I’m off on hols with mother and husband on Monday so I thought I’d send you one final letter for May. We often take a trip together when my mum comes to visit and this time it’s our neighbouring country, France! Severely underexplored from my point of view, I haven’t really been to France except two trips to Paris about 15 years apart, not since I moved to the EU anyway. I’ve had a grudge against Paris specifically for a while because the last time I was there I used my Indian debit card to get two city bikes and the bloody website took a 700 euro deposit from my bank account and didn’t return it until 2 weeks after we returned to India. So we wandered around Paris, Amsterdam and Berlin extremely broke, living on supermarket food and one hot meal per day (divided) but also staying in these really nice places because we’d booked them in advance. Over 2 euro wine and 5 euro steak in Berlin—K’s parents’ flat was empty so we had a free place to stay back then—I realised I could happily live in Europe, having managed it on a paltry budget. But still Paris stressed me out. I remember trying to get a prix fixe menu 1 by 2, but the waiter was super grumpy which delighted me later (a real grumpy waiter! in Paris!) and also we were literally next to the Eiffel, which meant tourist central.

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Anyway on this visit, my mum has a retreat in Bordeaux so we do Paris for a few nights, then Toulouse which looks cool for another two nights before we drop her off in Bordeaux and carry on to Marseille where we’ll stay 4 nights. All this by train, even our way there and back which is shockingly hard to do considering the two countries are next to each other, but K is enterprising and has figured out a way—let me know if you want the route, I’ll send it to you.

Also the French language is so much harder than German with all its silent letters. “Vin” should be pronounced like “win” not “VOHN.”

As always, tips and tricks for fun travel appreciated! We’re not very fancy, we like exploring and also eating good food but not in like a Michelin star place.

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Shopping

• Since my mother was coming from India with loads of suitcase space, I ordered some clothes from new Indian brands to her house. I was pleased with two. This t-shirt from street wear brand Psy Fyi I adore and have already worn TWICE. It runs big so even the XS I ordered is baggy. Also it’s a thick shiny sports material so might be warm to wear on hotter days. However, really good print quality and I love the photograph, it’s so random.

  

  I also got this dress from a sustainable fashion brand called Oziss, apparently all the clothes are made from recycled fabric. This runs true to size, so check the guide before you order. It’s very flattering and floaty even on a short curvy person like me.

  

The one I was a little less happy with is this cargo skirt from Days For Clothing, which alas, runs small because the fabric has no give, so I’m going to have to wear it with a hair tie through the buttonhole and a long t-shirt because alas, all the return windows on these things are only seven days. It’s a cool skirt and the label on it informs me that it was made in Dharavi which also adds to its street cred, but yeah, I’d go up a size or two if I were you.

• My mother also took me shoe shopping where we went from looking for one small pair of Teva sandals (like floaters, quite unattractive but hardy, I didn’t like the way they looked on my foot) to TWO new pairs of shoes.

These Allbirds Mary Janes (beautifully comfortable, but not a walk all day shoe, more like errands-movie-drink shoe) and these Birkenstocks (from the flagship store here which was the fullest shoe shop I’ve ever seen). I’m trying to break the Birks in quickly so I can take them to France but it may not be possible alas. (Allbirds is extremely true to size so I’m lucky they do half sizes, but these particular Birks run narrow so size up and tighten the straps.) (By the way Allbirds has recently pivoted to making AI structures instead of shoes? I don’t know, it’s a bit murky, I’m not sure what will happen to the shoes.)

Oh speaking of new shoes! I also got these second hand silver Pumas off Vinted and I love how they dress up everything. I like a basic white shoe as much as the next Millennial Woman, but there’s something about SILVER that makes you feel fancy. Also from Vinted, a trenchcoat, which I had to do some research on but settled on Gap, which apparently is the best in its class. I’ve wanted a camel coloured trench for a while for the inclement weather we get here in Berlin so I’m quite delighted with how sturdy yet lightweight it is. Plus, as the review says, it does feel quite expensive despite being priced relatively low.

Thus ends my consumerist glut. I hope you enjoyed that.

Reading

• Came across this interviewer via James Marriott's newsletter, which always leads me to click on at least one thing. (Most recently, he influenced me to buy The Balkan Trilogy.) Anyway I love her style and it’s worth delving into her archives but I liked this interview with Rachel Cusk especially.

• I’ve been seeing a lot of ads for “friendship making services” here in Berlin as well (I even filled out a form for one but took against it when all they asked for was your LinkedIn profile—and 400-ish euros. I don’t want to be friends with anyone whose only interest is in my LinkedIn.) Anyway, this writer did a few test runs with some new websites geared towards making friends and had interesting results.

• Any story about twins will suck me in but this one is cuh-razy.

• Are you kind of vaguely interested in search-and-rescue missions? If yes, then this blog documenting how the author meticulously searched for a group of German tourists who went missing in Death Valley, USA years ago will be quite fascinating.

• “So what makes a friend “a friend”? A friend is not a child, an intimate partner, or an employee, sandblasted bare for you. Friendship is subversive because it doesn’t feed the economy the way other non-professional relations like marriage and families do. What is unique to friendship among all other relations is that a friend, of their own private volition, chooses to love you. It is the absolute absence of compulsion that makes this a gift. Friendship is chaos.”

• “How did I end up here? The short answer is that I had a tough breakup in the dead of winter, when I was in my mid-forties, that stuck me with the full monthly rent for a one-bedroom in Manhattan, where I live. In my civilian life, I’m a novelist, and I was working on a new novel with characters who did sex work, which I dabbled in during my twenties and thirties, from spicy modeling to being a sugar baby. In New York City, being a sugar baby was amazing. One client paid me thousands of dollars just to watch marathons of The Great British Baking Show, cozied up like a real girlfriend. After the breakup, I dropped back into it, for research and to try to make rent, but I became increasingly paranoid that it could veer into illegal escort work. So I thought about Nevada. A cathouse thousands of miles away would be legal and easy enough to keep from interfering with my civilian identity. (I spend tons of time at writers’ residencies, so I knew I could just tell people I was away developing a project.) It seemed crazy, far-fetched, bizarre, and like the most prudent, most logical, safest move I could make.”

• The world’s richest cat is a recluse (like all cats.)

• On a trip to London three years ago, K took us on a walking tour of the Barbican (guided, highly recommend) and since then I went from not knowing it existed to becoming fully obsessed with it. Like when I spot it in movies and TV it’s damn exciting. So this post about what it’s like to live there FULFILLED the voyeur in me.

• Do you ever think of the village that Sasha Baron Cohen mocked in Borat? they haven't forgotten.

• Another Sam Kriss banger on AI writing.

• Forget german (she said thankfully) far more impressive to learn Esperanto.

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Have a great week! I’ll speak to you post France, au revoir my darling cabbages.

x

m

Here is a graphic that Storygraph made for me for the month of April. (Storygraph is my preferred reading tracker because it isn’t owned by Amazon, unlike Goodreads.)

I had a pretty good reading month. Thirteen books out of which three were a) solid winners and b) new to me? I take back “pretty good.” Let’s call this spectacular.

I miss April. This month has had nothing holding my interest. I feel v blah. It could be the weather which is moody, giving me some nice days, full of energy, light jacket, sunshine, wheee, but then mostly cloudy and sulky. Like having a teenage daughter, which I have some experience with, seeing as I was once a teenage daughter myself.

April was nice though. Look at my cover collage.

Look what I read, such indulgent tomes. Murder mysteries and teen girl romances. I started watching The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, I realise some of the Housewives are my age right now, but they seem so much more adult with their tight faces and clothes and their teetering heels. I’m writing this in my “day pajamas”; Uniqlo ribbed drawstring pants, a favourite t-shirt and an old black cardigan that is definitely too small for me on top of the whole thing. I’m not wearing a bra, the Real Housewives would DIE before they were so sloppy. Then again, if I had a camera crew in my house at all times, maybe I too would wear a satin nightie and a full face of make up as I emerged from my bedroom, laughing and waving a cup of coffee, ready to pick whatever manufactured fight the producers have in store for me. I was feeling indulgent in beautiful sunny April, writing and meeting people and going for long walks and now in May I’m just sitting here with my brain turned off.

Not everything was great reading though. So Happy Together by Olivia Worley was so forgettable that I had to search through my Kindle to find the book jacket so I could write it down even though I’d just finished it the week prior. Mona Acts Out by Mischa Berlinski was a book I was super excited about because I loved Fieldwork so much but it was ultimately… okay. Which is more disappointing than if it was outright bad. It was supposed to be a #MeToo novel, I think. At least, that was one of the central themes. It’s about this actor, Mona (we don’t say “actress” any more to indicate gender, we say “actor” for everyone like author, like poet) who breaks out suddenly from her New York apartment and walks through the city with her dog on Thanksgiving Day, which would all be well and good, a meditative novel on ageing and long careers if that was what it was going for, but it kept teetering in the middle, not able to decide whether it was plot heavy or just wanted to talk about the inside of Mona’s head some more. In there somewhere was also supposed to be Thoughts on Grief, and I think it just felt like a first draft. His writing is superb, so I read all the way to the end but I felt vaguely annoyed and dissatisfied.

Two New (To Me) Police Procedurals I Enjoyed

Have never before been able to get completely into PD James. I always found her a bit dry, lacking the style and humour of Christie, lacking the psychological insights of Ruth Rendell (her contemporary, I think.) But I wanted a bloodless sort of murder mystery with lots of people involved and the inspector barely coming into it at all. I found this in Cover Her Face, the first of the Inspector Dagleish series, which had that quiet English country town with its unwritten but extremely rigid class system setting that I like reading about sometimes (it reminds me a lot of India, except we also have caste mixed up in there). In the story—the first of the series—an “old” family, not rich but has been in the same “big house” for generations, has just hired a young and beautiful maid who, it is understood, wasn’t meant to be a maid, she’s just come to it because she had a baby out of wedlock. There’s a dinner party where the subject comes up, the maid is mysterious and beautiful and then shortly thereafter, turns up dead. Enter Chief Inspector Adam Dagleish, but also not very much. If anything, Dagleish is a cameo in each of these books (I have now read two) while the nuts and bolts of the murder are set where it truly matters—among the people who knew the dead girl last. We’re privy to dialogue between the suspects, their inner thoughts and all of this makes the story more claustrophobic, you can feel the dread creeping in. Still dry, like the rest of James’s work which is what saves it from become truly terrifying, as it is, as the audience you have a feeling that you’re pressed up against the window watching the action, with another writer you might be thrust into the action. Both approaches work.

And then I started watching Karen Pirie (the show) which covered book one of Val McDermid’s series, so I decided to read book two, A Darker Domain. Some time ago—last month? the month before? what is time?—I read book eight published in 2025 out of order, which got me interested in the series in the first place. They always tell you you can read detective fiction out of order but it’s much more satisfactory to build the story bit by bit with the author herself, so you know how Karen started—Karen being our detective, in charge of a cold case unit in Scotland with a small team of police under her—so each time there’s a modern day something or the other happening and then we go back to the past, which is related and where our trusty team of time travelling cops comes in (not really. I did read a book with that conceit, but I found it a bit thin, plot wise.) No, Karen Pirie and her gang have to go over the archives, see who said what to whom and figure out an old killing using modern day technology. Quite compelling.

Books for girls

Now I don’t know how old you are but when I was young, I was at the very tail end of “gendered books”. Adventure Stories for Girls. Books for Girl Readers. Your Judy Blume (she saw me through having a bratty sibling—okay, that protagonist was a boy, and also I’m an only child, but still—to having my period, to knowing what it felt like for boys to have wet dreams, to masturbation and divorce and friendships falling apart and finally, to sex. I love Judy.) and your Anne of Green Gables (currently re-reading) and your Sweet Valley Highs. At some point, you and the boys diverged; see, everyone liked stories of adventure and magic, but then as you grew older, it seemed like girls got romance and boys got detective stories. I received my first set of teen romance books at age 13 (the same age funnily that my parents gave me a copy of Gone With The Wind, perhaps the swooniest Girl Novel there is) and read them several times, though always with some disdain. I knew that there were Good Books and Trashy Books and Trashy Books just rotted your mind. (Oh sweet summer child that I was, only six years away from begging for a device that would act as a digital leash at first to finally controlling everything around me until even reading the trashiest of trash felt like an intellectual exercise because at least you’re reading.)

You’ll be hard pressed to find “books for girls” nowadays, but back in the 50s, there was a set of books called the Bodley Head Career Books that showed girls what sort of professions they could take up. A whole wide world of options was open to them! I myself own one (second hand, and I’ve read it many times) called Sheila Burton: Dental Assistant, which is all about a young woman called Sheila Burton whose greatest ambition is to assist a dentist. It’s quite convincing too, why would you want to be a dentist and study for ages when you could be a dental assistant? She made it sound v nice, with the chair that goes up and down and the little cups of water to rinse with.

Anyway, quite separate from Bodley Head, other publishers were also trying to tap into this trend (ooh alliteration) so there were a few books about women forging ahead in this crazy old world, but none as popular as Helen Dore Boylston’s red headed creation: Sue Barton. Sue Barton started as a student nurse, based on Boylston’s own career but soon went on to star in seven books which spanned across her long career, juggling nursing and domestic life. A funny thing about Boylston is that she was besties with Laura Ingalls Wilder's only daughter and the two of them planned to settle down near Laura and Almanzo and write their books, but I don’t think the Sue Barton books have stood the test of time, not like Little House etc. In fact, until I started to Google them recently, I had no idea anyone else had even heard of them, I thought they were as obscure as Sheila and her dental assistant days.

I’ve read the first Sue Barton book many time and just did a re-read in April. It soothes me. I’ve never read the rest of the series because I’m afraid it might not be as relaxing, but I should get around to them sooner or later.

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The other set of girls books I read were two Sarah Dessens, which all follow a basic plot: girl is a newcomer, girl is possibly without one parent or both and the lack of the parent is causing trauma in the girl as she goes about her life in the new small town/suburb she has been planted into. Girl meets a rag tag group of people, including but not limited to 1) Quirky adult whose quirks reveal a FLAW the girl can FIX, 2) Another Girl who seems MEAN to begin with but turns out she’s only RESERVED because ISSUES, who becomes our Girl’s best friend and 3) A Boy who pursues Girl despite her being very rude and standoffish towards him eventually becoming the Love of Her Life who she must also save.

So that’s Sarah Dessen.

A Book I Loved SO MUCH

Was The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West. She’s someone else who has fallen out of fashion these days despite being extremely popular in her own time 40s-50s. First I must tell you the sad news about The Fountain Overflows which is that was a planned first book of three in what West was calling the Hundred Year Trilogy but she never finished it! So book two is a first draft and book three is just NOTES cobbled together. Only The Fountain Overflows was published during her lifetime, which is making me wary about buying the other two books in the series.

I came to them—sometimes you like to hear the origins of my recommendations so I’m telling you—via an article by Yiyun Li, I spoke of her recently and how she just wrote a memoir dealing with her son’s death. Anyway, she had an article in the New Yorker where she was talking about the themes of death and she quoted West’s trilogy in it and when I saw it I thought I must have it for my own. I love sagas.

The Fountain Overflows has a child narrator, which I always like, because it allows the writer to obscure certain things and reveal them only later. Central mysteries hang over the whole plot, and while it’s not a very plotty novel, even if you, the reader, figure out something before the child in the book, you feel protective of her. It’s about a large family—three sisters, one brother—and their high strung musical mother and their even more high strung writer father. They are poor, proud, eccentric and so real that after I spent a week with them, I felt quite desolate. Hence why I thought I should warn you in the very beginning that this love story might be extremely short.

Here are some passages I loved.

“It is not considered complimentary to say that a human being resembles a horse; but sometimes a fine horse has a star in its eye, that tells of its capacity for speed, its inexhaustible spirit, and there was that sort of light in my father’s eye.”

“There were two thuds , like an exaggeration of the sound people make when they take off their shoes and drop them on the floor; all these noises were not merely the sounds made by a person performing these actions; they were that and something more. They were made to be heard and to distress.”

“I knew that I hated him and would hate him all my life. I also knew that he had wanted me to hate him, and had cleverly made it worse for me by seeing to it that I could never feel easy in hating him, because he had been so rude to me that I must always suspect my hatred of springing from hurt vanity.”

Other books I enjoyed

1. So Old, So Young has a terrific premise, looking at a group of friends over the years through various parties they’ve attended, one party for each time period moving forward. I thought it was smart and funny, and especially as someone who has friends and likes parties, very true, except that I don’t know anyone who actually has a group-group, we all have scattered friendships here and there, some are in a cluster and some are not, and certainly I wouldn’t put all my friend eggs in one group basket like some kind of sitcom character who lives in New York, a very large city, and seemingly never meets anyone else apart from the five other people he knows through college and/or birth. (This is why Sex And The City is the most realistic friend-group New York City show, despite Carrie’s lifestyle on a freelance budget.)

2. March Violets by Philip Kerr is a superb period detective story set in Berlin during the Third Reich where a grumpy apathetic detective must solve crime while also dealing with the Nazi of it all. I liked it very much and learned at least one fun fact. I bought an omnibus edition of this book so I have the first three in the series and am looking forward to reading the next.

3. I love Janice Hallet and I put a special order in at the library to get her latest. Do you know her stuff? She’s v popular, but in case you’ve missed it: she does stand alone epistolary mysteries, where everything unravels through voice notes, say. Or emails. This particular one is set in a pub quiz, something I have recently-ish gotten into, and as soon as I finished, I sent a message to a pub quiz friendly friend asking if there was room on her team, there was, I went, had a nice evening too. I sort of associate her with Thursday Murder Club, I think because the book jackets are similar but I like her books much much more. I find them far cleverer.

4. And my final murder mystery of April was beloved Laura Lippman who seems to have done a cozy mystery? Featuring an old woman who wins a lottery and goes on a cruise and then, you know. Stuff happens. It’s good. Entertaining. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to tell you that the old lady has won a lottery which is why she’s able to afford all these things and so I have been spending my own imaginary lottery winnings as well. (Mostly in dreams of real estate. I would like a mansion with a large garden that’s also in the middle of a city.)

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So that was April, a good month. What have you been reading?

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You guys liked my non-book reading recommendations last time so like a good little Substack writer, I decided to gather them all up in one place—I use Google Keep notes which syncs between my phone and laptop—and make this a sort of semi-regular series. I have a billion ideas right now for both my online and offline lives, fiction writing is also going great guns, after two full versions of my next novel, I am embarking on Draft Three, which will hopefully be the one that sees the light of day beyond my hard drive. I also finished a new short story and I’m thinking of sending one of my older ones out on this very Substack so I can dabble in fiction online as well.

ANYWAY, busy times. But also breakable times? What’s the opposite of a King Midas touch? Everything I touch is inexplicably breaking, from my favourite spectacles (bought for Rs 300 from some tiny optician in East Delhi, got stuck in the back of my drawer, I yanked, they broke and even the lens shattered in half) to my kitchen stove (making this dip, I put the tadka pan on and was happily sizzling my chilli and spring onions when the stove—electric, like most stoves here—went POP! really suddenly and stopped working) to a butter dish that a friend gave us when he left Berlin which I loved because it was heavy ceramic with a glass top, I put it on the edge of the counter and knocked it with my elbow. What’s next, I ask fearfully. And does it have to be one or the other? Does my brain working fast and furiously on all the stories I want to tell, have to slow down in order for things to stop breaking all over the shop? Shall we blame astrology? Let’s, because then it isn’t my fault.

• Loved this song—listen to the words closely that bely the pretty tune—by young Indian artist Karshni.

