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Showing posts from June, 2015

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Infinite Country by Patricia Engel | Thoughts

   Published : 2021   ||    Format : print   ||    Location : Colombia ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆   What was it about the country that kept everyone hostage to its fantasy? The previous month, on its own soil, an American man went to his job at a plant and gunned down fourteen coworkers, and last spring alone there were four different school shootings. A nation at war with itself, yet people still spoke of it as some kind of paradise.. Thoughts : Infinite Country follows two characters - young Talia, who at the beginning of this book, escapes a girl’s reform school in North Colombia so that she can make her previously booked flight to the US. Before she can do that, she needs to travel many miles to reach her father and get her ticket to the rest of her family. As we follow Talia’s treacherous journey south, we learn about how she ended up in the reform school in the first place and why half her family resides in the US. Infinite Country tells the story of her family through the other protagonist, El

Over at Postcards from Asia

While I spend a good chunk of this week getting ready for my five-day long weekend - Woohoo!! - I'm over at Delia's blog, Postcards from Asia . If you're not familiar with Delia, you need head out to her blog there right away. She is a reader, a blogger, and a writer, and her posts are always fun to read.

The Sunday Salon: On true equality and perceived equality

This has been quite an interesting week for the US. First, the Confederate flags have started coming down and then the pride flags went up. I had taken the day off from work on Friday when the US Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage . Honestly, I didn't see that one coming. I did believe that some day in the future, same-sex marriage was not going to be a big deal at all, like it is now. But to me, that future appeared to be way out there. After all, (loosely condensing several decades of US history) slavery was abolished in 1865, there was still racial segregation and discrimination in the 1960s when the Civil Rights movement gained traction, and we are still seeing racially motivated attacks today. The Stonewall riots happened in 1969 and same-sex marriage got legalized only this week. Women won the right to vote in 1920, and even today, they are often passed up for promotions or raises in favor of men, they don't get decent maternity leave, and god forbid if a woman

The Truth According to Us by Annie Barrows

I have since wondered, of course, how my life would have been different if I'd decided to stay home that morning. This is what's called the enigma of history, and it can drive you out of your mind if you let it. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society was one of my favorite reads in 2012, so when I heard about Annie Barrows' new book, The Truth According to Us , I was sure I wanted to read it. Even though Annie Barrows completed Guernsey Literary after her aunt, Mary Shaffer, the original author, passed away, The Truth According to Us appeared to have the same quaint feel as the other book, from the synopsis alone. The Truth According to Us is set in the summer of 1938, while the US was recovering from the Depression. Layla Beck has just been banished by her senator father because she refused to marry the man he chose for her. Instead, he coaxed his brother to give her a job that took her to a little town called Macedonia in West Virginia, where she ha

The Sunday Salon: One of the better weeks in a long time

This has been one of those better weeks, busy yes, but good busy with several silver linings. Family arrived on Friday night amid some flight delays that got them home later than planned. My brother-in-law and his wife were also visiting us this weekend (their first time here after their wedding in April) and they just left a couple of hours ago. They brought so many delicacies from India that I'll have to watch my waistline for a good while. Not that I have a waistline anymore. We also had so much fun this weekend. Last night, we went for bowling, where everyone but me bowled. Fine by me though, I'm not that good at bowling and would have just sulked all evening while everyone else racked up scores in triple digits. I can be very competitive even when I am not good at something. We also spent this morning at the Smith Mountain Lake. Yours Truly stayed on the pontoon but almost everyone else rode the jet ski occasionally. Despite staying less than an hour

Quick Short Thoughts - Anatomy of a Disappearance and Family

Anatomy of a Disappearance  by Hisham Matar I finished Anatomy of a Disappearance months ago but have been super reluctant to review it. Part of the reason is because I wanted to enjoy this book but it didn't quite appeal to me much. Anatomy of a Disappearance is told from Nuri's perspective. His father had just gone missing - apparently kidnapped for being a political dissident of the state. Nuri and Mona, his father's second wife deal with the tragedy in their own ways. Anatomy of a Disappearance is semi-autobiographical. Hisham Matar's father was kidnapped in 1990 and has been missing ever since. I cannot begin to imagine that kind of tragedy - unresolved and lacking closure. So, I feel bad to even admit that I didn't enjoy Anatomy of a Disappearance . I found it very detached and unemotional. It is obvious that Nuri is suffering but that emotion didn't quite come through. He was more obsessed with Mona, whom he fell for from the very instant he se

The Sunday Salon: Painting and Comics Galore

This week, we've been painting the would-be playroom. Or rather, the husband has been painting and I have been taping plastic to the floor and the walls. Mostly, I've been reading while he worked. We actually started doing this two weeks ago, intending to spend the new few weekends painting but the weekends have been busy for a month now so this entire week, the two of us would find ourselves in the basement getting ready to layer another coat of paint. Last night, we finished all the painting that needed to be done and can finally start setting up the room. Good timing too, because during the upcoming weekend, our family will be coming over and will be with us for six months. Although they would love to help us, we wanted to finish setting up the playroom (the way we picture it) before they arrived. We've chosen blue and green for the playroom colors. A few people have been asking why we didn't go with pink since that's the color for girls. Honestly, I hate

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

If there's a single lesson that life teaches us, it's that wishing doesn't make it so. After hearing so much about this trilogy , I had to get to it at some point. In general, I enjoy books about magic - I just don't read enough of them. The Magicians , the first book in this trilogy, starts off with Quentin revealing his immense obsession with the Fillory books, a fantasy series written by an author long dead. To say that he was obsessed is an understatement. Quentin fervently wished that the Fillory world was real, that he was living in it and not in the real world, which to him is very boring to him. He also mentions this through much of the book that you won't be forgetting that for the rest of your life. Luckily for him, he gets an invite to attend a secret school, Brakebills Academy, in upstate New York, where all the invited students have to pass a series of tests before they can snag an admission to attend classes there. This school is secret because

The Sunday Salon: On early morning reading in bed

I've been up since 6 am (not that early for me nowadays) and reading Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In . It's been a while since I've read anything in bed in the morning - a time when the world around you is still asleep and only the dog is also awake (but then she's awake whenever any human is awake so that she can demand that they pet her). I started off the morning with reading a little about superheroes and their origins - part of an online course I signed up for on edX . I love watching superhero movies, I wish I were introduced to them earlier. Every time, I watch a superhero movie, I find myself wishing that I understood the canon better - how it originated, how the characters are related to each other, what their back-stories are, how old these stories are, whether they are based on or inspired by real people, and so on. After each of these movies, I ride a high where I'm obsessed with these stories and wonder how amazing it would be if they were real, mi

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes #MayFFA

  Read my halfway thoughts  here . Last weekend, I finished the second half of Flowers for Algernon in two sittings, just in time to have a week to ponder the book and gather my thoughts about it. By the end of the book, I felt as ambivalent about Charlie as I did initially, though I did empathize with him a lot more in the second half. Daniel Keyes narrates a very compelling story by addressing the age-old question - what happens when you get something you always wanted but never prepared yourself to live with it? You may want riches but if you came into it suddenly one day, would you know what to do with it - squander it away or invest it or save it? In Charlie's case, it was intelligence. He wanted to be smart but it is not that he was incapable of enhancing his smartness, rather he was born mentally challenged. I knew what to expect in the second half of the book, thanks to a spoiler in the Introduction. For much of the book, I was bummed out that I knew about it, bu