Rosh's Reviews

AUTHOR: Yuval Noah Harari GENRE: Nonfiction. PUBLICATION DATE: January 1, 2011 RATING: 3.25 stars. Assume that you are a huge coffee lover, and you are served a cup of tea. You refuse at first, but are then informed by all and sundry that it is no ordinary tea, but a delightful masala chai, exotic and exquisite, innovatively prepared like never before... All these raring compliments convince you to give it a try. Still slightly wary, you take a tentative sip. "Well, it does seem pretty good for tea", you think, and end up drinking the whole cup. You relish the flavour and appreciate the chai-maker for converting something mundane into something so pleasing to your senses. You feel like complimenting him for not following the typical tried-and-tested recipe but taking a different approach towards instilling new flavours in the brew. However, a teeny tiny part of your heart is still not satisfied. Just because it was tea and not coffee. "Sapiens" to me is that brilli...

AUTHOR: Norton Juster GENRE: Middle-Grade Fantasy. PUBLICATION DATE: January 1, 1961 RATING: 5 stars! Life works in such mysterious ways. There was this book that used to keep popping up as "Recommended for you" in my Amazon app. But as it was being advocated as a children's book ( which I already own a ton of! ) and it was a bit expensive, I was dilly-dallying about whether to buy it, in spite of the great reviews it had. Just a few weeks of indecision later, I was conducting my usual inspection of the local secondhand bookshop and its treasures, when suddenly, my eyes landed on this very book that Amazon was convincing me to buy! Obviously, the price was just peanuts. So I just threw my uncertainty away and bought it. Today, I am so tremendously happy that I followed my heart. Though "The Phantom Tollbooth" is a children's fantasy adventure novel, it is so fabulously written that every adult who is a child at heart will be able to enjoy this. Choc-a-bloc w...

AUTHOR: Fredrik Backman TRANSLATOR: Henning Koch GENRE: Contemporary Fiction PUBLICATION DATE: July 15, 2014 RATING: 4.5 stars. Like I had mentioned in my Eleanor Oliphant review , books that come highly recommended tend to be read with higher expectations, and more often than not, you end up disappointed. But I can't believe I have been lucky enough twice in the same year to find a book that doesn't just match the expectations I had but goes well beyond it. If you want a detailed analysis of "A Man Called Ove", there are many brilliant reviews of the same and I anyway won't be able to match that standard. What I can only do is pour out my heart about the book. This is the first book since "Wonder" that made me live the emotions rather than read them mechanically. I rarely laugh out loud or cry with books, but in this case, I found myself not just doing the above but even snorting a couple of times (and I am certainly not a snorter!) The book unfolds lik...