Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan's Blog, page 80
December 5, 2017
Today in Photo
To go with our uncharacteristic super festive mood this year, a surprise belated congratulations card in the mail with a Where's Wally advent calendar. The idea being you eat a piece of chocolate every day and find the character marked on the date. But we're greedy and it's day five already, soooo :) #delhidiary #ilovesnailmail #winterfestive
via Instagram
Newsletter: Goa Returned
As always, you can be more up-to-date on this by subscribing to my newsletter.
me trying to get back to work
The Christmas music is on. I repeat: the Christmas music is on! December in Delhi is as delightful as it always has been, even though the pollution is making our noses run, and I have had a weird red eye for the past three days, which is probably also pollution related. Around us, there's the sound of coughing, but also last night at a birthday party, there was definite Good Cheer. It's a great time to be in this city, if you stock up on antihistamines. Personally, it's my favourite month of the year, since it's also my birthday month, and the run up to the party I throw myself every year is still--if not AS exciting as when I was ten years old--something to look forward to.
I actually don't have much to update you about this week. Leaving Goa was a bit of a wrench, but it always nice to be home. When I think of Delhi, I think mostly of our flat. Even though when we walked in, fresh from our dilapidated mansion, it looked very small with low ceilings, but now I have stretched into it, and it is as perfect as I remember.
This week in television: I had a real weekend of lounging. We pulled out the electric blanket from where it lay--this is our first year in this house using it, since we were away during the coldest months last year--but the problem with pulling out the electric blanket is now no one wants to leave the bed. It's the coziest spot in the house, and if you don't have one, I highly recommend it. (Easily available on Amazon.) I might have to replace ours, bought on skiing holiday in Gulmarg, because now only one side is working, but when done right, the whole bed is heated and glorious. We haven't needed to pull out the room heater yet, because as soon as it gets cold, we go back to bed. And I had the perfect show to keep me company. My beloved Amy Sherman Palladino (creator of Gilmore Girls and the fantastic but sadly cancelled too soon Bunheads) has a period drama out on Amazon Prime called The Marvellous Mrs Maisel, and if that doesn't keep you cozy on these cold nights, I don't know what else to say to you. Set in the late 50s, with costumes that rival Mad Men, it's about a upper West Side housewife who is suddenly left adrift when her husband leaves her, so she turns her hand to stand up comedy. It's absolutely perfect and I only have thirty minutes left to finish the season, which makes me sad, but The Crown returns on Netflix next week I think, so at least there's another period drama to replace this one.
This week in books and reading: Scroll republished my best books of 2017 list and I added one that I forgot earlier:
My favourite series about a family: A very specific category, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles. Set in England between the world wars, and some of the Second World War, I came across her via Hilary Mantel who mentioned in an article that in her opinion, Howard was the underrated author of her time. I couldn’t agree more. Even though the books have been made into a TV series, there aren’t many fellow Howardites, which is what makes our special club even more special. Finely observed, with all the foibles that make big families so entertaining, these were definitely a set of books I was sad to give up.
This week in winter vegetables: Our gardener has been a busy man since we last saw him, and now the terrace is filled with planters, including lettuce! Which I'm super excited about. There's also spinach and two types of cauliflower, aubergine and the long chillis which I like to season and fry to eat as an accompaniment to daal-chawal. Pretty soon, our onions and garlic will blossom (do they blossom?) and we'll have no need for outside veggie shopping at all. (Well, except bhindi, and he tells me he can't plant those for me till March.) Winter vegetables don't look as gloriously green as the post-monsoon ones, but they're chunky and solid, much like my fashion options.
This week in winter cats: OH MY FLUFFIES. MY FLUFFY FLOOFERSONS. MY FATTY FLUFFIES. Even the one who has pissed in various hidden corners of the house, which no one has noticed and which we are now excavating like hidden treasure.
