shrutislibrary's reviews
188 reviews

A brief history and a practical guide on how one can enjoy the art of "Flaneuring", a French practice of strolling down the city streets and observing, taking in the details, the sights, the scents, and the people around you. It's a 19th-century fancy term for people-watching with intention (but don't pull a Joe from 'You' and go stalking lol). I found this book to be very Western centred - obviously coming from a white woman author from a so-called First-World nation, so I would like to research more into how this act of 'intentional wandering' is consciously or unconsciously practised in other cultures and countries like India, the Middle East, etc. While I can take away some tips from this book, most of the resources and spaces that the author mentions are unavailable to me and my surroundings. As the author rightly points out in the book, walking for leisure indeed is a privilege both in terms of the physical ability of your muscles to carry you from one place to another and in terms of how readily "safe" open spaces are available to women throughout the world that is decidedly not the West.

"Ms Ice Sandwich" by Mieko Kawakami is a tale told through the eyes of an unnamed young boy living somewhere in Japan & his infatuation with a whimsical looking young woman working at a sandwich stall in a supermarket - a girl with electric blue eyelids & a cool demeanour - a source of his endless summer fascination. 

Removed from a present yet absent mother & a bedridden grandmother, the boy devotes himself to visit the sandwich stall every day over the summer. Every day he orders the same egg sandwich at the counter which he doesn't even like eating. All the while committing every detail of Ms Ice Sandwich's face to his memory, every edge & line ingrained in his mind's eye only later to be reproduced on paper. He is happy to go along in this way: observing from a distance, happily floating, existing, alone in this bubble of euphoria he has created for himself until one day the unexpected sharp pinprick of rumours about Ms Ice Sandwich punctures his cosy bubble & tilts the world over for him. Will he ever look at Ms Ice Sandwich the same way again? Or feel the same emotions she once ignited in him when he looked at her face every day while buying a sandwich?

It's heartwarming, yet disheartening, it's meandering yet full of spunk, it's hopelessly teenagery & yet dashed with gut punches of truths aimed at grown-ups. The world of Ms Ice Sandwich is the world of bold accented electric blues, the smouldering heat of asphalt roads in summer and staring dead-eyed at rude customers without a hint of fear of the "I'm gonna call the manager so quick on you" attitude. 

This novella is so hard to write about because I am still trying to grasp, think & reach for words that would tie up the ending. This was a story of a life-changing summer, a summertime boy finds a sense of things that used to be & sees them through a new lens navigating the befuddled terrain of adolescence with an unlikely friend. Kawakami's sparse & flowy writing style authentically captures the anxieties, bubbling frustrations & anticipated nervousness of this young boy on the cusp of pre-teens. In the end, the boy, after dreaming of an escape with his princess on his back, wakes up from this dazed slumber of a lazy afternoon nap in summer and is gently nudged back to reality by Tutti's steady presence. The boy learns to appreciate the friendship he can have with Tutti rather than dwelling on what could've been with Ms Ice Sandwich (or never could've been).

"Murder on the Orient Express" begins on a famed train ride from Istanbul to London. The train is supposed to be vacant this time of the year because it's off-season but instead, this particular coach is unexpectedly teeming with passengers - a melting pot as it were of different nationalities and occupations. Poirot barely gets a seat himself. At midnight, the train halts because of a snowdrift. Poirot hears a mysterious cry in the compartment next to his occupied by an American philanthropist, Mr Ratchet. In the morning he is found dead. And so the question is: who killed him & what was their motive? With a detective on board, things could not have moved quicker.

The book has three neat sections - The Facts, The Evidence and the one where Poirot sits back and thinks by meticulously turning each fact over, and finally, he delivers his two explanations. 

The main element of interest for me about this book is that it is claustrophobic both in terms of atmosphere and the characters: all of the passengers, staff and detective squad are cramped up in a small space, both physically and mentally. Each under the microscopic lens of suspicion and questioning by the little Belgian detective. The ending- I don't know what to make of it except that I didn't expect that of Poirot's judgement. To be fair, I was already spoiled about the ending so naturally, I wasn't in the least bit surprised or shocked by the grand revelation. 

'Crenshaw' is about a boy and his imaginary friend, the titular Crenshaw, a human-sized cat and the struggles of his family to get by through barely a roof and two meals a day on their belly. It's a tale of friendships, believing in magic, and keeping alive that magic we believed in as kids into our adulthood even against all odds - when the world expects us to be "grownups" and behave like adults. The book shows us how the always rational and factually correct boy Jackson, starts to believe in his imaginary cat friend. This is a book where the adults - Jackson's parents act like kids and so Jackson thinks he has to be the more mature person in the house, all the while losing out on his childhood innocence. By the end, even though Jackson's family are reaching a new destination mired with uncertainty, there is now a clearly defined contract between Jackson and his parents: they must not tell lies or feign nonchalance about their poverty and financial scarcity to their son and Jackson finally reaches the delf-realisation that he will enjoy the magic while it lasts.

Parisian couple Myriam & Paul's marriage suffers from the inevitable strains of two children born in quick succession. Myriam, who was once a promising young lawyer is now relegated to changing stinking nappies & breastfeeding. Eternally bored & caged in their small two-bedroom apartment, she feels desperate to be a lawyer again (as luck would have it, an old law school friend comes in handy).

But they are now plagued by the nanny problem, that is until 'the perfect nanny' arrives on their doorstep as a saviour of all their problems - Louise, a 40 something woman with childlike manners & doll-like porcelain features: her face ageless & graceful.

