Quinta da Graça

Goa.

Band Baaja Boys – my thoughts

Pic Source

Author – Rachna Singh

Blurb –

Band, Baaja, Boys! is a sure-fire laugh riot that will make you giggle, chortle, chuckle and often burst into large guffaws.
BA-pass Brajesh sold bras in Manphodgunj. Perhaps his destiny was sealed the day Babuji named him Bra-jesh. Under normal circumstances, Brahmins were not supposed to be businessmen. But Kumud Bajpai had brought along a hosiery shop as dowry and there was no looking back. Only front!
One glance and Brajesh could estimate, ‘Madam, 38D will be perfect.’
Together, they had produced and raised Binny, their twenty-year-old daughter, who they lovingly called a ‘happy-go-lucky’ girl: happy to spend her father’s money while different fellows got lucky.
As was noted by most of Manphodgunj’s male population, Binny had come of age. Who, from the queue of suitors will bag her? Raja, who has lost his heart to her? Or, the ‘gorment‘- job-holder Tarun? Or, will it be the Sanskari-N.R.I., Harsh? Or, will Binny spurn all of them and elope with Rahul Pandey?
Band, Bajaa, Boys! will take you on the laugh-o-coaster of your life!

My thoughts –

I am Woman!

Pic Source

The past weekend was kind of a let’s-celebrate-womanhood for me. Today, many people understand feminism as feminazi and I would like to make it clear here that I am all for the former only. Let’s make it clearer with their definitions –

Feminism (noun): the advocacy of women’s rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes. (Source)

Feminazi (noun): a term used pejoratively to describe either feminist who are perceived as extreme or radical, women who are perceived as seeking superiority over men, rather than equality(Source)

Two-in-One

Image source here

Today with this post I am trying to catch up with two reviews in one post. The people at Fingerprint Publishing have always been patient with me and my mostly-delayed reviews of the books they send me. So here I am with two reviews – one pending and one on time 😛 and they are –

1. Those Immigrants by Scott Haas
2. Penumbra by Bhaskar Chattopadhyay

What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding – my thoughts

Author – Kristin Newman

Blurb (from Goodreads) –

Kristin Newman spent much of her twenties and thirties buying dresses for friends’ weddings and baby showers. To escape her fast-paced job as a sitcom writer, Kristin travelled the world, often alone, several weeks yearly. She fell in love with the planet and attractive locals – connection without commitment. Israeli bartenders, Finnish poker players, sexy Bedouins, and Argentinean priests help transform her into “Kristin-Adjacent” on the road – a slower, softer, and, yes, sluttier version of herself at home.

My thoughts –

As a part of the 2016 Monthly Motif Reading Challenge, I picked up this book for the month of July, for which the motif was – LOL: Hilarious memoirs, silly chick lit, comedic sci-fi. Pick a book that is guaranteed to make you laugh out loud. The book was in my TBR for quite a long time. The title of the book was what attracted me to it and when my friend gifted this one last month, I was super-duper happy! 🙂 😀

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry – My Thoughts

Author -Rachel Joyce

Blurb (from Goodreads) –

Recently retired, sweet, emotionally numb Harold Fry is jolted out of his passivity by a letter from Queenie Hennessy, an old friend, who he hasn’t heard from in twenty years. She has written to say she is in hospice and wanted to say goodbye. Leaving his tense, bitter wife Maureen to her chores, Harold intends a quick walk to the corner mailbox to post his reply but instead, inspired by a chance encounter, he becomes convinced he must deliver his message in person to Queenie–who is 600 miles away–because as long as he keeps walking, Harold believes that Queenie will not die.
So without hiking boots, rain gear, map or cell phone, one of the most endearing characters in current fiction begins his unlikely pilgrimage across the English countryside. Along the way, strangers stir up memories–flashbacks, often painful, from when his marriage was filled with promise and then not, of his inadequacy as a father, and of his shortcomings as a husband.
Ironically, his wife Maureen, shocked by her husband’s sudden absence, begins to long for his presence. Is it possible for Harold and Maureen to bridge the distance between them? And will Queenie be alive to see Harold arrive at her door?