Tuesday link list:
me trying to get back to work The Christmas music is on. I repeat: the Christmas music is on! December in Delhi is as delightful as it always has been, even though the pollution is making our noses run, and I have had a weird red eye for the past three days, which is probably also pollution related. Around us, there's the sound of coughing, but also last night at a birthday party, there was definite Good Cheer. It's a great time to be in this city, if you stock up on antihistamines. Personally, it's my favourite month of the year, since it's also my birthday month, and the run up to the party I throw myself every year is still--if not AS exciting as when I was ten years old--something to look forward to.
I actually don't have much to update you about this week. Leaving Goa was a bit of a wrench, but it always nice to be home. When I think of Delhi, I think mostly of our flat. Even though when we walked in, fresh from our dilapidated mansion, it looked very small with low ceilings, but now I have stretched into it, and it is as perfect as I remember.
This week in television: I had a real weekend of lounging. We pulled out the electric blanket from where it lay--this is our first year in this house using it, since we were away during the coldest months last year--but the problem with pulling out the electric blanket is now no one wants to leave the bed. It's the coziest spot in the house, and if you don't have one, I highly recommend it. (Easily available on Amazon.) I might have to replace ours, bought on skiing holiday in Gulmarg, because now only one side is working, but when done right, the whole bed is heated and glorious. We haven't needed to pull out the room heater yet, because as soon as it gets cold, we go back to bed. And I had the perfect show to keep me company. My beloved Amy Sherman Palladino (creator of Gilmore Girls and the fantastic but sadly cancelled too soon Bunheads) has a period drama out on Amazon Prime called The Marvellous Mrs Maisel, and if that doesn't keep you cozy on these cold nights, I don't know what else to say to you. Set in the late 50s, with costumes that rival Mad Men, it's about a upper West Side housewife who is suddenly left adrift when her husband leaves her, so she turns her hand to stand up comedy. It's absolutely perfect and I only have thirty minutes left to finish the season, which makes me sad, but The Crown returns on Netflix next week I think, so at least there's another period drama to replace this one.
This week in books and reading: Scroll republished my best books of 2017 list and I added one that I forgot earlier:
My favourite series about a family: A very specific category, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles. Set in England between the world wars, and some of the Second World War, I came across her via Hilary Mantel who mentioned in an article that in her opinion, Howard was the underrated author of her time. I couldn’t agree more. Even though the books have been made into a TV series, there aren’t many fellow Howardites, which is what makes our special club even more special. Finely observed, with all the foibles that make big families so entertaining, these were definitely a set of books I was sad to give up.
This week in winter vegetables: Our gardener has been a busy man since we last saw him, and now the terrace is filled with planters, including lettuce! Which I'm super excited about. There's also spinach and two types of cauliflower, aubergine and the long chillis which I like to season and fry to eat as an accompaniment to daal-chawal. Pretty soon, our onions and garlic will blossom (do they blossom?) and we'll have no need for outside veggie shopping at all. (Well, except bhindi, and he tells me he can't plant those for me till March.) Winter vegetables don't look as gloriously green as the post-monsoon ones, but they're chunky and solid, much like my fashion options.
This week in winter cats: OH MY FLUFFIES. MY FLUFFY FLOOFERSONS. MY FATTY FLUFFIES. Even the one who has pissed in various hidden corners of the house, which no one has noticed and which we are now excavating like hidden treasure.
Tuesday link list:
When Hannah was young, she said why at least a thousand times a day, and Dan and I developed a theory: She needed to know the truth; the truth would soothe her. Then on Christmas morning, when Hannah was 5, decked out in her new fairy dress, she asked where babies came from, and Dan told her. She didn’t speak for a week.
- A writer writes about her teenage daughter, interspersed with comments from said daughter, which are hysterical but also very wise. I loved this story.
