The Latte Factor imparts an important but simple financial lesson: an investment into yourself in the present to make you richer in the future is told through a story of a girl trying to get her personal finances in order. The girl, Zoe, a 27-year-old travel writer in NYC is helped by a kind, smart barista named Henry to start investing in her future by the simple act of saving a certain cut of her daily wage every week and keep compounding that amount for of 30-40 years which would eventually make her a multi-millionaire at a good interest rate.
The three secrets shared by the barista are briefly: 1. pay yourself first 2. make it automatic 3. find your why and live rich now
"And I do nothing but dream every day that at last I shall meet someone. Oh, if only you knew how often I have been in love in that way...."
"White Nights" begins with the solitary nocturnal wanderings of a young 26-year-old dreamer (who has never had a lover but dreamed of being in love many times) stalking the streets of St. Petersburg utterly lonely and desolate trying to find the cause of his deep sorrow & loneliness, when he chances upon a young woman, Nastenka, with whom he develops a bond so precious and beautiful yet the cause of more torment & heartbreak. This encounter leads them to unravel their entire histories, their darkest thoughts and dashed hopes with each other trying to find a common ground, where there are no secrets between them. They give each other much-needed consolation, lend a kind ear to their sorrows of abandonment, and lost loves and nurse their broken hearts over four white nights.
This novella was my first venture into Dostoevsky's works and I was smitten by the tenderness of his prose and the complexity of emotions displayed by both the characters but especially the unnamed male protagonist. The narrator's utter dejection at being left alone on the streets of St. Petersburg, how he felt he had nowhere to go, and the paranoia at every object appearing as old, dingy and out of sorts in his apartment show the genius of Dostoevsky's writing. The way depression is many shaded and insidious and pervades every space, every thought and aspect of one's waking life has been depicted so well. The nocturnal descriptions of the city were captivating to read and brought alive 19th century St. Petersburg so vividly in my imagination. I can't wait to delve into his more famous works next! This was a solid, yet not-so intimidating introduction to Dostoevsky and I'm thankful to the person on the internet for this recommendation.🖤
"Women have so few choices, Nellie. Our gender can be our greatest strength, but it is also our greatest weakness."
Have you ever been on a train you were promised would be a fast ride, which started pretty slow and steady, then arrived at the last station without ever hitting the highest speed you had anticipated?
Well, this book felt exactly like that. It didn't ever cross that maximum speed limit.
Let me explain.
The story follows two parallel timelines, one in 2018 navigating the recent move of married couple Nate & Alice Hale who leave their city life behind in New York City to shift to quiet suburban life in Greenville. The other jumps back in time following Richard and Nellie Murdoch who lived in the same house that the Hales recently bought back in 1956.
Unsettled by the house move which is crumbling in aspect but has a lovely garden to its credit & her husband Nate's designs to get her pregnant, Alice is feeling discomfort, unease & uncertain of her future. Will she become the boring suburban housewife, just content in cooking and cleaning for her hardworking husband? Who am I? A failed wife, an amateur novelist, a liar? These questions plague Alice.
The 1950s plotline unfolds when Alice chances upon the letters written by Nellie to her mother Elsie and the family cookbook passed down from her mother to Nellie. Through this correspondence, we, like Alice, witness the unravelling of Nellie Murdoch's perfectly happy life & marriage.
This novel shows the lack of agency women had back in the olden days, & even now when it comes to making choices in their lives in general & their marriages in particular: be it regarding their bodies, sex, childbearing, career, or whether or not they should be wearing kitten heels or flats to Tupperware parties. It explores themes like female desire, women's roles in traditional heteronormative societies as efficient homemakers, 'good' wives & attentive mothers, and what a successful marriage should look like.
How far one can suffer lies, deception and abuse in marriage & how far one can do those things to present the facade of a happy marriage is the central concern. Or is it as Oscar Wilde once said "the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties."
The writing was pretty factual, and the persona of Nellie was the most enigmatic one. She displayed all the qualities of a 1950s wife. The whole book could play like a movie because of the way it was written. The thing is that I thought that the mystery element was going to be a lot stronger, but alas the key mystery/shocking event I could guess from a mile away so it didn't matter when it was delivered to me, only the mode of it varied. So overall the reading experience was okay, nothing very 'thrilling' happened as I had expected.
Told in the form of a story within a story, a voice narrates the tale of a people residing in the foothills of the Himalayas, where they once lived in harmony with the Living Mountain (though this harmony is broken from time to time by warring with neighbouring clans & villages). They had perfected a balance of living by respectfully maintaining their distance from their sacred mountain, decreed to be out of bounds by the law of their ancestors. That is until the day the intruders come charging with weapons.
'The Living Mountain' is a fable for the voices unheard, the songs unsung & the dances that are forgotten from an era of humanity when indigenous cultures thrived living close to the rivers and mountains and forests of the world. Until the Age of Anthropocene was ushered bringing with it greed, discord & irreverence of the ancestral knowledge and way of living. Until these mountain people (who are now called Varvaroi) were enslaved and colonised by the new kind - Anthropoi for their selfish reasons: to ascend the slopes of the sacred mountain & to discover & take by force the riches that lie in the womb of Mahaparbat. What follows is a mad grab for riches and resources by both Anthropoi & Varvaroi resulting in near-catastrophic consequences.
