Magic Moments

1. Wild Wild Country 2. Midsommar / Wicker Man - Read more here 3. The Family Upstairs - Read Book Review here 4. Offering to the storms ( Baztan Trilogy) - Read more here 5. House of Secrets : The Burari Deaths 6. The Jonestown Massacre - Jim Jones who led a mass suicide of 900+ people. 7. Under the banner of heaven This post is a part of  Blogchatter Half Marathon 2023 .  

I first heard of this novel in a BooksOnToast show on their YouTube channel. And I'm so glad I did.  Spanning four generations of Tagore (Thakur) family in Bengal, from 1823 to 1902, this book is a very unique experience. It is especially the life stories of the daughters-in-law and the daughters of the Tagore family - their world and their perspectives.  There's the din and bustle of a joint family household, where the everyday chores are an elaborate affair, and I could relate to it all. A palatial mansion which was home to the little child brides from their pre teen years till their death. They almost lived their entire lives here. Difficult to imagine. Aruna Chakravarti brings alive the era, the inception of the Brahmos, the new religion, the changing laws of the land, and the various members of the Tagore family who influenced the Bengali culture and tradition a great deal with their written word. Satyendranath who wrote plays to be enacted for the public, Swarnakumari wh...

  I have long been fascinated with Shillong. Rather Meghalaya as a whole. Introduced to it through Janice Pariat’s books – ‘Nine Chambered Heart’ , ‘Boats on Land’ , and ‘Everything the Light Touches’ . In her stories it seems a far-off land, deep in culture, myths and folklores, where people speak such a different tongue. The oral tradition of storytelling there has long enchanted me, of how mountains came to be, those fireside narrations and gatherings in winter nights. I long to visit the rolling hills, the forests, the sacred groves, the clean waters of Dawki river, the idyllic villages, and the numerous roadside waterfalls in the state. Through ‘Name Place Animal Thing’ I was introduced to how the childhood and the school life of a teenage girl looks like in Shillong. The author, Daribha Lyndem, has put the tale so simplistically, like a collection of memories from days past. And recently through numerous blogs by Cheryl Rhyn, I was again fascinated by so many local tales...

  The Yogi Witch By Zorian Cross   Publisher - ‎   HarperCollins India (20 June 2023) Language - ‎   English Paperback -   352 pages Genre – Fantasy Buy At - Amazon   Book Blurb: GoodReads: Raised by a trio of witches, Jai Gill invites us on a journey of magic, mystery, and mayhem - all while teaching yoga during the day and slaying demons at night. As Jai begins the journey of not only embracing his magical legacy, but also making peace with his sexuality, his magical life is shattered when he falls in love with the boy next door; the man who's destined for a life steeped in evil. Love is, after all, a curse for all witches! Myths become real and the mundane becomes enchanting, as Jai and his witchy family remove the veil that separates reality and fantasy, all enjoying endless cups of lavender tea and sinfully delicious goodies that are magically removed of all guilt. Amazon: By day, Jai Gill teaches yoga, reads tarot and, like m...

Early this year I think I discovered The Storygraph – a website, quite a competitor of GoodReads, for logging books read, shelfing them, and jotting down private thoughts and reviews. It has this amazing feature of stats, that calculates not just books read, but rather pages finished, from books we somehow ‘Did Not Finish’. The data scientist in me loves these stats. Sharing a few here. I love fiction. So, most of my reads this year have been fiction. And I love print, but boresome household tasks demand audiobooks. So Storytel and Audible are my go-to apps for listening to audiobooks while morning walks, cooking in the kitchen, arranging things around the house or just lazing around on the couch. I am loving this chart for Genres. Quite an eclectic mix. Makes me so happy. The one thing that I wanted to do this year for my reading goals, was to read several new authors. I wish that feature was also there in The StoryGraph. I read for the first time this year Balli Kaur Jaswal , Arefa T...

