book review
BOOK REVIEW: NONFICTION / Taking folk melodies of Bangladesh to the world
Folk Melody of Bangladesh: An Anthology of Bangladesh Folk Music in Standard Notation is a music anthology that compiles 204 carefully chosen folk songs of Bangladesh that date from the 16th century.
BOOK REVIEW: GRAPHIC NOVEL / Down the rabbit hole of science and art
The city of Prague, now the capital of the Czech Republic, was once the breeding hotspot of the 20th century’s greatest writers, scientists, scholars, and activists.
BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / Sad men behaving badly
In January 2023, I was sitting in the crowd, listening in on a panel at the 10th and possibly the final edition of the Dhaka Lit Fest. Sheikh Hasina had already been in power for almost 15 years, and it felt like the sun would never set on Awami League, at least not in my lifetime.
BOOK REVIEW: NONFICTION / Unravelling Yuval Noah Harari’s ‘Nexus’
Review of ‘Nexus’ (Random House, 2024)
BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / For the ‘Twilight’ fan who grew up
I was a Twilight girl.
TRIBUTE / Story of an ‘Unaccompanied Minor’: A tribute to Matthew Perry
It's almost as if Matthew Perry was destined to write this book.
BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / Of dewdrops and grit
‘Shabnam’ is a dewdrop in Persian. Shabnam (1960) is the name of Syed Mujtaba Ali’s passionate love story that stretches beyond the history of nearly a century ago.
BOOK REVIEW: FICTION / A tale of forgetting and remembrance
Being an ardent admirer of K-pop culture, I wonder why I was hitherto unaware of this gem of a book, One Left by Kim Soom, and the excruciatingly painful truth it delineates.
BOOK REVIEW: NON-FICTION / An exploration of the history and panoply of Indian Subcontinental cuisine
Review of ‘Forgotten Foods: Memories and Recipes from Muslim South Asia’ (Picador India, 2023) edited by Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Tarana Husain Khan, and Claire Chambers
Exploring The Rebel’s call to revolution
Review of ‘Bidrohi Puran’ (Pendulum Books, 2024) by Arif Rahman
Beyond science and scope: ‘The Three-Body Problem’
The Three-Body Problem is the first book in the Remembrance of Earth’s Past (2006) trilogy by Cixin Liu, a renowned Chinese author.
Why Dune stands the test of time
I recently had the sublime experience of watching the recent adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune (Chilton Books, 1965), a 2021 and 2023 two-part movie series directed by the passionate Denis Villeneuve. It is, in my mind, a cinematic triumph, and I am thrilled to witness the surge interest these movies have driven for Herbert’s science fiction book series of the same name.
The saga of a mother’s sacrifice and resilience
Anisul Hoque’s Kokhono Amar Maa-ke is the story of appalling sacrifices made by a mother and her unwavering determination to secure a bright future for her children.
Poetry for our times and a poet’s new frontier
Inevitably, Kaiser Haq’s The New Frontier and Other Odds and Ends in Verse and Prose is about the poet, his poetic predilections, and situatedness at this time of human existence. In many ways it is typical of the verse we have come to expect from our leading poet in English for a long time now, but in other ways it articulates his present-day concerns in new and striking poetic measures.
Should this lost novel have been found?
Articles on Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s last novel to be published by his sons against the author’s wishes built up my anticipation and I couldn’t wait for April to arrive. Thanks to Bookworm, I got my copy the moment they had it in store and I read it twice. It didn’t impress me the first time as it was just a string of chapters describing how a promiscuous woman drove herself into the arms of different men on her annual August 16 visits to a Caribbean island.
It’s ‘Mean Girls’ meets ‘Heathers’ meets ‘The Craft’
The best part of this book is perhaps the fact that all the weird, bonkers cultish stuff just happens with no rhyme or reason to it.
(Re)visit to the alleys of contestation, narratives, and memories that the Partition left behind
The book discusses the lack of sensitivity among policymakers in acknowledging the distinct socio-cultural differences and linguistic and community identities of the refugees that often got merged. It explores how different categories of refugees received different treatments.
A love letter to traveling with friends
A review of ‘Roaming’ (Drawn and Quarterly, 2023) by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki
The strange library of Haruki Murakami
Review of the Bangla translation of ‘A Strange Library’ (Knopf, 2014) by Haruki Murakami