In the years that followed, we shared so much, or looked at differently, so little: our lives were small, restricted. The Jhabvalas moved to the beautiful house designed by Jhab on Flagstaff Road, and there were now three daughters – and two enormous German shepherds. I too married and had children and would take them over for tea, which they would greatly look forward to because Ruth always had her cook, Abdul, bake a cake for them and Jhab would come back from his office to entertain them with his repertoire of magic tricks.
- Anita Desai on Ruth Praver Jhabwala. Made me go out and get a copy of Jhabvala's short stories. I've never read her, but was very intrigued by this piece.
My mother’s life started years ago in a small village, barefoot and unable to remember when she first wore shoes. She thought that Sunlight soap was for washing your clothes, then your hair and then your body — one after the other. I think of how her world grew bigger and bigger and then how, after a point, it started to shrink. She was boxed in by marriage and children and all those things that she had been taught to be afraid of. Unknowns and ‘what-ifs’; the places women could not go to, the things they could not do.
- A writer on her 70-year-old mother's world expanding with a phone.
In 1905, when seventy-year-old Mark Twain began to collect a bevy of adolescent girls, whom he called his “angel-fish,” he defended his predilection by insisting that he longed for grandchildren. His own daughters were grown—his favorite, Susy, was dead by then—and he was lonely. But grandfathers can have grandsons as well as granddaughters, and Twain, the creator of one of literature’s most famous adolescents, surely celebrated boys’ cheeky energy. There was more, then, to his strange sorority than an elderly man’s yearning for grandchildren, more even than nostalgia for his daughters’ childhoods. “As for me,” Twain wrote at the age of seventy-three, “I collect pets: young girls—girls from ten to sixteen years old; girls who are pretty and sweet and naive and innocent—dear young creatures to whom life is a perfect joy and to whom it has brought no wounds, no bitterness, and few tears.”
- Why are so many famous men kinda gross and creepy?
Octopus don't have any tentacles. 0. Not one. They have 8 arms.
- Twitter thread on that one fact scientists wish you knew.
December 2, 2017
December 1, 2017
Today in Photo
Ugh, in the Not News, Delhi so polluted man. It has taken exactly 24 hours, maybe less, to make my nose run like an Olympic champion. In better news though, Begumpur Masjid in the early twilight is still a revelation, despite chips packets scattered everywhere, shattered beer bottles crunching under your feet and several groups of young men doing drugs in shady corners. Can the ASI get involved already? #delhidiary #historicalsoundskindalikehysterical
via Instagram
November 30, 2017
Today in Photo
Snotty nose notwithstanding, it's good to be home. Gardener took me round the pots today and we did a harvest of some early winter veggies. We're going to eat well this December! #terracegarden #eatwhatyougrow #delhidiary
via Instagram
November 29, 2017
Today in Photo
Last Goa beach day this year! My hair is salt watered to the point of straw, I'm as brown as a coconut and I'm chilling at a friend's hut at the Anahata resort, reading my book. This will be a good photo to look back on in two weeks when it feels like the cold and the smog is the only reality I've ever known. #traveldiary #goamoon #beachlife
via Instagram
November 28, 2017
Newsletter: The Best Books I Read In 2017
(To sign up for my newsletter, subscribe here.)
In 2016, I set myself a reading challenge on Goodreads to read 200 books. I've got to admit, I struggled with that number last year. For whatever reason, I wasn't reading as much as I normally did. So, slightly humbled by how genuinely hard it was, I set a lower target this year: 150, and guys, it's November 25 and my current count is about 182 so far? I read across the board this year, following series to their completion and trying to challenge myself as much as I could. This is not to sound smug or anything, I'm actually a little alarmed how something I used to do with ease and pleasure, without really thinking about it, has become the target for an actual goal. When you bring a step count into it, as it were, are you really reading?