• Speaking of music, a friend gave me a tip to listen to German radio to improve my understanding of the language—learning German is going to be my permanent hobby till I die I think—and I came across this station which you should be able to access from anywhere in the world. Ignore the German if you like, the news and traffic comes every four or five songs, but stay for the immense 90s nostalgia. I swear they have a playlist that seems to have been curated by me in 1995. I keep going, “Oh my god! THIS SONG!”

• This bookstore owner wanted to help his unhoused neighbours by letting them camp in his backyard, which caused a problem for the housed neighbours.

• "Just as it is impossible for me to articulate with any certainty the moment I entered adulthood or began to believe that human life on Earth would not last past the twenty-second century, I cannot tell you when I first became aware of Shen Yun." SAME.

• Liked this article on Dr Ambedkar's beloved pets v much.

• of course you need some funny pointless investigative journalism especially now when all you're reading is not funny extremely pointy journalism. (couldn't decide which section of this hilarious article to highlight because it's all extremely "personal blog in the early noughties" vibes but paid for by the Atlantic.)

• “ You can’t spend a month in someone’s shelter and pretend you’re invisible. The Chinese side of me knows it’s a cultural sin to refuse food—or worse, to eat alone. The instinct to share food runs deep. In many cultures, generosity isn’t conditional on abundance. Even in the harshest conditions, some values are non-negotiable.”

• 

  This “painting” I just read about recently. “With Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), Rauschenberg set out to discover whether an artwork could be produced entirely through erasure—an act focused on the removal of marks rather than their accumulation.”

• “The question is: why is fiction still usually published in hardback, despite readers’ stated and revealed preferences?”

  Thanks for reading The Internet: Personified! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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• “We have lost the sentimental ways we used to describe people. Now you are always late to things not because you are lovably forgetful, not because you are scattered and interesting and secretly loved for never arriving on time, but because of ADHD. You are shy and stare at your feet when people talk to you not because you are your mother’s child, not because you are gentle and sweet and blush the same way she does, but autism. You are the way you are not because you have a soul but because of your symptoms and diagnoses; you are not an amalgam of your ancestors or curious constellation of traits but the clinical result of a timeline of childhood events. Every heartfelt, annoying, interesting piece of you, categorised. The fond ways your family describe you, medicalised. The pieces of us once written into wedding vows, read out in eulogies, remembered with a smile, now live on doctors’ notes and mental health assessments and BetterHelp applications. We are not people anymore. We have been products for a long time, and these are our labels.”

• “I was reminded of it, of all places, in a North London ocakbaşı, where I found out that İndiregandi is Turkish slang for ‘embezzlement’.” I read the LRB reviews so I don’t have to wade through entire tomes of Extremely Specific Non-Fiction, this is a great review of a new Indira Gandhi biography.

• “The first thing that hit Ajith when he arrived was the cold. The second was the realisation that none of what he’d been told was true. He had not secured university accommodation, so he rented an Airbnb for the first fortnight while looking for a place to live. He quickly discovered that to rent property in the UK, you need payslips and references from a previous landlord. He had neither. Panicking, Ajith called the agent in India for advice. The agent told him to walk around the city to find “for rent” signs, and then blocked his number.” Life as a foreign student in the UK, but also Germany.

• This is an old story about the dark side of Dubai which I found very interesting. But then I Googled the journalist, which YIKES, but to his credit, this story isn’t cited in all the ones he faked. Still, Dubai is odd.

• Cute column about dating a much younger man (20s) when you yourself are in your 40s (and female, I should say. Men somehow do shit like this all the time and don’t write columns about it.)

• Lovely (very) long read about Lawrence Bishnoi. I’d say fight your flagging attention span and spend the thirty minutes it’ll take to read it.

• And finally, I very much enjoyed this profile of Romila Thapar, still alive, still holding strong, by Raghu Karnad.

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Have a great week!

xx

m

(The good news is that the one month break I imposed on myself from the library has ended today! It is an awfully rainy day, but it promises to clear up soon and then I shall set off, my tote bag (slogan: I LIKE BIG BOOKS AND I CANNOT LIE) slung hopefully across one shoulder. I ordered some books thinking I’d wait till they arrived before I went back, but I miss my library too much, it’s like a physical craving now. Is that odd? It must be because I’m wanting novelty, as we all do in this overstimulating world.)

I was feeling historical novels in March which I will tell you about, feeling also the family story, whether it was found family or the one of origin. Two romance novels which is unusual for someone who doesn’t really care about the genre and one mistake: I see The Concubine is listed twice, which means I read FOURTEEN books in March, not fifteen. (How am I doing on my reading challenge? Not so great, I’m eleven books behind! But I’m sure I’ll catch up soon.) (And if I don’t? It doesn’t matter, it’s just a guiding line for me to aim towards, sometimes you hit your hobby goalposts, sometimes you don’t.)

PS: I wrote one of my “un-tourist” guides to Puglia, which you can read for free here. If you want more, I also wrote about my Italian summer on this very Substack, that post is below.

Why I Love Historical Novels Especially About Henry VIII

I swear at this point I know more about Henry VIII than I do about any other historical figure. If you say “the Great Matter” I know that’s Henry trying to break with the Church so he can marry Anne Boleyn. I know the order of his wives: Katherine, Anne, Jane, Anne, Katherine, Catherine. Obviously I know the rhyme:

King Henry VIII to six wives was wedded,

One died, one survived, two divorced, two beheaded.

And I think that’s the fascination. Here is this immense Bluebeard-esque figure who could quite literally command women to his bed, no one would say no to him, who could turn on a whim and have you killed or sent off to a nunnery, no one would marry you after Henry had rejected you (thinking of Anne of Cleves, the German who had an arranged marriage with Henry, who he rejected for being “too ugly” who could therefore never go home again or marry anyone else in England.) But living in peace—even if you were childless and husbandless—was better than the alternative which saw your head being chopped off for treason, ie, the King is tired of you and would like to remarry, as was the case for poor Anne Boleyn—and Katherine Howard, whose only crime was that she may not have been a full virgin when she married the old tyrant.

I can tell you about Henry’s trajectory, from a child-prince welcoming his brother’s Spanish wife, to a bold and dashing man when he was pursuing Anne Boleyn (more on that in a bit), to his eventual decline into a very unfit older man who had an open wound on his leg which stank, as did the rest of him.

So, I’m very familiar with the whole thing, from beginning to end. I started with Philippa Gregory and her gorgeous historically accurate Tudor “romances.” I moved on to Alison Weir, who has a novel for every one of Henry’s wives (I liked her Anne of Cleves one especially because I didn’t think there was that much to her story and yet Weir managed to flesh it out beautifully.) Then Hilary Mantel released her Wolf Hall series bit by bit and I swooned over that prose. (I re-read each one from the beginning as soon as a new volume came out. (Here’s a review I did in Open Magazine of the final book, you’ll see I’ve mentioned my little nursery rhyme there as well, I can’t help it, I’m very fond of it.)

Being familiar with the story, knowing it from so many different angles, means that every time I read a new Tudor novel, I’m kinda already clued in. I know the main characters, I’m aware of how they fit together. I suppose this is why mythological re-imaginings are so popular too, everyone likes a new angle to an old story. My knowledge of Henry’s era ends with him though, I was never that interested in his daughters or the whole Mary, Queen of Scots trend. I’ve read some books set pre-Henry VIII, at the time of his father or grandfather—again, I refer you to Philippa Gregory—but I haven’t come across much post that fascinates me to the same extent. (Maybe you can recommend something?)

Adding something new to my Tudor shelf therefore was Norah Lofts. I’ve spoken about her before, a new author to me, but one who has sadly fallen out of fashion so finding her books is difficult unless you really hunt. I had an ebook version of The Concubine, which is Anne Boleyn’s story, told from many different points of view so you zoom in and zoom out, until you have a portrait of this long courtship and short marriage, a tragedy by all accounts. Even though I’ve read so many books about Henry VIII in general and this particular marriage to be specific, I found The Concubine to be the best sort of historical fiction: absorbing, entertaining, well-researched without doing a data dump, something so many writers get wrong.

Other Historical Novels I (re)Read In March With Great Enjoyment

From an era I was super familiar with to two historical periods I don’t know very well at all. Starting with the first book in the Last Hundred Years trilogy by Jane Smiley. There’s nothing I like more than a big fat family saga (my top three apart from Jane Smiley: the Cazalet Chronicles, A Suitable Boy and —I haven’t re-read this yet but still remember with great love—The Penderwicks.)

Side note: did you know Goodreads has a page for Vikram Seth’s very anticipated will-probably-not-come-out-I-recognise-the-signs1 sequel to A Suitable Boy? And someone has left the following review?

Madeline! I believe in you (and Vikram Seth, despite my pessimistic footnote, maybe that’s just me and my one hundred draft folder abandoned manuscripts, maybe he’s almost done AS WE SPEAK.)

I also want to point out that this book which no one, not even the publishers, has seen has a 4.17 rating on Goodreads aggregated from 133 reviews.

and also

Where was I? Oh yeah, Jane Smiley. The first of the Last Hundred Years trilogy is Some Luck which follows every member of a farming family in the midwest United States right after WWI all the way to the 1950s after which it picks up in the next volume and so on. It’s very good, low stakes but high drama, each member is real and present, and you feel, by the end of it, that you know this family inside and out.

My second historical fiction—sort of—re-read was 11/22/63 by Stephen King, possibly my favourite King, though it’s hard to choose, he has so many excellent books. I think I will go for this one though, it’s got my favourite speculative fiction trope ie time travel. (I keep asking physicists I meet, and I meet quite a few, whether it’s possible to time travel and they all say no, except one who said it might be possible to toss an image of yourself back in time. I’LL TAKE IT.) (One day, I too will write a time travel novel, I just have to figure out where we’re going. Everyone goes backwards, those are the best books. Forward might be interesting too though, don’t you think?)

11/22/63 is a time travel story, a man discovers a hole in time that lets him go back to the late ‘50s. His mission is to stop JFK from being assasinated. Now I don’t care v much about JFK or that section of American history, what draws me back to this book again and again is the descriptions of being a traveller out of time, adjusting to this new (old) world. Knowing things in advance and knowing that this knowledge makes people suspicious of you. It’s a good book. (Have you read Charlotte Sometimes? If you like time travel too, you’ll enjoy it. In fact, I think I might enjoy re-reading it too. You might also know it from this song by The Cure.)

And the rest

• ADORED Barbara Vine’s (Ruth Rendell’s literary mystery writer avatar) Brimstone Wedding set in an old age home, with two parallel plots, so good, take that Thursday Murder Club with your cough industry plant cough smugness. (Am I using “industry plant” correctly?)

• Re-read for the zillionth time Betty Smith (best known for A Tree Grows in Brooklyn) Joy In The Morning, which was, as always, delightful in that “outsider is so wholesome everyone loves her by the end” kind of way.

• Re-read Jo Walton’s My Real Children which is one of those parallel timeline books, very enjoyable. Readers looking for more recommendations than what I can provide should also check out Walton’s regular reading column.

• Did Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq for our Berlin book club, which introduced the rest to gobi manchurian (I sent them a recipe, after turning up my own nose at it) and me to a delightful new writer, I enjoyed all the stories and some even made me laugh out loud.

• Friend Sarnath Banerjee’s graphic novel Absolute Jafar is an absolute treat and I recommend it highly especially for those of you meditating on the idea of what home and family mean.

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• To get out of a reading rut, I read Mhairi McFarlane’s You Belong With Me which was lots of melodrama but enjoyable for being a super immersive beach read. (I was on a beach.) It’s part two of a two part series about a commoner who falls in love with a prince. (Okay, a regular person and a movie star get together. There’s lots of crying.)

• The Wasp Trap by Mark Edwards was not as twisty as promised, a little heavy handed actually. The twist has just come back to me and it’s… well, unexpected but not in a “the answer was there all along!” way, more like a last ditch “what’s the twistiest thing we can do” way, which I don’t enjoy so much.

• You & Me & You & Me & You & Me is by two authors which sometimes works (see: The Nanny Diaries but not the sequel) and sometimes doesn’t. In this case it didn’t work not because it was choppy, but because it seemed way too low stakes to care so much about. There’s character novels and plot novels, this couldn’t make up its mind so it sat in a puddle in the middle.

• This Is Not About Us by Allegra Goodman is once again a novel about a large family which made me inclined to enjoy it, but while I liked her style a lot and would seek her out again, this one just didn’t absorb me so much. I think I didn’t care for the characters.

• And finally, the hype-y Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry which was cool, two journalists competing to write the biography of a reclusive actor. Henry fans have complained about it not being romantic enough but I found it a bit far-fetched in terms of romance, I mean, you sleep with someone ONCE and they’re all “I love you so much.”? Bridget Jones would NEVER.

And that’s your lot this month! Feel free to leave a tip in my jar or a comment (BUTTONS BELOW) if you feel overwhelming like for me in the moment or something. I will also accept literary debate.

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Not a real letter, but some links I liked recently.

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• Part three is where this gets twisty.

• Re: Helsinki, this was a funny/sad piece which confirmed a lot of my ideas about Finland as well.

• I just started watching this show last night and I had to make myself stop. Based on a book (which I read year before last) from the POV of the least explored Bennett sister, the book was a bit tedious actually, but the show is delightful.

• Speaking of Bennett, here’s Alan Bennett (unrelated) on libraries he’s loved. Long time readers will know about my passion for the Berlin city Bibliotheks, but it also brought to mind one very humble and exciting library I loved in my childhood. It was a small shop with dozens of books packed high and wide, everything giving off dust, about a two block walk from my grandparents’ house in Hyderabad. It was called Mughal Library and for a handsome some of 50 or a 100 rupees a month—not cheap—you could take out as many books as you liked a week, or one a day. My favourite part about Mughal Library was that it was stuffed with absolute TRASH: every single Mills & Boon ever written for one, and in my case, many exciting bound volumes of Archie comics. I didn’t have an endless supply of this elsewhere in my life, Archie was an “imported” comic then so too expensive for such a short reading time, is what I always figured. So this was a special summer treat, walking down to Mughal library, choosing my comic with care and walking back home again.

• I don’t know if you’ve been following the Brooklyn Beckham drama as closely as I have (a Spice Girl! My only football crush! A nepo baby!) but my Berlin book club group chat has been all over it. And now a delicious long read dissecting the whole thing? YES PLEASE.

• Animal breeders are sort of… creepy, as this old article on exotic looking domestic cat breeders from 2014 will prove. (The cats are domestic yet look exotic. Not the breeders, who are average looking, I guess.) I did a story on a cat show in New Delhi ages ago which also you might find interesting.

• “Cut to: Catherine and Heathcliff are now sexy adults. In spite of the fact that Cathy dies as a teenager, Margot Robbie is clearly Margot Robbie, a woman in her mid 30s. Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff comes up to her and tells her about how their seventy-year-old drunken father has beaten him again. He being a character played by a 29-year-old actor with a beard and a body like Hugh Jackman. It is extremely unclear how old they are actually supposed to be even though I’m pretty sure the movie told me exactly how many years had passed. Then they witness Joseph, who in the book is a religious maniac so zealous that he abhors music—even Christmas carols—fuck a woman in the stables with a horse bridle on.” - Everything I read about the Wuthering Heights movie makes me glad I didn’t watch the Wuthering Heights movie. (I actually haven’t read the book. I KNOW! I’m just a Charlotte Brönte woman, leave me in peace.)

• As someone who frequently finds herself wanting to buy presents for small people, this investigative feature about what exactly the (American) kids are into is v useful.

• Fun read on that dated old subject: Berlin’s nightlife. (To be fair to the article, it came out about a decade ago but I just now found it.) (I haven’t been to Berghain, no. I’ve actually barely been to any clubs, I’m not huge on electronic music nor super late nights, but I’ve done one or two day time parties which were fun for being during the day.)

• Indian Chinese has been analysed many times in the past so I was delighted to see this essay on Indian ITALIAN, yes, it’s a thing.

• The chimpanzees of Uganda are having a civil war.

• You might’ve already read this piece on why all AI writing sounds the same but I just came to it. (And v sad that it began using my third favourite punctuation mark—the em dash—for its own gain.) (You didn’t ask but my top five go: 1) the Oxford comma; 2) the semi-colon; 3) the em-dash; 4) the digression bracket; 5) the full stop.)

Let’s get straight into February’s books.

The Berlin City Library lets you have interlibrary loans but charges you a 2 euro transport fee. I decided to SPLURGE in February and ordered a bunch of books, not just to their home library (which would have cost me a 1 euro “holding” fee) but sent straight to my own Pablo Neruda Bibliothek which is a mere twelve minute walk from my house. I felt quite extravagant, I can tell you, walking away with my pile of brand new books—most of them were too new to have been read already—even though I knew that I was actually saving money by having them sent to me, it costs 2.50 one way for a train ticket. You know that old meme: when I’m a millionaire, I won’t tell anyone but there’ll be signs? I’m still not a millionaire (how sad) but I’ve decided this is going to be one of my luxuries.

So I got a lot of these books from the library, which means I got to read them in actual print. I love ebooks for their convenience, but honestly, I just prefer print when I’m at home and on my reading armchair with the light positioned just so and a warm blanket over my lap. I feel like they read better.

I want specifically to talk about two books about loss: Yiyun Li’s Things In Nature Merely Grow and Lily King’s Heart The Lover. Some months I get attracted to a theme and I start reading around it, but I couldn’t have predicted that it would be a reading month for remembering. Memory can be an extraordinarily painful thing, and I feel like lately I’ve been drawn to books about memory. It’s because I’m writing a novel about how we look back at our lives—one person does, specifically—but I think the reason I’m writing this novel is because I’ve been thinking over the last five years about how we remember events and people, and whether you can ever have a “pure” memory or whether everything you think is just filtered through who you currently are.

Things In Nature Merely Grow is a thin book, which is lucky because the first thing Li tells you in this memoir is that once she had two sons, both of whom died by suicide. The older one had died six years ago, I think, she wrote a book about him and now, the younger one has gone too. Reading about a parent’s loss of their child must be the worst kind of grief and yet Li manages to distance herself from it, to talk about her sons as real people, to talk about her own grief as she wades through the days following and unbelievably she even manages to write through all this. It is, in some sense, an academic sort of book on grief, if you can call a mother writing about her two sons choosing to end their lives academic. She doesn’t blame herself or her children, the title actually is a good reflection of her attitude throughout the book: things in nature merely grow. It is an exceedingly sad and difficult book to read, and also my first approach to Li, and in these cases, it’s hard to sieve out the subject matter from the question of whether or not it’s even a good book, but it’s wonderfully done, almost like she’s using language as solace.

It reminded me a lot of Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala, another grief memoir, but this time about how she went to Sri Lanka with her husband, two small sons and her parents and the tsunami hit and they all died except her. It’s different from Li’s in that Deraniyagala talks about the events leading up to the wave and the events after whereas Li’s book doesn’t follow any particular sort of chronology. Wave ruined me, I couldn’t get it out of my mind, particularly one passage when Deraniyagala goes back to London to their family house and she can almost hear her sons and her husband in the other room. I don’t know how you climb out of that, I really don’t.

Meanwhile, Heart The Lover is a novel, which some people (on the internet, very loudly) have been calling “literary romance.” I was at this writer’s salon this past weekend and someone asked me what I wrote so I said, “Mainly literary fiction” and they said, “Isn’t everything literary fiction?” (Actually this was a person who bummed a cigarette from me and then became slightly combative, I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s because I told them I didn’t like any of the Indian restaurants in Berlin and they said they did.) So I explained that literary fiction puts a greater emphasis on character development and language than plot. I would have explained more but they began talking about Saravana Bhawan. (yes, there is one here. It’s okay, I feel the quality has slipped somewhat since they first opened but it’s still authentic enough to recommend.) Literary fiction has plot, I want to retrospectively go back and say, but unlike, oh I don’t know, maybe a thriller that you buy at an airport, you’re given many layers to work with as a reader. There’s a lot of why and a bit less what. I don’t know, you get an instinctive feel for it after a while.

