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Post by dancelover on May 28, 2014 23:10:29 GMT
Just found in library:
Abby Spencer Goes To Bollywood: the exciting story of how I met my father
c2014 by Varsha Bajaj
I find this to be well-written. A thirteen-year-old Houston girl, raised by her mother, nana, and nani,
learns that her father has become a Bollywood superstar.
Dancelover
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Post by elizabennet on Jun 2, 2014 12:27:58 GMT
Oryx and Crake
The Year of the Flood
MaddAddam
I can recommend all three and it is best if you read them in that order.
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Post by MrB on Jun 28, 2014 14:05:14 GMT
A Strange Kind of Paradise: India Through Foreign Eyes, by Sam Miller. From the blurb: I must declare an interest here, as Sam is a friend, but he's also very well qualified to write about India from the foreign perspective, having been a BBC reporter there for many years, and having married an Indian woman. The book is learned without being academic, wide-ranging and discursive, being full of fascinating historical titbits and giving an entertaining account of foreign views of India from the earliest times through to the present day. It's a light read, but informative, and the interwoven autobiographical elements are enlivened by Sam having been close to the centre of major recent events such as the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. Some may find the style a bit prurient in places, or the footnotes slightly too digressive, but overall this is a very readable overview of the relationship of foreigners with India through the centuries.
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Post by jabimetbollywood on Jun 28, 2014 18:25:47 GMT
^Sounds interesting! Thanks, MrB.
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odadune
Star of the item number
not around much due to stuff in my personal life.
Posts: 1,494
Favorite actor: Currently a certain Kumar, but I like most of them
Favorite actress: whoever's in films I'm interested in this week
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Post by odadune on Aug 27, 2014 13:39:09 GMT
I've been reading some fantasy sagas from the 80s/90s.
Dragon Prince, by Melanie Rawn: book one of a gossipy family saga type thing with standard medieval technology and trappings, a particularly hippy dippy magic system, and some plot elements borrowed from the Dune books (male lead's mystic connections, to large destructive desert creatures, the intrigue around the process of him siring an heir, plus one character is a Bene Gesserit in all but name). The author is really good at geographic description and economics, rather good at action scenes, and sort of entertainingly bad at characterization: the title character lurches unconvincingly from nice guy to PTSD-fueled berserker and back, the villains are mostly unsubtle schemers and sadists with only one morally ambiguous character in their whole faction, most of the good guys are defined by their attractiveness and diabetically sweet love lives. The only ones who feel particularly believable as people are the heroine (who goes off the deep end and comes back from it in a much more convincing way than her love interest does), the morally ambiguous character mentioned above, and the Bene Gesserit wannabe. The used paperback I'm reading is old enough to have an advertisement for the saga's fanclub and their newsletter/fanzine thingie (the printed kind) in the back.
Daughter of the Empire and Servant of the Empire by Janny Wurts and Raymond Feist: spinoff from Feist's main Riftwar series, this is 2/3rds of a trilogy about a young noblewoman trying to secure her family's position in a culture that's a mashup of Japanese, Aztec, ancient Roman and (minor) Indian elements. The characterizations and politics are better done than in Rawn's book, economics and scenery are almost as well done. Second book suffers from too many references to the Riftwar books, which I've not read, and a cartoony medieval fantasy guy (from the culture/world of the main Riftwar books) whom the heroine takes as her lover. He makes a good vehicle for critiquing the things that are genuinely wrong with her culture, but he's still annoying.
Currently reading Star Scroll (sequel to Dragon Prince) and Mistress of the Empire (third part of the other trilogy).
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Post by jabimetbollywood on Aug 28, 2014 3:44:23 GMT
I've been reading some fantasy sagas from the 80s/90s. Daughter of the Empire and Servant of the Empire by Janny Wurts and Raymond Feist: Oh my flashback!  I hadn't thought of these books in years, but I read your post and this cover immediately and vividly popped into my mind:  I read all three of those books, so I must have liked them. But I don't remember them very well. |
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odadune
Star of the item number
not around much due to stuff in my personal life.
