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Books

Book Review: “Warlight” by Michael Ondaatje

The Trauma of the Post-War Generation In the second review from the Man Booker longlist, Warlight by Michael Ondaatje proved a much more intense read than the crime-thriller Snap by Linda Bauer. A Canadian writer born in Sri Lanka, Ondaatje is an author of high regard, having won the Man Booker prize once before for his internationally acclaimed novel, The English Patient, and similarly winning the Golden Man Booker Prize in 2018 (the prize conceived to celebrate 50 years of the Man Booker which awards one book per decade a prize) for the same novel. To all those who know…

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Movies

The Past and Present of BlacKkKlansman

Last weekend, I went to an open air cinema to watch Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman. I had heard nothing about the film, except for a rather vague explanation from my brother who was watching the film with me, and was frankly slightly apprehensive about watching the movie. The reason simply being that it’s not usually the style of film I would watch. BlacKkKlansman, a modern age Blaxploitation style film, is a telling of the real life (“based upon some fo’ real, fo’ real shit”) infiltration of the Klu Klux Klan by an African American cop, Ron Stallworth (played impeccably by John…

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Movies

“To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” Film Review

Warning: Major Spoilers below! When I first watched the trailer for the new Netflix film To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (based on a novel of the same name), I wasn’t sure what to think. Personally, I am not a massive fan of overly sappy movies or shows because I find sappiness to be disingenuous most of the times, or romanticized to a point of unbelievability. That’s sort of how this film came across, but what caught my eye was that the main character was a PoC (actress Lana Condor is of Vietnamese ethnicity, playing half-Korean character Lara Jean…

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Books

Snap by Belinda Bauer – Book Review

Snap by Belinda Bauer (Penguin Random House, Bantam Press) “On a stifling summer’s day, eleven-year-old Jack and his two sisters sit in their broken-down car, waiting for their mother to come back and rescue them. Jack’s in charge, she’d said. I won’t be long. But she doesn’t come back. She never comes back. And life as the children know it is changed forever.” While a very popular genre, crime novels have never been at the top of my reading lists. Not for lack of interest! I went through a phase in high school when I bought and burnt through every Kathy…

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Books

Waking Gods (Themis Files Book 2) – Book Review

Following from Sylvain Neuvel’s debut novel, Sleeping Giants, I took the first chance I could to go buy the next in the series of the Themis Files. Waking Gods was as much an excitement to read as the first book was (read my review of Sleeping Giants, here). So, of course, after tearing through it, I knew I had to write another review for it. Though in all honesty, I struggled with writing this review, mainly because the story is so engaging and complex simultaneously that I find it hard to describe it without including spoilers. With that said, Here…

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Books

Canongate Myth Series Review: Jeanette Winterson’s “Weight”

For the first review in the Canongate Myth Series I chose to pick up Jeanette Winterson’s novella, Weight. Winterson has an interesting reputation as a writer of being completely unpredictable and incredibly insightful, which is a description that perfectly sums up Weight. Weight retells the story of Atlas, who carried the world on his shoulders and Heracles, the half-god hero, from Greek mythology. Already, by choosing to rewrite such popular stories, Winterson was in for a challenge. However, it is not simply the story of Atlas or of Heracles that she writes, but that of herself. Many of her novels…

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