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.