2021 – In Images

Some interesting finds this year are:

And it starts….

Reading Challenge

According to goodreads , last year I managed to complete 100+ books and I was glad to get hold of the available Agatha Christie ones from Kindle Unlimited and complete them as and when they were available. This year I have set myself a modest challenge for just about a 100 books. Let’s see how it goes. I managed to start it off with my favourite author and currently reading Reginald Hill’s A Cure For All Diseases (A Dalziel and Pascoe Novel) which we got as a paperback way back in August.

Not a bad year but could have done more…

Last year I clocked 120, so it is much lesser but I have been reading Morse and Inspector Battle series from the library and physical books takes twice the time when compared to their kindle counterparts. I am enjoying them very much, so I am going to go with them until I can finish the series, by next year.

As long as I keep reading that is all that matters, to me.

I am Pilgrim

Nope, it ain’t me. It is just the title of the book that I recently completed. It took me more than 2 weeks to complete this massive 900-page paperback. I got it for 3£ on a second-hand sale. Since the half-term break was coming up, I decided to finish it just before then. Thankfully I gave myself two weeks time to read this. And it took just a couple of days more than that and some extra reading time to complete it before we went on our short half-term holiday break.

I am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes is a book I never thought I would enjoy. I have read this book’s blurb so many times and have passed it because of the sheer size and magnitude of the story. But this time I decided it was time and since it was on second-hand sale I didn’t want to miss it. Terry Hayes is a screenwriter and it is very evident in this book. It goes back and forth with memories, with people, with pov’s etc. It needs getting used to such randomness, but the imagery it creates is very captivating. It is a very heroic story (heard that Brad Pitt was being considered for the movie?!!?) akin to the Mission Impossible ones. Very patriotic, very dramatic, very gruesome… I thoroughly enjoyed it.  My only gripe was that I couldn’t read the book lying down. It is too heavy and my wrists started to hurt after a couple of minutes. And towards the end, I spared no time (small breaks between classes, while having my food, any spare time I got I used it) to complete the book and just in time for my half-term break and my journey to Swansea.

Mission Accomplished!

I gave it 4 stars out of 5 (I am not a very generous person with respect to marks…my students would vouch for that 😉 )

 

A Rising Man – * * * *

A Rising Man – Sam Wyndham Series by Abhir Mukherjee. Mr M read this some time ago and recently before our trip to India, he found out that the second book’s paperback edition was out so we went book hunting and he was lucky the second time. Foyles usually is our go-to bookstore. At least it is his. When he had finished almost 3/4th of the book, he turned to me and said that this series was TV series material and it would be good to see it in a TV series. I haven’t heard that from him for other books (maybe because most of them are non-fiction) so I told him that I will give it a try after we come back from our vacation to India.

I started the first book, A Rising Man on a Saturday and completed it by Tuesday. It was a detective series but set in a very different background. A background I have had the opportunity to read at length but from a different perspective and a different angle. The story is set in Kolkotta (earlier known as Calcutta) during the British regime. That in itself is a tricky thing because you don’t have a choice but to add the history that took place during that time and it involved a lot especially in a place like Kolkatta which was the hotspot at that time. The story ends when the Jalianwala Bagh incident happened in Amritsar. The turning point of Indian Independence history, as we have read about it.

A murder takes place and the victim is a British officer. The newly transferred Sam Wyndham is appointed to investigate. Surrender-not (actual name: Surendranath, but simplified for easy pronunciation) is the Watson to Sam’s Sherlock. To be honest, I kind of guessed who it might have been halfway through, but I couldn’t figure out the why or the how. It was just pure guesswork and I got lucky. Mr M was trying to put me off the scent but I knew it in my heart that I was kind of right in my guess (and maybe the small bits of information that weren’t there also helped)

There is no Sherlock-ism in here. Lot of legwork, travelling around gathering information battling against the humidity of the country and the city, not less the antagonism against the British empire. It is very interesting to read and brings forth a lot of the cultural elements of the City (and the Country). It was a good choice by Mr M to recommend it to me (and I wonder how he got to know of this in the first place). Thank you, Sir and I will definitely get on the second book shortly.

I would definitely give it 4 stars (as I did in my Goodreads) and it will be very very interesting to see if it was made into a TV Series. It is historical and so it would need a lot of work in the Arts department to recreate the atmosphere. Good luck, if anyone wants to try.