Posts: 1,494
Favorite actor: Currently a certain Kumar, but I like most of them
Favorite actress: whoever's in films I'm interested in this week
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Post by odadune on Aug 29, 2014 2:34:31 GMT
I've been reading some fantasy sagas from the 80s/90s. Daughter of the Empire and Servant of the Empire by Janny Wurts and Raymond Feist: Oh my flashback! I hadn't thought of these books in years, but I read your post and this cover immediately and vividly popped into my mind: I read all three of those books, so I must have liked them. But I don't remember them very well. hah, that is exactly the edition I bought so cheap on amazon!  I believe I read somewhere that the cover art was done by the author's then-husband. They're not big on plot arcs per se-just a bunch of incidents where the heroine and her servants match political wits with Bad People in the interests of survival and maybe the greater good. They're a little bland and they have plot holes sometimes, but their take on the political intrigue among nobles works pretty well, and I liked the "exotic" culture involved. Just finished Star Scroll by Melanie Rawn (sequel to Dragon Prince). First half is very slow with lots of adolescents mooning over their love interests, but it picks up a lot in the second half. My favorite morally ambiguous characters from the first one went out like punks, and it looks like the next gen analogue to one of them is probably going to be a bad guy. But it's a good soap opera, and the dragon angle is starting to pay off. The first one didn't leave me with an urgent desire to read the second one, which is how I ended up finishing Servant of the Empire before Star Scroll, but I'm actually kind of curious to see how this saga turns out in Sunrunner's Fire. |
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Post by dancelover on Sept 5, 2014 15:26:16 GMT
A group of three books:
GREAT SOUL: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India - c2011 by Joseph Lelyveld, an American
GANDHI BEFORE INDIA - c2013 by Ramachandra Guha, an Indian. Includes Lelyveld among his sources. Uses many letters written *to* Gandhi, and also many newspapers.
INDIA AFTER GANDHI: The History of the World's Largest Democracy - c2007 by R. Guha.
I recommend them all.
Howard "Dancelover" Wilkins |
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Post by Prem Rogue on Oct 14, 2014 19:27:41 GMT
I'm currently reading Down Melody Lane by G.N. Joshi, who was a musician who became a recording executive for HMV from 1938 to the early 1970s. He recounts a wealth of information about the Hindustani classical singers and musicians he recorded over the years. This is a Kindle edition (physical copies must be long out of print), which has quite a few typos. I wonder if they used some software to scan a copy of the book and convert it to an e-book? |
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odadune
Star of the item number
not around much due to stuff in my personal life.
Posts: 1,494
Favorite actor: Currently a certain Kumar, but I like most of them
Favorite actress: whoever's in films I'm interested in this week
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Post by odadune on Dec 19, 2014 21:16:58 GMT
The Land Across, by Gene Wolfe. If you're not familiar with his surrealist/postmodern take on the "pulp" genres (detective, science fiction,fantasy, and so on), this isn't a good book to start with, but I enjoyed it more than some of his other recent works. The fans and interpreters working themselves up into a lather trying to make sense of it with an insufficient command of gothic horror/gothic horror parody tropes are way off-base; to me it seemed pretty clear that Vlad Dracul is the amnesiac/brainwashed narrator's allegedly dead father, and the dictator, and a couple other minor characters, and definitely supernatural, but may not be a vampire. That the girl the narrator goes with at the end is the ghost of the woman whose body is found earlier in the story, and the narrator's other girlfriend, the woman married to his jailor, may or may not be a ghost as well. The only real question is whether this lot and their allies are what the narrator claims them to be at one point-bad people or bad creatures trying to do the right thing-or the actual villains of the piece, but I'm inclined to think it's the former. The hostile cult the narrator and friends go up against late in the book is definitely a bunch of vampires, and is clearly patterned on the Satanist from the old Universal horror movie The Black Cat, which had Dracula portrayer/ future drug addict/general Hollywood loser Bela Lugosi as a very dark and vengeful character who's nonetheless mostly helpful to the good guys. Which would make the golden-voiced religious prelate who turns out to be hostile to the narrator's bunch, an analogue for Boris Karloff's (extremely evil) character in Black Cat. |
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Post by dancelover on Feb 3, 2015 17:06:39 GMT
reviewed by www.thedailybeast.com in their "women" section:
Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary, by Anita Anand.
Sophia was one of eight children of Duleep, the deposed (c1850) son of Ranjit Singh, the Sikh Rajah of the Punjab, who was brought to England and was allowed to marry when he grew up. Two of his children, including Sophia, became god-children of Queen/Empress Victoria.
Princess Sophia went to India for the 1903 Durbar, and learned Indian Nationalism. She took up the cause of the lascars (Indian seamen).
Then she went back to Britain. In 1909 she met Evangeline Pankhurst and became a suffragette. She joined Pankhurst in her protests, and was arrested several times.
I have not read this book myself, but the reviewer loved it.
Dancelover |
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odadune
Star of the item number
not around much due to stuff in my personal life.
