Miss Clueless

Seventy-nine? Looks like this is the number of books I'll read this year. Why? Because I read fifty-nine books in 2024 and sixty-nine in 2025. I can do it. Not fretting, though. The number of books is not important. What's really important, real readers know. To summarise the books I read in Jan: 1. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky 2. Human Acts by Han Kang 3. My Friends by Fredrik Backman 4. Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa 5. James Baldwin, The Last Interview and Other Conversations 6. Moral Ambition by Rutger Bregman 7. Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin 8. The Day the World Stops Shopping by J.B. Mackinnon 1. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky About free will, rationalism, ego, and contradiction. This is a reread. This time, I am more empathetic to the underground man compared to last time. I guess I grew a little. I may not get the full depth and meaning of the book. But I got enough to find it interesting.  Also, Fyodor Dostoyevsky...

Sixty-nine, not bad! Anne's House of Dreams by Lucy Maud Montgomery A House for Mr Biswas by V. S. Naipaul Arrival/Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf 🙌🏻 Winter Recipes from the Collective by Louise Glück Dottie by Abdulrazak Gurnah 👍🏻 The Enigma of Arrival by V. S. Naipaul The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk 🩵 The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman 👍🏻 Anne of Ingleside by Lucy Maud Montgomery Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out by Mo Yan The Stranger by Albert Camus The Lady with the Little Dog by Anton Chekhov The Color Purple by Alice Walker Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin Beloved by Toni Morrison 🙌🏻 The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Kiki’s Delivery Service, Eiko Kadono The God of Small Thing...

Let's go straight to the books: 1. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley 2. What You Are Looking For Is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama 3. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson 4. Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi 5. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde 6. White Nights by Fyodor Dostoyevsky 7. Woke, Inc. by Vivek Ramaswamy Brave New World by Aldous Huxley A dystopian novel where society trades freedom, individuality, and deep emotion for comfort, pleasure, and stability. I've often seen this book being compared to 1984 by George Orwell, and I plan to read it sometime. Finally read this month. For me, 1984 is >, but this book also raised some chilling questions and gave food for thought.  "I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."  Yeah, this. I don't believe in God, though. What You Are Looking For Is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama A gentle, interconne...

End of the month today, here are the books I read. 1. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante 2. The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante 3. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante 4. The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante 5. Oneness vs. the 1% by Vandana Shiva, Kartikey Shiva Yes, I read the Neapolitan novels, all four books by Elena Ferrante. Lina and Elena gave me company, the whole month, my head was full of what Lina did, what Elena said, etc, etc.  1. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante "I feel no nostalgia for our childhood: it was full of violence." The first novel follows the intense, complicated friendship between Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo as they grow up in a poor neighbourhood in postwar Naples. Amid violence, poverty, and rigid social expectations, the girls push each other intellectually and emotionally, shaping one another’s ambitions even as their paths begin to diverge. The novel explores how identity is formed through rivalry, admirat...

I remember the first book I ever bought and owned. It was when I was in high school. I had read other books before; I remember the Harry Potter books, not sure from whom or where I borrowed them, but somehow I got my hands on them, and I was hooked. Now that I think of it, it must be the Harry Potter books that got me interested in reading. The first book I bought was a thin little paperback, with an old man and a fish skeleton on the front. The Old Man and the Sea.  I didn’t know anything about Hemingway back then, just that he was well known. I remember my school English teacher saying it was a good book, giving an approving nod. Or at least I think so, it's so long ago. The Old Man and the Sea is about an old fisherman named Santiago who hasn’t caught a fish in weeks, but he refuses to give up. One day, he heads out far into the ocean and hooks a giant marlin, beginning an intense, days-long battle between him and the fish. It’s just him, the sea, and his determination. He...

October, the month of Diwali and Ningol Chakouba. Not particularly enjoyable for me this year. The night of Diwali, I found myself curled up in bed, hands clutching my head as if that would stop the terrible headache I was having. All the noise, not to mention the obvious pollution, made me mad. Abemma, one of our dogs, had a terrible, terrible time. And why do Manipuris celebrate Diwali? Because the king of Manipur was influenced by a Hindu preacher, converting Meities to Hindus. Well, I reject that. The same week was Ningol Chakouba, initially cancelled (for reasons I won't get into here), but later we celebrated anyway. All that and other things happened, and I also read some good books in October. Here they are: 1. The Source of Self-Regard by Toni Morrison 2. Mother Mary Comes To Me by Arundhati Roy 3. Enduring Loss—Stories from the Kuki-Naga Conflict in Manipur 4. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy 5. A Life of One's Own by Joanna Biggs 6. Welcome to the Hy...

Wake up, wake up, Children of the Land! You hear and hear, yet turn a deaf ear. You see and see, yet close your eyes. You know, you know, but pretend not to know. Wake up, wake up, Children of the Land! The world has seen the light of science. Has your time not come? Are you still chasing ghosts of old history? Have you forgotten? Do you not remember? Who are you? Where do you come from? To which place do you belong? Who are you to ignore the past that shaped you? Is your behaviour still human nature? Wake up, wake up, Children of the Land! There will be rain. There will be flood. Does fear still dwell in your heart? A tiger does not spare a deer. Have you forgotten? Do you not wish to write a new history? Do you not wish to be brave? Be wary, even as you sleep, Your own blood has turned cold. Like seeks like, and power pairs with power. That history, written by the mighty, Do you wish to let it rule again? Do you not wish to end it? Do you not wish to become Our fath...