Siddhartha Golu

Every account of Holocaust is moving and when Elie Wiesel - being a survivor of Auschwitz - gives you the horrifying details of what happened in those concentration camps, you can't help but wonder - Can humans really be so monstrous?

I cannot even begin to imagine what Elie must've gone through experiencing these brutalities - watching a son beat his father to death over a piece of bread, when every moment you were wondering whether the next will be your last - and all this at a tender age of sixteen? No wonder he lost faith in God!

- “I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people.”

I need to gather my notes before I can write a proper review, however, below are some of my off-the-shelf takeaways/critics of the book:
* Dawkins is too intimidating in his opinions - he hammers on and hammers on until either you have changed your opinion or you get exhausted. Neither sounds good for someone having a constructive argument.

* The crux of the argument is - and this is something that I've wondered for quite some time - keeping aside the hard religious conservatism, why even the so-called liberal values teach us that we should question everything, except when it comes to religion. Religion is somehow the holy grail of the argument (pardon my pun) - you can't just question it, no matter what. That's bewildering, to say the least.

* The problem of “Unquestioned faith is a virtue” and the power of religion to “console” us through the bad times. Believing in God and believing in belief are not the same thing.

This is the 3rd book of the Russian author that I've read and now, he has easily become one of my favorite authors! This was such a passionate tale of an individual who's sick of the society and its laws, and often at the expense of being self-contradictory, this paradoxical narrator goes on to explain the importance of suffering in life. The first part might feel like a rant of someone depressed, but bear with it and you will be rewarded, although I should warn you - this is not something you pick up if you want to read an uplifting book. One of the most depressing, but strangely beautiful books I've ever read.

Originally published on my website

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A phenomenally written book! Mr. Rushdie is a master of using metaphors and he went all in in this book. Weaving together multiple narratives, using India's post-colonial history in a postmodern prose to deliver a magical realism masterpiece, there's no wonder why this book was awarded as the Best of the Bookers.

In my previous piece about Shame by Mr. Rushdie, I'd written:

Rushdie has a peculiar way with words, an authoritative stance where the sentences bend over backwards to dance to the master's tunes. He weaves them in and out and creates intricate relationships between the story, storyteller and reader. You need to be acquainted with the history of India and Pakistan, or at least be familiar with the events surrounding the partition, in order to grasp fully what he has set out here to do. The book is filled with brilliant uses of metaphors and similes, creating a parallel universe of Pakistan during the tumultuous years after partition. The sentences are measured and precise, neatly packed with an intricate plot and the social commentary (with a tinge of satire) leading you towards the destination.

“Open your eyes and see what you can with them, before they close forever”

What a journey! What an incredible, heartbreaking, beautiful and bittersweet journey! Poetry disguised as prose - the phrase that comes to mind while reading this book. Strangely, I felt the same while reading The Book Thief, another beautiful story set in those grim years of World War II. What is it about wars that is so fascinating to authors - maybe the atrocities that are committed, the inevitable doom that casts its shadow over both the perpetrators and the victims, or maybe how despite living in the worst of times imaginable to them, people manage to survive but however brave they are, war leaves a black hole in their hearts that can never be filled.

All the characters are incredibly well-written, especially Marie-Laure LeBlanc, who I think is probably the most beautiful character ever written. The disruptive non-linear narration only adds to the beauty where chapters flow into one another forming a giant interwoven web of stories that manage to shake you from the core.

I'll leave you all with a quote from the book -

“You know the greatest lesson of history? It's that history is whatever the victors say it is. That's the lesson. Whoever wins, that's who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest. Of course we do. Name me a person or a nation who does not. The trick is figuring out where your interests are.”

I loved this book! I haven't read any novel by Ursula K. Le Guin, but after this beautiful collection of essays by the author, I am really looking forward to read her other works. She has a simple yet incredible style, something which penetrates the heart of its readers. In the first chapter itself entitled “Introducing Myself,” she is at her best, attacking the prevalent patriarchy of the current time with fierce wit. She writes,

I am a man. Now you may think I've made some kind of silly mistake about gender, or maybe that I'm trying to fool you, because my first name ends in a, and I own three bras, and I've been pregnant five times, and other things like that that you might have noticed, little details.......Women are a very recent invention. I predate the invention of women by decades. Well, if you insist on pedantic accuracy, women have been invented several times in widely varying localities, but the inventors just didn't know how to sell the product. Their distribution techniques were rudimentary and their market research was nil, and so of course the concept just didn't get off the ground. Even with a genius behind it an invention has to find its market, and it seemed like for a long time the idea of women just didn't make it to the bottom line.

Huge heavy things come and stand on granite and the granite just stays there and doesn't react and doesn't give way and doesn't adapt and doesn't oblige and when the huge heavy things walk away the granite is there just the same as it was before, just exactly the same, admirably. To change granite you have to blow it up.

But when people walk on me you can see exactly where they put their feet, and when huge heavy things come and stand on me I yield and react and respond and give way and adapt and accept. No explosives are called for. No admiration is called for. I have my own nature and am true to it just as much as granite or even diamond is, but it is not a hard nature, or upstanding, or gemlike. You can't chip it. It's deeply impressionable. It's squashy.

