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Month: April 2021

Book Review: Hellfire by Leesa Gazi

April 21, 2021April 21, 2021 ~ Deepika ~ 5 Comments

In my last post -- a review of Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous -- I wrote, "If the fences are eventually lifted, where will we go from there?" Strangely, Leesa Gazi's Hellfire, translated from the Bengali by Shabnam Nadiya, starts from there. Lovely gets out of the house for the first time all … Continue reading Book Review: Hellfire by Leesa Gazi

Book Review: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous By Ocean Vuong

April 18, 2021April 21, 2021 ~ Deepika ~ 3 Comments

I am always looking for something sweet, something ugly, something that talks about what it means to be human, something that can tell me that there is meaning and that this life is not absurd, and something that can hold space for me to salvage myself. Even when I read a pop-science book on how … Continue reading Book Review: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous By Ocean Vuong

Book Review: Long Live The Post Horn by Vigdis Hjorth

April 12, 2021April 13, 2021 ~ Deepika ~ 7 Comments

Trigger Warning: This blog contains mentions of suicide and depression. There was a lid over the world. As in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, I thought. I wondered if I should read it again, but surely it would only intensify my sense of isolation, I punch my fists into the air as if to smash … Continue reading Book Review: Long Live The Post Horn by Vigdis Hjorth

ஓடும் நதியின் மேலே
உட்காரும் தட்டான் போலே
லேசாக அமர்ந்தே பறப்பேனே
புவிமேலே...

பூவிழும் குளத்தின்மேலே
உருவாகும் வளையல்போலே
நான் வாழ்ந்த அதிர்வைக் கொடுப்பேனே...
- கார்த்திக் நேத்தா

Recent Posts

  • On The Room with a View
  • The Arrow of Time
  • On Finding The Strength To Do Both
  • Book Review: Cold Skin By Albert Sánchez Piñol, Translated By Cheryl Leah Morgan
  • Goodbye, The Guest Cat

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Tweets by theboookdog
‘I’ve been thinking a great deal about time and motion lately, about being a still point in the ceaseless rush.’ My forever muse, under the lightfall. ✨ A dog called Solace. ✨ I finished reading Sigrid Nunez’s What Are You Going Through this week. I knew I was touched by the book, but I couldn’t pin down what exactly moved me, what dropped rocks in my heart. My thoughts about the book were untameable. And then, I come home this morning to find A Horse at Night delivered; I have no memory of when I ordered it, but a bookseller seemed to have remembered that I wanted this book at some point in time. I leaf through the book and stumble upon a passage about Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend, which I had read five years ago and Goodreads reminds me that I seemed to have loved it so much. The passage that I run into in A Horse at Night today is about the relationship between the narrator of The Friend and Apollo, a Great Dane, mourning the loss of his human. Amina Cain’s unadorned meditation on the friendship between the narrator and the depressed dog made me think of the books we read, surrender our memories about them existence and our tryst with them to time, and only for all of them to be returned by another book or a conversation overheard or a song. When we remember why we loved a book so much, we want to read it all over again. Sigrid Nunez’s What Are You Going Through will return to me someday like that — one of the reasons to keep staying alive. ❤️ This moment, this slice of beauty, waited for no observer. The light poured and made a rainbow on a colourless concrete, on a completely mundane day, and made me feel like I entered another portal for a second just because I observed it, and I was kicked back into this reality by some force. 🌈 Is it just me, or does Emily St. John Mandel always love her characters unconditionally? For a tiny moment, while that shahi tukda was being served, and while an ancient dad joke made my family laugh, I forgot that this city is new to me, and I don’t have a home yet. And what’s home really! Is there a specific word for the kindness and trust gifted by the cats and the dogs in a new city! 🐾✨ I take the trains and the buses, and she is the one who sits by the window. ❤️

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