Guest Post By Shivani Pandey A year ago I chanced upon the magnum opus of my favorite author Paulo Coelho. Certainly, some accidents are blessings in disguise. It was a period of emotional turmoil both in my personal life and my educational sphere. I thought a novel would be a good refreshment but little did I know that this would have an effect on my mind and soul that would last for a lifetime.  The novel speaks about a lad who despite being a scholar wishes to travel the world. He embarks upon a journey as a shepherd unaware of the fact that this would be a life-altering one. He gathers the courage to follow a vague dream which often people like me disregard. He interprets the dream as the language of God- the way God communicates with his creations. He believes that to seek one's destiny, one needs to hear the signals that He sends. I personally have started paying heed to the omens that the universe sends- good or bad- and things have changed for the better.  ...

Book Blurb: " Cynthia is a young widow struggling to raise her six-year-old daughter. Mathilde, an eccentric and short-tempered old woman, tries her best to keep people away. Despite their differences, Cynthia's circumstances draw them together. Will Mathilde turn her back on Cynthia? Will these women learn the true meaning of a family? " The book starts with Cynthia Dawson trying to make ends meet for herself and her daughter, Jeanne as they are left alone to fend for themselves after her husband passed away a few months back. But being the wife of a rather violent war veteran was nothing better than the life of a widow. He hit her and Jeanne whenever he felt like it and hung himself one fine day in the garage. Charming moments between the mother and the daughter set pace for a heartwarming read. Cynthia has been an orphan living with several foster parents since childhood. And as the title suggests, the story revolves around Cynthia’s las...

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library.” — Jorge Luis Borges I came across this book tag on Twitter at  Zezee With Books , Life Of a Female Bibliophile , and PaperFury . I wanted to write on it, but somehow couldn't and my sister was searching for prompts to write on and happily took this one up. So over to my sister- Samikshya Mishra, as she shares her bookish savory delicious indulgences.                                 ************************************************ I love doing recommendations. When I chanced upon a few posts talking about books and relating them to delicious desserts, I wanted to write one too. So here’s a list in which I’ll tag books and movies with a flavor of cake. All the tags I read before writing this made me imagine delicious cakes in a small café in a countryside, a sweet old lady baking bread and cookies, the warm a...

Discovering a new author whose words speak to your sensibilities is always exciting. And you wonder what you did all these years without reading any of this author’s works. For me such an author is Victoria Hislop- and I cannot imagine myself in a life before reading The Island anymore. It’s like there is an entire world out there you know nothing about. I had such strong sentiments for a book when I first read Jane Austen, JK Rowling and Haruki Murakami. Read the first part of the review here.  Spinalonga This is the island that the title refers to, separated by a narrow waterway from the mainland of Plaka, Crete where those afflicted by leprosy built a habitation right from the scratch. In crude words, lepers were banished there to die. They built houses, church, school, bakeries, printing press, hospitals, and graveyards; they created their own legal and political system; they grew their own food and herbs but also had to depend on the weekly supplies from the...

Book Blurb: “Satyajit Ray was a master of science fiction writing. Through his Professor Shonku stories and other fiction and non-fiction pieces, he explored the genre from various angles. In the 1960s, Ray wrote a screenplay for what would have been the first-of-its-kind sci-fi film to be made in India. It was called The Alien and was based on his own short story “Bonkubabur Bandhu”. On being prompted by Arthur C. Clarke, who found the screenplay promising, Ray sent the script to Columbia Pictures in Hollywood, who agreed to back it, and Peter Sellers was approached to play a prominent role. Then started the “Ordeals of the Alien” as Ray calls it, as even after a series of trips to the US, UK and France, the film was never made, and more shockingly, some fifteen years later, Ray watched Steven Spielberg’s film Close Encounters of the Third Kind and later E.T.:The Extra- Terrestrial , and realized these bore uncanny resemblances to his script The Alien, including the way ...