What makes Heart The Lover a “literary” romance then is that there’s a young woman narrator for the first half of the book who is dating one man but finds an unexpected connection to his roommate. That’s it, I think, there’s no meet-cute, no happy ending. Yes, there is a love story of a sort, but that’s one of the major themes of all books ever written. I liked it very much, and resisted (and continue to resist) the need to classify it which is a bad habit publishers have got us into. We’re not always at bookstores hunting for something. You should be able to talk about a novel that features friendship, love, motherhood and loss without first having to stop and slot it in somewhere. I liked Heart The Lover despite the fact that at the very end it dances with deploying one of my least favourite recent writing trends: an extremely lovable man is being taken care of and defended by everyone and we the readers have no idea why he is lovable, we just have to assume. It makes me want to throw the book against a wall, that’s how much of an ick I get. The author has only made him very needy and annoying and yet, we’re supposed to care about him. Absurd. And it’s always men! Sad crying men who women must then nurture! PLEASE. UGH. (Books with examples of this: Hello Beautiful and All The Colors of the Dark. To a certain extent, also A Little Life.) Luckily for Heart The Lover, it’s already told us why we should care about this man and given us actual incidents from his life that make him lovable so we do, we do care.

To a smaller extent, Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov (translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel) is also about loss. We read this for my book club—we’re doing translated literature this year—and it was a weird book for all of us, no narrative, just sort of meandering all over the place but somehow I can’t stop thinking about it. Ostensibly I guess it’s about a man who builds an old age home in which each room represents the person’s favourite decade so they can relive the 60s or the 80s or whatever, the “time shelter” of the title. But it’s also about this man talking about time, his own memories, is he himself losing all of it? Is he in a time shelter of his own? I was reading it in fits and starts, stopping to think to myself “this is actually good” every now and then. But it’s an absurd book, jumping from here to there, almost like several personal essays attached with a paragraph than a novel.

Notes on the rest:

1. I read Ghost Eye, Amitav Ghosh’s newest, in Delhi because my mother was reading it for her own book club. His books sometimes have this one character who is him, a Bengali man living in a flat somewhere and looking back over his life. (This is from reading The Shadow Lines and now this one.) I’m not a huge fan of that perspective, so I was glad that the book chose to focus on the female characters: in this case, a psychiatrist and a young girl born to a Jain family who wakes up one morning and demands fish, something she’s never eaten. So far, so fascinating but I felt the book sagged towards the end, not able to keep up the almost thriller-esque pace it had set earlier.

2. Sequels: Island Calling by Francesca Segal, which is her follow up to Welcome to Glorious Tuga. Perhaps because I didn’t remember much about the first book (except that I loved it) I wasn’t very immersed in this next book. It felt like more of the same. I still enjoy the world though and will read the next in the trilogy ? I think she has planned. Also I’m quite loyal to books I like and will follow them to the end, even if I’m getting more and more disappointed in each. Also read all three of Belinda Bauer’s Exmoor books, where the second book sort of grew absurd but the third one picked it right back up again.

3. What Kind of Paradise by Janelle Brown was okay, quite propulsive while you were reading it, but ultimately forgettable. The character, a teenage girl raised in isolation with her father, is sympathetic until suddenly in the second half the book she conveniently becomes super competent and manages to do everything with very little struggle. A lot of very plotty books struggle with endings—I’m struggling with an ending so maybe that’s why I’m so aware of it everywhere else.

4. But, as a final recommendation, a re-read of Addie Pray by Joe David Brown. My hard copy of this book, bought without knowing very much about it at the Sunday Book Bazaar in Delhi, has been much read and much loved. Written in 1971 about a father-daughter set of con artists (the father in his late twenties, the girl about ten) during the Great Depression, the book has somewhat fallen out of fashion but it was made into a movie starring real life father and daughter Ryan and Tatum O’Neal. winning her the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1973, the youngest person to ever receive it.

As for the rest, I don’t have much to say about them. Sometimes you read to Nourish Your Soul and all that jazz, sometimes you just read for “timepass” as they say. They were timepass books. You need those too.

Buy me a coffee if you liked this or any of my other posts!

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Have a good week! We have a long weekend coming up and while I’m normally like the Dowager Countess of Grantham all "what… is a weekend?” this time I’m allowing myself to be swept into plan making and general good time having IN ADVANCE instead of just sitting around in my pajamas and reading a book.

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m

This is a boring beginning for any sort of newsletter/blog thing, and I’ll tell you why. It opens with a cliche, a mention of the passing of time being rapid, HOW ORIGINAL MEENAKSHI. It goes on to talk about a task that is important only to the writer, ie me, and I’m sure you enjoy my book round ups, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not like you’re standing there tapping your watches and going, “GET ON WITH IT ALREADY.” In fact, if you’re a regular reader of this letter, you probably didn’t even notice until just now when I called it to your attention. So that acknowledgement of failure wasn’t aimed at you, it was to myself, and is that something you want to spend your time reading? You may as well read my to-do list which today features such gems as “finish unpacking.”

Anyway, in the spirit of “do as I say not what I do,” don’t write like this if you too have a newsletter/blog thing.

Helsinki

We’d been sitting on the tarmac for an hour before I realised something was wrong. You’d think I’d have noticed earlier, but I was too busy picking my film—I think I was watching the entirely forgettable Aziz Ansari comeback movie with Keanu Reeves in it? Ugh, what was it called? (Good Fortune, as it turns out, also an entirely forgettable title. You want plot summary? Okay: Aziz is down on his luck worker bee, Seth Rogen is rich man who invests in things, Keanu Reeves is junior angel who switches their lives. Hilarity—and life lessons—ensue.) I looked up about one hour into it thinking, “Huh, this is odd.” K was similarly absorbed next to me.

By the time they announced we weren’t leaving for Delhi that night, I had finished my movie. (Eh. Two stars.) Something about me is that in moments of tiredness and/or sudden plan changes, I am, let’s just say, not my usual optimistic self. I’d go so far as to say I’m actually extremely negative in a harbinger of doom sort of way. I’d never describe myself as a control freak, but you guys, maybe I am? Yikes.

(When we last left off, I was writing to you whilst also slapping mosquitoes off my legs at a Goa beach resort. You can catch up here if you’re new to this, or keep reading, it’s not a story that needs PREVIOUSLY IN M’S LIFE.)

So it was up to K to carry the baton of positive thinking all the way to the transfer desk at Helsinki airport—we joined a long queue of Indians, all gathering in large knots at the desk—and up to K to see the bright side about a two day delay in our plans, there was no flight empty enough to seat all of us the next day. And we considered ourselves lucky, the woman in front of us, travelling alone, was told she’d be routed through Bangkok the next day with a five hour layover. We were given a list of hotels we could check into and we picked “the best one” (according to the lady on the transfer desk to the poor via-Bangkok woman).

We were not as jolly as the group of three English men to our right who periodically broke into gales of laughter and went on to tell K they had been given a massive allowance for the next three days—all we got was a 17 euro voucher each and a vague word of mouth “maybe” for a 50 euro a day limit for expenses, redeemable on receipts sent. I tried to get other things: an upgrade for our flight to Delhi, more money for warm clothes (we packed for summer) and so on but sadly, this is all we could get despite the cackling-with-joy Brits, so who knows what their deal was.

Our hotel had the advantage of being within the arrivals terminal so no having to exit or catch a cab, we walked past the food court and were whisked right up to a long line of people all waiting to check in. So we had our (quite bad, lasagne, but I had my hot sauce with me) buffet dinner first and then checked in at leisure. We didn’t have our bags at this point so were quite clothes free, including toothbrushes, all that would have to wait till the next day.

Airport hotels have always exercised a strange fascination for me, some of them (especially in Delhi) look so nice! And so convenient for early morning flights. I have a secret love for anonymous business hotels as well, the identikit rooms with the dark furniture, the precision of the folded towels, the perfect heating/cooling temperature. You know where you stand with a business hotel is all I’m saying, and where you stand is you have a nice comfortable bed, a kettle to make your own coffee in the morning and a good hot shower. Breakfasts are generally large and there’s often free coffee in the lobby. I mean, don’t get me wrong, boutique hotels are often v cute and five stars are often v luxurious but they lean into their quirks, and my actual real life home is quirky enough already, I’d rather have the assembly line vibe of a well run large hotel, no frills, just service.

Finland was home to one of my favourite authors as a child: Tove Jansson. You might be familiar with her creations even if you don’t know her, the cutesy Moomin shops have taken over half the world. I spotted one in London, I remember, and Primark once had a line of Moomin underwear. Obviously Helsinki was crawling with Moominstuff, large stores with every sort of uber cute Moomin stuff a person could desire, and many persons did. The shops were all crowded, we wandered into a flagship store because I wanted to get some merch as well, and had to battle through at least five sets of Japanese tourists to browse.

Jansson was actually a super subversive author and illustrator. The Moomin series is for children, yes, but dealt with some dark themes. For instance, this from the Wiki summary of Moominvalley in November: “in which the Moomin family themselves never appear, is especially sombre in tone, possibly in consequence of the death of Jansson's mother during the year that it was written. […] Following this book, Jansson stated that she "couldn't go back and find that happy Moominvalley again" and so decided to stop writing the Moomin books.”

Jansson put herself in the books—both Little My (my favourite character) and Moomintroll are based on herself; her female partner Tuulikki Pietilä inspired another character who helps Moomintroll in the winter; Moominmamma and Moominpappa were her parents; her male lover at another time became Snufkin, this wandering hippy type and Moomintroll’s best friend, and so on. She was very cool and very radical (you could ignore the Moomin books and start immediately on her novels for adults, I recommend The Summer Book) and it seems a shame to her legacy that she’s reduced to plush toys and collectable plates. The Moomin shops stock very few of her books and even fewer of those in English so it seems a shame.

Ever since I went to Finland, I’ve been seeing it mentioned a lot more. Call it the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, call it a whisper from the universe (less likely), but Finland has suddenly exploded across my headlines. For eg: writing this sentence, I tabbed away to look at my email and one of the stories sent in my daily BBC News email is this one. Or: my dad offered us some biscuits when we were staying with him, apparently someone had just visited him and brought him them from Helsinki. Or even: this news snippet I saw as I was flicking through the city supplement at my mum’s. The world has mentionitis and it’s dropping Finland’s name.

What did we do? We first stopped at a second hand store called UFF (a very cool thrift chain across Finland, akin to Humana here but with better prices) to get some winter wear, then we walked through the city to an old market hall to eat some (v expie, Helsinki is not cheap) salmon soup. We had a drink at a shop that sold boutique beer brands from around the world (cider for me) and we —obviously—booked in a sauna back at our hotel where we got it for one hour, darting in and out of the hot steam to the jacuzzi outside (it was about -17 degrees at this point so the metal handles to lower yourself into the warmish hot tub burned our palms) and chatted to a Finnish arms dealer who said the rest of the world fetishized saunas by treating it as a spa thing where you had to be absolutely silent whereas the Finns just considered it part of socialising. “Every apartment building has a sauna,” he went on to say, drinking his beer (under a sign that said not to drink), “And every private home has one too. I have one which I sit in alone, sometimes my dog joins me.” I asked about the heating costs and he said the whole country was hooked on nuclear energy, which explains why they aren’t dependent on Russia at all. “Anybody would be a fool to invade us,” he said, smiling.

The rest of my trip

was lovely but uneventful. Perhaps because it was so eventful I can’t write about it except in a recap sense. A good friend of mine got married, and we had four days of celebration, and the weather was gorgeous so all these outdoor events and FLOWERS and excellent cocktails and me in my skimpy blouses (ugh, I hate that word, but it seems to be canon for the top you wear with your sari.)

A MINOR DIGRESSION WHILE I GO INTO A RABBIT HOLE ABOUT THE HISTORY OF SARI BLOUSES

In the beginning, there was no blouse, as many sari aficionados will tell you. Women just wore a lower garment, wrapped like a sarong and then tossed another piece of cloth across their breasts. Some knotted the sari across one shoulder, like a beach cover up. It’s not as sexy as it sounds, with the correct draping, it remained a modest garment and you could go braless beneath it. Sculptures from ancient India tell us that many women wore a three part garment: bottoms, a sort of bralette, and a veil to throw over it all. This wasn’t standard, but it appeared to be normal.

Fast forward to other influences in the country, when the Mughals came in, many women adopted the stitched choli, a sort of half sleeved crop top to wear on top of skirts or saris. Then the Brits with their Victorian morals entered the scene as did a lady called Jnanadanandini Tagore (I’m not sure how she was related to Rabindranath, but some sort of relation nonetheless), who I’m going to call Jnany, just so I don’t have to keep copy-pasting her name into this already unwieldy letter to you. Jnany is famous for inventing our modern sari, the standard one that everyone wears these days, pleats in front, pallu over left shoulder etc. Jnany’s husband was the first Indian member of the civil service and had gone off to England to study (he asked permission from his family to take her with him but they refused and confined her to strict purdah). When he got back, they both moved to Bombay where for the first time in her life, Jnany had to consider her outfit.

Her Bengali way of draping the sari got too inconvenient to shake all those hands, so she decided to combine all the styles she knew and make an entirely new fashion, which she advertised about in a local magazine, offering to teach it to others. Traditional households like hers would not have needed their women to wear a top underneath the saris, because they’d never go anywhere anyway, but she had to meet many people and go to many parties, so what was an active lady to do? Add a blouse. She was a cool lady who shocked her family on many occasions but she did get us an outfit we could wear anywhere to anything, which is quite a legacy.

Where was I? Oh yes, we also had to get our old flat ready for new tenants so we spent a couple of days there which was lovely and nostalgic. Our sleepy little Delhi colony got a very fancy coffee shop though, which was exciting. Also exciting, after several years of Berlin practice of taking the stairs (lifts take so long, not every place has escalators, one of my closest friends lives on the fifth floor, no lift) climbing the three flights up to our old place was a doddle. What on earth were we complaining about before, I thought smugly.

I’m back in Berlin now, enjoying the spring sunshine in my little glassed in balcony/office, reading a Stephen King novel, suffering from all the pollen and cat allergies at once, but that’ll pass, as does everything else “at last and too soon.”

How You Can Help Me (IF YOU WANT)

Listen, if you liked this post or any of my others, you can do one of three things:

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2. You can share this post, because the more subscribers I get, the more I can do, I think?

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3. You can buy one of my eight published books, because honestly, that’s the thing I care about the most. There’s something for everyone. Here’s a link to Amazon India, but honestly, in India bookshop sales are the best, so if you can, please place an order with your local bookstore. Outside India there are copies floating around various Amazons or email me and I’ll sell you a PDF/ebook of whichever one you like. (If you are a translator who’d like to translate my books from English into another language also please get in touch!)

Buy one of my books!

And have a lovely week! Speak soon.

xx

m

The only reason I’m writing at this bar, at an hour where I should be drinking my cocktail and enjoying my novel—something trashy probably, although there’s also a Shirley Hazzard book I have in my Kindle queue that’s calling my name—is because K, before we left Delhi, made a trip to Nehru Place which is like his Sarojini Nagar which, for my non-Delhi, non-Indian readers, is a giant market which sells only clothes, mostly export surplus. Compared to Nehru Place, Sarojini Nagar is practically a mall, Nehru Place is this giant set of absolute warrens of buildings, each building stuffed, four floors worth, with computer shops. You can get any sort of computer part in Nehru Place and the really deep cuts are the floors on the inside, where you take a lift and then walk through some back doors. That’s where I once tried and failed to get my Macbook Air fixed after I spilt coffee on it, but lost it forever (RIP) and also my desire to own Apple products. (My current machine is, and has been for some years now, a succession of second hand Thinkpads, which you can find in mint condition on listings websites, sold by people who have just left their job and don’t need the new laptop their company gave them two or three years ago,) ANYWAY, so K goes to Nehru Place and returns with a gift for me, a new mechanical keyboard because my old one is v v old and also completely stuffed with cat hair. This one has bouncy keys and I like the tick-tick sound of typing and I carried it across the country with me, imagining fondly great periods of time when I would write and edit and do all sorts of things and here we are about to head back to Delhi and thence, Berlin, and I have not done a single stroke of work. Not that this newsletter is work, of course, it is a PLEASURE. But I felt I should, having a free evening, do a little writing, and so I’m writing to you.

Let me tell you about my travels thus far. I’ll go backwards, because that’s the easiest way to remember things.

Goa is wonderful, as it always is. The nice thing about Goa, for us anyway, is that because we spent a lot of time here pre-pandemic, even renting a little house in Assagao before it became too popular for its own good, is that it feels familiar. I know the vibes I should expect, I know what to eat, I know where I want to stay (since we became tourists, it’s only been beachside, because we enjoy waking up in the morning and going for a swim before breakfast) and we even have friends who we look up each time we’re here. The only problem is, since moving to a very cold city, I seem to have lost my ability to withstand the heat. We walked for only seven minutes today to find a fish thaali—you can’t trust the ones on the beach for quality so you have to go inland, in our case, a little way down the main road—and as a result I seem to have lost my will to live even now after a nap and extensive cool down in our room. I’m either tired or headachey, but the Bloody Mary (Bloody MARRY, this resort calls it) is helping. This is the one place in India that K and I own together, not sprinkled with either of our separate histories, but together as a unit. I mean, of course I went to Goa before we met, many times, but never as more than a tourist, staying usually at Baga or Anjuna (this is before they got gross) and not seeing it as anything else except a place for drinking too much and sleeping late. The resort we’re staying at is extremely bougie, including jacuzzis set out facing the sea, but despite its attempts to be a party place, seems to only be inhabited by large families with small children. The locals, our friends here, say that the place has changed but visiting as we do, infrequently and not for very long, it has a certain timelessness. Not this resort, this is new to us, but Goa in general.

When you, an Indian, return to India after a long gap, statements beginning “Indians are like this” or “Indians do that” seem to come out of your mouth more often. On this visit, I’m wondering about swimming. So many people I know don’t know how, and in the sea, where we have been these past two days, it’s all Russians and us. Where are the Indians in my resort going, what are they doing with their days if they’re not swimming? The answer, I realised, was the very shallow resort pool, where you can stand up in all four corners of it. I saw a fully clothed family, and I do mean fully clothed, t-shirts and pants and long skirts, frolicking in there for several hours yesterday. Prior to this beach we were in Honavar in Karnataka, on a long strip of beach called Eco Beach, where once again, I saw people fully clothed entering the sea and sitting down in the shallows, letting the waves wash over them and shouting in delight. I felt quite self conscious in my two piece, and even considered buying a slightly more modest one piece for my next visit. Only to realise no one was looking at me at all, except out of curiousity, and we are quite a sight, a tall German man, a short Indian woman, both speaking rapid English to each other. On the other hand, I may as well be naked whenever I wear something low cut, “Indians like” breasts, legs not so much. I comfort myself whenever I see a gaggle of young men staring at me aggressively that I’m old enough to be their mother, so I’m allowed to do what I like. (If I had had a baby at nineteen, for instance.) But in Goa, and maybe this is why I like it so much, no one gives a shit about what I wear, there being so much flesh on display that you get sort of immune to the sight, like if you’re a kindergarten teacher and get sick for your first year there because of all the kids sneezing on you and then never get sick again like a Superwoman. I have many female friends who wear what they want all the time and don’t care about the stares, but I’ve never been very confident about that sort of thing, and whatever confidence I have comes from cosplaying one of these friends in my head.