My thoughts –

Six Degrees – my thoughts

Pic Source: Goodreads

Author/Publisher: Blogadda.com

Blurb:

As part of their #CelebrateBlogging initiative, BlogAdda.com ran the first edition of Game of Blogs in September 2014. Five characters and their descriptions were provided. The objective was to write a fictional story revolving around these characters. Bloggers came together as teams and after three rounds filled with its own set of twists and turns, three stories made it to the end.
The three stories in this book are a fascinating example of how one set of characters can have interesting lives with completely different dimensions. Six Degrees is a result of how collaboration can truly breed creativity in the modern day world of connected living.

My Thoughts:

The Spectacular Miss – My Thoughts

Image Source: Goodreads

Author – Sonia Bahl

Blurb (from Goodreads) –

I learned that I am, despite my early years spent as a
swaggering boy, at heart just a middle-class, hard-working,
risk-averse, un-creative, strait-laced, routine-obsessed
conformist. In case I forgot to mention it, I’m also
prudish to the point of being puritanical.
But at eight, Nira had only one over-powering wish—to pee
standing up like a boy. In fact, to be a boy.
Join Nira as she steps into her brother’s clothes and becomes
the self-appointed Al Caponesque gang leader of the neighbourhood
boys. Her oddball yet madly loving family shapes her
personality, and a poignant relationship with her brother’s best
friend shapes her life.
She uses uninhibited candour to detail her coming-of-age journey
from Calcutta to London, from tomboy to reluctant woman-
in-progress . . . always trying to fit in, but always failing. She’s
a laugh a minute, and yet she breaks your heart with her subconscious,
percussive yearning for the one person who is always too
old, too far, too married to be hers.

My thoughts –

I AM MALALA – my thoughts

Goodreads Page

Author: Malala Yousafzai, Christina Lamb

Blurb:

I come from a country that was created at midnight. When I almost died it was just after midday.
When the Taliban took control of the Swat Valley in Pakistan, one girl spoke out. Malala Yousafzai refused to be silenced and fought for her right to an education.
On Tuesday, October 9, 2012, when she was fifteen, she almost paid the ultimate price. She was shot in the head at point-blank range while riding the bus home from school, and few expected her to survive.
Instead, Malala’s miraculous recovery has taken her on an extraordinary journey from a remote valley in northern Pakistan to the halls of the United Nations in New York. At sixteen, she has become a global symbol of peaceful protest and the youngest-ever Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
I Am Malala is the remarkable tale of a family uprooted by global terrorism, of the fight for girls’ education, of a father who, himself a school owner, championed and encouraged his daughter to write and attend school, and of brave parents who have a fierce love for their daughter in a society that prizes sons.
I Am Malala will make you believe in the power of one person’s voice to inspire change in the world.

My thoughts:

Participating in the 2016 Monthly Motif Reading Challenge has been so far a good experience and has done me good by making me pick up books from my huge stack of tempted-to-bring-home-but-not-yet-read books. For the month of May I had to select a book under the motif “Story of Survival” and while going through my earlier mentioned stack, the picture of Malala Yousafzai staring at me from the cover made my job easy. So, for the month of May, MALALA it was!

Unaccustomed Earth – my thoughts

Author – Jhumpa Lahiri

Blurb –

In the stunning title story, Ruma, a young mother in a new city, is visited by her father who carefully tends her garden–where she later unearths evidence of a love affair he is keeping to himself. In “A Choice of Accommodations,” a couple’s romantic getaway weekend takes a dark turn at a party that lasts deep into the night. In “Only Goodness,” a woman eager to give her younger brother the perfect childhood she never had is overwhelmed by guilt, anguish and anger when his alcoholism threatens her family. And in “Hema and Kaushik,” a trio of linked stories–a luminous, intensely compelling elegy of life, death, love and fate–we follow the lives of a girl and boy who, one fateful winter, share a house in Massachusetts. They travel from innocence to experience on separate, sometimes painful paths, until destiny brings them together again years later in Rome.
Unaccustomed Earth is rich with the author’s signature gifts: exquisite prose, emotional wisdom and subtle renderings of the most intricate workings of the heart and mind. It is the work of a writer at the peak of her powers.