Overrated!

These are books that I guess have a damn good PR team behind them who have hailed these books as the next best thing.  Unfortunately, in my opinion, they were a waste of both time and money--translate: highly avoidable.


Bride Test by Helen Hoang
What a promising book this seemed: a modern day arranged marriage, a hero with Aspergers, and Vietnamese origin Americans all in one book.  Clearly 'seeming' does not always mean is! All issues in the book were reduced to sexual desire and nothing more.  Any attraction between the two protagonists was driven by sheer lust, resulting in a Vietnamese Silhouette rather than the Vietnamese Crazy Rich Asians I was expecting. 

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi
Why oh why do I not learn from my past mistakes?!??!?  Once again I picked up a Man Booker prize winner, albeit the international award this year (2019), and ended up kicking myself for such a decision.  The book's narrative was fragmented which coupled with a meandering plot and incomplete threads had one asking what is the point of this book.  The only redeeming aspect of this novel was that one gained an idea of Oman's history; but frankly one is better off reading Wikipedia for the same.

Day by Michael Cunningham

I read for a lot of reasons; but chief amongst them is to enter a new world, which is why reading a book about the tedium of daily life was one of the most difficult things I have had to do in recent times. The only reason I persevered with this arduous task was that it was my book club's read of the month (we have to choose better next time).

Not only was the subject matter of the novel quite banal, none of the vast array of characters was even marginally interesting enough for one to want to find out what happened to them at the end of the narrative.

Given that this book was set partly during the pandemic, there is so much the writer could have included but did not. Frankly if the date had not been provided I would never even have guessed that this book was set during Covid times.

Needless to say, the publishing world is just like any other business, so the book Day does have its fair share of positive press and endorsements which led us to selecting it.

So, who is the writer Michael Cunningham?—a professor of Yale who has penned a number of published works.  Probably the most famous of his books is The Hours.  I cannot comment on his earlier oeuvres having not read any, but seriously if Day is what Yale professors churn out, I really wonder about the university's credentials, Ivy League or not! 

Death is Hard Work by Khaled Khalifa

Family Life by Akhil Sharma

An Indian immigrant family, 1970’s New York, a brilliant son whose brain is damaged in a swimming accident—ingredients for a gut-wrenching tale, that’s what I thought.  How wrong I was.  I figured that here is an Indian Diaspora story that I have not yet come across so it will be a refreshing albeit grim read.  Given that it has received a lot of good pres seemed to validate this assumption of mine.  How wrong I was.  Even though Sharma doesn’t hesitate in showing how the family disintegrates in the face of this dreadful tragedy, the book seemed to lack emotion.  It was basically a narration of events that just failed to draw me in.  The only bit that was actually interesting was the part with Hemingway.  The descriptions of 70’s India while making one nostalgic lost its charm each time Sharma ‘translated’ hindi words for his American audience (a rather irritating trait of his).  Finally, after much plodding I came to a really impactful sentence--unfortunately, it was the last sentence of the book.

Firefly Lane by Kristin Hannah

Please remind me to avoid the bestseller types….such a waste of time.  I picked this book as I wanted to know how the Netflix adaptation would end, since I was too impatient to wait for the next season of the show.  Reading the book, I realised the series had deviated from the book significantly.  The book on its on…spoiler alert…was really a "Love Story/One Day" starring best friends rather than lovers.  The writing was rather trite and beyond throwing in song titles and other references to popular culture of the times there wasn't really much going for the book.  I guess Hannah was lucky Netflix picked up her book for an adaptation ensuring a surge in readership including people like myself who otherwise would never have picked it up.

French Exit by Patrick Dewitt 

Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi
I had read her short story "The Sex Lives of African Girls" which definitely packed a punch. So I was really looking forward to the publication of her novel. The fact that Rushdie and Morrison have raved about her made her seem like the writer to watch out for, I guess I am too humble a reader to enjoy the recommendations of the literary greats. Perhaps, the kind thing would be to say that she is a much better short story writer than a novelist. On the whole, the book is good in segments and the writing is beautiful and densely packed with descriptions. Yet, despite the skill of the craftsman it was a difficult book to get into and an even more difficult one to complete as it was just unable to engage the reader. This book had me apologising to my book club as I had recommended it. 

If Cats Disappeared by Genki Kawamura 
I picked up this book with great anticipation…let me put it this way, my first book of 2020 was certainly not an amazing read.  The book had a great deal of promise: a deal with the Devil, but Kawamura's Devil was quite lacklustre compared to Bulgakov's.  For the first half, the book was quite predictable, well actually most of it was, but it did become more interesting in the last quarter. Is this a book I would recommend, not really.

