The books I read in 2022 (mosaic)

New Year, New Book Mosaics! I can’t believe a year has gone by since I put my mosaic for 2021 complaining all the time that it was my lowest tally in recent years. Well, it turns out that my tally for 2022 was even lower than that of 2021. But I’m not disappointed. I spent…

Featured in a book

It’s no secret to anyone who knows me that I am very interested in the ancient world. So what could be cooler than to be featured in a very specialised book about the ancient world? Well, when I say featured, I mean that one of my photographs was included in an academic book. I went…

Summer Reads #9 – #13

These last few weeks, I have been making steading progress in reading through my TBR piles – not as fast as I would like, but slow and steady wins the race and all that. A quick snapshot of the books that I have read since late July. #9, 10 and 11 The Fionavar Tapestry by…

The copyists

A few days ago my mum stumbled across an online article that spoke about the ten most remarkable locked room mysteries ever written. I think I have mentioned several times before that my mother is a connoisseur of crime and thriller books and has probably read several hundred books of this genre, if not more….

Summer Read #8: The Majesty of History (of the Deccan)

Lords of the Deccan by Anirudh Kanisetti, published by Juggernaut Books (2022) History is a bit like the proverbial storm in chaos theory, an accumulation of butterfly effects, where seemingly small actions provoke a larger than life legacy. History is not a monolith that stays unchanging. It is a fabric that is woven from an…

Summer Reads #5 – #7

Over the last week I read three more books and wanted to share my thoughts on these books. I read two of these books on Kindle and one of them was a physical book. The Paradox Hotel by Rob Hart was introduced as a sci-fi locked room mystery which was super intriguing. I’m always on…

Stacking a bookshelf

Arranging books in a bookshelf is a fairly aggravating experience, I have learnt. Especially if you are trying to stack by theme, rather than colour or size. And if you have limited shelf space. Ugh! And this was less than 5% of all the books I have (sigh!). Let’s not even talk about cataloguing the…

Summer Reads #4 Upstream by Mary Oliver

Upstream is a selection of essays written by American poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019). I must confess that I have not read any of her work before even though her words keep appearing regularly either in other articles about nature or recommendations from people I follow on social media. I find that reading essays requires closer…

Summer Read #3: Vandana Singh’s Speculative Fiction

I love speculative fiction. It’s not only because I love to see a good story unfurl and to wonder at the imaginative power that crafted the tale but also because somehow reading science fiction and fantasy somehow seems to open up more doors and infuse new ideas and possibilities into our mundane daily reality. In…

Infinity

Without light pollution and with optimal weather conditions, we could see an infinite ocean of stars in our night sky. I captured the photograph above on a fairly clear night at Folly Beach, South Carolina. I had a few nights there and was only warming up on the first evening with this photograph as an…