Rosh's Reviews

AUTHOR: Vivek Shanbhag TRANSLATOR: Srinath Perur GENRE: Indian Fiction. PUBLICATION DATE: January 1, 2013 RATING: 4.25 stars. Those who have regularly interacted with me on my Facebook group, Readers Forever! , know that I do not have a preference for contemporary Indian authors. Forget preference, I don't even consider their books worth reading. Before you get all riled up by this admission, please note that I don't include expats such as Jhumpa Lahiri or Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, senior storytellers such as Sudha Murty or Ruskin Bond and classic masters such as Rabindranath Tagore or Satyajit Ray in this category. What I mean is the likes of Chetan Bhagat (I blame him and him alone for the plethora of B-grade books in the market!), Durjoy Datta, Ravinder Singh, Savi Sharma and others of this ilk. An unfortunate side-effect of this closeminded bias was that I missed out on some genuinely good books just because of their authors being modern Indians. To remedy this lacuna, I ...

AUTHOR: Jodi Picoult GENRE: Contemporary Fiction PUBLICATION DATE: March 5, 2007 RATING: 3.75 stars. Has it ever happened that you have been spellbound by a book, only to be terribly let down by its ending?  I took up this Jodi Picoult with a lot of expectations, and of the almost 600 pages, I really enjoyed the first 570! Not a bit of reduction in pace and an optimum interest level maintained by the parallel past-present storyline.  But the last chapter seemed in such a hurry to bring everything to a satisfactory close! It was like an art film had turned into a Bollywood potboiler.  I mean, there are PLOT twists, and there are plot TWISTS! This was definitely in the second category.  Anyone else who has read this and shared a similar feeling? I am still making up my mind about what rating to give the book. PS: This is the second time this is happening to me with a Jodi Picoult book, the first being the popular "My Sister's Keeper".

AUTHOR: Paul Kalanithi GENRE: Memoir PUBLICATION DATE: January 12, 2016 RATING: 3.75 stars. When you think of a doctor, you picture a strong, stoic, scientific person, one who works hard and works wonders. You assume that the doctor won't be religiously inclined because... well... science and religion are like oil and water. But when your assumptions are turned on their head, they cause a revolution in your mind. Paul Kalanithi was a brilliant final-year neurosurgical resident, on his way to graduation and a successful worklife when he was diagnosed with lung cancer at the young age of 35. The diagnosis killed his hopes for his career trajectory, which had been shining brilliantly till then. As such, he used his last few months to fulfil another lifelong dream: that of penning a book. I had expected "When Breath becomes Air" to be a morbid book about a man facing death and his struggle accepting this twist of fate. But this book is so much more. You can't help but be ...