Jasmine Days by Benyamin
October 2018, saw me very excited about the newest literary prize in town specially since it seemed to give regional voices an equal platform.  Having read Benyamin's Goat Days a while back, I was sure that Jasmine Days must be a wonderful read too specially since it beat the likes of Murugan to win the award. So with great expectations I opened Jasmine Days; it was slow to begin with and had a stilted voice, but i continued to read on convinced that this book would floor me; there seemed to be a glimmer of hope with references to  the Hizbollah—ahh i thought the writer has great plans and so i trudged on only to reach the end where I was left with only one  question reverberating in my head:  How the hell did this book win the prize, were the jury members drunk?!?!?!? This was a novel with potential but it failed…it lacked an authentic voice—whether it was Sameera's or Ali's Shiite uncle who ate dal! Perhaps in isolation the book may be considered worthwhile for its attempts to examine the consequences of revolutionary violence on protesters and the the violence perpetrated by a  regime as at the end it is the innocent who suffer on both sides.  But to then think that this novel beat Poonachi, where Murugan skilfully weaves a moving account of a goat's life that the reader is sucked into the novel and moved to tears at the end seriously makes me question every one of the jury members. Clearly, merit was not the sole criterion when it comes to choosing the winner for this award.
Read only if you have no other book to read.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
Lord only knows how I plodded my way through this book…and the only reason I did so was because it was a well intentioned Mother's Day gift from my daughter.  Little did she suspect, when organising this surprise for me, that this was exactly like those books that motivated me to set up this blog—over-rated and touted by the critics as a wonderful book.  Of course, I can't quite blame her for being taken in by the critics, after all even the blurb on the jacket made the book seem interesting and quite different: an account of a a young woman who decides to take a year off, with the help of a few prescription drugs.  Unfortunately, the book just read like the whining of a kid who has a fairly good deal in life but doesn't think so and decides to sign out!  Critics have hailed the book for its scathing insights into American society—clearly they were too subtle for me to pick through the haze of drugs and human emissions.  Obviously, self pitying rants are not my cup of tea or perhaps this is meant for an American audience, for the Asian in me felt like yelling at the protagonist to snap out of it!  The ending when it finally arrived was so cliched and I was left wondering why I wasted my time!  And to think that Otessa is being hailed as the next great American voice—either there is something wrong with me or there is something wrong with the critics.  

Passion Flower: Seven Stories of Derangement by Cyrus Mistry

Mistry’s Passion Flower: Seven Stories of Derangement simply confirms my belief that most authors cannot successfully produce different forms of writing.   Short stories are clearly not Mistry’s forte.  I loved his novel  Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer, and, therefore, was only too happy to pick up this book, beautifully published by Aleph with a very attractive cover (proving one should never judge a book by its cover).  However, I was too quickly disappointed.  While these stories clearly showcase Mistry’s elegant sentences, they lacked the soul that Chronicle had.  The stories did not seem to go anywhere—perhaps they were too subtle for me!  I plodded through 5 of his stories and then gave up—deciding that my time was too precious to waste on a book that, well, left me blank.

Sleeping on Jupiter byAnuradha Roy

The Gurkha's Daughter by Prajwal Parajuly

The Hindus: An Alternative History by Wendy Doniger

The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende

What a let down this book has been.  I had such high expectations of Allende, and then this book smashed them.   Had I not known, I would never have even imagined that this book was written by her, for it could have been written by almost anyone.  The book is touted as a breath taking romance, it’s anything but.  At times, it seemed that book was merely filling various criteria by throwing in different ingredients (class, race, sexual orientation etc) to be contemporary rather than developing the plot.  

Recommended only if you want a glimpse of what it meant to be Japanese in World War II America.

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri
The fact that this novel was short-listed for the Man Booker in 2013, even before it was published, made one pick it up.  That was a huge mistake on my part, given that I did not like her earlier novel The Namesake.  Gauri, one of the  main characters, is one of those people who is never happy with their life and proceeds to sabotage her own life. That in itself would not be so bad except for the fact that events that take place in this novel just seem so contrived, included just to fit in.  by the end of the book, I felt that just because a person writes good short stories, like Lahiri's collection in Unaccustomed Earth, does not necessarily mean that they can pen an interesting novel. 

The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante

The Magician of Lhasa by David Michie
A sheer waste of time.  What should have been an exciting book about an escape from Chinese occupied Tibet turned out to be a trite tale of reincarnation!

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

Once again I became a victim to the media hype.    With a ton of good reviews I figured I must read this book.  A love story within a war story...could it be another English Patient.  Most certainly not, I discovered.  After the first 75 pages, I decided to skim through the book only reading the war parts properly.  The non-war parts of the book just failed to hold my attention, they seemed too mechanical despite the bits of poetry thrown in. 

