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: 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: 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…

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…

Goodreads catchup: what am I reading next?

I started using Goodreads in high school when I felt the desire to read a certain kind of books but didn't quite know the titles. Goodreads is that virtual bookstore where keywords, ideas and thoughts can result in actual titles to delve into very soon. Lately, its kind of become a graveyard of books I…