Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag: An Excerpt

I talked about the book Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag in yesterday's post on my February reading. For completeness sake, I'm including it here as well.

Here's what I wrote:

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I discovered this book thanks to Liz McCausland, and I cannot praise it highly enough. The original story is in Kannada (one of the languages of southwestern India) and is set in Bangalore. It is told by an aimless, shiftless young man who resides in a complex, interdependent, joint family situation with his parents, wife, sister, and uncle. The uncle runs his own spice trading business, which has become quite profitable, and is the sole earner of the family. The family, in turn, caters to his every want and desire, even before he realizes he needs it. The story starts with them living in a modest lower-middle-class house and then moving up to a fancy two-storey house. Once prosperity enters their house, so do untold troubles. Shanbhag does a masterful job of teasing out the turmoil in this tightly psychological novella through his protagonist's observations, actions, and reactions.
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Partway through the story, the protagonist, let's call him Vikram, has an arranged marriage with a young woman named Anita. Arranged marriages are usually where a family friend or relative will introduce the boy's side of the family to the girl's side of the family. In this story, Vikram and his family drive from Bangalore to Hyderabad to meet Anita and her family. Over cups of tea and snacks, while the families are getting acquainted, Vikram and Anita are given a few hours of alone time to talk and see if they're compatible. That's it. Everyone decides they will suit and the wedding is arranged before Vikram and his family return home.

To historical romance readers, this sounds very much like a marriage of convenience plot, doesn't it?

Shanbhag handles that moment when the newly wedded husband and wife, who are strangers to one another, are finally alone with a sensitivity and acuity that I wish more historical romance writers would do. Here it is, and I quote:

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I had on a white kurta bought specifically for the night. My mind swirled with the possibilities that lay ahead as we made our way to the room. I found it hard to even look at her. I tried to act casual as I closed the door behind us. When I turned around she was standing by the bed. The light switch was next to the door and I turned it off. The room was now faintly lit by the haze from the streetlamp outside. I walked up to her. I could smell her scent now. I didn't know what to do next, and I paused for a moment. Then I raised my right hand and placed it on her shoulder. One thing alone gave me the courage to touch her: we were married now. My hand lowered itself along her arm and stopped at her elbow. My left hand went to her waist and drew her closer. She moved toward me as well and we embraced. Her touch, her smell, the fragrance from the flowers she was wearing, the press of her chest on mine, her lips against my neck.

That single moment's intensity hasn't been matched in my life before or since. A woman I didn't know had chosen to accept me, in body and mind. Perhaps it is this instant that forms the basis of traditional marriage—a complete stranger is suddenly mine. And then, I am hers, too; I must offer her my all. I want her to wield her power over me as an acknowledgment of my love. The rush of feelings all at once is too much to describe. Language communicated in terms of what is already known; it chokes up when asked to deal with the entirely unprecedented.

Similar feelings must have welled up in her, too. Her face was buried in my chest. Her arms tightened around me. I could feel the bangles on her arms pressing into my back. Through touch, through the giving, yielding closeness of our embrace, this unknown woman began to be known to me. I've often longed for a comparable experience, but there seems to be none. That sense of strangeness, surrender, dependence, compassion, entitlement, and a hundred other sentiments bundled together cannot possibly be relived.

I held her tighter still, then relaxed. I raised her face and through her lips gained my first taste of her world.
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Wonderful, isn't it? Evocative and nuanced, it fair snags your attention.

[Please note: I'm not sure if it is alright for me to quote so much text from the book. If it is not okay, I will take it down. If that happens, you can buy/borrow a copy and turn to pages 74 & 75 to read it.]

My February Reading

This was a stellar reading month for me, because I spent less time online. I call this a win. I read, I reviewed, I journaled, I wrote my morning pages, I worked, and I watched the Olympics. Nothing like watching our young athletes work so hard, believe in themselves, and achieve unprecedented success to make me believe that life can be good despite the ever-present negative reality.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention those brave kids, who're showing through their activism what fantastic human beings they are. I'm awed at their clear-sightedness, at their strength of purpose, at their resilience, and their courage. They shame us adults into remaking our lives into ones with meaning and purpose.