Fortunately, the sections dealing with WWII were another story.  Flanagan focuses on a POW camp on the river Kwai with Australian soldiers forced to work on the railway to Burma under the Japanese.  He doesn’t hesitate in portraying the brutalities the Japanese indulged in.  Even more interesting is how Flanagan follows some of the Japanese officers to the end of their lives.  What was a real eye-opener was to see how the International Military Tribunal for the Far East did not punish all the culpable equally.  Japanese officers were able to get off the hook unlike Korean soldiers who did their bidding.  He suggests that the Americans were interested in some of the Japanese research and hence let perpetrators of human experimentation off the hook.  The book clearly shows that Japanese were no less guilty than the Nazis when it came to human torture. 

Do not read this book for the story but for the historical angle.

The Orchard of Lost Souls by Nadifa Mohamed
Young, articulate, female, attractive with a successful novel under her belt made Nadifa seem like a writer worth following--even if I had not read her first book.  Why do I keep falling into this trap?!?!?!?  I plodded through this book, waiting, waiting for the book to take off...only to reach the end.  This book deals with the onset of civil war in Somalia focusing on the impact of events on three women.  Unfortunately, it did not make for interesting reading, though certain extracts dealing with the senseless violence and abuse did make me recoil; but to learn of these atrocities it would have been better to pick up a more factual account than this particular work.  At the end, I was left with the thought that an excellent command over the language does not necessarily make for an excellent storyteller.

The Return of the Butterfly by Moni Mohsin
When I purchased this book, it never even crossed my mind that I would be placing this book in this list.  I have really enjoyed the first two Butterfly books and, therefore, eagerly purchased this third one the moment I spied it in the bookshop. What a mistake!!!  In a nutshell, Mohsin is suffering from sequel syndrome.  While the first book was a breath of fresh air with Butterfly's unique voice, the second instalment had a much tighter plot around which the diary entries were woven.  In this third book, there is no sense of  a plot and the novelty of Butterfly's voice has worn off, resulting in a book that goes nowhere!

The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthhiessen
My picking up this book is probably an example of how internet alogrithms can be totally wrong.  This is a book that was cropping up for quite a while whenever I was online (I guess triggered by searches on travel destinations in the Himalayas).  After seeing it quite often, my curiosity was piqued, and on learning how well regarded this book was, a veritable part of the canon, I figured this would be a good book to read for the book club; especially since it charts the author's journey to Dolpo, a Buddhist district in Nepal and one of the oldest Tibetan kingdoms.  
I guess I should have read the finer print more carefully for this was not just any travel book but one that charted an inner journey, which in itself is what all travel does I guess.  Unfortunately, the fall off was that Matthiessen often misses out on bringing to life the beauty of the landscape, most notably Phuksumdo lake (thankfully with Google around, I was able to see how beautiful the lake was).  In my opinion, this lacuna was a huge drawback of the book; Matthiessen just doesn't seem to do justice in describing the dramatic, rugged landscape of Dolpo in all its details.  Throughout the book, I kept turning to Google to see how the places he mentions actually look.  
While, one might overlook this gap and put it down to personal preference, I reallly could not handle Matthiessen's Orientalist gaze, Buddhist or not!  The way Matthiessen looks down on the locals and his accompanying Sherpas and porters was most unpalatable.  And as one read on, this condescending attitude becomes all the more unjustified given his own behaviour: rudeness to the locals, urinating on a dog and leaving a pile of shit in a village courtyard that he had requisitioned!!!! 
At the end of the book, I really couldn't wrap my head around the fact this work is considered one of the classics of travel literature, perhaps for the Western audience!

The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis
This book was touted Oprah as an amazing read.  Unfortunately, it turned out to be a major let down...a family saga that goes nowhere.  I was really disappointed reading this book, especially since I have read a lot of good books courtesy Oprah's recommendations.  I left the book wondering to myself, what was the point of it all; what am I as a reader supposed to carry back with me?  My answer was: nothing much.

The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers

I bought eagerly, I started to read, I groaned, I plodded, I eventually made it to the end and then I cursed myself for first buying The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers and then wasting my time reading the entire book—I so need to learn to give up on a book if it’s an uninspiring read.  I guess the history buff in me kept me reading the book, but even that side of me was let down.

The Yellow Birds touted by the media as a powerful novel on the Iraq war, to my mind is once again an example of the mercenary nature of the publishing business where any book gets hyped as the next best thing.

Powers has tried to create an intriguing plot by playing with chronology, going back and forth in time.  Unfortunately, playing with technique does not always make for a riveting read.  The book is dotted with long descriptions, perhaps trying to mimic great writers—but the magic is missing, leaving me with the feeling that the writer was trying too hard.  The book was also filled with the usual elements of a war story: the tough soldiers, the decent but distant superior, the weak one, a mother making her son’s comrade promise to look after her son, the interlude with prostitutes, the brutality of the enemy, and of course the difficulty settling back at home.  In the entire book, I think there were just about two pages of genuine emotion and dialogue.

I don’t mean to belittle any soldier’s war experience.  However, not all soldiers can write or create a great book despite the best of intentions.  Unfortunately, with this book, Powers is one of them.