The Whimsy Bookworm: A Book Blog from India

  Hello April!  Hello Bengali New Year!  Hello Summer!  Hello Reading Bengali Books and Authors all month long!  I am so excited April is here.  A month of reading from my corner of the world. Doing my annual #AllBengaliBooksinApril where I celebrate all things Bangla and read books written originally in Bengali and the works of Bengali writers.  My goals for this month are simple:  Read good books.  Journal.  Be creative.  Hopefully writing a little bit. Finish a story I've been working on and getting it out in the world.  Maybe go for a little road trip.  :)  Oh and read Jhumpa Lahiri's new book. I am so excited for it.  To kickstart my reading of Bengali books, I have started with an old favourite.  The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri:   Join Ashima in her journey through complex Indian situations  Namesake is the brainchild of Jhumpa Lahiri. The story unfolds with Ashima’s grandmother coming to know ...

  Hello March!  Hello Spring!  Hello Holi!  Hello Flowers!  :)  I am hoping and praying and wishing that this March is leaps and oodles better than the last one.  I am hoping for good reads, slow days, maybe some outing (though I think I've forgotten what it's like to go out and meet people tbh).  Some Journaling.  Art Journaling.  Colouring.  Being.  & Reading More Women and Only Women writers for #FemmeMarch.  With that goal in mind, I have started my month with one of my favourites.  Re-reading one, if not my most loved books ever.  I have read and re-read this a whole bunch of times and each time I come back a little more moved and stirred and in awe of this world and Jhumpa Lahiri's magic.  You Will be Fine.  :)  I hope we are all fine and well this month.  Bookmark from Tanuka Draws.  Seemed apt for this month and this book. 

Hello!  Time to share my monthly book haul. I got these five books from Kitab Khana on a recent visit.  I don't see myself getting any more books in the rest of the month.  I did get a few ebooks as well which I will share soon.  Now for these beauties.  Books Bought///  Death Knocks Twice by Robert Thorogood  The Tidal Zone by Sarah Moss  The Underground Railway by Colson Whithead  Midnight in the Bright Ideas Bookstore by Matthew Sullivan  Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie  I am so happy with my book haul, I found some books I am so excited to read.  And I am so glad I found some books that were on my radar for a while- The Tidal Zone and The Underground Railroad.  So much happy reading in my future! 

Hello!  Today it's time to list some of my Literary Fiction Top 5 reads.  We, the sister and I, were really lucky to have read some amazing books this year.  And while choosing the Top 5 contenders for this list we actually came up with more than just 5 books.  Not a bad thing at all. It just means we read great books and just couldn't narrow down the list.  Let's see the books we loved in this genre...in no particular order!  1. All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr: A spectacular war story. Full of wonderful characters and some lovely writing. This Pulitzer Prize winner is a gorgeous novel that I highly, highly recommend. A full review can be found HERE .  2. A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler: A simple, easy and very engaging story about a few generations of a family and their lives and loves and conflicts and so much more. A book I loved immensely. This was on the short list for the Man Booker this year....

Book: All The Light We Cannot See Author: Anthony Doerr Pages: 531 I read: The Kindle version I read it in: 5-6 hours Plot Summary: Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When Marie-Laure is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris, and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel. In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, ...

Book: A Confederacy of Dunces Author: John Kennedy Toole Pages: 394 pages Read on: Kindle Read in: Across a few days Plot Summary: A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece. John Kennedy Toole's hero is one Ignatius J. Reilly, "huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter. His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans' lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures" (Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times ) What I Liked: This is an utterly hilarious, laugh-out-loud funny book! That apart, here is the list: The characters in this book are real characters ! They are eccentric, kooky and totally nuts! They are all trapped in their own worldview/ way of looking at things and this is what leads to a lot of shenanigans and the aforementioned laugh-out-loud moments.  The setting of New Orleans- the languag...