While unheard of for me these days, I disengaged from politics of all stripes this month to a large extent. This is not to say that I was not well-informed, but that I didn't allow the outrage machine to consume me. This afforded me the space to cogitate on how I want to positively engage going forward. Where do I want to spend my time? What do I want to be concerned about? I don't wish to expend my anger uselessly on a wide array of topics, but rather focus it on a handful of things where I can make a difference.

On to my reading...

Various poems by Ursula Le Guin
Category: Poetry
Comments: Like last month, I continued reading more of Ursula Le Guin's poetry.

The Living Fire by Edward Hirsch
Category: Poetry
Comments: Over the years, I have loved reading and re-reading Hirsch's poetry collection Special Orders. It's a treasured volume in my personal library. So once I was done with Le Guin's online poetry collection, I decided to try out more of Hirsch's work. I'll continue to read from it a little at a time over the next few months. Lately, I have been plagued by insomnia, so this really spoke to me: Silently / you confront the blue-rimmed edge / of outer dark / denied warmth, denied rest, / denied earth's sleep and granite.

She Unnames Them by Ursula Le Guin
Category: Short Story
Comments: Like The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, which I read last month, my daughter recommended I read this. Like her, I loved it as well. The background of the story is the Biblical book of Genesis, in which Adam names the animals, but Le Guin subverts this by having Eve unname the animals. The story is in two parts: one part describes how the animals feel about the unnaming and the second part describes how the narrator (Eve) feels about the unnaming.

Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag, translated by Srinath Perur
Category: General/Lit Fiction
Comments: I discovered this book thanks to Liz McCausland, and I cannot praise it highly enough. The original story is in Kannada (one of the languages of southwestern India) and is set in Bangalore. It is told by an aimless, shiftless young man who resides in a complex, interdependent, joint family situation with his parents, wife, sister, and uncle. The uncle runs his own spice trading business, which has become quite profitable, and is the sole earner of the family. The family, in turn, caters to his every want and desire, even before he realizes he needs it. The story starts with them living in a modest lower-middle-class house and then moving up to a fancy two-storey house. Once prosperity enters their house, so do untold troubles. Shanbhag does a masterful job of teasing out the turmoil in this tightly psychological novella through his protagonist's observations, actions, and reactions.

Making Up by Lucy Parker
Category: Contemporary Romance
Comments: While I am not going to say too much here since it's a May release, I do want to say that I loved it. It was my most anticipated read of 2018 since I loved both her previous two books, and it has exceeded my expectations. If you enjoyed Act Like It and Pretty Face, you will enjoy Making Up.

With This Ring by Carla Kelly
Category: Traditional Regency Romance
Comments: This story may be in the traditional style, but this is hardly a typical Regency romance, and it is a breath of fresh air. I like how some trad writers took such risks with their stories unlike the Regency authors of today. The protagonists in With This Ring are clearly from the upper classes but the story is of them as ordinary, even impoverished, people. Major Samuel Reed, the Earl of Laren, Northumberland is injured badly from the war. He and his suffering cavalry battalion are housed in an abandoned church in squalor. It has become en vogue for the upper crust to traipse into this makeshift hospital and gawk at the wounded and leave without having made any attempt to help, physically or monetarily. The Cinderella in this story is Lydia of Devon who accompanies her spoiled sister Kitty on one such contemptible outing. There, her heart is wrung from the despair and need that she sees among the soldiers, and she boldly offers to help. Her newfound independence gives Lydia a much-needed boost to her self-esteem. Over time, seeing how poorly her family treats Lydia, Sam offers to marry her and take her away. Then comes the really unusual part of this marriage of convenience where he goes about enabling her to stand on her own two feet and to believe she can become somebody with purpose and a sense of place. However, the Sam of the latter quarter or so of the book makes questionable decisions that put me out of charity with him.

