Vodafone-Crossword Book Awards

The Vodafone-Crossword Book Awards 2008 shortlist is star-studded — and finding place are ‘The Enchantress of Florence’ by Salman Rushdie, ‘Sea of Poppies’ by Amitav Ghosh, ‘Unaccustomed Earth’ by Jhumpa Lahiri, ‘Past Continuous’ by Neel Mukherjee and ‘Escape’ by Manjula Padmanabhan.
This was announced by a panel comprising publisher-writer Urvashi Butalia, authors Mani Shankar Mukherji and [...]

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The River Has No Camera – Anjali Chandran

If one went by the title or the packaging, one could have easily missed this book. If you took a little trouble and pulled it off the shelf and read the blurb, you may take a chance. That’s what I did.  Anjali Chandran launched this book in 2001 and I dont remember reading about it, [...]

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Afterwards – Jaishree Misra

Disappointing, was my thought as I turned the last page. Another Indian author that I had not tried for a long time despite several people urging me. The fact that she is related to Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai as stated by Wikipedia  was certainly one reason to try this one out. May be this is not [...]

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The Finger Puppet – Anu Jayanth

Reading The Finger Puppet on the heels of Lost Flamingoes of Bombay,  was very reassuring - all is not lost with Indian writing.  Which brings me to my pet peeve - that authentic and deserving writers rarely get nominated for those awards. Shashi Deshpande’s In the Country of Deceit was the Indian nominee for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize recently and Siddharth Shangvi’s book has also been nominated for [...]

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The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay – Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi

If the ’Last Song of Dusk’ was bizarre, this one is bizarre too; less but bizarre all the same. Siddarth hid behind the facade of magic realism in his last book, this one however exposes him. ‘The Lost Flamingoes of  Bombay’ is disappointing and does not stand up to all the hype created by the spin doctors. Even the [...]

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No Onion Nor Garlic – Srividya Natarajan

I attempted this one more out of compulsion, so that P did not crib about her failed attempts to make me read Seven Ancient Wonders by Matthew Reilly. By the fourth page even the mallu on the PA system saying, “Ladies and gendlemen,  flight number won, seero, seero….. from Chennai to Baaingaluur”….. could not distract me. I have not giggled as much [...]

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The White Tiger – Aravind Adiga

The whole world is talking about Aravind Adiga’s Man Booker Prize but I got to read it only now. The write-ups before the Booker were uninspiring and I stayed away. Come to think of it, I think only Arundhati Roy deserved her Booker, Kiran Desai’s book was lame and Rushdie’s book convoluted. The White Tiger [...]

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In The Country of Deceit – Shashi Deshpande

I was wading through Lament of Mohini by Shreekumar Varma and feeling any book would be a reprieve when I started on ‘In The Country of Deceit’. I have to admit that it started off well and then it just tapered off especially towards the end as though the author also lost interest and just was not sure [...]

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Naked in the Wind – Brinda Charry

It almost seems eerie that I read this book given the recent religious strife in Orissa. It also received the Golden Quill Awards this year. An interesting book, I liked it. Scout’s honour, I was definitely not intrigued by the fact that as a boy I stayed on Campbell Road. It had nothing to do with my [...]

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You Are Here – Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan

She was on ‘We the People’ a while ago, awkwardly warding questions about how much of her blog is fact and how much was fiction. Meenakshi also talked about how the popularity of her blog resulted in her being approached by publishers to write a book. Ever since I was intrigued about her book and was looking [...]

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