But speaking of clothes, I haven’t done much shopping at all this time which disappoints me, India is usually where I refresh my summer wardrobe for the three months of summer Berlin gets. But nothing this time has been super inspiring. All the clothes in the boutiques have been those long tent-y kaftan-y things made for some ideal version of woman who is straight up and down and tall and so can glide through life looking elegant and at ease. In my case, they just look like large pieces of cloth that fall down like tents with no definition on the good bits of my body and clinging unflatteringly to the bad bits. (Okay, okay, less than the ideal version of beauty we were fed in the nineties bits.) Then too, there’s the fact that Sarojini Nagar and even my hidden East Delhi secret: the Mayur Vihar Phase II Monday Market have yielded very mid results even after extensive searching. My mother says this is because Trump’s tariffs have done a number on the textile industry which we can add to the giant laundry list of things he already has to answer for. I should probably delete that if I ever want to get a US tourist visa again, eh? But let’s be honest, who wants to visit right now and get turned away at the border? Everything is so shit right now, that all you can do is hope for the best and resist, resist until it washes over you. I greatly fear in this decade of my life I have become a nihilist. I have no hope and no optimism any more about the fate of the world, only a small scrap of me hopes all these bad leaders are eventually ousted, but even then, the trolls are out of their cages and they won’t go back in again. At least—ha ha—we don’t have any children, so there’s no one after us to worry about. (Except all the other children.) (Ha ha.)

We arrived in Goa after a three day long road trip with my father from Kochi. It was his idea, I promise. He has a big car and he wanted to give it a little test drive so he hired a driver and we went slowly slowly up the coast. From Kochi, we stopped in Payannur, a little way up from Kannur, where they have this yearly tradition called theyyam, just in that one small part of Kerala. The community there believes that once a year, the gods come down to earth and possess humans. This is displayed in great performances, fire walking or just dancing, shirtless men in white mundus pounding on temple drums as the deity/human in full make up and costume parades in a small temple courtyard. It’s quite something. The really good stuff is in the middle of the night, like 3 am, but all of us being worn out from the long drive, we caught a relatively tame 9 pm … show? I’m not sure what to call it, because it’s not a performance but it also is? It’s quite a well known season, and if you Google theyyam + Kerala, you’ll find quite a few videos illustrating it. (I’d link to some myself but the internet is being extremely temperamental so I’m not even sure I can send this off as soon as I write it.)

(Have just paused in my typing to order a Squid Butter Garlic. We ordered this in Honavar, at some random bar/restaurant and it was terrible, batter fried with a creamy sauce, but we trust the Goans will give us what we want which is just pan fried calamari in lots of butter with enough garlic to ward off a zillion vampires. Meanwhile I’m also watching the table in front of me, remember I said it was a married couple with their single bachelor friend? I was wrong, the “bachelor friend” has been joined by his wife and two daughters who have run off doing mysterious child things together. I’m watching the new wife hold court, she seems to be telling a very long and involved story which requires her to show the other wife a lot of the facial expressions this other person she’s gossiping about was making. My typing has raised some curious eyebrows but they’re too busy making each other laugh—okay only new wife is the comedian—to look at our anti social table much. Only the waiter who brought me a coil for the mosquitoes has remarked admiringly, “You type so fast.”)

Which reminds me oddly of Chat GPT which also comes up so much more here than it does back in Berlin. I mean sure I have friends in Berlin who use it, but here it’s become sort of the new Google. My parents both use it, and today, sharing our table with two strangers who asked us how we’d discovered the (very hidden away) fish thaali restaurant, I said, “Google maps” laughing, so obvious, but the woman looked pleased with herself and said, “I asked Chat GPT where to find a good fish thaali around here.” Same same but different as they say in these hippie-ish parts of the world. I use Google Maps for EVERYTHING, and usually, because of my meticulous research (I read all the reviews sorted by “newest”) we do pretty well, but in Germany, restaurants are allowed to sue for defamation if they get a one star review and the person can’t prove they ate there, so it’s not all roses there either. I even found our resort through Google Maps, using the search function to look along the beach and then just clicking on the properties. (No, but I also use Reddit when I can, especially to find good restaurants in over touristed cities like Athens or Rome.)

At a little bar we found in Saligaon—also through my Google Maps—there was this TV on playing songs from YouTube and all the videos, I mean ALL the videos were showing AI animation. It was terrible. We couldn’t look away, playing spot the difference like a Where’s Wally book. Only it was kind of hard to always find the AI giveaway, which is scary, right? One of the playlists was showing older stuff and there you could instantly spot the AI but the newer stuff is deceptively realistic. And this on a random YouTube channel called “Retro Songs of Italy” or some such.

(The Squid Butter Garlic has come and gone—it was delicious—and so I open my laptop again. I’m fascinated by Old Wife on the other table, she’s not old but she was sitting there in the beginning. Okay, Original Wife. She’s been smoking cigarettes which surprises me, because she doesn’t look a cigarette smoking type and then I have to confront my own ideas of what I think a cigarette smoking “type” is which leads to me giving me a lecture in my own head. Anyway, she’s not inhaling her cigarette but she’s sitting back and smoking them with great pleasure. She’s had three already since I’ve been sitting here. Not that I’m counting. Not that I’m not rolling my own cigarette right now and raising my hand for another drink. Original Wife probably won’t return to her real life and keep smoking whereas I, a Cigarette Smoking Type if ever there was one, will until I shake it off with great drama again.)

After Payannur we made our way up to Honavar for our second night on the road, stopping on the way at a small town whose name can’t remember but who invented the mutton ghee roast which is this rich, incredibly delicious meat dish that made our fingers smell like ghee for the next few hours. There I had a cigarette even though my father warned me it was a very BJP town and so would not appreciate a grown woman smoking on the road like a slut. I had my phone so I nervously flicked through Instagram while a group of smoking young men stared at me like I had two heads. We had a nice home stay booked by the beach which is very remote and very dry, which is why we had to find a bar two towns away, home of the bad butter garlic squid.

The next day we made our way down (up) to Panjim, which as luck would have it, was also dry, it being election time. Goa too has a BJP government and one of the things they’ve done is try and regulate the mafia-esque taxi unions by creating an app where you can actually book cabs online—very rare for Goa. We got a super grumpy driver the next day taking us across the state for half the price so we booked him and were immediately felled by guilt so tipped him, despite his extreme grumpiness and unwillingness to take us further down the road to our resort leaving us (K mostly) to carry my stuffed strolley suitcase in the heat for some time. The government here, a man who worked in a Panjim coffee shop told us, wants to commercialise all land, including farm and forest, but he said, there have been big protests against that, so it’s not happening… yet. “Maybe Rahul Gandhi will win next year,” he said.

TOMORROW (or the day after that! Or next week!) I’ll tell you about Kochi, my new old Delhi adventures AND my unexpected two days in Helsinki on the way over here. I bet you can’t wait.

What’s impeding me from getting my Lonesome Dove on (have you heard of it? It’s an old book “everyone” —meaning certain bookish people in the US—was reading last year and then writing about with great excitement. I came across it on an episode of The Mindy Project several years ago, because I am Ahead of the Game as it were. More on it when I actually read it, but two small observations: 1) it is impossible to find a copy of this, I looked when I was in India and nothing and 2) it’s a Literary Western which might explain why it’s taking so long for me to read because I’m not a huge fan of Westerns in general, but this book piqued my interest.) (WOW THAT WAS A LONG SEGUE IN BRACKETS, I’M JUST GOING TO RESTART THIS SENTENCE, I HAVE JUST FINISHED MY MORNING COFFEE IN MY DEFENCE.)

What’s IMPEDING ME from getting my Lonesome Dove on is that I have discovered a “hack” to reading all the new buzzy books without having to spend €€€€, and that “hack” is the library. I’ve been ordering every single new book I like the sound of, and these cost a little extra money—very little, €2 for interlibrary loans, €1 for just reserving it at my own, cheaper than taking a train and collecting it from one of those other city libraries—so I’m reading them first because of their temporary nature. However, this is also not stopping me from buying more second hand books whenever I like the look of something and now I’m behind. Trying very hard to rapidly read five books I have placed holds on and also three others I borrowed at the same time before we go off on our annual India trip in ten days. SO my new resolution is once I’m done with this lot, I’m going to not return to the library until I have finished at least ten of the books I’ve acquired for myself. (I mean physical books, I’m not worried about my ebook consumption, I’m travelling soon which always puts a dent in it and I can only read my Kindle, not paper books, at night because I like to turn the light off and read in the dark until my eyes get heavy and I tuck the device under my pillow and have weird dreams.)

I’m also very proud of my book collection which I’ve started from scratch here. It’s almost all slightly obscure books from backlists, and I can point to the reason I bought them and why I was interested. (Usually when I’m looking up another author and I see something linked in the opening paragraphs of a critical essay about them.) I’d like to read all the books I collect, I think that’s my goal for the next few months.

Here then are my stats for January which are of interest to me so forgive me for the indulgence and scroll a little further down for the cover collage:

I love crime, gravitating towards it whenever I need a break or a palate cleanser, but literary fiction is what I truly enjoy. Perhaps because I write it? I like to see what other people are doing and how they’re making language work for them. Only one of my highest rated books of this month is new, two are from the library and one is a re-read. I don’t tend to rate things higher than a 3.5 (which out of five I think is a generous score!). Every now and then I’ll give something a 4. Five stars is very rare for me. My rating also depends on the time of the month—earlier in the month, I notice, I’m more generous, and as the days go by, I drop down to 2s. Even 1s.

Here’s all the books I read in January.

January Books From Best To Less Best Because It Was A Good Reading Month For The Most Part

1. Wise Children by Angela Carter: Took me ages to find Carter—I mean mentally. Physically she’s been close by via a collection of short stories I bought ages ago at a Delhi book fair and never quite read—and now that I’ve read Wise Children which is a book about TWINS who go on stage in the twenties and their bizarre life and family, incredible. The writing is so fun that you find yourself re-reading sentences just for the joy of them. Sadly she died of cancer very soon after writing this book which means there’s not an ENORMOUS backlist but when I get to Delhi this time I’m going to dig out those short stories.

2. The Magicians by Lev Grossman: introduced me to these books which became a house favourite, both K and I adore them and have watched the TV show with love as well. It’s Harry Potter + Narnia + Millennials which is all you really need to know. Dark AF. (Do people still say “AF”? I haven’t seen it in a while but then I’m an elderly millennial myself.) I’m currently trying to speed read my way through The Bright Sword, Grossman’s Arthurian epic which is some 600 pages long and also from the library and which is also v good so far, but nothing compares to The Magicians which is part one of a trilogy, you lucky things.

3. Long Distance by Aysegul Savas: The kind of vibey not much happens but mood short stories that I enjoy the most. Set out of the US (where the author is based), a lot of scenes in Europe. I’d heard really good things about this author’s first novel and I read one of the short stories in the New Yorker so I was already primed to love it.

4. Consider Yourself Kissed by Jessica Stanley: I read and enjoy her newsletter and I like romance and domestic novels so I placed a hold for this at the library. Enjoyed very much except the British politics sections weren’t really something I was super familiar with and those are woven into the plot so I had to skip bits.

5. Best Offer Wins by Marisa Kachino: A ridiculous yet fun thriller about how far you’d go to get a house in a competitive market. Having waded through Berlin’s terrible housing situation, this book felt like it COULD happen which is always fun to read. I read it very fast and said, “What nonsense!” out loud a few times (complimentary.)

6. Cassandra Darke by Posy Simmonds: Gorgeous graphic novel. A little thin on plot and wraps up too quickly but the illustrations are so vivid you won’t even notice until the end.

7. The Heir Apparent by Rebecca Armitage: Would’ve gone higher on the list but the middle section was a bit draggy. Still I love a good British Royal Family send up, which this was. The premise is: what if Prince Harry was a girl whose twin was William who dies in a skiing accident leaving our heroine to decide whether she wants to climb on the throne (with her former bestie who is a Katherine/Megan mash-up) or return to her life as a doctor in Australia. It’s funner than it sounds, I promise.

8. Loved One by Aisha Muharrar: What if your bestie is a famous singer who dies and leaves unfinished business especially with you and you have to deal with the grief and tie up loose ends all at the same time? I liked the flashback sections of this very hyped novel from 2025 the most.

9. The Hunter by Tana French: Re-read of French’s less loved series about a man called Cal who is American and a former policeman who moves to the wilds of Ireland and somehow keeps getting entangled in murder mysteries. I’d rate this higher but this series features a main character, a teenage girl, who I find extremely annoying as well as the author’s attempts to make me love her. No thank you, I will not be fond of this character today.

10. Buckeye by Patrick Ryan: Family saga. Nice enough, but I’ve read better family sagas. At the end of this (again very hyped) novel I didn’t really care so much about the characters but it’s pacey and moves along nicely.

11. Silent Bones by Val McDermid: The latest in the Karen Pirie series, who is this fictional detective in Edinburgh who deals with cold cases. I haven’t read the others, but I did start watching the TV series. You don’t have to read the books in order to enjoy this one but I suspect it helps.

12. Those Pricey Thakur Girls by Anuja Chauhan: Re-read, I was in the mood for Bollywood and this book always makes me laugh.

13. Christmas Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella: Read all of the Shopaholic series over the Christmas break, because I was feeling so sad Kinsella died. She’s another writer who still makes me laugh. This is the final book in the series which somehow I hadn’t come across but Rebecca is a little less high stakes now that she’s happily married and has a cute child and is friends with everyone.

14. Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler: A re-read and a good book because Tyler can’t write a bad one, featuring a large family from different points of view, a Tyler specialty, but this one is a bit slow because she’s managed to make all the characters unlikable, no small feat.

15. Almond by Won-Pyung Sohn translated by Joosun Lee: This year my Berlin bookclub (which is now a Friends Club That Reads) is doing books in translation. This was the first, a Korean novel about a child who can’t feel emotions. In some ways, nicely done, but none of us really cared for the staccato writing style, even though that might have been the point.

16. Blacklands by Belinda Bauer: I mean, I liked Bauer enough to find the two sequels to this book and finish those off quickly, but I’m not sure I’m a huge fan of her writing style which takes mystery/crime and makes it slightly… ridiculous?

17. So Far Gone by Jess Walter: I loved Beautiful Ruins which is probably why this book by the same author is a no from me.

Movies I Watched In January

K and I bought each other this movie pass for three months letting us watch unlimited films at a bunch of cinemas including the one two blocks away. Unfortunately we have now run out of films we want to see, but the going was good while it lasted.

The best movie I saw in January was The Secret Agent, a Brazilian film set in the 70s. SO immersive. I loved every inch of it, the rich colours, the lead actor, the shots of Brazil, the storyline was okay though, nice, but one of those meandering plots where there’s flashbacks and flashforwards and everything comes together in the end in a nice and satisfying way.

Much more straightforward and a straight up HARROWING film was It Was Just An Accident. Filmed IN SECRET in Iran, it’s about a guy who realises that he’s just bumped into his torturer from prison. I don’t want to tell you too much but especially with all this waves hand you should watch it too.

Watched Wake Up Dead Man, the latest in the Knives Out films at home and enjoyed not one but TWO hot priests. I also like backwoods church stuff, so the atmosphere was right up my alley.

Bugonia was amazing. I put up so much resistance to it because I didn’t like Poor Things by the same director at all, but K kept pushing and I’m so glad he did because it was REALLY good.

In contrast, the first Hunger Games prequel, A Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes was SO BAD that I was glad I was watching it at home and could do my crossword side by side.

How You Can Help Me (IF YOU WANT)

Listen, if you liked this post or any of my others, you can do one of three things:

1. Very simple, very straightforward: you can leave me a virtual tip. The link to do that is here.

2. You can share this post, because the more subscribers I get, the more I can do, I think? The button to share it is below.

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3. You can buy one of my eight published books, because honestly, that’s the thing I care about the most. There’s something for everyone. Here’s a link to Amazon India, but honestly, in India bookshop sales are the best, so if you can, please place an order with your local bookstore. Outside India there are copies floating around various Amazons or email me and I’ll sell you a PDF/ebook of whichever one you like. (If you are a translator who’d like to translate my books from English into another language also please get in touch!)

Buy one of my books!

Ok! speak soon! Please leave a nice comment about what you read or watched this month.

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m

Every time I return to Delhi I wonder which city I’m channelling this time, and which one I’ll meet. I think S’s wedding has taken me back to the Delhi of my teens, I’m in someone’s home—not mine—this is an “old” Delhi home, by which I mean not in Old Delhi where I don’t know anyone, but a home that’s been in the same family since the partition, which makes it old for this new city. The AC is blasting, it’s summer. Or, the quilts are rumpled on the bed and a heater stands in a corner, it’s winter. Whoever this friend is is someone I don’t know very well, I’m not sure why I’m standing in her bedroom while she lolls across the bed, her feet on the wall. She calls out for snacks, a man who’s been working for her family since before she was born, brings us warm things on a tray, cold coffee in the summer, cold coffee in the winter, that being the only way she’ll drink milk. No one thanks him, but he tells the girl on the bed that her mother wants to see her. Or her grandmother, still living in the same house, does. She says fine and can you bring me the cordless. Her mother appears with the phone, she’s a Society Woman, who doesn’t have a profession but seems to be busy all day regardless. She looks at her daughter with disapproval but also with a certain amount of pride, look at my girl lounging like that, look at my girl who doesn’t see the need to please anyone else. She says something about everyone being out and the girl is alone for dinner and what does she want to eat? They run through a few options, the girl chooses, the mother leaves, the phone is tucked into the girl’s chin, against her ear. I am still there, bearing witness.

This isn’t a real memory. I mean, it is and it isn’t. It’s a pastiche of several different evenings in several different homes with several different girls that my brain has knit together. It’s this same girl calling me and I imagine her across her bed, talking to her Labrador—these families always have Labradors—as she talks to me. I don’t think of myself as very interesting to her (to myself I am endlessly fascinating, but I don’t have much to offer girls like this, no cute brothers/friends, no Central Delhi house I can offer up for hangings out or parties, no car and driver at my disposal to take us where we want) so I’m flattered by her interest. My brain has given her a name, Karishma, which is fake, I don’t want to tell you what name my brain has actually given her because that’s a real person I know who I could have been talking to but I know my memory is associating this person with this memory because I can’t think of where else I could be, however the memory is also wrong because I was never close to Karishma in school or college, I never drank cold coffee at her house, never even received a call from her, cordless phone to cordless phone.

Perhaps my brain is throwing up the past because it’s easier than dealing with the present as the world gets more and more fucked up around us. I was reading an article the other day, quite a bad essay so I won’t link it, but there’s one bit that stayed with me. The narrator’s boyfriend asks her which era she’d most like to be born in and she says, without thinking, “This one.” It made me wonder. Objectively, as me, I have a better life now than I would fifty years ago. But it’s a time where we know a lot of things. With great knowledge comes great responsibility. I did not have great knowledge as I sat outside the Gymkhana Club in someone’s car, Robbie Williams playing, the smell of cologne and Pan Parag in the close air conditioned air.

I like my life in Berlin because it seems as though I have been spawned as I am: forty four, carrying lightly all the choices I’ve made in my life that led me here, comfortable at last in my skin and with who I am (mostly.) It’s easy to think as I make new friends, and as my oldest friends here chronologically are only five, not even ready, in human years, to learn how to read (? I don’t know how old you have to be to read) that this was always who I am—social, sociable, goblin-y, a woman of sweeping pronouncements and varied interests. It’s not though, it took me a long time—DECADES—to even know what I liked in books let alone people, and I’m still surprised every now and then when I read something and respond to it different than how I think I will.

Delhi, then, is where I can’t hide from some unflattering aspects of myself, which is not great for the old ego. I don’t miss it, I don’t think. I used to have this old Douglas Adams quote as an email signature: “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.” I remember this mother of an ex-boyfriend, I had emailed her about something and she wrote back and said, “I just noticed your email signature, it’s so true it made me cry.” It’s giving Robert Frost anyway, another poem that resonates within me.