The flip side--and the reason I signed on for a "challenge" in the first place--is that it lets you log and rate each book you read. This is super useful, because I now know what I loved even way back in January, which brings me to the Theme of this week's newsletter: the best books I read in 2017. I did consider making it just books published in 2017, but I read so many wonderful authors who were published years ago that I thought it would be nice to share all my discoveries. I've sorta slotted it by genre, and since I read some more than others, you'll see a lot more books in that category. Also, I'm counting series or books written by one author as one entry and not multiple. I know it's only November, but December is a busy time of the year and reading might be slightly intermittent. Let's get started!
My favourite mystery/detective novels: It's funny--and when I say "funny" I mean "interesting" that a lot of great crime novels are by women. Take Agatha Christie or Gillian Flynn for example. Maybe it's because women can imagine crimes against women a lot easier than men can, since it's what most women do every day of their lives. My top two books in this category are both series: the first is Kate Atkinson with her Jackson Brodie books, beginning with Started Early, Took My Dog. I've loved Atkinson since I read Life After Life a few years ago and tried to thrust it into the hands of everyone I met, and when I came across the first of the Jackson Brodie books in a second hand shop, I devoured it in one sitting. They're long literary mysteries, with delicate turns of phrase and simple but intricate plotting.
Then, this was also the year I discovered Tana French. I started with The Likeness, which reminded me a lot of Donna Tartt's A Secret History, a detective has to pose as a student in an undercover mission to discover who killed her doppelganger. This is the second book in her Dublin Murder Squad books, and all five are heart-rate-increasing pacy books with lots of detail about Ireland and the people who live there.
My favourite children's fantasy series: The Chrestomanci series by Diana Wynne Jones. A sort of Harry Potter-esque world, but one where wizards and witches are well known and exist. Other worlds exist too, and there's a sort of training institute where the chosen ones get some schooling that their regular magic classes can't teach them. Written pre-Rowling, I saw a lot of her inspirations in these books as well, and like the best kids fantasy, there's no dumbing down, no unnecessary exposition, all is revealed in the right time, and it takes a little while to understand what's going on.
My favourite literary novels: The quietest, richest book I read all year was Stoner by John Williams. I bought it on an impulse, because the blurb said "the best novel you've never heard of" and that is a good way to suck me in. After I read it, I searched all over the internet for a backstory: apparently, it had a huge revival a few years ago, when people in Europe started picking it up by the droves and recommending it to each other. What's it about? It's the life story of one man, named William Stoner, his quietly unremarkable life, his unhappy marriage, his relationship with his daughter and also how he becomes a professor of English literature, and all this doesn't sound like much, but it is STUNNING. STUNNING.
I love parallel world narratives (see: Birthday Letters by Lionel Shriver) and 4321 by Paul Auster is just that. There's a boy, he lives and dies. In each life and death, there is a slight variation, and there are four of these stories, hence the title. Each section is a different life lived, but by the same people. This was a Booker nom this year and I was hoping it would win.
Another Booker nomination that I loved was Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie. Antigone retold, it's about a Muslim boy in London who joins ISIS and the fall out this has on his two sisters. I can't say very much else without giving away the plot, but it's beautifully told.
My favourite books by friends and family: Even though they are friends and family, I'm still going to give my full on five star recommendations for each of these books as a reader, because they are that good. My mother's book Mr And Mrs Jinnah taught me about a period of history in India that I've actually never given much thought too, except "oh, freedom struggle time." She used letters as a base and built up from there to tell the story of Ruttie Jinnah, a woman who was misunderstood and lonely for much of her life, including by the people who loved her the most.
Diksha Basu's The Windfall was a book I was looking forward to for a very long time, and I wasn't disappointed. It's a sort of black comedy about a Delhi family that strikes it rich and moves to Gurgaon. Deftly observed with points of view from people you'd never actually think about, I thought it was an excellent meditation on how we live today.
Prayaag Akbar's Leila just won an award, and besides being jealous of everyone I know who wins awards (normal?) it was definitely well deserved. It's a slim hardback volume about a dystopian Delhi, where society is broken up into--well, I won't give too much away--but it stays with you a lot longer than it takes to read it.
