Book Review: The Widows of Malabar Hill

I’m going to be honest, I judged this book by the cover. But it was in favour of the book. Something about the purplish hues and a embossed, veiled woman with a briefcase on the cover drew me to the book. It had the elements but was still not the cover of a typical South…

Book Review 'Beloved Delhi: A Mughal City and Her Greatest Poets by Saif Mahmood

Delhi or Dilli is not just a Mughal city known for its amazing food, architecture or Chandni Chowk . It is a living garden of culture and literature whose paths have kissed the steps of greatest influences of South Asian and world history. Be it Gali Qasim Jaan or Balli Maraan, these lanes have witnessed…

Book Review: The familiar sorrows of Karachi in Kartography

South Asian fiction has been one of my favourite genres ever since I started reading. Even when I lived in Pakistan, it would be a welcome change from the dominant Western literature we would be exposed to in our schools. So reading a familiar name or street in an English-language novel would be a big…

Book Review: Sophia of Silicon Valley

There is no other genre of books I crave than a buzzing young professional's story. Sophia of Silicon Valley satisfied this craving to the fullest being the powerful, roller-coaster ride of a story about a young businesswoman. Anna Yen has carefully crafted the Young family, who is an immigrant family in California, living the American…

Book Review: Moveable Feasts by Sarah Murray

Rightly promised by the blurb, it is a journey behind the scenes of treats in our grocery stores that we gobble up so easily without thinking where or how it came about there.

Book Review: The Well of Ascension (Mistborn, #2) by Brandon Sanderson

Why spend hundreds on tickets to watch the Hamilton musical when you can just read the first half of Brandon Sanderson’s The Well of Ascension? Partway through the book, I could almost hear Washington’s voice telling Hamilton “Winning was easy, young man. Governing’s harder.” The evil Lord Ruler has kept the bureaucratic cogs in the…

Welcome my fellow reader, blogger…

It was getting lonely here so, guess what? Yes, I got a dear friend to join me in sharing her passion of reading. Going by the pseudonym trajaque this new author will be sharing book reviews of what she's currently reading - and mind you, she reads a lot! What's new and amazing is that…

Book Review: The Final Empire (Mistborn, #1) by Brandon Sanderson

The age-old struggle between good and evil rarely favours the villain—except for when it does. The sun is red, ash falls from the sky, and plants, as far as people know, have always been brown. Brandon Sanderson’s The Final Empire, first of the Mistborn trilogy, centres itself in a world where one thousand years ago,…

Book Review: Upstairs Wife by Rafia Zakaria

There's no way to avoid saying this. Representation of Pakistan is minimal in books that are actually readable and not reference books. When there are stories from and about Pakistan they are limited to subjects like post-terrorism stories and portraying how difficult life is. While these stories are all genuine, there is also a need…

Winter break reading list

I started this post a while ago with the intention of setting a reading list target. I even started a good reads shelf 'winter-break' but as time went plans changed. I had planned to read mainly but recently picked up a big knitting project (more on that soon!) and have started catching up a lot…