Some of my (Indian) friends in Berlin call me the Happy Migrant, which makes it sound as though I go skipping down the road with my basket, avoiding the Big Bad Wolf just by accident, but the truth is, I’ve just decided to be happy with where I am. I am here so I will put down my little roots and thrive as best as I can. Life still pummels away at you like a strong wind, setbacks and challenges and hurdles and all the things that seem to increase with every passing year with the delicious surprises coming fewer and farther between but I’m just standing here bloody and unbowed and so on. It’s how I choose an outfit for an occasion, like a costume, to get me through things. I went to this Irish pub quiz on Monday so I wore a green cashmere sweater over a woollen pleated skirt and added a greyhound printed scarf at my throat. I was going for Demure. I was going for I Know Things. (In the end, I found myself disagreeing violently with my team, most of whom I’d never met before, creating a great conflict between the two aspects of myself I call Likes To Win Everything and Likes To Be Liked. Sagittarius/Libra for my fellow astrology nerds. My moon is in Cancer which, if I’m reading that right, means I’d have rather stayed at home and finished my nth rewatch of Downton Abbey.) (Anyway maybe pub quizzes don’t bring out the best sides of my character.) So, what I’m trying to say is, I choose a mood like I choose a costume. I stay cocooned in Think Positive because I have to, because if I don’t then I might have to give in to despair and despair is frightening. Mostly, I’m in a good mood though, I don’t want you to think that I’m doing that scene from a movie where you’re all like hahaha in public and then it cuts to you standing in front of your own bathroom mirror and your face sags and your eyes get really blank.

Suppose it’s not the teenage Delhi I meet but the one where I was a new grown up driving to my first job in Jhandewalan, going through one two three four roundabouts till I reach the one with the round post office and turning left, I can remember it all, Videocon Towers stretching into the sky, the Barista kiosk on the ground floor and my laminated name badge as I hopped into the lift. Going wherever they sent me, so pleased to be asked. Returning home to the other end of Delhi, my own little room that I shared with two friends who are now both in the same continent as me, with whom I have a WhatsApp group, do you remember when we first found the place and we drew lots to see who would get each room? One room had a balcony, the other had an attached bathroom and the third had nothing to say for itself except a lot of cupboards? So we wrote BALCONY and BATHROOM and CUPBOARDS on three pieces of paper and drew lots and I got CUPBOARDS and tried to look like I was okay with this. It was a lot of cupboards though, especially then when I didn’t have as many clothes. Ah, but the flat worked in its own way, how could it not with three very social young women living in it, each with a whole set of friends that we brought forward like in laws. We had the roof, a privilege of a third floor walk up, and I wrote about it in some detail in my first novel, down to the neighbour next door. In fact, it was so long ago, that the fictional neighbour and my real neighbour have sort of become one person, as has the rest of it. (Except the boy. Him I invented, but not his Jor Bagh house which I Frankensteined the details of from various other similar homes.)

No wonder the longer we live the closer we come to being in a state of homesickness all the time. How can you live in the present when the past keeps batting up against your ankles and demanding to be fed? Every year I return to India a little different and every year it takes me a minute to get back in step with all the Meenakshis that exist there. “Oh hello,” I’ll say, when Twelve and Twenty Four both go past me hand-in-hand, “It’s been a while since we’ve talked.”

Listen, if you liked this post or any of my others, you can do one of three things:

1. Very simple, very straightforward: you can leave me a virtual tip. The link to do that is here.

2. You can share this post, because the more subscribers I get, the more I can do, I think? The button to share it is below.

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3. You can buy one of my eight published books, because honestly, that’s the thing I care about the most. There’s something for everyone. Here’s a link to Amazon India, but honestly, in India bookshop sales are the best, so if you can, please place an order with your local bookstore. Outside India there are copies floating around various Amazons or email me and I’ll sell you a PDF/ebook of whichever one you like. (If you are a translator who’d like to translate my books from English into another language also please get in touch!)

   Buy one of my books!

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   Another thing I wanted to tell you about is that Samit Basu who is an incredible writer and teacher (and also a dear friend which is lucky for me) is starting a writing class, so if you’ve ever wanted to do that, now’s the time.

   Duck of Dystopia

   Writing workshops

   I feel like most of my online chatter last year was about being the instructor for Clarion West’s inaugural Novel Writing Workshop (the 2026 round is about to start soon, led by the inimitable Dr. Karen Lord). We wrapped up the 2025 workshop in November, and after nine months of trying to keep 12 wonderful books in progress in my head through 2025, I’m …

   Read more

   5 months ago · 2 likes · Samit Basu

That’s all I’ve got for you this week! Speak soon.

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m

Re: quitting smoking, I’m using an app to monitor it called Kwit, which makes you log each time you feel a craving how you’re feeling and why you want a cigarette. It then offers you some options: drink water, breathe, let the craving go, OR have a cigarette which you can log and it’ll then adjust how much nicotine you have in your system. I think this is nice because so many quit smoking apps don’t have this option and you feel like your streak is gone if you lapse once. This way I keep up my streak and can have the occasional “oh no.”

Bad News: At least I was feeling positive and upbeat. Took our cat Squishy to the vet the other day because he’s been limping on and off all winter which I thought was arthritis related but turned out to be because he’s DIABETIC. Lots of changes for us all, including daily insulin shots and checking his glucose. The best case scenario is if after a month of this regime, he goes into remission and just has to be monitored on and off. Worst case is twice daily insulin injections for the rest of his life. But we love him and would do anything to make him happy and comfortable so not complaining just worried a bit because we are travelling back to India in the middle of February and have to check with our regular cat sitter if she can give him the shots if need be or else pay for a medical sitter to come for his injections twice a day if he still needs it. Keep your fingers crossed for us that this just becomes one more thing and not THE THING.

ANYWAY. How have you been? Have you had a nice start to the new year? Isn’t the news from the world horrific and how is it that we’re now in 2026 and everyone is still a little bit fascist? Aren’t things supposed to get better now that we’re in the future and we know how everything works?

This is part one of a new series I’m starting inspired by a note in my Google Keep where I add things I’ve learned while I’m reading/watching other things. I have two magazine subscriptions (Harpers and New Yorker) and sometimes the articles will refer to something or use a word I don’t know so it’s fun to look those up and see where it takes you.

Context is boring, instead pretend we’re at a bar together and I’m two drinks down and insisting on telling you all the things that have interested me recently. It’s very that kind of energy.

• This poem of which the below is an extract by Elizabeth Bishop

• Dobos torte also known as Dobosh, is a Hungarian sponge cake layered with chocolate buttercream and topped with caramel.The layered pastry is named after its inventor, Hungarian chef József C. Dobos, a delicatessen owner in Budapest. In the late 1800s, he decided to create a cake that would last longer than other pastries in an age when cooling techniques were limited. The round sides of the cake are coated with ground hazelnuts, chestnuts, walnuts, or almonds, and the hardened caramel top helps to prevent drying out, for a longer shelf life.

  

• A BOOK TO READ: Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford. “a 1960 autobiography by political activist Jessica Mitford, which describes her aristocratic childhood and the conflicts between her and her sisters Unity and Diana, who were ardent supporters of Nazism.”

• Goethe was a Virgo. “It was on the 28th of August, 1749, at the stroke of twelve noon, that I came into the world in Frankfurt on the Main. The constellation was auspicious: the Sun was in Virgo and at its culmination for the day. Jupiter and Venus looked amicably upon it, and Mercury was not hostile. Saturn and Mars maintained indifference. Only the Moon, just then becoming full, was in a position to exert adverse force, because its planetary hour had begun. It did, indeed, resist my birth, which did not take place until this hour had passed.” - From My Life, Poetry and Truth quoted here. (He also believed people born under a Virgo sun were destined to write, which should please my dad, who was and is.)

• This poem by Philip Larkin

  

• Author Jamie Quatro.

• The Marconi scandal was a British political scandal that broke in mid-1912. Allegations were made that highly placed members of the Liberal government under the Prime Minister H. H. Asquith had profited by improper use of information about the government's intentions with respect to the Marconi Company. They had known that the government was about to issue a lucrative contract to the British Marconi company for the Imperial Wireless Chain and had bought shares in an American subsidiary.

• The date on this article which took me an embarrassingly long time to discover.

• The word valetudinarian.

• This article on why you shouldn’t actually stop drinking. (Refreshing!)

• Karl Lueger was an Austrian lawyer and politician who served as Mayor of Vienna from 1897 until his death in 1910. He is credited with the transformation of Vienna into a modern city at the turn of the 20th century, although the populist and antisemitic politics of the Austrian Christian Social Party (CS), which he founded and led until his death, remain controversial, as they are sometimes viewed as a model for Adolf Hitler's Nazism. (Whose name appealed to me because “Lüger” is German for “liar.”)

• Our bodies reach peak sensitivity to light stimulus between midnight and 6 a.m. Exposure in that period, particularly to bright light, causes your body clock to begin to reset, sending signals throughout the body, Burns said. The study found a dose-response relationship between nighttime light exposure and cardiovascular disease risk. For heart attack, for example, compared with those in the darkest 50th percentile, those who experienced some nighttime light — in the 51st to 70th percentile — had a 20 percent increased risk of heart attack. Those who experienced more light, in the 71st to 90th percentile, had a 27 percent increased risk. And those who experienced the most nighttime light, in the 91st to 100th percentile, had a 47 percent higher risk. (From here.)

• The Prelude Op. 28, No. 4 by Chopin was played at his own funeral which was his request, along with Mozart's Requiem.

• According to the European Water Association, it is illegal in Europe to modify or sanitize mineral waters in any way; instead, they must be bottled straight from the source, without any human intervention. When this is done correctly, and without overexploiting a spring, the water comes out naturally clean. You can remove iron, manganese, and sulfur, but the only thing you’re allowed to add is carbonation. If a brand cleans its water, it loses the “mineral water” label (such as Vichy, Catalan, Evian) and becomes “filtered water” (Dasani and smartwater), which isn’t good for business, because the latter is much cheaper. (From here.)

As always, speak soon and have a great week!

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m

(THIS IS AN EXTREMELY LONG POST SO CLICK ON THE TITLE TO READ IN YOUR BROWSER IN COMFORT.)

My second personal favourite time is looking back through the year and checking out what I’ve been reading! Isn’t it funny how books you read in January feel like you read them fifteen years ago and books you read in November register as something you might have picked up last week? TIME! IT’S A FUNNY OLD FUCKER.

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I’ve had a brilliant reading year which was totally not what I was expecting. I thought I’d had too many slumps to count this year as good, but it turns out I have an unusually high list of books I’d like to pass into the hands of other people. I read 171 books this year, which is a large number (next year I’m aiming for either a) 200 books, which I know, it doesn’t seem like I need to, but the reason I didn’t hit 200 books this year is entirely due to spending too much time on my phone/watching television and TV wasn’t that great this year. My phone is fine, it’s still v nice but I scroll stuff on my laptop anyway, so it’s a lot of time spent online or b) reading books that aren’t “easy” which I do some of anyway, but maybe genres that I’ve so far avoided?).

Generally, in my small bubble, despite all the shit that’s going on around me and around the world, I’ve had a good 2025. Met some goals, did some interesting things. I managed to find several good doctors just before the end of the year so I’m scratching that to-do off my list as well. (Feel v adult which is a funny thing to admit as a 44 year old, but really, we’re all just pretending half the time.)

I got a first draft of my new novel done and it is like nothing I’ve ever written before and now I’ve broken it into parts and am embarking on an even more ambitious second half. (I fear this book will only be ready to submit by next year, especially since my edits are moving so slowly, thanks to the difficult nature of it.)

I travelled a lot.

I have not quit smoking or taken up any significant exercise so I’m just going to move those into the 2026 column and hope I can be more disciplined this year. But more often than not, I’ve taken a little “mental health” walk (what we in this household call a “menty” as in “let’s go for a menty”) and that has actually somewhat improved my mental health. As has no doubt, my fourth year of psychoanalysis, which I feel myself drawing to a close with.

I have also not advanced a language level so I’m still on A2, but I have a whole year before my current residence permit runs out and I have to apply for a permanent one which needs a B1 language certificate. Easy peasy though, it just needs a chunk of time which I am currently short of. German grammar is tough, but no one needs me to be perfect, just understandable. (Note to self.) My vocab and understanding (what they call listening comprehension) continues to grow in leaps and bounds and it’s not unusual for me to jump into a pure German conversation with my English response, although the Germans (the ones I meet at any rate) are usually extremely polite about this sort of thing and will switch to English immediately after that. I think I’m a little afraid of sounding rude or brusque, or dumb, but the few times I’ve just let go and let my mouth move, my brain has automatically moved “German” into my language centre and I’m able to communicate fairly well as long as we stick to the basics and don’t go into politics or the nuances of an ethical argument, say.

This has been significantly the year people started approaching me to ask for help (in German at that) which I gave them when I could, so I must look how I feel, comfortable and confident in my new home (less new now, we’re heading into year five.)

I watched a bunch of films and went to a bunch of art shows and all this had this weird effect of expanding my mind, which who knew, right?

I’m still reading some excellent books but taking my time, so they’ll probably feature in my January reading round up. That was one nice change I made this year, a monthly recap of everything I’m reading (and all the culture I did that month including films, theatre and art) in this newsletter. Which makes it so much easier to cross reference as well.

Comfort reads

The Year of Binchy: This was the year I discovered Maeve Binchy in all her glory. I have a love for Irish writers, all of them, I love their turns of phrase, I love how Ireland in their books feels both like a small town very familiar to me as well as a foreign place. I love the people Binchy writes about, their lives intersecting with each other. My favourite Binchy this year was Firefly Summer, followed by Light A Penny Candle, which I just bought a paperback copy of, because on my Kindle wasn’t enough.

Speaking of the Irish, I also re-read (and acquired) all of the Dublin Murder Squad books by Tana French. Complete at six books (how sad, I want more!) these are very different from Binchy in tone and sensibility but they’re Ireland all right. A trip to Dublin is definitely on my list some time in the future, but annoyingly, it requires a UK visa for my Indian passport, so it’ll have to wait for the next time I jump over. (I had assumed, since it’s part of the EU that I could go on my German residence permit, but alas.)

Quiet books

Which are my favourite sort of book. I love meandering soft character studies with very little plot that just sort of evolve over the page. I’m not talking about the VIBES ONLY literary novel, those are very dull, and I find them extremely hard to read. These are books where the stakes are low, but the characters are so real, you emerge feeling like you know them well.

• Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan: Here’s what I said about this in my February Books & Culture Recap: A tiny little book which got a bunch of awards and which I really loved. It takes place during Christmas and Bill… Someone is a lumber merchant? And he’s walking around his small Irish town and delivering his lumber and coal and thinking about his life. It’s really gorgeous and super slim but with hefty subjects.

• Three Days in June by Anne Tyler: From March: Anne Tyler always goes to the top of my “I have to own this” list, but alas, I have copies of almost all her books, and the ones I don’t have on paper, I have digitally, so I’d like to make her work faster, write more books about older people and their quiet domesticities in Baltimore. I don’t even know very much about her, she’s doesn’t come to people’s lips as often as say, Elizabeth Strout, who works with almost the same material, or Marilynne Robinson, but she’s won awards and everyone know who she is, so I suppose we’re all reading her, considering her our own quiet delight. This is her latest which just came out and is as good as all the rest. Shorter though, which is sad, because I always feel like I could spend years in her books.

• Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood: Also from March! This book made it to the Booker shortlist which means I probably should’ve given it a year or two “to breathe" since I’m not a huge fan of hype-y books. (As it turns out, there was very little buzz around this one—or come to think of it, any of the books on the list this year. Who even won the prize?) But I was intriguied by the premise: a woman joins a nunnery in Australia, there’s a plague of mice, the woman remembers her own life. It was one of those stunning quiet books that you find yourself looking up from the middle of reading and realising, “This is really good!” each sentence dense with story. I can see myself re-reading it in a few years. (EDITOR’S NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: I made my book club read it, but sadly missed the meeting because I was stuck on a train, and they disliked it—well, the one that read it did, the other read a different book entirely, and I’m not sure the other two finished it at all. So maybe NOT a good book club pick, but a lovely novel all the same.)

• The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald: From May: I was under two delusions before I picked up this book: a) Penelope Fitzgerald and Penelope Lively were somehow the same person & b) that this was a book called 84 Charing Cross Road (written by Helene Hanff, not a Penelope at all). The second misunderstanding is easy to understand, 84 Charing Cross is about an English bookshop after all, and so is The Bookshop, but there are literally HUNDREDS of books set in bookstores, so really, maybe not such an INTELLIGENT misunderstanding. Anyway, somehow I had decided that this book, Penelope Fitzgerald’s book was 84 Charing Cross Road by Penelope Lively, whose books I love. I don’t know. Sometimes I do this. It took me many years to figure out that Sinead O’Connor and Sigourney Weaver were different people, I kept thinking, oh she’s so talented, she sings and she acts! I liked The Bookshop though. It’s slim and sad, like a has-been actress with a Past. I didn’t expect it to be so weighty for what it was—I mean, guys, I was expecting a cheerful story about a bookshop in a small town, so really, a pleasant surprise. (EDITOR’S NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: The Bookshop convinced me to pick up a lot of Fitzgerald’s backlist of which I have two sitting on my groaning TBR shelf, Fitzgerald being the sort of author one comes across frequently at second hand stores, which is a compliment I think.)

• Sipsworth by Simon Van Booy: From July: Oh, this book made me sad. It’s a slim novel about an old woman with nothing to live for who discovers a mouse, and then turns the mouse into her pet (called Sipsworth.) Along the way, she learns to reach out to other people and is a little more within her community than she was before his arrival. A beautiful book about being alone and the unlikely connections you make along the way. I’m a sucker for any novel with a pet.

• Leonard and Hungry Paul by Ronan Hession: From September: This is the sort of book you feel like you’ve “discovered” on your own when you see it in the library. (Untrue, I had come to it via the newsletter of a small British bookshop, a link to which I can’t find, because I can’t remember the name. Was it Aldergate? Something. If you follow me on Notes, the Substack app, I’ll post a link there when I remember.) It’s just gentle low stakes not much plot and the cover, let’s be honest, is kind of terrible and somehow, this book you’ve discovered and love and think no one else has read has 17,018 ratings on Goodreads and reviews all over the shop. I mean, it’s really good, and perhaps some of the publicity is this view that somehow you’re “discovering” something, you know? Everything is so splashy these days that to stumble across a book that feels forgotten is almost magical. But it turns out, it’s doing pretty well, which is perhaps because the author is a famous musician in Ireland and also the book is going to be adapted into a BBC series. None of which takes away from the fact that it’s genuinely a good book about two nice people: Leonard and Hungry Paul, lonely men, a little adrift from life, but essentially gentle and kind. It’s a lovely book about friendship and relationships but without descending into twee like what I find Frederik Backman’s books do. I hate books that are manipulative in that sort of way, like where I can see the strings. Leonard and Hungry Paul works precisely because it isn’t. (EDITOR’S NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: It is the ALDERBURGH BOOKSHOP which is a small independent bookstore with a lovely newsletter.)

Books I Couldn’t Put Down

Self explanatory surely.

• Welcome to Glorious Tuga by Francesca Segal: Another from July: I was so immersed in this book that I actually Googled whether Tuga was a real place (which it isn’t), so vividly is the island drawn. Tuga is a fictional island, cut off from the rest of the world, and only open during the non-storm season when boats can go through which is when our heroine, a young scientist wanting to study their native tortoises disembarks. Once she does, she finds herself amongst the island folk, a close knit community full of secrets and intermarriages. Skipping through points of view, the book goes deeply into what it means to be from an intensely intertwined population like this one, and has all these little quirks that make reading it super satisfying, especially for someone from a big city, like myself. I believe there’s a sequel out this year, but I’m saving it for later so I can spread out my enjoyment.

