific instances from his childhood and student days that illustrate the normative cruelty practiced by caste Hindu society on Dalits. We encounter all the tropes of (male) Dalit life:

Isolation in school where even drinking water is an ordeal.
Life in the village where Dalits perform the filthiest tasks but are denied access to common wells and lakes.
They cannot step into shops and therefore have their purchases thrown at them.
They have to cut their own hair because no barber would touch it.
Consuming dead-animal meat and innards.
Doomed love affairs with upper caste women.

A painful, disturbing, thought-provoking memoir, this text is conversely full of vitality, even tenderness. In its structure and purpose as a series of notes towards a Dalit autobiography Government Brahmana appears to be anticipated by Ambedkar's own autobiographical sketches.]]> 132 Aravind Malagatti Gopal 5 4.04 1998

author: Aravind Malagatti
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1998
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/08/31
shelves:
review:
This is a must read book. Each chapter is an eye opener Into our society that sadly hasn’t changed much. The last line of each chapter is like a knock out punch. 5 stars !
]]> The Years 145625252 Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist’s defining work and a breakout bestseller when published in France in 2008.

The Years is a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present—even projections into the future—photos, books, songs, radio, television and decades of advertising, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from 6 decades of diaries.

Local dialect, words of the times, slogans, brands and names for the ever-proliferating objects, are given voice here. The voice we recognize as the author’s continually dissolves and re-emerges. Ernaux makes the passage of time palpable. Time itself, inexorable, narrates its own course, consigning all other narrators to anonymity. A new kind of autobiography emerges, at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective.

On its 2008 publication in France, The Years came as a surprise. Though Ernaux had for years been hailed as a beloved, bestselling and award-winning author, The Years was in many ways a departure: both an intimate memoir “written�� by entire generations, and a story of generations telling a very personal story. Like the generation before hers, the narrator eschews the “I�� for the “we�� (or “they��, or “one��) as if collective life were inextricably intertwined with a private life that in her parents�� generation ceased to exist. She writes of her parents�� generation (and could be writing of her own book): “From a common fund of hunger and fear, everything was told in the “we�� and impersonal pronouns.”]]> 240 Annie Ernaux 1609807871 Gopal 5 4.22 2008 The Years

author: Annie Ernaux
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/15
date added: 2023/08/15
shelves:
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]]> Other Minds 28116739
In Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith, a distinguished philosopher of science and a skilled scuba diver, tells a bold new story of how subjective experience crept into being—how nature became aware of itself. As Godfrey-Smith stresses, it is a story that largely occurs in the ocean, where animals first appeared. Tracking the mind’s fitful development, Godfrey-Smith shows how unruly clumps of seaborne cells began living together and became capable of sensing, acting, and signaling. As these primitive organisms became more entangled with others, they grew more complicated. The first nervous systems evolved, probably in ancient relatives of jellyfish; later on, the cephalopods, which began as inconspicuous mollusks, abandoned their shells and rose above the ocean floor, searching for prey and acquiring the greater intelligence needed to do so. Taking an independent route, mammals and birds later began their own evolutionary journeys.

But what kind of intelligence do cephalopods possess? Drawing on the latest scientific research and his own scuba-diving adventures, Godfrey-Smith probes the many mysteries that surround the lineage. How did the octopus, a solitary creature with little social life, become so smart? What is it like to have eight tentacles that are so packed with neurons that they virtually “think for themselves��? What happens when some octopuses abandon their hermit-like ways and congregate, as they do in a unique location off the coast of Australia?

By tracing the question of inner life back to its roots and comparing human beings with our most remarkable animal relatives, Godfrey-Smith casts crucial new light on the octopus mind—and on our own.]]> 257 Peter Godfrey-Smith 0374227764 Gopal 5 3.86 2016 Other Minds

author: Peter Godfrey-Smith
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/13
date added: 2023/08/13
shelves:
review:

]]> The Centre 123207726 A darkly comic, boundary-pushing debut following an adrift Pakistani translator in London who attends a mysterious language school which boasts complete fluency in just ten days, but at a secret, sinister cost.

Anisa Ellahi dreams of being a translator of 'great works of literature', but instead mostly spends her days subtitling Bollywood movies, living off her parents�� generous allowance, and discussing the 'underside of life' with her best friend, Naima. Anisa’s mediocre white boyfriend, Adam, only adds to her growing sense of inadequacy with his savant-level aptitude for languages, successfully leveraging his expansive knowledge into an enviable career. But when Adam learns to speak Urdu with native fluency practically overnight, Anisa forces him to reveal his secret.

