Well. I got this book for my birthday from Akash and I finished it really fast. Well. I took a couple of days break from it and read almost the entire book (220/291 pages) yesterday. It was that good. You have the typical story of immigrant parents who have their child, named Gogol after the author, and he struggles through life trying to decide what sort of person he will be. Cliché, right? Not at all. The book was heart-warming, but sometimes I didn’t feel sympathy for Gogol. Lahiri makes it so that although you understand the struggle he is going through, it is still unacceptable in one way or another. Lahiri gives you a good description of Bengali culture, but still makes the book accessible. It is not assuming, nor is it too simply written. Her writing style is perfect. I would recommend this book to you if you want a tale about immigrants and feeling out of place. Although I’m not indian, there were certain spots where I was like… “Yes. That is something all immigrants and their children have to go through.” Overall. It was amazing.  *****/*****

I’m sure many people have seen the movie, but the book is much more intense. It’s not for kids, as the movie isn’t really, but it’s not as disturbing as some scenes in the book. But McEwan writes so eloquently that regardless of WWII happening, you keep reading, enthralled. The first thing that hits you as you read the book, is double perspective. You have to remember when you’re reading the book, that in the beginning, some things that Cecilia and Robbie do are misinterpreted by Briony. So one reads the scene multiple times from different perspectives. But magically, McEwan keeps everything connected on a string, so there aren’t inconsistencies in character’s actions, such as when Cecilia and Robbie are caught in the library. (This is NOT a scene for children: it is much more intense than in the movie). Other noteworthy sections of the book are during the evacuation to Dunkirk. His descriptions are so vivid, you do really feel like you’re there. It’s very realistic, and the amount of research McEwan must have done to create this image of disturbing war is fantastic. It was disturbing, but well work going through because you come out all the more impacted by his novel. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a good read. As long as you aren’t scared of pushing the boundries of descriptors in novels.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 [The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien]
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 [Harry Potter series - JK Rowling]
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 [Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell]
9 [His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman]
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 [Catch-22 - Joseph Heller]
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 [The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien]
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis (Isn’t this a repetition of #33?)
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 [Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden]
40 Winnie-the-Pooh – AA Milne
41 [Animal Farm - George Orwell]
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 [Atonement - Ian McEwan]
51 High Fidelity – Nick Hornby
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 [Brave New World - Aldous Huxley]
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray (Currently Reading)
80 Possession – A. S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery (In French)
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 [Hamlet - William Shakespeare]
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 [Les Miserables - Victor Hugo]

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