Siddhi's Blog

 "Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is."  Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre is one of the most important philosophers of all time. Despite his work garnering considerable flak over the years, his theories on existentialism and freedom cement his place among the most influential Western philosophers of the 20th-century and beyond. Nausea is Sartre's first novel. I am not big with philosophy, but man do I love words and books! I picked up Nausea because first, it has a very curious title and second, I was looking for something short and interesting. Nausea is 100-something pages long. It is the diary of Antoine Roquentin.  Roquentin is a French writer and the narrator. He lives in solitude writing History related texts. In the book he interacts with two other characters regularly. One is the self-taught man and the other is a woman with whom the narrator sleeps with often. The self-taught man is an important character. He spends his time reading books, he reads t...

Tomb of Sand is a book written by Geetanjali Shree, originally in Hindi and translated by Daisy Rockwell. The book won the International Booker Prize in 2022. The book,  if I describe it vaguely, is a book about a depressed old woman and her story of overcoming that depression and revisiting her teenage trauma from the India-Pakistan partition. But this is not just a long book. This is a big book, huge. It tells the story of a woman, two women and women in family, women who are not 'women', of men and grown children. It tells the story of a family, of a country, two countries, the border and the old woman. The book is more than 700 pages long and is written in three parts. The first part starts with the old woman facing the wall after she lost her husband. She is grieving, the entire family is grieving. The family tries to pull her back, but she is deliberate and stubborn , saying "nahi hi uthungi" which later turns into "nayi hi uthungi", "I will rise ...

Chronicles of the Lost Daughters is the most recent book I have read. I picked it up because of the beautiful cover and was not able to put it down without reading.  Originally called "Narach" (which means weapon) it is a bestselling Bengali novel written by Debarati Mukhopadhyay. It is historical fiction, which is not my most beloved genre of books because of how detailed and heavy the stories end up sometimes. But this book with its easy language and engaging plot, was a page turner right till the end. The story is set in nineteenth century Bengal. Tragedy falls over a young widow Bhubonmoni and her brother Krishnoshundor's family where they are forced to leave the village and the events follow one after the other.  The story involves many interesting characters. The young musician Chondronath. The two young daughters of Krishnoshundor . Notorious businessman Nobokishor Dutta. In the narrative of this novel, many historical figures, including Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, Kadom...

 I am a slow reader but I live for the sense of achievement that comes with finishing a book.  Anna Karenina is pretty daunting with its eight hundred pages lying on my shelf staring at me while I read ten different books that are two hundred pages each. The little books are the best things to exist. This year I read some really interesting ones that blew me away. I am listing down my favorites in this blog . 1. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka  The Metamorphosis is very close to my heart. I love Kafka and this was my first time reading absurdist fiction. The protagonist turns into a bug and the story revolves around his self-loathing , isolation , guilt and slowly becoming an object hated by his own family .It is remarkable and intense. Bizarre as it sounds, but I feel like we all could relate to being a giant disgusting bug laying all day at some points of our lives, or maybe it is just me and Kafka. Nevertheless this book will either make no sense to you or you will ab...

  “Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, to absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.” It took me a week to finish reading this beautiful novel after it had been laying on my shelf for more than year. Truly a classic. Broke my heart and mended it again. Passionate , raw and unpredictable. The book starts with Jane Eyre giving an account of her childhood and her experience growing up into a woman of education . Her account of childhood circumstances alt...