• The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donaghue: Wow July was a really good reading month it turns out. This had been on my to-be-read pile for ages and I finally got around to it and devoured it in three short sittings. The story of a friendship between a gay man and a straight woman, lots of throwbacks to being in your twenties and sharing a flat with your friend, it was beautifully told and one of the most accurate representations of that time of your life than I’ve read before, the characters behaving just as they ought to, not like forty year olds stuck in twenty year olds bodies. It’s set in Ireland, which I should not be surprised by, so many excellent books coming out of that small country that now I only have to check to see if the author is from Ireland to know I’ll enjoy the book.

• The Birthday Boys by Beryl Bainbridge: And another from September (do I read better books in the hectic days of summer?) For our round-the-world book club we read this, set in the South Pole, detailing Scott’s doomed voyage. A slim, sad book, moving along in time and between characters. I really loved it, I think it was my favourite of what we’ve read so far. But I happen to like icy Polar books, they make me feel warm and cozy and glad to be alive. (EDITOR’S NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: Another author where my introduction to them has led me to their backlist. My next Bainbridge is her novel set on board the Titanic.)

• First two of the House Trilogy by Norah Lofts: September ONCE MORE. This is what I said about the first book: Holy crap, why has no one told me about Norah Lofts before? Why did it take an INTERVIEW which I had to SEARCH FOR with Alison Weir, author of some of my favourite Tudor novels, to bring me to Norah Lofts’ forgotten door? When I tell you I adored this, I mean I began with some bewilderment, not knowing if I’d like it, and then I found myself both reading fast, because I was so invested, and also slowing myself down because then it would be over. This is part one of a three book series, loosely related because it shows the history of a family through the history of the house. Part one, this one, starts with a serf, who manages to break free which reminded me uncomfortably of the caste system in India, which only made the stakes even higher. I bought books 2 and 3 swiftly on my usual website for used books, but I have been holding back on reading them. However, since I’ve hit a reading slump this past week and am unable to settle down to anything, I think it’s time to blaze through the next two as well. Norah Lofts is dead, alas, but she has a massive backlist which I’m going to go through with great delight.

Worth the hype

These are books that came out in 2025 (or late 2024, I can’t be bothered to look it up but recent enough anyway) to loads of fanfare which I actually enjoyed. (I had a lot of books that I ditched halfway as well, so hype doesn’t always work on me.)

• Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe: From April: This was SO GOOD, I think definitely making my best books list this year. Margo is a 20 year old single mother with a baby and no job so she turns to Only Fans to make money while her ex-WWF father moves in to help out with the baby. It’s funny and sad and about chosen and blood family in all the best ways. (I placed a hold for this at my library which means I had to pay 1 euro for it, totally worth it.) (EDITOR’S NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: This holds system at the library means I’ve almost completely stopped buying new books because I can test run them for SO CHEAP and then return them without any investment. Instead I spend all my books budget on older books that came out a decade or so ago and have stood the test of time. Everyone wins!)

• Woodworking by Emily St James: Another from May: I think in years to come we’re going to start talking about the Trans Literary Novel and how it evolved in the 2020s. Think Detransition Baby which was huge and now this book about a new trans woman who befriends the only other trans woman she knows, her high school student. I thought it was nicely done, very “found family” very flipping of the power dynamic. Did I find the characters a little self absorbed to the extent that they didn’t seem to be very good friends? Yes. But still wholesome.

• On The Calculation Of Volume I by Solvej Balle: JULY YOU BEAUTIFUL BEAST. Translated from the Danish, this is part one of a seven volume series (!!) about a woman who finds that she has somehow slipped through time and is reliving November 18 over and over again. It was also deeply melancholy—what is it about bright sunny summer days that makes you seek out sad books?--but the narrator’s matter-of-fact voice keeps you going. In it, she runs an antique book business with her husband and finds that after one trip to Paris (they live in France), she isn’t able to rejoin regular time, so she keeps redoing the same day. It’s been hundreds of days of this and she is lonely and isolated as anyone would be in the same strange circumstances. This was shortlisted for the International Booker last year, and is immensely readable, even if you’re put off by translated novels. While you might be reading the premise and thinking Groundhog Day, fun fact: Balle got there first, she started thinking of her series a good six years before the movie came out.

• Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico: From November. The Fitzcarraldo darling of the year. Originally written in Italian, with a masterful translation by Sophie Hughes (by which I mean you can’t tell it’s translated at all) it’s the passive voice story of a young couple who move to Berlin, get fooled by the trappings and finally realise the vibe has gone. It reminded me of so many of my friends who have lived here for years and years, and the slight disappointment they express with the city. Depressing, but a good, fast book,

• Tilt by Emma Pattee: Yup, July AGAIN. Another book I was surprised moved along so fast, another sad book. A vastly pregnant woman is shopping for baby things at a large store (Ikea? One of them) when a massive earthquake destroys the city and she must make her way back home, or back out to find her husband. Told as she’s narrating to her fetus, it moves through time, as she talks about her own mother, her relationship with her husband, her fears about being a mother herself. The fear of a “big earthquake” striking is real, as Portland (which is where the novel is set) is on a major faultline, and Annie, our narrator, soon-to-be mum grows fiercer and with a greater survival instinct as the book progresses. It’s the kind of odd premise that either works or doesn’t, and in this case it truly does.

• Flesh by David Szalay: WHY DON’T I JUST REPOST JULY AND HAVE IT BE THE END OF IT. I still cannot pronounce David’s last name. This book wound up in the Booker longlist, and is my favourite to win—not that I’ve read any of the others. (EDITOR’S NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: Hah. I told you so.) Flesh is the story of a Hungarian man named Istavan and how his fortunes move and change with him, a bildungsroman in a sense, except that everything that happens to Istavan happens in the passive voice. It’s a brilliant indictment of modern masculinity, and a book I’ve been recommending to everyone.

• Bring The House Down by Charlotte Runcie: From August. A theatre critic gives a show at the Edinburgh Fringe a one-star review, but the review is only published after he sleeps with the woman whose show it is. She then takes revenge by turning this experience into another show, the critic is cancelled, press is high, and the whole thing is told from the point of view of the critic’s colleague, a woman you can’t quite trust. Quite a ride and very propulsive in a cringe-fest sort of way which I adore but the reason it’s in my good books and not best books section is that I was dissatisfied with the final third of the book, a bit of a whimper after all that excitement. (EDITOR’S NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: The reason it’s made my best books of the year list is because I found myself continuing to think about it long after I’d read it. If a book stays with you for so long, well, I think it’s earned its spot.)

Genre novels

I mean, isn’t every novel a genre novel? But FINE, according to the publishing industry these are books that aren’t literary or commercial fiction. I read a lot of murder mysteries, thrillers, and horror, so these are the best of those.

• Her by Harriet Lane: From April. A creepy two person perspective of two women, one a successful artist, the other a new mother, and there’s a relationship between them but you don’t know what it is till the end. It also ends on a cliffhanger if you enjoy that sort of thing (I do sometimes.)

• The Party by Elizabeth Day: Another from May. Found this on a Substack I consistently enjoy. I really liked this book for the weird narrator and the world he enters. I also enjoyed Saltburn so ymmv depending on how you feel about low stakes high energy books.(EDITOR’S NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: There is now a SEQUEL of sorts to The Party—I say “of sorts” because it can be read by itself—which I am about to embark on, look out for that review soon.)

• The Gathering by CJ Tudor: Also in May. I liked The Gathering a lot, I picked it up on a whim at my library. True crime meets vampires, I’m going through a vampire phase right now and as monsters they are so satisfying. They LOOK like humans but they actually EAT us. I hadn’t read much by CJ Tudor before and because I liked this so much, I got some of her backlist including The Burning Girls which was also supernatural adjacent and set in a small town but not quite so atmospheric.

• Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell: And ANOTHER in May. This has become one of my favourite books of 2025. A gorgeous middle grade book, which actually you could read as an adult because its themes are not childish at all. Think His Dark Materials meets Avatar: The Last Airbender. I adored it and—huge for me—couldn’t read anything else for the rest of the day after I finished it. I believe it’s the first in a series, but so satisfying and complete was the book that I can’t think of how she’ll do a sequel. (EDITOR’S NOTE IN THE FUTURE: The sequel is here, but I’m still holding this book close and don’t want to read the next one until I’m sure.)

• The Compound by Aisling Rawle: From August. I tend to avoid buzzy “book of the moments” because so often I feel the hype blinds us to the merits or demerits of the story on the whole. However, I was so curious about this one that I got it before my usual period of a year to five years to let the book simmer and sit in its own juices. It’s set in this future dystopia where there is a dating show, sort of Love Island-esque, men and women in an isolated villa and they have to pair up and they’re constantly being filmed and there are daily challenges you have to play to get stuff. But, told entirely from the point of view of one of the contestants, it’s that and it’s also deeply disturbing at the same time. As a commentary on dating shows and also late stage capitalism, it’s terrific. But I felt it might’ve done better as one in a collection of short stories around the same theme instead of being stretched into a whole novel. Also reminded me of UnREAL, a favourite TV show, which, if you have a VPN and an active Netflix account, you can watch in the USA.

• The Stand by Stephen King: From September. I first read The Stand, all 1500 pages of it, back in 2017, when I enjoyed it but thought “wow a respiratory virus that kills half of the population? That is SO unlikely, Stephen.” Reading this book is 2025, however, is reading it as the horror novel it is. The entire first third of the book is dedicated to how the virus spread, and my god, I read it with one hand over my mouth. I couldn’t even read it that fast because my stomach started churning—literally! I had to put the book down and look at soothing things on Instagram! Which backfired because my algorithm is full of pro-Palestine images and text! As it should be because of the people I follow! But it doesn’t help at all in soothing one’s stomach!—anyway, you know those haunted houses that will scare the crap out of you but that you want to go into anyway? No? But persist, because once the first third is over the second third is a lovely if stressful description of how everyone reaches their designated destinations, because this is King, there’s a force for good and a force for evil, both playing out in people’s dreams and you walk towards whichever one compels you more. I think everyone should read it so we can discuss. Here’s one question that always baffles me in these post apocalyptic situations: why does the power always go out? Surely if everyone’s dead, then no one uses the electricity and it should keep running merrily without anyone to turn it off?

• The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons: From October. I have never read such an imaginative haunted house book. It’s fed on rumours and drinking, everything feels unreliable. From the blurb: “Thirty-something Colquitt and Walter Kennedy live in a charming, peaceful suburb of the newly bustling Atlanta. Life is made up of enjoyable work, long, lazy weekends, and the company of good neighbors. Then, to their shock, construction starts on the vacant lot next door, a wooded hillside they’d believed would always remain undeveloped. Soon, though, they come to realize that more is wrong than their diminished privacy. Surely the house can’t be “haunted,” yet something about it seems to destroy the goodness of every person who comes to live in it, until the entire heart of this friendly neighborhood threatens to be torn apart.” The first section of the book is just a society novel, all these rich people drinking in their fancy Southern back gardens and very very slowly the menace increases. I was riveted. (PS: for the horror averse, it leans more psychological damage than jump scare.)

Memoirs

I don’t read much non fiction, but when I do, it’s primarily memoirs. Especially lives of writers, I love those.

• A Woman In The Polar Night by Christiane Ritter: Another from October. Here’s the blurb: “In 1934, the painter Christiane Ritter leaves her comfortable life in Austria and travels to the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen, to spend a year there with her husband. She thinks it will be a relaxing trip, a chance to ‘read thick books in the remote quiet and, not least, sleep to my heart’s content’, but when Christiane arrives she is shocked to realize that they are to live in a tiny ramshackle hut on the shores of a lonely fjord, hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement, battling the elements every day, just to survive.” AND it’s a MEMOIR. I love books about cold icy conditions and everyone freezing and trying to make do. I think it’s because I was raised in a warm country, it seems so alien to me to see nothing but snow all around you, for blizzards to continue all the way till June. The translation (from the German) is light and deft, and so there’s no barrier between you and Christiane, you’re really reading what she wrote, seeing what she saw. Very good, would recommend for nice icy winter reading.

• Mother Mary Comes To Me by Arundhati Roy: From December! Which is now! I LOVED Roy’s memoir, crafted as the story of her relationship with her mother. I felt her hurt, I felt her pain, but mostly I felt extremely envious of her writing. Which is always a good (if painful) reaction for a writer to stir within you. A harrowing and yet propulsive story, you’ll want to read it very fast, but you’ll find yourself putting it down and abandoning it for days at a time because it’s so hard to read about. My mother, mother-in-law and I all have been discussing it, together and separately. I also bought her second novel at a second hand shop because while I can quote The God of Small Things, this one, whose name I can’t recall so I have to actually Google it, didn’t make such an impact, but she talks about it at such length in her memoir that I felt I had to revisit it.

Short stories

And finally, my favourite short story collection this year deserves its own category, because they really are the perfect art form.

Diamond Dust by Anita Desai (which I read in November) I’d recommend this book for two stories alone, the first is the story of a very garrulous man who goes to stay with his extremely put upon friends, it’s so funny and vivid and the second is the title story about a dog called Diamond, who lives in the very colony in which I spent some of my childhood: Bharti Nagar! I too had an unruly dog! I too walked to the Ambassador hotel as it was in those days! Ugh, the familiarity. I’m especially thinking of three friends of mine (sisters) who grew up next door to me and how much they’d like this story too, since it evokes so much of our shared history.

PHEW. That was very long but I hope you found several additions to your TBR list. Did you read anything I recommended this year? I’d love to hear about it!

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And ending with my favourite cheesy saying that I can only say once a year:

SEE YOU NEXT YEAR!!!

x

m

When I moved to Berlin, after ditching most of my wardrobe (donated half to Goonj, the other half on Instagram stories to whoever could come and pick them up) I had to reinvent my wardrobe a little. For one thing, I was suddenly in a country where it was cold more often than not, and my little sweaters and my cotton dresses with thin tights underneath them weren’t going to cut it, except on cool summer evenings. For another, I realised no one gave a shit. I could go to the supermarket in my pajamas or in my evening gown, no one blinked twice. I had to wear sensible things that held up through the weather—if you’re staying indoors then your layering has to come off, for instance. If you’re going for a walk, then no one needs to see what’s on underneath your thick jacket. No one wears make up, so I stopped except for special occasions. I got bored quickly of trying to make interesting outfits happen so I stuck to jeans and a sweater with my trusty heattech underlayers. This is the outfit I’m wearing today. It doesn’t need much thinking about on a mid-December evening where the temperature is about 2 degrees Celcius. I’m not going anywhere fancy.

(Actually I AM going to see Rahul Gandhi on his Berlin tour where he’s speaking to NRIs such as myself about the future of India, which should be interesting, but not Lipstick Interesting. EDIT THE NEXT DAY: I did wear lipstick after all, and trekked about an hour to the old airport area, which is in this cute little village not at all like Berlin, all low houses and pretty Christmas lights and pedestrianised shopping streets. RG came into the room with a great rush of attendants, the lady on the stage tried to get up a weak “Rahul Gandhi, zindabad” but the crowd didn’t respond the way she wanted them to. How could they? They were mostly young male students, sitting shoulder to shoulder, bundled up in their puffy jackets with scarfs around their necks. Sam Pitroda gave an inspiring speech about the idea of India but I think the only part people paid attention to was his homily at the end about Rahul being just a human and getting exhausted with all the requests for selfies. At this the students roared in dismay and RG had to reassure them that selfies were okay. Then he gave a tiny possible ad-libbed speech about us being the ambassadors for India, which I was quite delighted by until I realised he also meant the loudly chatty boys behind me as well who hadn’t ceased talking since they sat down. He left in a flurry of extras pursued hotly by the male students, brandishing their phones.)

(No, but his work at exposing the BJP’s flaws and theft is inspiring and I think he might be the hope we need for India. It’s hard to summon up hope right now what with one thing going so despairingly after another, but we need it, and I think RG is the way forward. I endorse him is what I’m saying, for whatever that’s worth because I think he might be able to give us the India we’re missing, our pluralistic stubborn traditional marching forward towards modernity country where everyone lives and lets live.)

Back to clothes.

Anyway, so four years in, going on five, I still experiment with my outfits from time to time in this City That Doesn’t Care What You Wear. Now it’s for me though, no one will judge me for going to a party in jeans and a boring sweater, or even stained track pants. But I do it for myself, to make life interesting.

I went through all my photos of my clothes in 2025 to see what outfit decisions I had made and these are the ones I liked best. I’m over fast fashion and buy most of my stuff at thrift stores, especially when I travel. On my yearly trip to India I stock up my vast and expanding summer wardrobe which I barely have any space for any more. I have two clothes rails in our bedroom which are full to overflowing and so I’m at the happy place in my life where I have most things for any outfit that I’m thinking of. “Shop your closet” I think they call it. I do a lot of that.

All my adult life I’ve wanted people to ask me what I’m wearing. They don’t do it often enough, so here’s my super indulgent #whatIworethisyear recap just for me. And for you, if you find this sort of thing interesting. (If you don’t, hold hard, my best books recap is coming soon.)

This is also a tribute post to Madeline Wickham aka Sophie Kinsella who died last week and whose character Becky Bloomwood, the Shopaholic, feels like a friend.

One of my favourite vintage shops in Berlin is called Soul & Style, and it’s only a block away from where I live, housed in this little mall. They were having a sale in November where they filled paddling pools with pants and parkas and sold each one for 10 euros a pop. (Each piece that is, not each pool.) I found this in a pants pile, it’s a pair of lederhosen, which is traditional German menswear, except instead of being made partly from leather, this is pure wool. It has these cool slouchy cargo pants, lots of pockets and built in suspenders. I’m wearing them here with a black polo neck, and because it needed more colour, a red silk blazer, and let me tell you, I was BOILING HOT all night. These things are extra warm. I recently wore them in December, a cold windy night, and it felt like nothing could touch my skin at all through them. Here they’re also paired with my tall boots, bought from TK Maxx, which is this discount store for labels, everything always on sale with some dubious brands you’ve never heard of, but sometimes you get a good deal, like these boots for only 25 euros. (Rs 2500 for my Indian readers.) They’re pleather “vegan leather” if you’re trying to be trendy, and very stylish and comfy.

I like this outfit a lot because of the nature of taking something that belongs somewhere else and applying it to a Fashion Outfit. I get the same feeling repurposing a sari blouse into a crop top.

We went to the Netherlands this summer for K’s birthday, mostly so we could experiment with the train system. It was a lovely holiday, hot as hell, which is why I’m standing around here with my legs exposed instead of tucked into tights. (In Berlin, this summer was a complete wash—literally. It rained almost constantly, I didn’t get a single swim in.) Earlier in the week I’d been to the Rijks Museum which is terrific and you must go if you’re in Amsterdam and have the chance, especially the room full of adult doll houses. Across the large entry hall I saw a tall man wearing the coolest skirt, long denim pleated with large pockets across the top. It was a very masculine skirt, not at all femme, and I coveted it but I felt too shy to go ask him where he got it.

Later in our trip we go to Utrecht and I wander into a second hand shop as is my wont and there hidden in the skirt section is this, an almost perfect copy of the shape of the man’s skirt! Except it’s short and not denim, but this is what the pockets looked like, these the pleats. It’s teamed here with a beautiful butter yellow cheese cloth shirt I bought in Bangkok’s Fashion Mall—have you been? You must.