My favourite comfort read: You know, you work hard, you have a lot on your mind and you need some way to forget all your stresses, and Netflix isn't doing it for you. Enter Miss Read, a pseudonym for writer Dora Saint, who wrote over forty books about idyllic English villages, very Call The Midwife, except, with no midwifery involved. I liked her Thrush Green series more than Fairacre, but both are perfect, gentle reads about a recurring cast of characters who do every day things like bake sales and rebuilding churches and what not. (This is a good time to also mention that my Discovery Of The Year, so to speak, was Amazon's Used Books section. Very good, and the books arrive in good condition, also cheaper than buying new, so bear that in mind.)
My favourite memoir: I didn't expect to feel so many things reading Ruskin Bond's Lone Fox Dancing. But I totally did. Sad, and sweet and poignant and you just feel like going back in time and giving the little boy he was a hug. Like the best memoirs, this gave you a lot of answers, but also not ALL the answers, because writers should ultimately retain a little mystery in the end.
My favourite essay collection: When you're crawling up on thirty six, your biological clock either starts to tick with great loudness, or in my case, you just assume you have a defective one, because my womb is perfectly happy being just a womb, not a carrier of Future Life and so on. Every single essay in Selfish, Shallow And Self Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on Their Decision Not To Have Kids validated that choice. Having children is not for everyone, and I'm glad we live in a world where the second choice is also explored and analysed and recognised as valid.
My favourite YA: You guys, what can I say about The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas that will sum up exactly how much I love it? I don't think my words are adequate but: young black girl in a shady neighbourhood learns what cops are able to do to young black men, and realises her identity through it. SO GOOD.
My favourite short story collection: Out for drinks one day with a friend who brought along another friend who said The Adivasi Will Not Dance by Handsa Sowvendra Shekhar was the ONE book she was buying and giving to friends consistently. Of course, I had to have it. There was some controversy around the book, but I only recall the lyrical language, each story is pitch perfect and a representation of people we don't often hear from: "the hinterland of Jharkhand" as the blurb says.
My all round favourite book of the year: Just finished Pachinko by Min Jin Lee two days ago, and already I am feeling withdrawal symptoms. This is my favourite sort of book: a long family saga, grandparents and parents, and kids and their kids, but set in Japan, amongst Korean immigrants. I don't know very much about this part of the world, and was prepared to find the book dense and difficult, but instead, I found myself savouring it and slowing down so it would last longer. The last time I felt like this about a book was A Little Life, so PLEASE read this IMMEDIATELY.
And (because this is MY newsletter after all) my favourite book that I wrote this year: *AHEM* My book The One Who Swam With The Fishes got great reviews across the board, and is the story of Satyavati from the Mahabharata. Sort of her origin story, there's myth, there's a young girl's journey, there's feminism, there's sex, you'll like it. Link to buy at the bottom of this newsletter.
You can read more of my picks by the month over at BLInk, where I have a column recommending books by theme.
In 2016, I set myself a reading challenge on Goodreads to read 200 books. I've got to admit, I struggled with that number last year. For whatever reason, I wasn't reading as much as I normally did. So, slightly humbled by how genuinely hard it was, I set a lower target this year: 150, and guys, it's November 25 and my current count is about 182 so far? I read across the board this year, following series to their completion and trying to challenge myself as much as I could. This is not to sound smug or anything, I'm actually a little alarmed how something I used to do with ease and pleasure, without really thinking about it, has become the target for an actual goal. When you bring a step count into it, as it were, are you really reading?
The flip side--and the reason I signed on for a "challenge" in the first place--is that it lets you log and rate each book you read. This is super useful, because I now know what I loved even way back in January, which brings me to the Theme of this week's newsletter: the best books I read in 2017. I did consider making it just books published in 2017, but I read so many wonderful authors who were published years ago that I thought it would be nice to share all my discoveries. I've sorta slotted it by genre, and since I read some more than others, you'll see a lot more books in that category. Also, I'm counting series or books written by one author as one entry and not multiple. I know it's only November, but December is a busy time of the year and reading might be slightly intermittent. Let's get started!
