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Showing posts from March, 2016

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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

A Day in the Life
(Spoiler: it's baby, work, and oh, a baby)

Last year, when Trish hosted this event, I was visiting Toronto and so didn't get a chance to participate. But, in a way, the bigger reason I didn't participate was because I was sure reading and writing about my day was going to be boring. I mean, in those days, the most eventful thing that happened to me was maybe catching up on a favorite TV show or writing a blog post. So, subconsciously, I decided that I didn't want anyone to pity my boring weekday but officially, I told everyone who cared that I was on vacation. And then, I sat down to read everyone else's account of their days, and I saw days that were... remarkably similar to mine. Most importantly, I loved reading these posts. So what I learned was that it may be boring to document one's days but it was infinitely more fun to read such posts. So without further ado, here is my attempt to document one of my weekdays. This day below is Thursday March 17 and is typical of my weekdays. 12.20a Shreya is

An impromptu long weekend | The Sunday Salon

Currently / 3.27 pm. We just got back from spending the afternoon at a friend's place, where we had some delicious food and plenty of fun. Now, everyone is snoozing the afternoon off, so this is my cue to get some blogging done. Update at 3.33 pm: I guess a cup of tea will go well with writing. Update at 3.41 pm: Of course, the baby has to wake up right this minute. Update at 4.03 pm: Tea's ready and the baby is sleeping again, so blogging continues. This past week  / Has been wonderful. The pace at work has slowed down, enough so that I took a day off on Friday. Getting this long weekend for myself has been nice. I got some things done around the house, I spent a lot of time with Shreya, and I started a new book - Eleanor by Jason Gurley (even if I read only a few pages). I wish I had more time off and I didn't have to go back to work tomorrow but you can't have too much of a good thing. Grateful for / My dad arrived here last week. It has been a long

The Beautiful Bureaucrat by Helen Phillips

The person who interviewed her had no face. Under other circumstances—if the job market hadn't been so bleak for so long, if the summer hadn't been so glum and muggy—this might have discouraged Josephine from stepping through the door of that office in the first place. But as things were, her initial thought was: Oh, perfect, the interviewer's appearance probably deterred other applicants After a long period of unemployment, Josephine is relieved when she gets a job, so relieved that she doesn't care to raise an eyebrow about her masked employer or the lack of windows in her office building or even the purpose of her job (entering dates next to names of people into a database). Now she had a paycheck and both she and her husband, Joseph, can soon move away from sublet apartments and buy a decent place of their own. However, instead of the security that she craved, mysterious occurrences greet her. Every person she meets at her office appear to be plain forgettable

The post where I catch up to the present | The Sunday Salon

None of the posts I wanted to write this week actually happened. Except for maybe the one review I posted. But I had other stuff I wanted to share that never got written about. So this is going to be the list of all those things and more, if I can remember what all that was. The birthday weekend Last Tuesday was my husband's birthday. However, the party had started during the previous weekend. His brother and wife arrived on Friday night, followed by his best friend, wife, and daughter the following morning. We had a blast last weekend. Games, cooking, outings at the park, cake, and just plain fun. The husband didn't know of these visits until the day before - the surprise was totally worth it. I gave him a telescope for his birthday, since he had been talking about getting one for a long time but been reluctant to actually commit to it. An aside: The husband and I have very different interests generally - Introvert me loves home-bound hobbies like reading, knitting, wr

Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon

“Sometimes I reread my favorite books from back to front. I start with the last chapter and read backward until I get to the beginning. When you read this way, characters go from hope to despair, from self-knowledge to doubt. In love stories, couples start out as lovers and end as strangers. Coming-of-age books become stories of losing your way. Your favorite characters come back to life. Lately, I have been passing up YA books. I would read reviews and maybe express a desire to read the book but then change my mind a few minutes later. I have had so much trouble with YA books that I don't see any merit in trying them. Plus, reading time is at a premium nowadays. I was not keen to spend a lot of time on reading a book only to complain about my experience with it. So, when Everything, Everything started showing up on book blogs (with rave reviews, that too), I went through the same drill. Yup, sounds good, but no thank you. At one point however, I requested the book from my