The Sins of Lord Lockwood by Meredith Duran
Category: Victorian Romance
Comments: I loved Duran's last book in this series, A Code of Misconduct, but this one is even better. We first see Lockwood in the Duke of Shadows, Duran's début book. That book hinted at Lockwood's mysterious past that we see here fully fleshed out. Anna is the Countess of Forth in Scotland in her own right. She needs an heir to secure her earldom and access rights for her island of Rawsey. The Earl of Lockwood has inherited debts and decrepit estates from his father. Both need to marry and decide to do so, but despite their practical decision, they find tenderness and attraction welling up between them. However, on their wedding night, Lockwood is kidnapped and thrust on a ship to the penal colony New South Wales where he suffers untold horrors, humiliations, and brutality. In the meantime, Anna thinks he has abandoned her. Lockwood returns four years later, a completely changed man, traumatized in body and psyche. How these two strong-willed people reconcile their differences, adjust to Lockwood's PTSD, and forge a strong bond with each other is a thing of beauty. My review is here.

A Duke in the Night by Kelly Bowen
Category: Regency Historical Romance
Comments: This is a fabulous read! This is the first book in her The Devils of Dover series, whose prequel novella The Lady in Red I loved. And this is even better. It's rare that I have auto-buy authors—I gave up on giddy fandom as I aged into my new decade—but Bowen has made me a convert. August Faulkner, the Duke of Holloway, is a wealthy, powerful peer, who is known for his brilliance, ambition, and ruthless business practices. Clara is the headmistress of an elite finishing school in London for the daughters of the nobility and wealthy cits. She also runs an unusual school for select students in the summer to empower them to become independent women, free to pursue their passions. They had met ten years previously and their one dance had been imprinted on their minds. Now they meet again at Clara's summer school, where unbeknownst to him his sister is a student and he's there to charm Clara and her brother into selling their failing shipping business to him. My review is here.

A Governess for Christmas by Marguerite Kaye
Category: Regency Historical Romance Novella
Comments: This is a novella from the Scandal at the Christmas Ball duology. The stories are intertwined with shared characters, and I'm always fascinated by how writers make this work, especially since Marguerite told me that they were writing simultaneously. Lots of planning and lots of communication most likely, but still a feat to pull off. The premise is that both the hero and the heroine have irrevocably blotted their copybook, but have been given a chance to forge a better future. In order to protect the reputation of her pupil, governess Joanna sacrifices her own reputation and is branded a thief. Doors are permanently shut to her as a governess, and she's forced to seek a position as a lowly teacher in an impoverished school. Drummond was a high up officer in the army. During the initial charge at the start of the Battle of Waterloo, an ensign under him turns tail and runs back, dropping their regimental flag in the process. What he must do is clear—shoot the soldier—but he is unable to do so and is stripped of his medals and epaulettes. And the soldier is shot anyway. Society's and the army's doors are shut to him. They are at the Duke of Brockmore's estate over the twelve days of Christmas to scrub their reputations. And the one thing they cannot do is get involved with each other, both being an eminently unsuitable match for their futures. Good story overall, though fell short a bit in execution, because it was a bigger story that felt compressed into a novella. It needed a novel's real estate to be fully fleshed out.

Heaven's Fire by Patricia Ryan
The Shattered Rose by Jo Beverley
Saving Grace by Julie Garwood
Category: Medieval Romances
Comments: SIGH, Garwood! What can I say? I have loved her since her very first medieval book, and Saving Grace is one of her best. Strong and gentle Gabriel and courageous and gentle Johanna make a marriage of convenience in the Highlands—a Scottish story before they became clichéd. Medieval illuminated manuscripts and Oxford scholarship—I needed no other reason to read Heaven's Fire, and it is a wonderful story of female agency in a time when women had few rights. I adore JoBev's medievals and of them, The Shattered Rose is my favorite. Hero goes off to the Crusades to ask God for a son, returns to find that a son had been born to him, had subsequently died, and his wife had started living with his rival after presuming him dead. How in the world are the hero and heroine to return from this ruin of their lives? This is a complicated story not made easy with platitudes and the commonplace. JoBev allows it to remain complicated and uncomfortable for the reader. My brief reviews are here.