Posts: 1,494
Favorite actor: Currently a certain Kumar, but I like most of them
Favorite actress: whoever's in films I'm interested in this week
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Post by odadune on Mar 16, 2015 1:30:15 GMT
Fortune's Pawn/Honor's Knight/Heaven's Queen, by Rachel Bach. There's been a steady trend towards conventional-romance/space opera hybrids over the last ten years, and I've read some (Ann Aguirre's Grimspace for instance) but not all. Rachel Bach's trilogy has way too much side-switching and moral grandstanding (especially considering that by the middle of the third book, every major character including the heroine/primary narrator has offed at least one unstable teenaged girl with psychic powers and called it a mercy kill), and a bizarre inability to figure out whether the narrator from the planet with the vaguely European/feudal culture thinks her planet's king is a deity or a miracle-working holy man. But it is also an interesting mashup of a bunch of different elements, including Firefly, LeGuin's Omelas parable (see, killing unstable teenaged psychics, above), and various forms of anime: the main alien menace seems to be inspired by some of the Macross spinoffs, another faction seems to be a cross between Babylon 5's Vorlons and the Inbit from Mospeada, the heroine uses a streamlined power armor of the Bubblegum Crisis school, while some supporting characters have full fledged mecha, and there are also Guyver analogues.
The ethical muddles and the frankly annoying love interest (the heroine, despite some amazingly stupid moments remained pretty likable) keep me from recommending this, but it's an interesting collision of a bunch of things you don't often see in one place.
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Post by moviemavengal on Mar 22, 2015 15:36:50 GMT
Highly, highly recommend A Bollywood Affair by Sonali Dev. Sonali’s debut novel, A Bollywood Affair, was on Library Journal’s and NPR’s list of Best Books of 2014, it won the American Library Association’s award for best romance.  From the Amazon summary: I met Sonali Dev, the author at our local bookstore for the book launch. I asked her straight out if Samir, the hero, is based on Hrithik Roshan, and she admitted he is. The golden eyes gave it away! This is going to be a series, and The Bollywood Bride comes out in the fall. I can't wait. I gave A Bollywood Affair as gifts for Christmas and everyone loved it. The premise of the book, a child marriage and the flight pilot who later married, was based on a real story Sonali Dev's parents told her about some friends of theirs in India. |
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Post by dancelover on Mar 23, 2015 16:27:09 GMT
Several months ago a Free Library of Philadelphia staff member recommended ABA, and I reserved it. Thursday it came in. It was a slow read, because I kept stopping to say "do it this way!" and "not that, this" and "don't be such a fool!" and "you *have* to tell her/him!!"
What's good: the depiction of emotions. Dev always makes me say "Yes! he would feel this, she would feel that," and " yes, that smart person's feelings *would* distract her/him from that obvious clue."
Later: I should add Dev's use of "travel" and "food" to the What's Good list. She uses "travel" to tie the parts of her story together, both literally and figuratively. Whenever anyone goes anywhere, whether by flying, driving, or walking, something Important (usually good) will happen upon arrival. She also uses long walks to show the size of Mumbai. "Food" turns any of her groups of two or more people into a Community.
What's nonsense: the brothers Virat & Samir don't think to tell their Baiji about the letters & legal notices signed M V R. It's not the time to tell Rima, and Samir's emotions prevent him from communicating his agent-message to Mili, BUT Baiji Lata had dealt with this matter from the beginning, so of course knew all about it! Had she been Virat's agent, Baiji would have resolved the matter in half-a-chapter (and Mili would not have fled from her voice in the first place). This means that the story has an Idiot Plot.
Incongruities: India's capital is called "'New' Delhi." Various Aunties call their sons/nephews "beta," which is normal, and then they call their daughters/nieces "beta" too, instead of "beti." How long has Sonali Dev been living in America, that she forgot that? Director Samir Rathod has an "agent" who represents him. I guess that directors differ from actors in this.
Bollywood medicine: Sara is dying of cancer, despite getting radiation-therapy in her isolated Michigan farmhouse far away from any big city (and its hospitals). When her son comes to visit her, she immediately starts to get better. Two months later, the therapy is completed, and she is cured.
All-in-all, a very good read. I did not want to read it a second time, because I'd studied it so carefully the first time that it amounted to two readings in one.
Dancelover
PS I have posted to the author's website sonalidev.com that two of us reviewed her book here.