Find this review - and some more - on my website here.
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This book falls into the category of books that I like to call “Fast-food books”. They won't necessarily make you healthier or your mind sounder, but it'll feel really good while you're eating them. There's only so many anecdotes you can digest. The most common criticism that people have with these kind of books are that they could've been summarized in a much shorter format - probably a blog post or two. The same applies here - only the irony is that it is BECAUSE of those blog posts and the reaction it generated that prompted the author to write a whole book about it.

Probably should have let the blogs say it all.

Well, now that my rant is over, I'd like to list some of the positive things that I got out of this book. While tiring at times, reading through the different stories and the paths ordinary people take to become successful made me appreciate the importance of THINKING about your career. For people in my field (software developers), it can be a daunting task to get ourselves out of the autopilot and start questioning things - which includes the choices that we've made for our own careers. But doing exactly that is an important and necessary step towards achieving a fulfilling career.

Give this one a read if you haven't obsessively read all those countless Quora and Medium posts. Otherwise, skip it.

“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”

What a journey! This is certainly a very unconventional book - You'll probably feel hatred towards the protagonist (or antagonist?) throughout the book. But you'll also be able to feel his emotions and sympathize with his actions. I don't approve of Humbert Humbert and his peculiar obsession, but if you can just crawl into his mind through Vladimir's brilliant writing (and believe me you will), you'll be able to, at least, appreciate his dilemma he faces throughout his life. A masterpiece indeed!

I cannot bring myself to rate this book.

It's like a saying I read somewhere - Proust is for life - which I think I'm able to understand now. The term “Proustian” had such an enigmatic character to itself for me, much like the word “Kafkaesque” would be for people who haven't read Kafka, that the more and more I encountered it, more and more I became intrigued and perhaps a bit afraid as well of getting disillusioned when I finally do make its acquaintance. There were a lot of moments in the book where I questioned why exactly was I reading it, followed by an intense love for the sheer pages in front of me, and sometimes ending with an indifference to an entire chapter. This ebb and flow of emotions continued throughout the book, and I'm afraid in the end, it still remains an enigma for me.

Proust cannot be conquered. Although if someone has come close to doing it, it would be this guy.

I dream of the day when I would be able to read it the way it was written - and the way it was meant to be read - in its original French. Until then, I'd have to live with the pain of losing things in translation and be content with it.

I have been a lover of music since my early childhood - runs in the family - and have imitated and performed songs (mostly inside my own head) on numerous occasions. Despite this lifelong love affair with music of all kinds, there was one particular genre of music that always baffled me. Mostly because of my own ignorance, but partially also because nobody else was talking about it. Nobody else in my own vicinity that is. It didn't play on the radio, you won't hear it playing on any of the countless music channels and certainly, nobody was going on tours giving live performances.

This was the wonderful genre of concert music.

We have all probably heard the following names: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky. But, and this is especially true in India, very few listeners would be able to identify a piece of concert music by its composer, the way they would a Linkin Park song for example. Now I realize the comparison is a bit unfair, and I'm not trying to pit one musician against another - it's just to illustrate a point - the point being that we are grossly unfamiliar with these great composers apart from reading a passage about them in history books about what geniuses they were.

This series of lectures is dedicated towards amending this misstep. Narrated by the ever passionate and wonderful Dr. Robert Greenberg, this is a collection of 48 lectures of 45 minutes each (36 hours in total), which takes you on a musical journey starting from the ancient Greek music up until the first half of the twentieth century. For the lack of a better word, these lectures are absolutely amazing - especially because of the narrator. His enthusiasm is simply so infectious!

Do give this one a listen. I promise it'll be worth it.

Camus was such a powerful force of nature. Clear, precise, penetrating and brutally honest. His essays “Reflections on the Guillotine” and “Create Dangerously” were one of the most precise works I've come across on the subjects that I think about a lot - the futility of the death penalty and the work of an artist. Looking forward to read the rest of his bibliography.

A brilliant backstory to the global phenomena that shook the world to its core and ultimately, for better or for worse, shifted the entire political spectrum in many countries. This Pulitzer-prize winning book deserves all the acclaims it gets. Mostly when people talk about terrorists and Jihad, they only discuss the result - the bombings, the beheadings, the hijackings - but very few people care about going into the details of how these attacks happened in the first place. Although it remains a big mystery to me, Lawrence manages to shine some lights on some of the key figures in this global Jihad and what ultimately motivated them to take on this deadly course. A page-turner for sure and a must-read for anyone who is as ignorant about Jihad as I was till sometime ago.

“Even death has a heart.”

This book is a poetry disguised as prose.

Such beautiful sentences, an unusual narrator (you don't come across death sharing his feelings every day), a phenomenal story - heartbreaking to say the least while also maintaining an air of inspiration, a brilliant depiction of History's one of the most devastating periods - living in Germany during World War II.

I cannot recommend this highly enough, people.

This is probably the first time I've cried while listening to a book. There's something intoxicating in the way Stephen Fry narrates and the whole section with Harry and Dumbledore in the caves was so emotional that I couldn't help but shed a tear at Dumbledore's desperate cries for help. I remember when I was first reading this book, I'd been really shocked to discover Dumbledore's death. However, that feeling was nothing compared to what I felt when Fry's pleading voice of Dumbledore echoed through my ears. I felt shattered once again. Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore - you will be missed!