Surprise Me by Sophie Kinsella
Category: Contemporary Romance
Comments: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. That would be the advice I would give to the protagonists of this tale. These two have a wonderful marriage of equals and closeness, fulfilling jobs, a comfortable home, and adorable twins. But one day, they're told that they're so healthy, they're going to enjoy sixty eight years of married bliss. And their hearts stutter. Sixth Eight years! How is the world are they going to keep their marriage fresh and prevent it from going stale for that length of time? And so begins their efforts to re-jig their lives and expectations, which sets off a chain of events that nearly unravels their marriage, but which through growth and maturity, they manage to save. This is a wonderful look at marriage and the work it takes even when two people are well-matched. My review is here.

Hello Stranger by Lisa Kleypas
Category: Victorian Romance
Comments: Not as great as Devil in Spring, this book is still worth a read for Dr. Garrett Gibson. I've been waiting for her story for a few books now, and I wasn't disappointed. In Ethan Ransom, ex-detective, now-spy, and all around rascal, the proper doctor has met her match. How they reconcile their different backgrounds, stations, and life goals is a journey of discovery. This is the grittiest of Ravenel series, but I liked it all the more for it. And the elephant in the room is the gratuitous colonialism that pops up with no warning and for no reason; to wit, Ethan learns fighting and sexual techniques in mysterious India. Kleypas could just as easily have had him learn his prowess elsewhere and thus avoid this Orientalism. My review is here.

The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory
Category: Contemporary Multiracial Romance
Comments: This is a story of a deep-seated connection and a building of trust between two people who don't have a history of longevity in their relationships. Is this going to last? is a question they constantly grapple with. Alexa Monroe is a lawyer and the chief of staff of the mayor of Berkeley. Dr. Drew Nichols is a pediatric surgeon from Los Angeles. The meet-cute happens in a stuck elevator and they hit it off from the get-go. While it is billed as a rom-com, this isn't a witty tale, but has a rather breezy, sexy, modern vibe. The couple starts out with a sex-only hookup with weekend flights up and down the coast. While the tenderness and connection between them is very well done as is a long-distance relationship, the emotional immaturity shown by the people, who're well in their thirties is rather off-putting. My review is here.

When We Were Alone by David A. Robertson, illustrated by Julie Flett
Category: Children's Picture Book
Comments: Like Missing Nimâmâ by Melanie Florence that I read lsast month, this is a First Nations Cree story. A young girl lives with her Nókom (spelt as Nokhôm in the previous book, and also kókom, all meaning grandmother) and observes details about her grandmother, like her colorful dresses, her long braided hair, the language she speaks, and the frequent visits of her brother. The grandmother then tells the girl stories from her childhood when she was taken from her Cree village and forcibly sent to a boarding school where her freedom was curtailed. She had to wear black uniforms, had her hair hacked off, was required to only speak in English, and was torn asunder from her siblings. Her stories also talked about the little bits of rebellion that she and other Cree girls in her school enacted in secret, but these particles of joy were few and far in between an otherwise lonely and frightening childhood. So now that she is grown up and owns her own house, she wears colorful clothes, has long hair, speaks Cree, and frequently meets with her brother.

Feather by Rémi Courgeon, translated by Claudia Zoe Bedrick
Category: Children's Picture Book
Comments: Paulina has always been called Feather by her rough and clumsy (read: clueless) family consisting of her dad and three older brothers. She was not like her Russian immigrant dad, nor did she share the sporting enthusiasm of her brothers. She, on the other hand, was small and girly and loved to play the piano. She is constantly on the receiving end of chores and menial tasks as she struggles to assert herself. One day, after a black eye, she decides enough was enough. She was quitting piano and taking up boxing. With her brothers' laughter ringing in her ears, she enters the gym, determined to learn and learn well. She trains hard and becomes stronger every day. She starts winning more fights against her brothers, which means fewer chores for her, which means more time for training. I loved this story of a plucky girl who has a problem, and instead of sitting moping in a corner, sets out to change her world. Eventually, she earns her brothers' respect, hangs up her boxing gloves for good, and returns to playing piano, but with an increased sense of self and her ability to do anything she set her mind to doing.