Adam begrudgingly tells Anisa about the Centre, an elite, invite-only programme that guarantees near-instant fluency in any language. Sceptical but intrigued, Anisa enrolls—stripped of her belongings and contact with the outside world—and emerges ten days later fluent in German. As Anisa enmeshes herself further within the Centre, seduced by all it’s made possible, she soon realises the true cost of its services.

By turns dark, funny, and surreal, and with twists page-turning and shocking, The Centre takes the reader on a journey through Karachi, London and New Delhi, interrogating the sticky politics of language, translation and appropriation with biting specificity, and ultimately asking: what is success really worth?

A remarkable debut from Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi, announcing the arrival of an extraordinary new talent.]]> 320 Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi 1529097827 Gopal 0 to-read 3.47 2023 The Centre

author: Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Olga Dies Dreaming 57693171
Despite their alluring public lives, behind closed doors things are far less rosy. Sure, Olga can orchestrate the love stories of the 1%, but she can't seem to find her own...until she meets Matteo, who forces her to confront the effects of long-held family secrets...

Twenty-seven years ago, their mother, Blanca, a Young Lord-turned-radical, abandoned her children to advance a militant political cause, leaving them to be raised by their grandmother. Now, with the winds of hurricane season, Blanca has come barreling back into their lives.

Set against the backdrop of New York City in the months surrounding the most devastating hurricane in Puerto Rico's history, Olga Dies Dreaming is a story that examines political corruption, familial strife and the very notion of the American dream--all while asking what it really means to weather a storm.]]> 369 Xóchitl González 1250786177 Gopal 0 to-read 3.95 2022 Olga Dies Dreaming

author: Xóchitl González
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida]]> 62357957
Ten years after his prize-winning novel Chinaman established him as one of Sri Lanka’s foremost authors, Shehan Karunatilaka is back with a “thrilling satire�� (Economist) and rip-roaring state-of-the-nation epic that offers equal parts mordant wit and disturbing, profound truths.]]> 400 Shehan Karunatilaka 1324064838 Gopal 5 war-stories 4.10 2022 The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

author: Shehan Karunatilaka
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/08/07
shelves: war-stories
review:

]]> Wilderness Tips 103162 Wilderness Tips take us into the strange and secret places of the heart and inform the familiar world in which we live with truths that cut to the bone.

Contents:
True trash --
Hairball --
Isis in darkness --
The bog man --
Death by landscape --
Uncles --
The age of lead --
Weight --
Wilderness tips --
Hack Wednesday.]]> 228 Margaret Atwood 0385491115 Gopal 4 3.83 1991

author: Margaret Atwood
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1991
rating: 4
read at: 2016/06/20
date added: 2023/07/29
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Open Empire: A History of China Through 1600]]> 1053922 480 Valerie Hansen 0393973743 Gopal 0 to-read 3.84 2000

The Open Empire: A History of China Through 1600

author: Valerie Hansen
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement]]> 49108665 Jodi Kantor Gopal 0 to-read 4.12 2019

She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement

author: Jodi Kantor
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> On the Marble Cliffs 501415 128 Ernst Jünger 0140029850 Gopal 0 to-read 3.85 1939

author: Ernst Jünger
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1939
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Incal (The Incal Saga, #1)]]> 10842223 307 Alejandro Jodorowsky 1594650152 Gopal 0 to-read 4.12 1981

author: Alejandro Jodorowsky
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1981
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Quarterlife 142065993 424 Devika Rege 9356990875 Gopal 5 indian-fiction 3.91

author: Devika Rege
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.91
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2023/07/19
date added: 2023/07/21
shelves: indian-fiction
review:
Most characters are from a class/caste, and many of us won't even be in that circle, let alone interact with them, even if we are from Mumbai. That said, have you ever distanced yourself, or have people you know, worked with, or even family members withdrawn or come closer to you because of your ideological views (to whatever degree) after 2014? If not, have you noticed this happening among people you know? If so, this book is an interesting read. It's very well-told and at a good pace.
]]> <![CDATA[A Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe]]> 61604821 96 Milan Kundera 0063272954 Gopal 5 4.30 1983

A Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe

author: Milan Kundera
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1983
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/07/15
shelves:
review:

]]> The Bookshop 41015154 In 1959 Florence Green, a kindhearted widow with a small inheritance, risks everything to open a bookshop - the only bookshop - in the seaside town of Hardborough. By making a success of a business so impractical, she invites the hostility of the town's less prosperous shopkeepers. By daring to enlarge her neighbors' lives, she crosses Mrs. Gamart, the local arts doyenne. Florence's warehouse leaks, her cellar seeps, and the shop is apparently haunted. Only too late does she begin to suspect the truth: a town that lacks a bookshop isn't always a town that wants one.]]> 163 Penelope Fitzgerald 0547524773 Gopal 4 3.21 1978 The Bookshop

author: Penelope Fitzgerald
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.21
book published: 1978
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2023/07/15
shelves:
review:

]]> The Physics of Sorrow 23129709 The Physics of Sorrow reaffirms Georgi Gospodinov's place as one of Europe's most inventive and daring writers.

Using the myth of the Minotaur as its organizing image, the narrator of Gospodinov's long-awaited novel constructs a labyrinth of stories about his family, jumping from era to era and viewpoint to viewpoint, exploring the mindset and trappings of Eastern Europeans. Incredibly moving—such as with the story of his grandfather accidentally being left behind at a mill—and extraordinarily funny—see the section on the awfulness of the question "how are you?"��Physics is a book that you can inhabit, tracing connections, following the narrator down various "side passages," getting pleasantly lost in the various stories and empathizing with the sorrowful, misunderstood Minotaur at the center of it all.

Physics of Sorrow will appeal to fans of Dave Eggers, Tom McCarthy, and Dubravka Ugresic for its unique structure, humanitarian concerns, and stunning storytelling.]]> 287 Georgi Gospodinov 194095309X Gopal 5 4.06 2011 The Physics of Sorrow

author: Georgi Gospodinov
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/07/15
shelves:
review:

]]> Soft Animal 128015598
Soft Animal unfolds in urgent present tense with illuminating flashbacks, whip-smart dialogue and conspiratorial footnotes. Bringing the deftness of deadpan humour and the precision of meticulous social observation to the self-delusions of India's privileged urban middle class, Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan's latest channels an uncomfortably-and sometimes heartbreakingly-intimate experience of millennial marriage that is seldom portrayed but all too real.]]> 268 Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan 935708035X Gopal 4 3.52 Soft Animal

author: Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.52
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/15
date added: 2023/07/15
shelves:
review:

]]> ദൽഹി | Delhi 13357787 204 M. Mukundan 8171300480 Gopal 5 city-stories, audio-books 3.71

author: M. Mukundan
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.71
book published:
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/07/06
shelves: city-stories, audio-books
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Meow Meow: The Incredible True Story of Baby Patankar]]> 75874904 Call her a police informant, a slumlord, a successful businesswoman, a caring grandmother-but do not call Shashikala 'Baby' Patankar a drug dealer.

On 9 March 2015, a constable in the Mumbai Police force, Dharmaraj Kalokhe, was arrested by the local police for possession of a white powder believed to be the synthetic drug Mephedrone. His partner, Shashikala 'Baby' Patankar, was the informant. Later she was arrested by the police, too.

In the days that followed, the Maharashtra Police declared her a criminal and the media labelled her 'drug queen', but Baby always considered herself an innocent. Unearthing new facts about the case, this book is a blow-by-blow account of Baby's capture and the investigation that followed. It is also the story of Mephedrone - better known as Meow Meow - which, when it entered the schools, colleges and pubs of Mumbai, changed the rules of the game and the enforcement of narcotics laws in the city.

Fast and pacy, Meow Meow is the tale of one of Mumbai's most baffling crime and the intriguing life that Baby Patankar led.]]> 329 Srinath Rao 9356295883 Gopal 4 3.44 Meow Meow: The Incredible True Story of Baby Patankar

Meow Meow: The Incredible True Story of Baby Patankar

author: Srinath Rao
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.44
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2023/06/27
date added: 2023/06/27
shelves:
review:

]]> Yellowface 59357120
So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? This piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller. That is what June believes, and The New York Times bestseller list agrees.

