Take a Book at This!

Hi, I am Mrinalini, and I write about books. This is my labour of love.

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It took me over a year to read this book and a little bit longer to write about it. Perhaps because it hits home. Perhaps because the silences are too loud. Perhaps because we all need medicine but in small doses.

The book talks about the lives of lonely artists who can't help but fly right into the sun. They leave paper trails on the way, images of terror and beauty - "content that is both so disturbing and so resistant to interpretation" - that you fear looking at it directly. Or at least I do. The descriptions of loneliness are visceral, not even remotely romantic, and perhaps the biggest challenge you will face as a reader. Olivia Laing uses words soft words to voice an emptiness that's so personal, yet is something that lives in all of us, part of universal darkness. The impact is both gentle and debilitating.

Still, Lonely City is an attempt to understand the world and hold its pain in a way that does not destroy you. Pick it up when you don't want to feel alone.

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On days when nothing reaches me, her frail voice manages to. It slides in and curls up noiselessly beside me, and emanates a soft, warm glow. Then, a patch of silky grass, a benevolent tree casting shade and asking nothing in return, damp earth giving way to fresh blooms, birds snapping their wings open, all present themselves as reasons to be alive. Soon, the mess that I'm in the middle of seems worth wading through.

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I am reading the first volume of New and Selected Poems of Mary Oliver. Pick it up if you love nature and poetry.

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There's never a good time for horror, not with all that's going around us anyway. Still, I couldn't help myself from sharing spoonfuls of the lush and lavish illustrations by Emily Carroll in her book Through the Woods. These haunting fairytales bring an eerie fluidity to fright—the kind that drip drip drips into your daydreams. ______ I am reading Through the Woods by Emily Carroll. Her storytelling is reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe and even Stephen King. You'll enjoy it if you dig either of the two.

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Sometimes when I'm running a chore on a Tuesday afternoon that allows my mind to wander, my eyes glaze over and I'm transported to a reality where I'm a better, shinier, happier, version of myself and doing something of significance—it doesn't matter what—for if I am better, shinier, happier, it must be quite fantastic. This something is lent the quality of being fantastic by its absence from this reality. It also holds the power to cast a pall on the gifts I have been given in this life. When 35-year-old Nora Seed decides to end her life that is full up with regrets, she walks into a library of her possible lives instead of the afterlife. Each decision, big or small, leads to a different outcome and adds up to a different life she could have lived—one where she didn't leave her lover, another where she became an Olympic champion and another still, where her cat didn't get run over. Every book is a second chance and there are infinite second chances. The Midnight Library fell into my lap at the right time to serve as a grounding exercise. This liminal space is an opening to the many possibilities of the only life we are meant to live. Our own. ___ I’m reading The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. Read it when you're wishing for a different life.

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In a world where history has been written by and for men, no number of books celebrating women will be enough. Books with names of women you didn't know existed and who, even when they were around, spent their days living in the shadows. But shadows aren't all so bad when they make room for eccentricities and lend freedom to creativity. Tasia Kitaisakia's associations of these literary geniuses with witches is curious but not all that surprising, then. A witch is any woman who attempts to make her own way in the world. The spell of the witch being elusive and frightening is broken and she replaces the modern female protagonist as complex, magical and always a little bit badass. ___ I am reading Literary Witches by Tasia Kitaiskaia which is decorated with delicious illustrations by Katy Horan. You can also get the Literary Witches Oracle along with the book and make use of the pair as a witchy self-care practice. 

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I have come to believe that graphic novels can make even the most dreaded of topics accessible and Logicomix is proof. The biography of arguably one of the greatest analytical philosophers of the 20th century, Bertrand Russell, posits logic and madness as its central theme and turns it into a chicken and egg dilemma. Creator Apostolos Doxiadis shows Bertrand Russell as the modern Prometheus, exploring his life-long quest for absolute certainty and revealing the inevitable tragedy of it. The book is co-authored by Christos Papadimitriou—a computer science professor at Berkley, who renders simplicity and clarity to the otherwise frightful subject of Mathematics. A lot is going on here— three timelines, inner demons, self-references, paradoxes, wives, mistresses, melodrama, and mania. You also get to meet Gottlob Frege, David Hilbert, and Kurt Gödel among other logicians, and the bromance between Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein is unmissable.

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I’m reading Logicomix by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou. Pick it up if you enjoy philosophy or mathematics or graphic novels or hero stories. 

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Jim Kay appreciation post

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Day No. 1

And the Lord God said, “Let there be light,” and lo, there was light. But then the Lord God said, “Wait, what if I make it a sort of rosy, sunset-at-the-beach, filtered half-light, so that everything else I design will look younger?”

“I’m loving that,” said Buddha. “It’s new.”

“You should design a restaurant,” added Allah.