Dumpling Dreams by Carrie Clickard, illustrated by Katy Wu
Category: Children's Picture Book
Comments: This is the story of Chef Joyce Chen who is famous for popularizing Chinese food in the northeastern United States. Liao Jia-ai (Joyce) was born in Beijin in 1917. Her favorite treat is dumplings, and that is the first thing she learns to cook. Over the years of her girlhood, she learns many traditional dishes from their cook. She marries in 1943 and moves Hangzhou. Constant war and unrest take its toll, and Joyce and her family set sail for San Francisco in 1949 and eventually settle in Cambridge. Whenever, Joyce feels homesick, she cooks and cooks and invites homesick Chinese students and expats over to dinner. Over the years, through the urging of her neighbors and friends, Joyce opens her first restaurant. The success of her restaurant turns Joyce into a teacher instructing other chefs in Chinese cooking. As her fame spreads, she writes cookbooks and has a cooking show on TV. In 1984, she's invited to dinner at the White House with Ronald Regan. In 2014, Joyce is immortalized in a US postage stamp.

P.D. James: Modern Murder Most English

I heard in November of 2017 that Macmillan Publishers were disbanding their Heroes & Heartbreakers romance website. So I hurried to archive all my posts with them, by posting them to the blog and backing up to web.archive.org. It also made sense that they would disband their mysery site Criminal Element. So I backed up the one post I had with them, which posted to the site on May 14, 2011. It is archived here.

In the version below, I have removed references to Elizabeth George and left the piece as a brief review of A Taste for Death by P.D. James. I was striving for a comparison of the writing styles of George and James, especially, how much George imitates James, but that idea died aborning. It's much too complex to take on within the confines of a mere blog post. It requires extensive re-reading of both their works with annotations, notes, and quotations to illustrate my points, and could easily take up a few months of my time, while requiring a small thesis-sized essay to get it all covered.

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Want to understand what’s great about contemporary British mysteries? The essential qualities can be demonstrated from any one of P.D. James’ novels about Scotland Yard's Adam Dalgleish.

In A Taste for Death, the seventh in this series, two men are discovered with their throats slit in a London church, Commander Adam Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard is called upon to solve the case. One victim is Sir Paul Berowne, former Minister of the Crown; the other is a tramp accustomed to sleeping on the porch of the church. Almost no one but Father Matthew cares about the tramp, but Berowne's death creates mental gyrations for well-to-do women across London.

The women set spinning include Berowne's aged, acerbic mother; his flashily beautiful, but unfaithful, second wife; his resentful, defiant daughter; his mistress; and two more dead women, involved in one way or another with him.  This is not to exclude the men and lower classes affected, including his wife's arrogant lover and her good-for-nothing brother; the family’s chauffer; the family’s housekeeper; and various other, minor characters. Each and every one of these perceives Berowne in a different manner, expressing their roiling, changeable sentiments in unexpected ways. 

“Murder is the first destroyer of privacy as it is of so much else.” It is for Commander Adam Dalgliesh, with DCI John Massingham and DI Kate Miskin, to employ his detecting talents to invade the privacy of all involved, to puzzle out intricately linked details across the various strata of society, and to ferret out the perpetrator of the double homicide.

The characters here read Anthony Trollope and Philip Larkin. They are knowledgeable about architecture and art; they have highly developed sensibilities. James's civilized digressions do not detract from the suspense of the plot. She does not employ horrific details for shock. Her clue-by-clue description of procedural details, particularly those of forensic medicine, makes readers part of the ongoing investigation.

Her characters, most recognizably Dalgliesh and Kate have such depth. You can picture them in your mind's eye and empathize with them. And no matter which book you pick up, you learn the basic facts and personalities of all her characters, however, you ought to have read her earlier novels in the correct sequence to get a full enough picture of her main characters to enjoy the later books.


In delving into what she calls “the fascination of character,” P.D. James makes each actor in the drama memorable. And apart from the mystery, A Taste for Death explores the remnants of the British class system as it crumbles, the old guard represented by Lady Ursula grimly hanging on to the past, and Kate Miskin determined to sweep away all vestiges of her upbringing and to create a new life. It is a well-crafted opus with precise prose, rich settings, complex and believable characters with a wide range of emotions, and a finely-wrought plot . Like Elizabeth George, and as in all her other books, P.D. James achieves so much more than a mere whodunit.