I like this outfit because it illustrates the nature of discovery. How you see something on someone else and then have the joy of finding it yourself when you’re least expecting it.

This is another outfit that is designed to be something else. It’s actually a jacket, which I bought in Sarojini Nagar in Delhi—Sarojini Nagar has become an export surplus market for mainly Korean labels these days—and I’m repurposing as a dress. Again, it’s nicely warm so you don’t need to wear underlayers with it. I like that you can pull a cord at the waist to cinch it and the water resistant fabric.

I’m wearing this with a pair of spectacles that I picked up at a very cheap optician in Delhi. They cost 300 rupees (3 euro?) and are made of pressed plastic. My regular optician warned us that the spectacles might break once he put the lens in, which they didn’t, but they did suddenly when I was pulling a scarf over them. Nothing a quick application of superglue couldn’t fix! I want to get glasses in all my favourite colours and swap them round. If I have to wear glasses, they may as well be as flexible as coats. However, the last few times I’ve been to an optician they’ve said, “Ma’am it’s time for progressive lenses” which OVER MY DEAD BODY. I’m too young for bifocals no matter how old my eyes are.

I like this outfit because it’s unusual (I think). I don’t like to dress like other people but I still want to look (conventionally) nice.

This is after a brief flirtation with asking ChatGPT to dress me. I asked for an outfit built around a brown sweater vest which I found at our local park which is a free clothes drop off point. It leaked brown dye like I had killed it when I washed it which luckily I did in the tub, having noticed the care label was smudged with brown. ChatGPT told me to put on a polo neck, add a cream and brown scarf and a beret, all of which I had.

The scarf was a gift from my friend N, about fifteen years ago, this one and its fraternal twin, silk from Satya Paul. They’re so fancy, I always feel posh when I put them on, either around my neck or tied around my hair. A lot of older German women wear this same sort of outfit, but I’ve been recently getting drawn to a lot of Granny Chic. I just like the way older women dress—colourful, with patterns, simple eye catching styles. Gen Z and younger millennials in this city prance around in monochrome colours which are very boring to look at, or if they wear patterns, they don’t look good quality. Grannies on the other hand, Stylish Grannies I mean, look like they care about their clothes and what they put on their bodies. I like that. I want to emulate that.

My beret is from Bangkok as well, I’d been searching for a hunter green one (my favourite colour, I recently got a phone case in the same shade to match my Kindle jacket) and found it in a mall in Thailand.

ChatGPT took some of the fun of putting an outfit together out of it, but I was pleased with the (very basic) results. You can try too, the prompt is something like “what can I wear in X city today. I’m going HERE and HERE and HERE and will be walking X amount of time. I want to wear my new X, so build an outfit around that.” Then it gives you suggestions and you say “I don’t have brown pants but I do have wide legged blue jeans” etc etc. If your new item of clothing is easily found online, you can add a photo for it to “see” as well.

My friend O gave me this cap, he’s a scientist who works with this health start up (I’m not sure how much more to reveal, but there’s blood involved and this cap is part of their merch.) Sometimes O will wear his matching cap which again no one blinks at in this city. I wear mine as an indicator. LEAVE ME ALONE I hope my cap says. Or BE GENTLE WITH ME.

I wore it all over Italy and Spain and no one noticed, but I was pleased with myself and my period-y cap. Baseball caps have been everywhere the past couple of years and having no “team” I’ve never gotten the appeal but Team Menstrual Woman all the way.

And finally, from my birthday party this year. For once my actual birthday fell on a weekend so I was able to have a party the day of, which was a decision I regretted in the morning (cleaning! preparing!) and then was happy for again in the afternoon.

I was born on 13.12 which is significant for anti police slogans. This meant my birthday party was also partially celebrated by a massive anti police demo that wound its way under our apartment, leading all guests to lean out of the window and gawp. If the demonstrators had looked up, they’d have seen a woman in a pink wig, holding a drink staring down at them, very “let them eat cake” as an image so I’m quite happy we went unnoticed. I’m wearing a wig because my party had an “undercover” theme, which I only made up in order to wear my wig and my new-to-me sexy black dress from a second hand shop in Mallorca, which I’d saved all summer and hadn’t had a chance to wear. The nice thing about house parties is as the host you can wear what you like because you’re not going outside. Our flat is small so it got warm very fast.

After a while, my head started to hurt with the pressure of compressing all my kilos of hair under a tight pink HAT essentially, so I took it off and wandered around, no longer in disguise.

If you’re still here, thank you for indulging me in this little walk down fashion memory lane. Now that I’ve finished it, I keep thinking of all the other outfit photos I have that I HAVEN’T posted, but I will show some restraint. (If you’re interested, I do often post what I’m wearing on my Instagram stories.)

Did you have a favourite thing you wore this year? Tell me about it.

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Speak soon for more end of year stuff, or at least what I can get to. I’m still reading loads, so no Best Books List till at LEAST post Xmas. Maybe even January if I’m living dangerously.

Where am I? The Internet Personified! A mostly weekly collection of things I did/thought/read/saw that week.

Who are you? Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writer of internet words (and other things) author of seven books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.

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Forward to your friends if you liked this and to that one outfit you spent a lot of money on but never looked the same back home as it did in the shop mirror if you didn’t.

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After my last letter to you where I bitched about being in a reading slump, I went on a glorious holiday to Greece where I ate so much good food thanks to my METICULOUS RESEARCH and will do a (potentially paid for? I don’t know yet) guide to Athens and Thessaloniki soon which does not include the major tourist attractions and does focus on what to eat (which, by the way, Greek food is what I have been sleeping on, it’s so varied! So delightful! We did not eat a single non-Greek meal!) (you should also know I have gained two kilos from this experience, despite walking about 12,000 steps every day). Anyway on this holiday I read a lot and across the board and now have returned to my Berlin life ready to DEVOUR books again, which I am doing.

But I am faced with a dilemma since it is December and there’s so much end of year stuff to do, do I do a regular reading recap for November OR since I have procrastinated, do I bundle everything into one “Best of 2025” list? I am essentially indecisive so I’m going to do a sort of combination of both and tell you about the books I remember, the books I’m currently reading and also, in this same post, manage to tell you a little bit about what I’m doing. CAN SHE MANAGE IT ALL? We’ll find out.

Meanwhile, subscribe if you haven’t already. I’ve also started chucking some old posts up on Medium where I’m getting a little money for them so if you’re a Medium member, you can sign up for me here.

Currently, I am reading three books at the same time which is usual. One is MOTHER MARY COMES TO ME by Arundhati Roy which my mum just brought with her for me to read in hardback (a mission of love, she had to pay ELEVEN THOUSAND RUPEES excess baggage because we both fondly thought a “few” extra books wouldn’t add that much to the weight.) (This is LOT airlines where they are very stern and uncompromising, I usually fly Lufthansa where they are stern as well, but able to wink at a few kilos more here and there.) K’s parents took us and my mother out for dinner and the two mothers bonded over this book, which made me curious, was it saying such universal things about motherhood? I’ve always been an admirer of Roy’s prose, and the opening pages of this thing sings, absolutely. I’m also happy I have a hardback because it is gorgeous, the way books ought to be. I’m very out of touch with Indian publishing these days, but I hope it’s recovered its investment because we need more books that look like this.

I am also reading DIAMOND DUST by Anita Desai, which is her collection of short stories. I have to say I bought THE LONELINESS OF SONIA AND SUNNY by her daughter Kiran Desai and have ashamedly left it about 25% of the way in. As a child of writers, I know how frustrating it is when people learn you are a writer and they say, “Oh I love your father’s work” as though it’s the same thing but TO BE FAIR to me, I liked Desai senior for years when I was a child, THE VILLAGE BY THE SEA is a book I recommend to all children of a certain age, so it’s not really a betrayal, it’s just a sideways move. Anyway, I’d recommend DIAMOND DUST for two stories alone, the first is the story of a very garrulous man who goes to stay with his extremely put upon friends, it’s so funny and vivid and the second is the title story about a dog called Diamond, who lives in the very colony in which I spent some of my childhood: Bharti Nagar! I too had an unruly dog! I too walked to the Ambassador hotel as it was in those days! Ugh, the familiarity. I’m especially thinking of three friends of mine (sisters) who grew up next door to me and how much they’d like this story too, since it evokes so much of our shared history.

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I do like books of a place, especially if you live there. One that scratched a recent itch was PERFECTION by Vincenzo Latronico, the Fitzcarraldo darling of the year. Originally written in Italian, with a masterful translation by Sophie Hughes (by which I mean you can’t tell it’s translated at all) it’s the passive voice story of a young couple who move to Berlin, get fooled by the trappings and finally realise the vibe has gone. It reminded me of so many of my friends who have lived here for years and years, and the slight disappointment they express with the city. Depressing, but a good, fast book, I read it in a single evening. Another, that I read while I was in Greece (a re-read but felt new) was THE SONG OF ACHILLES by Madeline Miller who is so good! I loved her CIRCE, which will always remind me of my Delhi book club, I forget in whose house we were, but I keep thinking of mine, sitting on the black sofa, it was winter, I was making rum toddies and the house was warm enough that everyone could take off their jackets (rare in Delhi, flats are made to keep the warm OUT not in).

Having read Miller whilst in the land where myths began, I kept expecting to see more references to this ancient culture, but the thing is, while the Greeks know this stuff brings them tourism, they aren’t at all connected to it, not in the way we are in India where our gods are still alive. For the Greeks, their earliest hero is Alexander (as in the great), and beyond, bring up Achilles or Homer and they’ll look at you slightly pityingly and say, “Well, that is a myth, you know.” I mean, I do know, but the Greek gods have illustrated so much literature for the rest of us that you expect them to be more present in Greece, their home. Mostly they’re locked up in the Archaeological Museum where you stand near a giant set of toes attached to a stern looking person and you’re told this might be Poseidon or maybe Zeus, who knows. They feel real to me, and it was a bit of a culture shock to learn that the Greeks mostly think of them as something only the tourists care about.

(Miller was infected in the first wave of COVID and since then has been living with Long Covid which has left her, among other symptoms, unable to exert herself beyond very small bursts. She wrote a very moving piece about her illness here.)

Speaking of re-reading, one of the things I did to get out of my Reading Rut was to go back to my favourite detective novelist, Tana French, which also my mum brought for me (see: ELEVEN THOUSAND RUPEES). I’ve been re-reading the Dublin Murder Squad series—paused briefly now because I was going too fast—and this time too, they soothe, charm and invigorate me in a way few other books do. The series is six books, complete for now, as French adds more to her HUNTER books, and the brilliant thing about them is that you can read them out of order, in any way you like. I reached the books via THE LIKENESS, a SECRET HISTORY sort of book which you wish would go on and on, just drawing you in, just uncomfortable enough to keep you guessing. On my last read, I fell for BROKEN HARBOR with its uneasiness, thinking I would return to that first. On this round, I think it might be THE SECRET PLACE, set in a girl’s boarding school, featuring a friends group so delicate and loving you, much like the detectives, want to protect it.

I suppose I should mention two books I enjoyed, maybe not loved with a deep devotion, but liked well enough. One is a buzzy “upmarket” book which just released this year, THE CORRESPONDENT by Virginia Evans, which features, via letters, an elderly lady and the people in her life. I put a hold on this at my library, the big one, not the little one (I have two I use regularly and one of the upsides of gentrification-whee!—is that the English language section in my little library is expanding very nicely) and it was a good sort of book to get from the library if you know what I mean. Actually, why would you, I’m being very vague, what I mean is, it’s a pleasant heft with nicely laid out pages so good to read in hard copy but not so special that you’d want it on your precious shelf space (this coming from the person who stockpiles Maeve Binchy is a bit rich, but I re-read all my comfort books!)

(Adding to my comfort re-reads are three Anne Tyler novels, I own her complete bibliography back in Delhi but ELEVEN THOUSAND RUPEES has put me off, I recently got THE AMATEUR MARRIAGE, A PATCHWORK PLANET and DINNER AT THE HOMESICK RESTAURANT at my favourite local second hand bookshop. They have the advantage of being Tylers I’m not super familiar with—my personal favourites are ST MAYBE and BACK WHEN WE WERE GROWN UPS—so they’ll feel new when I embark upon them, perhaps next.)

Anyway, where was I? Yes, so Evans and another book I liked v much was THE IMPOSSIBLE US by Sarah Lotz, a nice twisty romance which is all, according to the blurb, I’m allowed to say. Very fast paced, great for a plane journey.

I think that’s all the books I want to talk about? Two small life things are a) I’ve started a scrapbook, which some people also call a Junk Journal, but the sad thing is that I can’t find enough mementos from every excursion to put in it, such is the curse of our digital age and b) my mum bought me a new phone for my birthday so I’ve finally upgraded my One Plus Nord, which has served me well, for a Pixel 8A. I bought a refurbished one in excellent condition which makes me feel slightly better about upgrading a phone that was still in functioning condition, but oh my, the camera is SO good. Also the Google AI stuff. Slick.

If you’d like to buy me a coffee you can do that here. All contributions are deeply appreciated.

See you again with my year end best of list, and wish me luck on suddenly rapidly ageing overnight next week. I expect to wake up and suddenly be bent in half, eyes cloudy with cataracts.

x

m

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Who are you? Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writer of internet words (and other things) author of eight books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.

Follow me on Instagram. (Plus my book recommendation Instagram!)

Forward to your friends if you liked this and to books you once liked but now can’t see the point of if you didn’t.

Also, write back to me! I love to hear from you.

Therefore you will notice most of what I read in October was Miss Marple, which I’m going to expand on below.

Ten Things About Miss Marple

1. As a child free woman, Miss Marple should be your epitome of feminism. She lives an independent life, has many loving friends and relations and manages a side career in being a detective without much fuss. I’m not sure what she lives on—family money?—but she manages to have a decent life, full of travel and also full of gardening. She also has a full time housekeeper and a series of maids.

2. I’ve always had a sneaking preference for Miss Marple over Poirot. I don’t know why, perhaps the domestic nature of her crimes. A Murder Is Announced used to be my favourite, but isn’t anymore (see below). Now I think it’s either They Do It With Mirrors or 4.50 From Paddington.

3. The reason I’m over A Murder Is Announced is because I noticed racist undertones to the book I never had before. Also Miss Marple gives a very anti-immigration speech which I’m choosing to ignore, because I think she’s a nice lady and it’s not her fault Agatha Christie was struggling for ideas in her book series (we’ll draw a line through A Carribean Mystery and At Bertram’s Hotel and never mention them again.)

4. First of all there’s the maid, Mitzi, who is described as “hysterical” and “mittel European.” They don’t come out and say she’s Jewish, but she’s German and a refugee and so reading between the lines, you can see quite well that she’s Jewish-coded. And then they make her a liar and a thief as well as someone prone to falling apart all the time. One character even sends her a fake postcard signed by the Gestapo as a prank.

5. But why do we read Christie again and again? Surely for these calm upper middle class English murders set in a certain era? Surely then the racism is fitting for their milieu and their times? In other Christie books, anyone who is half Italian, say, or Spanish, is written to be hot blooded, full of passion and therefore a likely murderer.

6. Miss Marple is extremely English. She’s described as having soft white hair and a pink and white face. She’s often to be found knitting. Her way of rootling out murderers is to connect them with people she knows in her village. One man will be like the butcher’s son, say, another will be like the maid she had who accidentally got pregnant.

7. There’s more implied sex in these books than the Poirot ones. Miss Marple deals in domesticity, and therefore in sex, so it comes up a lot more. Also, I think because she’s a woman, she can see the undercurrents between two people and comment on it, whereas in Poirot, it would be a bit creepy if he went on about it.

8. A hilarious thing for juvenile minds is how the police officers keep referring to Miss Marple as an “old pussy” and one of them even calls her “my old pussy.” This kept me in KNOTS.

9. Unlike Poirot, Miss Marple never dies. The very last mystery (Sleeping Murder, published posthumously) in fact, goes back in time, when she’s still able to travel properly, when her beloved nephew (Raymond) is still young-ish. I like Sleeping Murder, where a young woman suddenly realises that a memory she has of her childhood, a woman being strangled, is true, and enlists Miss Marple to help out. It’s very much Miss Marple’s type of mystery, slightly feminine, requiring gossip and speculation.

10. I haven’t been able to read Christie since I gave a speech about the theme of jewellery in her novels at the Agatha Christie literary festival in Devon in 2023. It felt like too much work. But enough time has passed now for her to return to gentle pleasure, for her writing to be a refuge once more, from a dreary reading month where I picked up and abandoned books so swiftly.

Oooh I really liked the other books I didn’t abandon though. My favourite was A WOMAN IN THE POLAR NIGHT by CHRISTIANE RITTER. Here’s the blurb: “In 1934, the painter Christiane Ritter leaves her comfortable life in Austria and travels to the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen, to spend a year there with her husband. She thinks it will be a relaxing trip, a chance to ‘read thick books in the remote quiet and, not least, sleep to my heart’s content’, but when Christiane arrives she is shocked to realize that they are to live in a tiny ramshackle hut on the shores of a lonely fjord, hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement, battling the elements every day, just to survive.” AND it’s a MEMOIR. I love books about cold icy conditions and everyone freezing and trying to make do. I think it’s because I was raised in a warm country, it seems so alien to me to see nothing but snow all around you, for blizzards to continue all the way till June. The translation (from the German) is light and deft, and so there’s no barrier between you and Christiane, you’re really reading what she wrote, seeing what she saw. Very good, would recommend for nice icy winter reading.

My second favourite was THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR by ANNE RIVER SIDDONS. I have never read such an imaginative haunted house book. It’s fed on rumours and drinking, everything feels unreliable. From the blurb: “Thirty-something Colquitt and Walter Kennedy live in a charming, peaceful suburb of the newly bustling Atlanta. Life is made up of enjoyable work, long, lazy weekends, and the company of good neighbors. Then, to their shock, construction starts on the vacant lot next door, a wooded hillside they’d believed would always remain undeveloped. Soon, though, they come to realize that more is wrong than their diminished privacy. Surely the house can’t be “haunted,” yet something about it seems to destroy the goodness of every person who comes to live in it, until the entire heart of this friendly neighborhood threatens to be torn apart.” The first section of the book is just a society novel, all these rich people drinking in their fancy Southern back gardens and very very slowly the menace increases. I was riveted. (PS: for the horror averse, it leans more psychological damage than jump scare.)

I also really enjoyed DEATH OF A BOOKSELLER by ALICE SLATER, which was rompy and nice, with two really enjoyably hateful main characters so you, the reader, feel very little sympathy for all the events. I enjoyed Slater’s writing very much so I’ll be keeping an eye out for future books. (There’s already one that looks very nice: LET THE BAD TIMES ROLL.)

I read the second of my Norah Lofts House trilogy: THE HOUSE AT OLD VINE, which I enjoyed as its part in the series. Only one book to go! (In case you missed it, here’s when I read the first book.)

Re-read of KLARA AND THE SUN by KAZUO ISHIGURO and came to the realisation that all of Ishiguro’s characters are created to serve other people—but this is a spoiler, and you should read NEVER LET ME GO. Klara is an excellent slow book about AI and what sentience means, so it’s very timely, in that sense. Besides, the main character is adorable.

And finally, THE DROWNED by JOHN BANVILLE which was very nicely written—I believe Banville has completely given up literary fiction to focus on murder mysteries for the rest of his career, however much time that may be, but the literary elements keep peeking in. But I read it out of order, so I feel like I missed a lot of references.

That’s my reading month! This recap will return in December, and I can assure you I’ve tried to vary my diet in November, but again, it’s a lot of re-reads. Oh well, the end of the year is here, and sometimes you want to read something you already have so it’s warm and familiar. Like soup.

