The Whimsy Bookworm: A Book Blog from India

  Book: Ma is Scared and Other Stories  Author: Anjali Kajal  Translator: Kavita Bhanot  Publisher: Penguin India  Pages: 208  How Long it Took me to Read: 2 days  Plot Summary:   An anxious mother waits for her daughter to return from work, while deflecting comments from judgmental neighbours. A chance encounter with an old college friend triggers the memory of a cruel trap once set for a young student, just because of her caste. In the middle of a lecture on the legacies of sexual abuse, a woman feels the weight of a whole lifetime suddenly pressing down on her. The stories in Anjali Kajal’s debut collection draw us into the lives of ordinary women in Northern India, making us realise quite how rarely we witness these experiences from Dalit points of view. Whether combating the caste-based disdain of colleagues at work or in the classroom or enduring the new blows that the pandemic landed on Dalit communities, Anjali’s characters find a re...

  Book: Won't You Stay, Radhika?  Author: Usha Priyamvada  Translation: Daisy Rockwell  Publisher: Speaking Tiger  Pages: 184  How Long it Took Me To Read: 3 days  Plot Summary:   After her widowed father marries a younger woman, Radhika’s world falls apart. She feels betrayed—the emotional and intellectual bond that she had forged with him since the early death of her mother breaks with that sudden marriage. To escape the unbearable situation at home—the growing rift between her and her father—Radhika moves to Chicago to pursue her master’s in fine arts. She returns to India two years later, burdened by a sense of alienation and homesickness, only to realize that while nothing had changed in her country, everything had. The family that she had longed to be reunited with barely acknowledges her arrival. The sense of belonging is missing, leaving her in ‘an emotional state of in-between-ness, of universal unbelonging’. As days pass, Radhika i...

  It's only March but summer is here and how!  The days are hot, yet the nights still feel pleasant.  This tall jar of Gadbad (an icecream sundae) is bringing me so much sukoon.  A book I recently read and loved.  Ma is Scared is collection of stirring short stories about women in North India and what life looks like for them and everything they have to overcome and ignore and survive.  There are also quite a few Dalit perspectives in here which were important and nuanced.  Reading as always has been a constant.  Fruits 🍍🍎🍓🍇 are life.  Seen here some prep for Fruit chaat. 💛  A thing of joy.  Flowers 🌸🌺🌻🌹🌷🌼💐 Adding some Spring vibes to my room. 

 March Begins.  With gentle days. Books. Coffee. Organising my Book Cart. Spring Cleaning.  & Joy ✨🌿✨ Moments of calm and peace.  A saffron candle from Ekatra.  A stack of March hopefuls.  And a cup of coconut water.  My pretty book mark and my gorgeous current read that I am really enjoying.  Some ( a lot) new additions to my elibrary.  Spring Book Releases making me so excited.  All I want to do is read and read and read.  A sweet little friend. 💛🐘💛

 Hello Loves!  August was a month of more reading and very little book buying. I went nearly all month without buying a single book, because my reading for the month was more than sorted. I hate a basket full of books waiting for me and I had no real need for books.  But then I spent an afternoon bookshop hopping and of course didn't leave empty handed.  I bought a total of 7 books and here is a little haul.  I went to Granth Books in Juhu and went to the iconic Prithvi Theatre and browsed at their bookshop Paperback and picked some books.  Here they are.  A Korean historical fiction, that I mainly picked up for my sister who immediately picked it up and read it. A review will come soon. This is set in Korean and Hawaii and is about Picture Brides, basically a kind of arranged marriage between Korean girls and Korean men that were immigrants in the US. I was drawn in by the cover and I am so glad the book is beautiful inside as well.  This book wa...

  Hello Loves!  August is over and done with and with that comes to end my yearly reading tradition of reading only books from India and the Indian Subcontinent.  It is usually one of my favourite reading months of the year and this year was no different.  I read a total of 20 books and I loved most of them.  I read books from India, translated books, a spot of non-fiction, a memoir, some essays and books from across the border.  A solid good month of reading.  And I can't wait to talk about my reads, so what are we waiting for?  Let's jump right in shall we?  BOOKS READ IN AUGUST 2022:   1. The Chronicles of Lost Daughters by Debarati Mukhopadhyay, Trans. by Arunava Sinha: I started my month with this absolute gem of a book and it was a perfect way to kick start my reading month and it was something that also ticked off reading something in honour of Reading Women in Translation.  This book is set in a era I love, the Golden Age i...

 Hello Loves! Long time no book haul, the reason is I bought zero books in April, May and June.  I had books sent to me from publishers but I didn't buy any books.  For no real reason but I was about to head back home and didn't see the sense in adding books to my burgeoning luggage.  And you know what? I was OK with not buying books. I was fine reading the books I already owned and books on my beloved Kindle.  I think this is the longest I went without buying books.  Look at me being so grown up and mature.  Go me!  In July, I was back home, in Bombay.  I was settling back in and there were some amazing sales going on...so I bit the bullet and got some books that were on my radar.  So I got myself some books and I have already read a few of them, so I'll be sharing some thoughts and mini-reviews along the way.  This one is a very Harper haul.  BOOKS BOUGHT:  The Chronicles of Lost Daughters by Debarati Mukhopadhyay. ...

 Hello Loves!  How has life been treating you lately?  My life has been curiously busy and full of other drama and books have not exactly taken a back seat but have definitely been on the back burner. I have been reading but in a distracted sort of way. I read but I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the books.  I just life to calm down a bit and find an amazing book to sit down and really focus on.  Hopefully this weekend I do just that: Sit tight and read.  For today's post I want to talk about two books I read this week.    Heaven by Mieko Kawakami:   Hailed as a bold foray into new literary territory, Kawakami’s novel is told in the voice of a 14-year-old student who subjected to relentless torment for having a lazy eye. Instead of resisting, the boy chooses to suffer in complete resignation. The only person who understands what he is going through is a female classmate who suffers similar treatment at the hands of her tormentors. T...

 Hello Loves!  I feel like 2021 has been the year of the short story for me. I read a LOT of short story collections this year. Which in itself is not out of the ordinary, I have always enjoyed short stories but this year I have found more comfort in short stories than before. Maybe some of it has to do with after Covid effects, when my attention was easily muddled and I preferred reading a short story instead of diving into a full length novel.  So here are my absolute favourite short story collections from 2021.  1. Immoderate Men by Shikhandin: I picked this book on such a whim. I thought to myself, well you only seem to read about women and their stories, won't it be nice to read about men for a change? I am glad I had this fleeting thought and that lead to this book and I am so glad I read this little gem. The stories here are about men in all sorts of shapes and forms. Good, creepy, sad, lost and so incredibly real and flawed and beautifully written. I loved th...

  Hello Loves!  August is Women in Translation month and a time to read and talk about the incredible stories that exist in languages other than English.  There is such a treasure trove of stories and characters written in various languages (regional languages in India and many international languages) and I am so so so grateful for the work translators do to make these stories accessible to all of us.  I've been meaning to compile this list all month long, but it's taken me forever to sit down and get this written.  I will split this post in two parts,  Part I is All Indian Books.  Part II is Books from All Around the World.  So let's get Started.  First here are some Indian Women Writers you need to/ have to/ got to Read.  INDIAN WOMEN IN TRANSLATION: BOOKS TO READ 1. Matchbox Stories by Ashapurna Devi (translated from Bengali) 2. The Kept Woman and Other Stories by Kamala Das (translated from Malayalam)  3. Lifting the Veil by I...