My January Reading

Two years ago, I had consciously read poetry, but last year got away from me. So this year, I'm once again making time in life for beauty. I find that I'm most enchanted with the British Romantic poets, though Frost is a favorite, too. My earliest memories of studying poetry come from memorizing heartfelt words and reciting them in school. Diction and emotion that brought the words to life were emphasized by our teachers. I regret the loss of memorization, recitation, and study of poetry in schools these days.

So, why learn Spanish?
Because of the beauty of the words of poets,
and if I don’t know Spanish
I can’t read them.
—Ursula Le Guin

Various poems by Ursula Le Guin
Category: Poetry
Comments: Ursula Le Guin's death was a shock to me. A light has blinked out in the world and we will forever be the poorer for it. She was a fantastic writer, no doubt, but she was also one of the great thinkers of our modern times, in my opinion. More than her fiction, it was her activism through letters and articles that really spoke to me. I read some of her poetry that is published here this month.

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula Le Guin
Category: Short Story
Comments: My daughter recommended I read this since she studied it in school this year and loved it. I loved it as well. It's a short story from A Wind's Twelve Quarters collection and is available on AMZ as a standalone. I simply cannot do the work justice with my paltry words, so all I can say is: go, read it.

Tempest by Beverley Jenkins
Category: Historical Romance
Comments: What a remarkable story! The best yet of her Old West series, and I'm really sad that the series has come to an end. This is a mail-order-bride western story of a wealthy, adventurous, free-spirited woman with heart full of caring and a dedicated doctor with a willingness to treat anyone and everyone even if they pay him in vegetables. Their romantic and sexual chemistry is marvelous as is the tenderness and caring between them and their desire to always look forward and resolve their differences calmly and quickly. My review is here..

Wallflower Most Wanted by Manda Collins
Category: Historical Romance
Comments: Collins writes lovely books with humor, tenderness, and suspense. The premise of her Studies in Scandal series is fun: an eccentric lady plucks four young women living in trying circumstances, but with a gift for unusual pursuits, and makes them benefactors of her estate with the proviso that they have to stay together for a year with all expenses covered in order to gain their inheritance. The women become fast friends as they pursue their passions, fall in love, and solve mysteries. Wallflower Most Wanted is the third in the series with a Grantchester-like vicar and a very talented and creative painter. My review is here.

A Princess in Theory by Alyssa Cole
Category: Contemporary Romance
Comments: Every book that I have read by Alyssa Cole has been wonderful. She writes such different books, not just different time periods, just different types of books. I'm blown away by her talent and eagerly looking forward to catching up with the books I have missed. This is a fairytale romance about an African prince of a make-believe kingdom and his lost betrothed, now a very independent American woman. How he beguiles her as an ordinary man, then loses her when she finds out about his true status, then wins her back again could've been a clichéd story but is elevated by Cole into a magical story. Not to be missed. My review is here.

Tulips For Augusta by Betty Neels
Hell or High Water by Anne Mather
Bond of Hatred by Lynne Graham
Category: Vintage Contemporary Romance
Comments: Betty Neels, Anne Mather...these are the names of my early 20s, when I ventured into contemporary romance after binging on Heyer and Garwood and Coulter. Lynne Graham came later. Of these three, Betty Neels holds a special place in my heart for her sweet stories of a courtly time that never grows old. My brief reviews are here.

Missing Nimâmâ by Melanie Florence, illustrated by François Thisdale
Category: Children's Picture Book
Comments: This is a fictional story based on true fact. There are many Canadian women of First Nations who will never return home, and this has devastating effects on their families and their children who are left behind. These indigenous women are missing or have been murdered with no justice for their families and no repercussions to the perpetrators.

Missing Nimâmâ is a Cree story. Kateri is a young girl living with her nokhôm (grandmother) whose nimâmâ (mother) is lost. Despite the love and care, her grandmother shows her kamâmakos (little butterfly), Kateri talks about her mother and dreams about her all the time. Half of each page is in Kateri's point of view, and the other half is in her ghostly mother's POV, where we see her thinking about and looking over Kateri and her own mother living their lives. And she is grateful they have each other and that they share a love and an unbreakable bond, even if she cannot be there with them.

"Taken. Taken from my home. Taken from my family. Taken from my daughter. I fought so hard to get back to you, Kateri. I wish I could tell you that. And when I couldn't fight anymore, I closed my eyes. And saw your beautiful face."

