The one good thing about 2019, was that it was a fantastic reading year. This was mainly thanks to NetGalley letting me read pre-publication proofs in exchange for reviews. Of course, there were good and bad books—including that eminently forgettable whodunit in which the only gay character was also the deranged killer—and also very unremarkable […]
Reviews
Review: Jinxed by Amy McCulloch
A round of applause to Amy McCulloch for a book (the first of a series) about girls in engineering. That and the the world-building were the two things that got me hooked on Jinxed, even though it ended in a cliffhanger, which I hate. The story is set in a time about 50 years from […]
Older and wiser…again
It’s stock-taking-of-the-year time and the only thing I can think of is, 2017 was the year I discovered Berena! Well, in the larger scheme of things, the year that just went by was a horrible one. Right-wing bigots continued to be in power, the digital enslavement of Indian citizens went on, the economy remained effed, […]
Career of Evil — finish or abandon?
Should you review a book you’re not sure you’ll finish? Don’t know the answer to that one, so I just won’t call this a review. To be fair, I wasn’t exactly champing at the bit to read Robert Galbraith’s Career of Evil so I can’t exactly moan about feeling let down. It sort dropped into […]
Why I want you to watch Holby City
**Note: Here be spoilers.** #1 Because representation matters The older I get the less patience I have for stories about men, for men. It doesn’t help that this covers most of TV. This started me on a quest to seek out series featuring women or series that have stories about women (not the same thing). […]
Wolfenstein: The New Order
There’s a lot of shooting everything in sight in Wolfenstein: The New Order (hereafter W:TNO), plus a decent amount of sneaking about if you so wish, but the overarching attraction of the game for me has been the premise its storyline is based on: What if the Nazis won World War II?
Review: Shatter Me
[NOTE: I feel a little bad roasting this book here, mainly because if you can’t find even one good thing to say, then should you say anything at all? But I’ve run out of patience ploughing through it, so here goes…] That hypothetical fine line between the sublime and the ridiculous? There’s a reason one […]
Book review: Come, before Evening Falls
Yesterday, at the Scholastic Writing Awards ceremony in Delhi, I ran into the author Manjul Bajaj. We were only introduced to the each other just as we were leaving, but we had a nice walk down the stairs talking about a mutual writer friend, Monideepa Sahu. Anyway, I digress… Meeting Manjul reminded me of a […]
Book review: Asmara’s Summer
Is there anything more important to a teenager than her street cred? No, at least not for Asmara. So when her Canada plans are cancelled and instead she has to spend a month with her grandparents in the conservative and definitely un-posh part of town, it is instant social disaster. So Asmara does the only […]