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From Intelligent Design by Paul Rudnick. What good is life if we cannot laugh at it? 🌝

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It takes skill to draw a hero and greater skill to draw a villain. But the reason why Suzanne Collin's prequel to the spectacular Hunger Games series stands out is not that she gives the villain center stage but because she gives him a clean slate and a fair chance, to begin with. In many ways, the young Coriolanus Snow and future President of Panem resembles our heroine Katniss. Deeply impoverished by the war and moved by an instinct of self-preservation, they even share a streak of selfishness and appear to be the two sides of the same coin. The frightening truths that reveal themselves when you read a villain's story lie in the many parts where you find yourself in agreement with them. Then, before you know it, you have a knife in your back. The build-up to this is excellent – dread creeps in at leisure, gnaws at you and clouds your judgement. I was left with a feeling of betrayal – for Collins birthed evil right under my nose and I missed the details. Everything adds up in the end. Why Snow's hate is so palpable and why his vendetta so personal. This prequel is not an embellishment but an important piece in making sense of the original series. Don't dismiss it as a Young Adult novel.

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I am reading Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Pick it up if you find comfort in dystopia. Illustration by Jake Wyatt

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Here are some bits from Brazilian twin brothers Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá's Daytripper that stayed with me. This spellbinding work has a generous dose of magic realism and is ideal for anyone in two minds about graphic narratives serving as serious literature.

Spend the most important days of his life with Brás de Oliva Domingos, who writes obituaries for a local paper, exploring the many deaths he sees in his lifetime, all of which are his own. There are few books that invite death to colour all of their pages without turning morbid.

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I am reading Daytripper by Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá

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What is the word to describe the feeling when you are both awe-inspired and utterly horrified? This is my first brush with Japanese horror mangaka Junji Ito's spine-chilling albeit hypnotising artwork in the cult-favourite Uzumaki and I'm hooked! Ito is regarded as the master of his craft, and who can contest that—just look that the scarily intricate details in his surreal stories. Uzumaki has three volumes, and if you consume horror with the same lust, all can be devoured in a single day (or night)

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I am reading Uzumaki by Juni Ito. Pick it up if you’ve always thought of Japan as cute.

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It is a good time as any to talk about Alice Walker's 'The Color Purple' – the first novel by an African-American woman with a lesbian protagonist to win the Pulitzer Prize in the year 1983.

This revolutionary work explores the themes of race, class, gender, domestic abuse, sexual assault, sexuality and religion, all through a series of letters that Celie writes to God. Walker has penned this in non-standard dialect – what she calls black folk language – and its gift is that you can read it in Celie's sweet voice.

The tenderness with which Celie and Shug's relationship is explored shows how love can look like so many things simply because it inhabits so many places. In spite of the violence that marks this novel's pages, the text remains soft, and that might also be the reason it is so powerful.

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I am reading The Color Purple by Alice Walker. Pick it up if you want to read something life-affirming and don't mind breaking into frequent sobs.

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Reading a Roald Dahl story book without Quentin Blake illustrations sprouting from your head is a ridiculous notion and does not exist in the real world. Besides, there is no way to unsee or forget them because the noses he draws follow you wherever you go.

Blake's drawings scream with chaotic, colourful and good energy from childhood. God knows we can do with more of them.

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Illustrations from Mr. Magnolia by Sir Quentin Blake and The Witches by Roald Dahl

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Illustrations by Maurice Sendak for Open House for Butterflies by Ruth Krauss

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Unreadable women in Victorian art, reading books in quiet rooms, by their windows, facing the other way and/or flourishing in gardens. A peek into private, solitary and contemplative spaces that are also reminiscent of our quarantine times.

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Challenging the status quo when you are part of the system may also be an effective way to question power, because you stand the chance of being heard. This is how New Yorker writer, Jia Tolentino works her way through Trick Mirror – walking out of the mist and then digging deep into the shaky grounds that make up the internet culture. She shows us how an effervescent culture that revolves around and profits from the self is also responsible for crippling self doubt. Tolentino's essays are complex and chaotic, same as her identity as a millennial that is entangled with the Web that she critically examines. She writes about her tryst with drugs and religion, American scams that hide in plain sight, difficult women who inhabit literary and real worlds, popular feminism that goes unchecked, online platforms promising social capital that define us as well as alienate us, and more. 

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Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion by Jia Tolentino. Read it if you want to make sense of the internet. There are no big answers in this book but it helps to ask the right questions. 

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One of the reasons why graphic narratives move us is because they show us things without speaking of them. Language is constantly changing and has the capacity to deceive us, but drawings, especially cartoons, are understood across cultures (perhaps why they are a powerful political tool as well). It is unsurprising then, to see why artist Riad Sattouf chose to depict his childhood years in the 1980s' war-torn Syria with an autobiographical graphic series.

I am easily intimidated by literature about the Middle East. As a novice, I often find myself biting my tongue lest I oversimplify the history of a troubled land. It is some relief to hold the hand of a young Sattouf, the golden-haired glory of his Pan-Arabist father, even as he is dragged across lands, dazed by dictators such as Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad.

Sattouf's father is also the protagonist of this story – living in abstruse poverty and driven by political idealism, he wants to raise his son as 'The Arab of the Future', which is nothing but a phantasm. Embodying the rage of the men he holds up as leaders, he is as pitiable as he is despicable, making it difficult to out-rightly hate him all that he stands for.

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I am reading The Arab of the Future by Riad Sattouf Pick it up when you want to explore the dark and delirious truth of the Middle-East with the help of an eccentric family.