Highly, highly recommend A Bollywood Affair by Sonali Dev. Sonali’s debut novel, A Bollywood Affair, was on Library Journal’s and NPR’s list of Best Books of 2014, it won the American Library Association’s award for best romance. From the Amazon summary: I met Sonali Dev, the author at our local bookstore for the book launch. I asked her straight out if Samir, the hero, is based on Hrithik Roshan, and she admitted he is. The golden eyes gave it away! This is going to be a series, and The Bollywood Bride comes out in the fall. I can't wait. I gave A Bollywood Affair as gifts for Christmas and everyone loved it. The premise of the book, a child marriage and the flight pilot who later married, was based on a real story Sonali Dev's parents told her about some friends of theirs in India. |
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sunset
Dancing in the chorus
Posts: 42 
Favorite actor: Amitabh Bachchan, Shahrukh Khan
Favorite actress: Aishwarya Rai, Madhuri Dixit, Manisha Koirala, Karishma Kapoor
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Post by sunset on Apr 1, 2015 21:28:05 GMT
The A-Z Guide to Arranged Marriage by Rekha Waheed
This book made me wonder why it hasn't been turned into a film yet. Throughout the book it made me feel like I was watching a Bollywood film or a crossover film. And the ending made me cry in happy tears!
Summary: Maya Malik is a 28-year-old single lonely aging Asian girl who wants a gorgeous husband and a grand ostentatious wedding. For a professional Bengali, her biggest fear isn't being overlooked for promotion. It's the realisation that she has to find a husband from a diminishing stock of eligible bachelors that consists of mommy's boys, coconut go-getters, and bendhoo bicharas. To join the league of the married, Maya endures family introductions, blind dates, with Internet meetings in a journey that takes her from London to New York to Dhaka, and then back to London again. And when close friend Jhanghir Rahman announces his sudden wedding, Maya realises that with love, life and marriage, a girl can use old world traditions, and new world savvy to get exactly what she wants. The A-Z Guide to Arranged Marriages celebrates the realities of an age-old tradition for the new generation. From bastard bridegrooms, interfering auntijhis's to wedding weepers, follow Maya's charming roller coaster ride through singledom and the arranged marriage process.
Gemma Doyle Trilogy by Libby Bray
These are so gripping! I've read them twice.
Book one: A Great and Terrible Beauty
Summary: It's 1895, and after the death of her mother, 16-year-old Gemma Doyle is shipped off from the life she knows in India to Spence, a proper boarding school in England. Lonely, guilt-ridden, and prone to visions of the future that have an uncomfortable habit of coming true, Gemma's reception there is a chilly one. To make things worse, she's being followed by a mysterious young Indian man, a man sent to watch her. But why? What is her destiny? And what will her entanglement with Spence's most powerful girls - and their foray into the spiritual world - lead to?
Book two: Rebel Angels
Summary: Gemma continues to pursue her destiny to bind the magic of the Realms and restore it to the Order. Gemma and her friends from Spence use magical power to transport themselves on visits from their corseted world of Victorian London (at the height of the Christmas season), to the visionary country of the Realms, with its strange beauty and menace. There they search for the lost Temple, the key to Gemma's mission, and comfort Pippa, their friend who has been left behind in the Realms. After these visits they bring back magical power for a short time to use in their own world. Meanwhile, Gemma is torn between her attraction to the exotic Kartik, the messenger from the opposing forces of the Rakshana, and the handsome but clueless Simon, a young man of good family who is courting her.
Book three: The Sweet Far Thing
Summary: It has been a year of change since Gemma Doyle arrived at the foreboding Spence Academy. Having bound the wild, dark magic of the realms to her, Gemma has forged unlikely and unsuspected new alliances both with the headstrong Felicity and timid Ann, Kartik, the exotic young man whose companionship is forbidden, and the fearsome creatures of the realms. Now, as Gemma approaches her London debut, the time has come to test those bonds. As her friendship with Felicity and Ann faces its gravest trial, and with the Order grappling for control of the realms, Gemma is compelled to decide once and for all which path she is meant to take. Pulled forward by fate, the destiny Gemma faces threatens to set chaos loose, not only in the realms, but also upon the rigid Victorian society whose rules Gemma has both defied and followed. Where does Gemma really belong? And will she, can she, survive?
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I hadn't thought of these books in years, but I read your post and this cover immediately and vividly popped into my mind:
I believe I read somewhere that the cover art was done by the author's then-husband. They're not big on plot arcs per se-just a bunch of incidents where the heroine and her servants match political wits with Bad People in the interests of survival and maybe the greater good. They're a little bland and they have plot holes sometimes, but their take on the political intrigue among nobles works pretty well, and I liked the "exotic" culture involved.
Since Sept. 6, 2022, Chiloka has not been reachable. (