I cried as I read this book, cried for its beauty and its tragedy.

If you would like to find out about this growing problem of the lost aboriginal women of Canada, visit the No More Stolen Sisters site at Amnesty International.

Frida Kahlo and Her Animalitos by Monica Brown, illustrated by John Parra
Category: Children's Picture Book
Comments: Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderon AKA Frida Kahlo was born in the early 1900s and lived in Coyoacán, the land of Aztecs, near Mexico City. She was born to a mestiza mother and a German-Hungarian father. Frida's life was fraught by illness (polio) as a child and an accident as a teenager, both of which involved being bedridden for months with only her imagination for company. During her second incapacitation, her mother encouraged her to paint, and her life was transformed by her magical creativity. She painted herself and her beloved pets, her constant companions in the journey life fraught with continuous health problems. Parra's artwork is evocative of Kahlo's style and adds greatly to the beauty of this book. Brown has made this complex biography simple by telling the story of how Kahlo connected with each of her pets with their imaginative names and personified characteristics.

The Blue Hour by Isabelle Simler
Category: Children's Picture Book
Comments: Everything in this book is in shades of blue. I was fascinated by the widely variant brilliance of Simler's palate. The theme of the story is that the period of time between sundown and nightfall, when the sky turns a gorgeous blue, commonly known as L'Heure Bleu, life starts to settle down for the night. Every pair of pages has a description and a finely drawn depiction of blue flora and fauna: jay, poison dart frog, songbird, vulturine guineafowl, damselfly, racer snake, and many others.

All the Books I Read in 2017

I may be a tad obsessive about my reading. Not only do I love reading books, I love recording what I have read. And this is not a mere handwritten record. It's a full-featured spreadsheet with all kinds of data. Here are the links to all the books I read in 2017. Lists 1-6 are pieces of one chronological list of 105 books from my Excel Reading Spreadsheet. Click on each image to embiggen to read it.

List One



List Two



List Three



List Four



List Five



List Six

Being Schooled on What I Should Be Reading

There was a recent discussion on Twitter about romance genre readers being schooled by authors and reviewers/readers on what readers should read. To which, I add, readers are also being schooled on how they should react to what they're reading. Instead of expanding, our world of romance is contracting. What those voices in Romancelandia slamming and shaming readers are failing to recognize is that reading tastes vary. And that is okay. No one has to like All Things. And that is okay.

My absolute favorite sub-genre in romance is traditional Regencies, which are completely monochromatic. My other sub-genre loves are primarily historicals and some contemporaries, and therein, I enjoy reading stories by #ownvoices authors about #ownvoices characters, in addition, to authors and characters of the dominant culture. However, I refuse to bow to the dictates by reading paranormal, urban fantasy, sci-fi, and erotic romance among other sub-genres—they are just not interesting to me.

In a bid to expanding my horizons and experiencing different worlds and points-of-view, I am trying to diversify my reading in different avenues. Where adult general fiction goes, and especially children's picture books go, I am eager to experiment with ideas and cultures widely divergent from my lived experience. As my Best Books list for All About Romance shows, my romance reading is fairly monochromatic, but as my Overall Best Books list for my blog shows, I'm more apt to be exploratory with general adult fiction and children's fiction.

Diversity to me means books by #ownvoices authors about #ownvoices characters, but it also means male authors since I primarily read women. If I don't seek out poetry, I would ignore it, and that would be a loss. Every time, I read a philosophical text or a biography, I come away with ideas I hadn't conceived of before, and despite knowing this, if I didn't make a special effort, I wouldn't pick these books up. Glitterland by Alexis Hall was an emotionally tough read, and I had to persevere with not giving up partway through, but at the end, I was grateful to have had the opportunity to read it. If I followed my inclination, I would only read romance, so I plan out my reading months in advance to be sure to include books that are in common parlance, but not something I would normally pick up.

There is no one definition of diversity, since it is subjective. Each reader has their own notion of what it means to them based on their own prism of awareness. Diversity then broadly means that readers are willing to be uncomfortable in their reading choices so as to experience disparate ideas.