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Thursday, July 10th, 2008Review: Unaccustomed Earth
Although I haven’t yet read Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize winning Interpreter of Maladies, after reading Unaccustomed Earth, I can understand why the committee was so impressed with her writing. Her stories of the Bengali immigrant experience were very well developed, and they had closure to them, something I’ve noticed is often times lacking in modern short stories. All the characters in the book have similar backgrounds — high intelligence and high potential — yet each story was unique. Each character was struggling with his or her own set of issues, most of them due to the individuals’ adjustment, or lack thereof, of living in a culture so different from their own or that of their parents.
Themes explored include family, loyalty, duty, and honor. Relationships encountered were father and daughter, husband and wife, brother and sister, roommate to roommate, and childhood friend to childhood friend. Birth, life, marriage, children, divorce, and death. These few stories covered a wide range of experiences of the Bengali immigrant living in America and illustrated well how being Bengali shaped the characters’ choices.
Highly recommended. I will definitely be reading Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake at a later date.
2008, 333 pp.
Rating: 
Popularity: 20% [?]
Saturday, November 10th, 2007The Uncommon Reader
This novella traces the Queen of England’s reading habits. She goes from being wholly ignorant of books and the literary life to being very knowledgeable and voracious in her reading-very much to the consternation of the Queen’s and the Prime Minister’s staff.
I enjoyed this book tremendously not only because of my obvious love for the subject matter, but also because it was very humorous. I laughed out loud while reading several times. However, it does have (ever so few, but still) some content issues that just seemed wholly unnecessary to the storyline. It would have been a ‘4.5′ otherwise.
2007, 120 pp.
Rating: 4
Popularity: 13% [?]