Continuing my series, as promised. In this post, I present the books I read in February 2023, in sequence.

Book	Author	My Rating
Midnight’s Children	Salman Rushdie	7/10
The All Bengali Crime Detectives	Suparna Chatterjee	6/10
Love Unlocked	Kavita Bhatnagar	4/10
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness	Arundhati Roy	9/10

Summary

At the end of January, I started reading Salman Rushdie. Compared to Arundhati Roy, I immediately found the writing much easier and funnier, too. However, I found the book much longer than it needed to be. I completely lost the plot in Book 3 where Saleem, the protagonist loses his memory and becomes a dog/tracker for the army (owing to his superior sense of smell) in the CUTIA unit. I skipped the chapters around this phase completely.

After the huge book that was Midnight’s children, I wanted to read something lighter and less well known. So when Amazon recommended me “The All Bengali Crime Detectives“, from a virtually unknown author Suvarna Chatterjee, I gave it a go. I found the story engaging, but found the setting of middle class Kolkata quite depressing.

From there, I went on to read another lesser known book Love Unlocked. It was about marital discord between a wife and her in-laws; always bickering. Eventually, when threatened with divorce by her husband, she mends her ways and learns to live with her in-laws.

Not only does she become a doting daughter-in-law, she develops excellent house-keeping skills, starts cooking meat and even becomes pregnant to please her in-laws. She even gets her adopted sister to come and do household chores for her in-laws.

Not trying my luck with unknown authors further, I went back to Arundhati Roy.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness was hands down one of the best books I have ever read. I would rate it 10/10 if not for the silliness of having real life politicians in the book but with slightly modified names (Kejriwal is Aggarwal, Modi is Lalla and Manmohan Singh is the trapped rabbit)

I also gave Kindle Unlimited a shot, but realised that the books on there are not the books I wanted to read and cancelled it soon after.