Harris Books and Literature Blog

It’s been on my bucket list for years to read the Booker-shortlisted books of the year once declared. And I could only accomplish it this year. The following are the six books on the Booker shortlist-2022: 1. Treacle Walker by Alan Garner 2. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka 3. The Trees by Percival Everett 4. Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout 5. Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo 6. Small Things like These by Claire Keegan The order of the above list is as per how I liked them. My perception says that Treacle Walker by Alan Garner is the best on the list as far as the literary value of the work is concerned. Hence, its placement at the topmost position. Which means if I were the sole Booker judge, I would have handed over the prize to Alan Garner However, I guess this year’s Booker might go to the next title on the list, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka. It would then be the first ever Booker for Sri Lanka. Here are the synopses of the books: T...

( Purchase book at Amazon ) ( Watch film on Amazon Prime ) Delta of Venus is a collection of erotic stories. In the preface of the book, Anais Nin has mentioned that she wrote these stories around 1940 for an ‘anonymous client’ of a book collector she knew. It all started with Henry Miller, her famous friend, who wrote stories for the ‘client’ for money. Gradually, he involved her and their other friends in the project. They all set their wild imaginations free and started writing stories of lust and desire to order. And the stories Anais Nin wrote were what later became ‘Delta of Venus’. It is obvious that these stories are less literature and more porn. Because the anonymous buyer of these stories kept telling her to dump poetry and philosophy and focus more on raw sexual descriptions. It was not an easy task for the writer, though. As a consequence, you can see the unpleasant tension of a fight between poesy and porn throughout the book. The struggle between her poetic imagination ...

                                                                         The Runaways The Runaways   by Fatima Bhutto is a story mainly revolving around three young characters, Sunny, Monty, and Layla. It has a simple plot yet involves some complex themes and is narrated in a captivating language. Sunny is from a Pakistani family in the UK. Monty and Layla are from Karachi. They go their own separate ways and reach the Islamic terrorist camp in the deserts of Iraq, each of them with their own intentions and missions to accomplish. The narrative continuously switches between the past and present events, which added to the excitement of the read. However, the past stories are not mentioned as mere reminiscences in a ha...

                                                                       Delhi: A Soliloquy (Malayalam) Delhi Gathakal  portrays the lives of ordinary people in Delhi beset with the turmoil of Indo-Pak and Indo-China wars and their aftermath, the Emergency, and the anti-Sikh riots. The novel progresses through the stories of a bunch of protagonists, especially Malayalis living in Delhi from the early 1960s to the present. The work is important in that it records, using the tools of fiction, a certain period in the history of a particular region. However, a major disappointment was that the narration was purely linear following a traditional storytelling style and hardly using any modern techniques of fiction. The novel is almost entirely set in Delhi and hence replete with...

  Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coelho In 2002, the author Paulo Coelho met an old gentleman in his seventies with his wife and granddaughter at the Grotto in Lourdes, in France. The man embraced him and told him about the importance of his books in his life. They made him dream. The words frightened the author because he knew that his upcoming novel  Eleven Minutes  dealt with a subject that was supposedly coarse, decadent, shocking... Coelho has dedicated this novel  Eleven Minutes  to that old gentleman, Maurice Gravelines, nevertheless, with these words: “I have a duty to you, your wife and grand-daughter and to myself to talk about the things that concern me and not only about what everyone would like to hear. Some books make us dream, others bring us face to face with reality, but what matters most to the author is the honesty with which a book is written.” After finishing reading the book, I was convinced he has indeed kept his word. He has been totally honest...

The author, Azar Nafisi, and several of her girl students who formed the clandestine book discussion group to discuss some of the forbidden classics in the revolutionary Islamic Iran were relating themselves to Lolita where there was a Humbert in their lives in one form or another, restricting the freedom of their lives in some way and taking control over them in a manner that was loathed by them all. The Humbert could take any form, from the uncle of one of the girls who tri ed to molest her in her childhood to the ‘Philosopher-King’ Ayatollah himself who, according to the author, tried to build up his dream kingdom by imposing the strictest rules and restricting the freedom of the subjects, especially women. In a country devastated by the so called revolution and a war with the neighbouring country, the only way these women could find to live the lives of their dreams was to turn to fiction, because they felt that their lives of freedom could exist only in their minds, in a world of ...

𝘏𝘢𝘭𝘧 𝘰𝘧 𝘢 𝘠𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘰𝘸 𝘚𝘶𝘯 is a novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on Nigeria of the 1960s. It narrates the struggles and tensions of the society in a country that had barely started breathing in its nascent independence. The British had just left in 1960 leaving the country to be governed by its own people. However, the citizens are not united. There is a wide rift between the North and the South like in almost any north-south geography. The North has tribes, mainly Hausa, Yoruba and the like, while the South and the East has mostly Igbo people. The differences between the two communities are well-pronounced. Odenigbo and his partner Olanna are Igbos and teach in the Nsukka University in the South. Olanna's sister Kainene lives with her English lover Richard who is in Nigeria to research on the heritage arts, especially the Igbo-Ukwu art. The sisters are from an affluent family living in the richest area of Lagos, the largest city of Nigeria. Kainene looks after her fathe...