Paul & Myriam's careers take off: they live in a perfect world but soon their perfect lives are upended when the vengeful nanny murders one of their children, Adam, slashes her wrists & throat & is rendered unconscious in the process. A police investigation is launched, media are at the gates, the cries & helpless gasps of other mothers echo in this quiet, prim & proper, middle-class Paris neighbourhood. The first chapter opens with the murders and for the next 200 pages, we try to solve not the 'whodunit' but the 'why she did it?'

'Lullaby' starts poised with all the right ingredients of a sharp-edged domestic thriller: negligent working parents too consumed by their careers, upper-class neighbours whispering & spying on each other, nannies in the park gossiping openly about their bosses while hiding their secrets, children playing & crying, demanding too much. The novel offers an incisive socioeconomic commentary on the condition of the 'classless' class of immigrants - a whole upstairs/downstairs dynamic a la Downton Abbey - an army of nannies who are coloured, destitute immigrants, who arrive in the 1000s in France from Morocco, Philippines, India & Middle East. All these women - mothers in their homeland, nannies in France suffer from a lack of identity, a sense of place and alienation from the institutions of democracy & liberty that this nation has to offer. 

What happens when the only place that Louise has for a home- the one where she is needed-the one she made in the cosy, homely world of Paul & Miriam's flat decorated by their beautiful children is threatened. Louise quickly realises that one day, she will be deemed irrelevant, her services no longer needed & the children will grow up. She must act fast to stop that from happening, to stop her existence from being relegated to that of rotting insignificance. The ending of the book left me reeling for more as we are never given a full picture of what immediate circumstances arose that led to this gruesome act being carried out. I guess the author was intentionally abrupt in her ending as we are left to speculate what drove the nanny to murder.

A heartbreaking story of a couple finding hope, joy, and strength after emerging from the grief of a lost child, illustrated with poetic frames set against the metaphor of a mother's dream drowning in the depths of the ocean of sadness. But in the end, they find a string of hope to tether them together.

"When you're given an opportunity to change your life, be ready to do whatever it takes to make it happen. The world doesn't give things. You take things."

'The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo' is the fictional biography of  Hollywood IT girl, the apple of Sunset Boulevard and the mercurial rise of a star and her life story. The novel starts with Monique Grant, a woman in her mid-30s working as an average feature writer at a renowned celebrity magazine in New York. Her life takes a turn for the better when she is offered an exclusive tell-all interview by none other than the legendary actress, icon and now septuagenarian, Evelyn Hugo, a woman who was the reigning queen of Hollywood in the 60s and 70s. What follows is the unravelling of Evelyn Hugo and her seven marriages, each more sensational than the last - each time the stakes just a little bit higher. 

This novel has so many elements and ingredients stirring up in a slow burner. Taylor Jenkins Reid like the true chef she is, serves us all the right dishes at just the right time like clockwork as you had expected from the menu. There's the rags to riches trope, the glitz and glory days of classic old Hollywood, multiple affairs and casual flings, husbands discarded like used dishcloth and of course, sex, lots of it. Or rather using sex as a weapon.

Seven marriages in seven monumental moments of her life: whom has she loved the most? Evelyn Hugo has only ever truly loved one person. It's that one person pitted against the rest of the things she holds dear - her money, fame, and unparalleled glamour of the life she has worked hard to build. The book touches upon important themes and discussions around female desire, sexuality, suppression of a person's true identity and the way Hollywood's studios created a 'movie star' & micro-managed every aspect of a celebrity's life back in the day. Reid in this novel deftly presents a larger argument about what one is prepared to sacrifice at the altar of superstardom - in this case, Evelyn did or rather she was forced to suppress her true self to achieve the American Dream because of an unkind world.

A lush, charming and beautifully illustrated graphic novel that will wrap you in a warm, cosy blanket of Avonlea, Green Gables and its surrounding magic.

July 26, 2020


Dear Charlie,


I hope you are doing really well in life wherever you are. Yesterday night, I finished reading your letters to your friend to whom you decided to confide about a year of your high school life in the early 90s. You have a real gift with words, charlie, and I wish I could write like you! you will be a 44-year-old man as per my calculation since in 1992 you were 16 but I could be totally wrong since math never made much sense to me either, just like you. 


I have so many things to say to you, charlie and so let me begin by saying thank you for writing those very candid personal letters to a total stranger. You are so brave to gather up the courage to pour forth your most intimate thoughts, fears, longings, friendships, insecurities, and your worst nightmares into those pages. Thank you for making me privy to your life experiences during a particularly difficult phase in your life and making me feel a part of them and not feel like an intruder. As a 22year old, I have similar agitations and uncertainties in life like you did at 16. and I don't know where it's headed. So you & I aren't much different.

 My favourite part of the book was the Christmas present unwrapping with all your friends. I loved the part when Patrick gave you a suit and Sam gave you the new old typewriter. I teared up throughout your letters because I felt sad but at that moment I was happy kind of sad. 


I'm so over the moon that you have shared the list of your favourite songs. I will begin by listening to each song in your winter playlist and then start all over again. I will read to kill a mocking bird, and on the road and every other book Bill gave to you to read over the year and which you shared with Sam and Patrick. 

I remember you saying, "It's strange because sometimes, I read a book, and I think I am the people in the book." It really stuck with me what you said cuz I feel like I'm you and I'm living your life in the letters of this book.


You said in one of your letters that you wrote them because you needed someone who would just listen. Well, I am listening, charlie and I am always here for you, no matter what. You taught me to be present and to participate in my life and it starts right here with this letter of gratitude. You will always be in my heart, Charlie.


Love always,

your friend.