Amitav Ghosh raises pertinent questions on the ownership of resources & land: who is the 'rightful' master of land? Is it the people who lived there for centuries? Or the colonisers who waged war & broke the native laws by asserting their right to rule & take what they desire? Or does it belong to no one? In a world governed by hungry merchants (corporations & billionaires), it isn't long before the Living Mountain (Earth) no longer has anything to give & the once potent life-sustaining mountain is no longer a protector but a destroyer, bringing damage to the life of the Mountain folks, ravaging their villages with landslides & avalanches.
The question is how long till we learn the same lesson before the Mahaparbat comes crashing down beneath our feet?
In the past, I've only had a passing acquaintance with Murakami and his work, having read 'Birthday Girl' and 'The Strange Library' but somehow I was drawn to his non-fiction.
'What I talk about when I talk about running' is too short to be a memoir and too loosely structured to be an essay. It's rather a meditation on the life Murakami lived before he embarked on the path to be a writer and the life he built after he decided to become a writer and took up running as a means to sustain his writer's life.
I have often wondered if when writing about their lives and placing themselves at the centre of a work of non-fiction, writers do not tend to imbue into their words a certain light of imaginative romanticism. Or else how could they remember a little kind gesture of a stranger passing by? Or the direction of the wind caressing their face when all seems to be lost cause in a moment of imminent failure and giving it a momentous value in the grander scheme of things to tell a personal narrative in a certain way. Well, Murakami does all of that, but he is painfully aware that there is no single grand life lesson or unified philosophy of living to be imparted at the end of this book. He is just an average writer and maybe a more than average runner (his words, I'm just paraphrasing lol) in a fiercely competitive world where there are many people with more talent than he has.
Murakami says that long-distance running has taught him a critical lesson in writing: the only person he has to compete with is himself, to achieve a personal best, and beat the previous time every time he puts on his running shoes and runs on the beaten track. The same holds when he writes a novel. He has to give it his all each time when he puts pen to paper.
To Murakami, running is then akin to writing. Being a self-proclaimed writer of middling talent who didn't even have particular ambitions of being a novelist one day until he turned 30 and decided one fine day while watching a baseball game that he had an intense desire to write a novel, Murakami ascribes that the only way he can write is the way he runs: he just does it every day, without a miss (well most days). Those 3-4 hours in the morning, he knows he gives his single-minded devotion to the task at hand: be it writing or running.
I am neither a runner nor a writer. But he is both of those things. Yet what could a renowned writer at 73 (though he wrote this book when he was well past 55) and a 24-year-old nobody has in common you ask? We are both flawed human beings trying to figure out life. And this short non-fiction was the perfect antidote to clear out things in my head as I find myself at a similar crossroads in life like Murakami did at 33.
"Maybe leaving something you care about in a place you don’t want to leave is a way of staying connected to that place—of hoping to get back there."
Set in the shimmering summer heat of 1983, this is a story of a father and a son's emotional journey and the accompanying external adventures over two sleepless days and nights in the coastal city of Marseille, southern France.
For years, Antonio has lived on borrowed time: in the garb of a seemingly normal 18 yr old teenage Italian boy doing what any normal 18 yr old teenage Italian boy would do - but under this guise is the well-kept secret & deep-rooted shame of being an epileptic. Growing up, his parents, especially his mother had drilled into him this idea of the public shame attached to being diagnosed with a mental illness. Life passed quite monotonously for Antonio for 3 years. When he turned 18 it was time to make the dreaded visit back to Marseille when the famed epilepsy specialist Dr Gastaut will, for once and for all, decide the course of Antonio's future: whether he will live the life of a normal young man or have an existence ridden with shame, exclusion & limitations.
In an unexpected turn of events, Antonio and his estranged father, a brilliant mathematics professor must while away two days completely awake in Marseille. Navigating this unprecedented situation, they discover truths and engage in conversations they never had on subjects like love, being broken-hearted, ambition, passion, hobbies, dashed dreams, poetry, sex, their parent's relationship, his father's childhood - trying to fill the void left between the father-son after his parent's separation. Antonio, having resented his father for years since he left his mother and him, arrives at a new perspective, having shed his earlier prejudices about his father. (Balikswas) Being ill-equipped to share their emotions and to be honest with each other, initially both father and son are discomfited. However, as night gives way to dawn, Antonio gradually connects with his father through the common language of jazz, poetry, books, music and mathematics.
Lately, I have taken to these small, everyday narratives, feeling that longer novels are not suited to my low attention span when the summer heat is raging and it's acutely difficult to concentrate. This novel was a welcome escape and distraction. It took me right to the colourful cafes and obscure late-night pubs of Marseille where Jazz fills the nondescript location in a hazy dream, to the grand old church of Notre dam de la Garde and the infamous Château d'If prison where the opening of 'The Count of Monte Cristo' takes place and to witness beautiful sunsets on isolated beaches by the Calanques & chance encounters with strangers. To put it simply- reading this book felt like being on a vacation by a dreamy beach, reading a good book and having daydreams.