My favourite mystery/detective novels: It's funny--and when I say "funny" I mean "interesting" that a lot of great crime novels are by women. Take Agatha Christie or Gillian Flynn for example. Maybe it's because women can imagine crimes against women a lot easier than men can, since it's what most women do every day of their lives. My top two books in this category are both series: the first is Kate Atkinson with her Jackson Brodie books, beginning with Started Early, Took My Dog. I've loved Atkinson since I read Life After Life a few years ago and tried to thrust it into the hands of everyone I met, and when I came across the first of the Jackson Brodie books in a second hand shop, I devoured it in one sitting. They're long literary mysteries, with delicate turns of phrase and simple but intricate plotting.
Then, this was also the year I discovered Tana French. I started with The Likeness, which reminded me a lot of Donna Tartt's A Secret History, a detective has to pose as a student in an undercover mission to discover who killed her doppelganger. This is the second book in her Dublin Murder Squad books, and all five are heart-rate-increasing pacy books with lots of detail about Ireland and the people who live there.
My favourite children's fantasy series: The Chrestomanci series by Diana Wynne Jones. A sort of Harry Potter-esque world, but one where wizards and witches are well known and exist. Other worlds exist too, and there's a sort of training institute where the chosen ones get some schooling that their regular magic classes can't teach them. Written pre-Rowling, I saw a lot of her inspirations in these books as well, and like the best kids fantasy, there's no dumbing down, no unnecessary exposition, all is revealed in the right time, and it takes a little while to understand what's going on.
My favourite literary novels: The quietest, richest book I read all year was Stoner by John Williams. I bought it on an impulse, because the blurb said "the best novel you've never heard of" and that is a good way to suck me in. After I read it, I searched all over the internet for a backstory: apparently, it had a huge revival a few years ago, when people in Europe started picking it up by the droves and recommending it to each other. What's it about? It's the life story of one man, named William Stoner, his quietly unremarkable life, his unhappy marriage, his relationship with his daughter and also how he becomes a professor of English literature, and all this doesn't sound like much, but it is STUNNING. STUNNING.
I love parallel world narratives (see: Birthday Letters by Lionel Shriver) and 4321 by Paul Auster is just that. There's a boy, he lives and dies. In each life and death, there is a slight variation, and there are four of these stories, hence the title. Each section is a different life lived, but by the same people. This was a Booker nom this year and I was hoping it would win.
Another Booker nomination that I loved was Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie. Antigone retold, it's about a Muslim boy in London who joins ISIS and the fall out this has on his two sisters. I can't say very much else without giving away the plot, but it's beautifully told.
My favourite books by friends and family: Even though they are friends and family, I'm still going to give my full on five star recommendations for each of these books as a reader, because they are that good. My mother's book Mr And Mrs Jinnah taught me about a period of history in India that I've actually never given much thought too, except "oh, freedom struggle time." She used letters as a base and built up from there to tell the story of Ruttie Jinnah, a woman who was misunderstood and lonely for much of her life, including by the people who loved her the most.
Diksha Basu's The Windfall was a book I was looking forward to for a very long time, and I wasn't disappointed. It's a sort of black comedy about a Delhi family that strikes it rich and moves to Gurgaon. Deftly observed with points of view from people you'd never actually think about, I thought it was an excellent meditation on how we live today.
Prayaag Akbar's Leila just won an award, and besides being jealous of everyone I know who wins awards (normal?) it was definitely well deserved. It's a slim hardback volume about a dystopian Delhi, where society is broken up into--well, I won't give too much away--but it stays with you a lot longer than it takes to read it.