But June cannot escape Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens her stolen success. As she races to protect her secret she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.]]> 329 R.F. Kuang Gopal 5 3.84 2023 Yellowface

author: R.F. Kuang
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/06/15
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Tejo Tungabhadra: Tributaries Of Time]]> 62708306 464 Vasudhendra 0670096180 Gopal 5 4.34 2019

author: Vasudhendra
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/05/29
shelves:
review:

]]> Time Shelter 58999261
In Time Shelter, an enigmatic flâneur named Gaustine opens a “clinic for the past�� that offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back in time. As Gaustine’s assistant, the unnamed narrator is tasked with collecting the flotsam and jetsam of the past, from 1960s furniture and 1940s shirt buttons to scents and even afternoon light. But as the rooms become more convincing, an increasing number of healthy people seek out the clinic as a “time shelter”—a development that results in an unexpected conundrum when the past begins to invade the present. Intricately crafted, and eloquently translated by Angela Rodel, Time Shelter announces Gospodinov to American readers as an essential voice in international literature.]]> 304 Georgi Gospodinov 1324090952 Gopal 5 3.59 2020

author: Georgi Gospodinov
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/05/29
shelves:
review:

]]> Om Namo 49542088 239 Shantinath Desai 8126026154 Gopal 5 4.00 1999 Om Namo

author: Shantinath Desai
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1999
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/05/03
shelves:
review:

]]> Kashmir -Behind The Vale 200206 232 M.J. Akbar 8174362509 Gopal 5 3.78 1991

author: M.J. Akbar
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1991
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/04/26
shelves:
review:

]]> Gyo, Vol. 2 564877 The Horrifying Conclusion...
Trapped on an island filled with the stench of mutating bodies, can teenager Tadashi save his girlfriend from a fate worse than death? Or will the cure prove worse than the disease? Hold your breath until all is revealed--along with the final stinking secrets of the "walking fish of Okinawa"!]]> 208 Junji Ito 1421513889 Gopal 0 to-read 4.31 2002 Gyo, Vol. 2

author: Junji Ito
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2002
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/04/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> A Riot of Goldfish 8051749 113 Kanoko Okamoto 1843918528 Gopal 4 3.61 1937

author: Kanoko Okamoto
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.61
book published: 1937
rating: 4
read at: 2017/02/19
date added: 2023/04/14
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Invention of Paris: A History in Footsteps]]> 7776186
On y voit naître, au rythme des enceintes successives, l'éclairage public, l'enfermement des pauvres et des fous, le numérotage des maisons, les terrasses des cafés et la police de proximité. Du Marais des Précieuses au XIe arrondissement des "branchés", on assiste aux migrations de la mode, à l'apparition de microvilles dans la ville, celles de Scarron, de Des Grieux, de Desmoulins, de Rubempré et de l'autre Lucien, Leuwen, celles de Gavroche, de Baudelaire et de Manet, d'Apollinaire, celles encore de Nadja, de Doisneau ou d'Anna Karina.

Mais les vrais héros du livre, ce sont des anonymes, les architectes du désordre qui, de génération en génération, se sont transmis l'art d'empiler les magiques pavés, au faubourg Saint-Antoine en prairial an III, au cloître Saint-Merri en juin 1832, au clos Saint-Lazare en juin 1848, à Belleville en mai 1871, au quartier Latin en mai 1968, démontrant chaque fois - et plaignons ceux qui croient la série close - la force de rupture de Paris.]]> 400 Eric Hazan 1844674118 Gopal 0 to-read 3.50 2002 The Invention of Paris: A History in Footsteps

The Invention of Paris: A History in Footsteps

author: Eric Hazan
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2002
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/04/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Story of Gilgamesh 23528235 104 Yiyun Li 1782690239 Gopal 5 audio-books 3.92 2011

author: Yiyun Li
name: Gopal
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2023/04/09
shelves: audio-books
review:

]]> All the Light We Cannot See 18143977
In a mining town in Germany, Werner Pfennig, an orphan, grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find that brings them news and stories from places they have never seen or imagined. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments and is enlisted to use his talent to track down the resistance. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.

From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the stunningly beautiful instant New York Times bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.

An alternate cover for this ISBN can be found here]]> 544 Anthony Doerr 1476746583 Gopal 4 audio-books 4.31 2014 All the Light We Cannot See

author: Anthony Doerr
name: Gopal
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2023/04/09
shelves: audio-books
review:

]]>