My favourite comfort read: You know, you work hard, you have a lot on your mind and you need some way to forget all your stresses, and Netflix isn't doing it for you. Enter Miss Read, a pseudonym for writer Dora Saint, who wrote over forty books about idyllic English villages, very Call The Midwife, except, with no midwifery involved. I liked her Thrush Green series more than Fairacre, but both are perfect, gentle reads about a recurring cast of characters who do every day things like bake sales and rebuilding churches and what not. (This is a good time to also mention that my Discovery Of The Year, so to speak, was Amazon's Used Books section. Very good, and the books arrive in good condition, also cheaper than buying new, so bear that in mind.)
My favourite memoir: I didn't expect to feel so many things reading Ruskin Bond's Lone Fox Dancing. But I totally did. Sad, and sweet and poignant and you just feel like going back in time and giving the little boy he was a hug. Like the best memoirs, this gave you a lot of answers, but also not ALL the answers, because writers should ultimately retain a little mystery in the end.
My favourite essay collection: When you're crawling up on thirty six, your biological clock either starts to tick with great loudness, or in my case, you just assume you have a defective one, because my womb is perfectly happy being just a womb, not a carrier of Future Life and so on. Every single essay in Selfish, Shallow And Self Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on Their Decision Not To Have Kids validated that choice. Having children is not for everyone, and I'm glad we live in a world where the second choice is also explored and analysed and recognised as valid.
My favourite YA: You guys, what can I say about The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas that will sum up exactly how much I love it? I don't think my words are adequate but: young black girl in a shady neighbourhood learns what cops are able to do to young black men, and realises her identity through it. SO GOOD.
My favourite short story collection: Out for drinks one day with a friend who brought along another friend who said The Adivasi Will Not Dance by Handsa Sowvendra Shekhar was the ONE book she was buying and giving to friends consistently. Of course, I had to have it. There was some controversy around the book, but I only recall the lyrical language, each story is pitch perfect and a representation of people we don't often hear from: "the hinterland of Jharkhand" as the blurb says.
My all round favourite book of the year: Just finished Pachinko by Min Jin Lee two days ago, and already I am feeling withdrawal symptoms. This is my favourite sort of book: a long family saga, grandparents and parents, and kids and their kids, but set in Japan, amongst Korean immigrants. I don't know very much about this part of the world, and was prepared to find the book dense and difficult, but instead, I found myself savouring it and slowing down so it would last longer. The last time I felt like this about a book was A Little Life, so PLEASE read this IMMEDIATELY.
And (because this is MY newsletter after all) my favourite book that I wrote this year: *AHEM* My book The One Who Swam With The Fishes got great reviews across the board, and is the story of Satyavati from the Mahabharata. Sort of her origin story, there's myth, there's a young girl's journey, there's feminism, there's sex, you'll like it. Link to buy at the bottom of this newsletter.
You can read more of my picks by the month over at BLInk, where I have a column recommending books by theme.
November 26, 2017
Today in Photo
Had a lovely time at the #goaphoto festival this weekend, where different exhibits were displayed in gorgeous old houses around Siolim. The idea was to walk through all of them but we took the scooter anyway. Followed by a party at the Siolim Institute also decked up for the night with a set of projections and craft beer by a company called Susegado flowing all night. #traveldiary #goamoon #villagelife
via Instagram
November 24, 2017
Today in Photo
Bae on baech. How many seaside days can I squeeze in before we leave next week? #traveldiary #goamoon #beachlife
via Instagram
November 23, 2017
Today in Photo
Way #latergram, from the night before I caught this bloody flu. Discovering the hipster joys of Chapora. Actually the HIPPIE joys. This is from Paulo's, a dive bar and an institution. No food, no photography (inside, of the many musicians that hang in frames, this photo totally doesn't count). Most of the clientele were ancient white hippies talking about what India was like in the 70s. (Conjecture, but what else would they talk about?) Charming place though. I'm totally going back. #traveldiary #goamoon #villagelife
via Instagram