Have a great week! Tell me what you’re reading below. Also please send Greece recommendations for Athens and Thessaloniki. (Yes, I know about the Acropolis :D)

x

m

Who are you? Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writer of internet words (and other things) author of eight books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.

Follow me on Instagram. (Plus my book recommendation Instagram!) (Although I’m off Instagram these days, so really, this is the only place I come to chat.)

Forward to your friends if you liked this and to having absolutely nothing to read on your overflowing bookshelves if you didn’t.

Also, write back to me! I love to hear from you.

Here’s a painting of all the five Pandava brothers. At this point, you don’t need to know much about them except they all have different bio-dads (gods) and they all share a wife, Draupadi. (They’re part of a larger epic called the Mahabharata, which is the story of a cousins’ war, the Pandavas, our heroes, vs their evil cousins, the Kauravas.) My story is about the two men flanking the throne at the back, holding fans. They’re twins, and they’re called Nakula and Sahadeva.

I’ve always felt sort of bad for Nakula and Sahadeva Pandava.

I mean, think about it. Sure, they got to share in the Glory of the Pandava Brothers, such as it were, but always as an afterthought. There was Yudhishthira the Just (on the throne with Draupadi on his lap), Arjuna the Valiant (on the left with the bow), Bheema the Strong (on the right with a mace, which is that heavy iron thing, not pepper spray), and after you’re done listing them, you go, “Oh and the twins, whatstheirnames, Nakula and Sahadeva.” On the other hand, even in a famous family, not everyone can be equally famous. Someone’s got to stay at home and handle the admin.

Nakula and Sahadeva are a little bit like the culture guy and the food guy from Queer Eye, we know they’re there and they’re certainly very attractive, but what do they do exactly apart from teaching someone how to make an omelette or giving a pep talk? I suppose they serve to round out the crowd—two’s company, three’s a crowd, but five, five is a party.

[Other members of the Queer Eye cast as Mahabharata characters: The interior design guy is doing all the heavy lifting (Bheema), followed by the hair guy who is the breakout star of the show (Arjuna) and the clothes guy is generally moral and upstanding (Yudhishthira).]

The story of Nakula and Sahadeva really begins with the story of their mother, Madri. Unlike the other three Pandava brothers, the twins had a different mother, one who died really early on in the story. So they were raised by their stepmother Kunti their entire life.

Mahabharata stans know that ancient piece of gossip—Pandu, their dad, didn’t actually father any of his five sons, since he was “under a curse” that meant he’d die if he ever had sex. (Sure, honey, it happens to everyone.) But the Pandavas’ PR team is so good, we’ve all collectively decided that if they must be illegitimate, they must at least be sons of gods, the next best thing.

Pandu had two wives—Kunti, who chose him at her swayamvara (brief aside to my global readers: a ceremony where a princess was allowed to choose a man from the many carefully selected for her based on caste and class, often a spectacle, where the competing men had to perform tests of bravery etc), and Madri, an arranged marriage, but who, it is implied, was much hotter than Kunti.

Kunti had, before her marriage, acquired a boon that allowed her to call down on any god to impregnate her. She offered to share this with Madri, so both of them could be the mothers of sons. (It’s a given that the gods never father daughters with humans.)

While Kunti had called on the gods of justice, valour and strength respectively to father her three boys, Madri, that cunning creature, went a different route. She decided to save time—and have a crazy god-menage-a-trois —by calling upon two minor gods at the same time, twins, the Ashvins, known for being young, handsome, and athletic. It’s like they both used sperm donors, and while Kunti hand-picked one NLS lawyer, one IAS topper and one IIT grad, , Madri was like, “Eh, whatever, as long as they’re hot.”

Twins were born from this threesome with twins, and soon Madri wanted another go (she was young, her husband couldn’t have sex with her, and I always see her as more highly-sexed than Kunti, who seemed satisfied with her lot). However, Kunti refused to share the god-aphrodisiac boon with her again because, she argued, it wasn’t fair that Madri got two children from a single encounter, and what if she tried calling twins again? As the senior queen, Kunti wasn’t entirely comfortable with Madri having as many or, gods forbid, more children than herself.

I suspect Kunti was also a little jealous of Madri. Pandu’s inevitable death-by-sex struck because he eventually couldn’t control himself, cavorting in the forest with second wife Madri, while first wife Kunti stayed in and looked after the kids. Pandu died, pretty much immediately after the sex, and Kunti so found Madri weeping over the body and promptly started to victim shame her, saying things like, “Why did you let him take you out alone?” Madri kills herself to join her husband in the afterlife not much after this because, as she admits to Kunti, she wouldn’t be able to raise all the boys equally, as though they were all born to her and not just two of them, and Kunti was nice like that. She really was, there’s never any mention of her making a distinction between Nakul and Sahadeva and their three half-brothers.

But it turns out the sperm donors actually did make a difference, because all the Pandava brothers took after their fathers. Nakula and Sahadeva were no exception, except their dads weren’t good at much except horses and being very handsome, both of which qualities the brothers had. And it’s not like the twins didn’t fight well during the Mahabharata war or weren’t super loyal to their family, it’s just that their three older brothers had better stories, better lines, and ultimately, stories are told about heroes, not just two people who were pretty cool but not very important.

Indian myths, especially the big ones, your Ramayana and Mahabharata, generally deal with siblings in a similar sort of way. The heroes—Rama, the Pandavas—are from families where all the brothers grow up in the shade of the eldest.

In the Ramayana, crown prince Rama, born the eldest of four half-brothers, is sent into exile when one of his stepmothers gets Rama’s father to put her bio son Bharata on the throne instead. So accompanied by one of his brothers Lakshmana as sidekick, Rama gets to enjoy alone-ish time with his beloved wife in exile, and then go on a grand adventure, befriending monkeys, killing a king, avenging his name and so on and comes back to claim his throne in the end. It’s epic.

Bharata keeps the throne warm for Rama until then, and happily and competently so. He is only praised as a foil to Rama, his story arc is that of the Good Brother, he exists in this tale as an example of what good brothers do, they defy their mothers when their brother’s happiness is at stake, they wait for the rightful heir to return, they do not challenge the filial hierarchy. They may never be royal, Lorde, but they are definitely loyal.

But “good brother” isn’t as faint praise as it sounds. It’s nice to be a good brother, and the epics put value on that. Stories of heroes in Indian mythology often feature their tightly-knit families. One can’t get along without the others—the hero is only the hero because of his bro back home dealing with things: united we stand. And one’s downfall is everyone else’s— back in the Mahabharata, the eldest Pandava Yudhishthira gambles away the lives of his brothers and his wife after he runs out of money to bet with.

Also by the way, many powerful modern-day Indian families would do a lot better really looking at the lessons from these texts instead of just worshipping the heroes. Maybe they’d be a lot happier now.

Actually, I don’t feel so bad for Nakula and Sahadeva after all. They were part of the story, just following a different destiny. You know, they were actually offered their own kingdom?. An uncle on their mother’s side said they didn’t have to be fourth and fifth in line to Yudhishthira, they could inherit his kingdom right then, no questions asked. They accepted—but with one caveat. They always wanted to be able to live with their brothers instead.

If you liked this post or any of my others, please buy me a coffee! It’s all a labour of LURVE, but it’s nice to be appreciated.

BUY ME A COFFEE

Have a great week!

x

m

Where am I? The Internet Personified! A mostly weekly collection of things I did/thought/read/saw that week.

Who are you? Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writer of internet words (and other things) author of seven books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.

Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. (Plus my book recommendation Instagram!)

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Forward to your friends if you liked this and to your less-than-loyal siblings if you didn’t.

Also, write back to me! I love to hear from you.

I hope you had a nice Diwali weekend wherever you are. It was just a normal Monday, but I had a very celebratory weekend, starting with our eighth wedding anniversary on Thursday where K bought me this gorgeous bunch of flowers, which we had to promptly hide because Olga thinks all flowers are a snack for her.

We spent the evening at his office party, which was more fun than it sounds, having free large drinks and free (too few) snacks. The next day we were both vividly hungover and a friend had invited us over for a Diwali dinner so we stayed sober through the evening and still had a lovely time, which is thanks entirely to the company. Here is a picture of me in my eye make up next to a painting of the eye of Horus that our host had made as a birthday present for one of our other friends.

On Saturday, having restarted my culture subscription app Abundo again after a three month pause for the summer, we scored tickets for a Queen Tribute band. The lead singer, a man named Marc Martel, is Freddie Mercury’s doppel-singer, and sang for Ramy Malik in Bohemian Rhapsody. The venue was the Uber Arena, which is an arena, duh, and also where all the biggest acts go. And it was pretty full… of people in their sixties, who in my row just sat lumpily in their chairs, occasionally lifting their phones to take a video and then quickly looked at the video to see if it actually worked. I’m sure the people who paid for standing room tickets were having a lovely time, but up by the nosebleeds, I found myself singing alone while the Olds looked grim and ready for their dinner. One or two obediently drank tall glasses of beer, like medicine. Anyway, it’s a bit odd to go for a cover band. It’s like really well-done karaoke. Or like you’re at a wedding. I enjoyed myself and knew all the songs, but there was a faint whiff of irony in the air which sort of spoiled it, because gigs are supposed to be about us, the fans, meeting them, our idols, and suspending all “too cool to be here” feelings. In fact, a gig should make you feel even more cool, because there you are being serenaded by an actual singer. Even Martel made several quips about, “Thanks for coming to listen to us singing someone else’s songs.”

We have been watching Slow Horses on Apple TV, just when I needed a new television show to get into. It’s very fun—for me and K, at least. Others are less into it.

A few weeks ago, we watched the animated film Flow at home, which is really quite a stressful film about the world being fully flooded, and the animals being the only survivors. A little black kitty is the hero, and he (or she? but since my own black cat is male, they are all males to me) gets on a boat with a group of animal friends, like a secretary bird and a capybara, but you know, as I’m telling you this, the movie sounds very cute and it’s really not twee at all. The animals act like animals, there’s no cuddling or licking—there are some dumb ass dogs, but the rest of them maintain a healthy distance. Anyway, Squishy came to cuddle as he often does when we’re on the sofa, and he was riveted by this movie. I’ve never seen a cat actively watch a film before, but since Flow is wordless, he didn’t need to listen to follow the action. He was particularly taken with the little black cat and when he (almost) drowns, Squishy was sitting forward in my lap, ears forward, his entire attention on the screen. I had to stroke him and calm us both down.. Squishy only paid attention to the cat scenes though, he got bored when the other animals got screen time, and fell asleep. I mentioned this on my Instagram stories saying it was a good movie to watch with your cat, and I think someone slid into my DMs saying, “And dogs!” but no, sadly, this is only a film for cats, dogs will either not enjoy the cat-centric action or will take offense to the film portraying them as oafs.

But they are generally quite intelligent animals, our cats. I mean human intelligence, not cat intelligent, which they also have, but I’m not sure how long Olga for instance, would last in the wild. However, if she’s under my feet while I’m making my dinner, and I say to her, in a reasonable tone, “Can you hang on for just a minute over there while I finish this and then I’ll feed you?” she gets it, and waits patiently. I’m not saying they speak English or anything, but I think they have a decent vocabulary and are very good at reading the tone of the room. I also feel very happy when we have a few people over for a meal and the cats come and hang out in the living room, being super social and just you know, being part of the party, instead of slinking off and hiding. (They only do this for groups of five and below, any more than that and they find it difficult to make small talk.) I feel it’s our excellent upbringing, but more likely than not, we just got lucky and found ourselves some extremely social unrelated kittens on the streets of Delhi. Quite a few of my friends are allergic, sadly, but they still like to come over and hang out, so I greet them at the door with an antihistamine.

More random posts like this one and my WORLD FAMOUS (well, people in India AND Germany read it) writing about mostly books but also sometimes other subjects.

This one actually needed no corrections! I made it last night, it goes:

A holiday morning

In the summer.

I play long

in the shadows

of the fire

Shall you

Me,

and my dangerous

Impulses

Meet

Sometime?

It’s a fun way to learn a new language. I can’t find the exact brand of this one, seems to be mysteriously absent on Google, but I’m sure just searching for magnetic poetry + language should lead you to a few.

• Speaking of, I have finally embraced AI. In a sense. I found this app, Superfluent, which lets you have voice conversations in different situations at different language levels and then corrects you live. It’s so good, I’m considering ponying up for the pro version. Nothing will replace a language school to teach you actual grammar and rules, but this is a good way to keep your hand in and practice, and you don’t feel so bad about being corrected because it’s literally a robot. Also it understands my accent quite well, which is always nice. This is from their About page: “We’re focused on more advanced learners, not beginners, and our goal is to help them reach true conversational fluency, not just learn their first hundred vocab words.
  For the small handful of people who know their CEFR levels by heart, that means we’re focused on helping A2 and B1-level learners reach the B2 and C1-levels.” Which is precisely what I need. It’s all very well knowing the rules of grammar and your first 100 words, but my goal is to be smart and funny in German as well, which FINE, is a lofty goal (who says I’m smart and funny in English already har de har har) but the problem with this city is that everyoneeeee speaks English when they figure out you’re a native English speaker which is WONDERFUL and why I’ve made so many friends but also v v bad for a lazy person like myself who doesn’t feel like doing a brain work out just to talk about what she’s been watching on television. Anyway despite this laziness, and this intermittent German learning, I’ve still gotten to a stage where I can make magnetic poetry make sense and also, FINE, order things for myself and talk about the weather and so on, which I think is impressive for someone who spoke exactly zero words five years ago. Imagine how good I’d be if I lived in a village somewhere and no one bothered to switch languages? Sigh. But then I’d have to live in a village, I s’pose. (Before I congratulate myself too much, many (German) people are still slightly disappointed at the speed of my learning and have said so.) German is no use to me in other parts of the world though, so I’m sort of wishing the lingua franca of Berlin was Spanish or something so at least I could travel with ease.

• I want to show you all the outfits I’ve been wearing to try and be fashionable and also warm, but it’s a lot of photos so maybe in a post of its own. I don’t mean fashionable like trendy or fashionable like look how sexy and/or elegant I look, I mean more like “this outfit pleases me.” It’s a creative effort, putting together clothes, and a nice low stakes one, unlike say, embarking on the second draft of your book. Sigh.

• Speaking of low stakes creative effort, we just got back into jigsaws, that pandemic pasttime. The dining table has been occupied by a large jigsaw showing the fantastic beasts of the world, a birthday present from K a few years ago, and now that we’re nearly done, I got jigsaw fomo and bought another, second hand, via eBay. (The new one is The World of Jane Austen which is a large map of houses and characters—so exciting! I used to have The World of Shakespeare which was also incredible.) (I’m so invested, I’m thinking of buying a jigsaw puzzle mat, the kind that folds over and stows away when you want to actually use your table. Instagram got wind of this and served me an ad for one at Temu, which actually looks really nice, should I do it?) How the small scale eBay here works (called eBay kleinanzeigen) is that people list their things, you chat, and you go over to collect. Very local. It’s also how we found our flat and a lot of our smaller appliances, TV, speakers, bookshelves etc. Yesterday, I was going to collect my puzzle from a man who lived in a large listed Soviet era building about two kilometres away. They all look like this.

  

And it’s exciting to go into one, because they look so gorgeous on the outside. The inside was nice too, old, with a small lift and long corridors. We couldn’t linger too long inside his foyer sadly, but we explored the back of the building sneakily. The gates had a motif celebrating German-Soviet partnership.

• We’ve been taking a lot of “menty health” walks these days, which is actually sort of lovely. Only you run out of urban exploration pretty fast when you do rounds of your hood, so we have to actively figure out new routes to keep things interesting. Since both K and I work from home, it’s easy to say around 5, “Come, let’s do a quick walk around the block.” It’s amazing how much you find to say to one another on a walk, even if you’ve been at home together all day. Someone asked me at this Diwali party, “What’s the secret to a happy marriage?” and it is impossible to answer that question without sounding very stuffy, but let me try again: it’s this sort of thing. Conscious time-spending, the way you would on holiday, except you can’t always be on holiday. Jigsaws and walks and what not. We stopped off for a pizza on the way home and then sat around on the sofa, watching Slow Horses. I’m trying to take more pictures so I took one of this electricity thingie which I’d like you to admire.

That’s all I’ve got! If you liked this post, or any of my others, please buy me a

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Have a great week!

xx

m

Who are you? Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writer of internet words (and other things) author of eight books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.

Follow me on Instagram. (Plus my book recommendation Instagram!) (Although I’m off Instagram these days, so really, this is the only place I come to chat.)

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(Previous editions, which I realise I have never linked before are here: January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August. We’re getting close to the end!)

Click on the post title to read the whole thing as Gmail might cut you off.

September was a nice month. Not much rain, which, after a super wet summer was very nice to have. The temperature dropped fast, so it was jacket weather sooner than I thought but nice jacket weather, crisp on your face and still warm on your body and I don’t have to wear my inners just yet, which is always a bonus because they might look very sleek but they still make me feel like the Michelin man. October has come in with leaves dropping and a rainy week, but we’ve had some golden days too. I feel Berlin was made for the winter. It’s a beautiful city in the summer (when it doesn’t rain). All those endless nights, a certain smell in the air, baking in the park on your picnic blanket, reading a book, cycling wherever you want to go, you’re never in a hurry in the summer. But it still feels a little put on. Like this isn’t the real city. The real city happens now, as it gets colder. There’s a buzz, an energy that’s missing in the lazy days. People look grumpier, yes (not as grumpy as they’re going to look next month but it’s already begun) but they walk with purpose. I like autumn. It has a back-to-school, librarian vibe. It’s red wine weather, cozy throws, bad television and on my Kindle, the complete Miss Marple, which I might just write about separately to these recaps.

Anyway! On to the books!

If you read anything from these lists, read these

• The Town House by Norah Lofts: Holy crap, why has no one told me about Norah Lofts before? Why did it take an INTERVIEW which I had to SEARCH FOR with Alison Weir, author of some of my favourite Tudor novels, to bring me to Norah Lofts’ forgotten door? When I tell you I adored this, I mean I began with some bewilderment, not knowing if I’d like it, and then I found myself both reading fast, because I was so invested, and also slowing myself down because then it would be over. This is part one of a three book series, loosely related because it shows the history of a family through the history of the house. Part one, this one, starts with a serf, who manages to break free which reminded me uncomfortably of the caste system in India, which only made the stakes even higher. I bought books 2 and 3 swiftly on my usual website for used books, but I have been holding back on reading them. However, since I’ve hit a reading slump this past week and am unable to settle down to anything, I think it’s time to blaze through the next two as well. Norah Lofts is dead, alas, but she has a massive backlist which I’m going to go through with great delight.

(Interrupting my flow, because just as I posted the link to the Alison Weir interview I noticed a small piece on the side saying that Jilly Cooper has died suddenly today, which is very sad. (That is, October 6, when I’m writing this.) This is a good time to mention that I’m extremely attached to her—was extremely? oh no—on the strength of a single book, not one of her novels but a diary she kept of dog walking on Putney Commons. I’ve read it over and over again, I love it so much. You must read it too. RIP Jilly. May you live long in memory.)

• Leonard and Hungry Paul by Ronan Hession: This is the sort of book you feel like you’ve “discovered” on your own when you see it in the library. (Untrue, I had come to it via the newsletter of a small British bookshop, a link to which I can’t find, because I can’t remember the name. Was it Aldergate? Something. If you follow me on Notes, the Substack app, I’ll post a link there when I remember.) It’s just gentle low stakes not much plot and the cover, let’s be honest, is kind of terrible and somehow, this book you’ve discovered and love and think no one else has read has 17,018 ratings on Goodreads and reviews all over the shop. I mean, it’s really good, and perhaps some of the publicity is this view that somehow you’re “discovering” something, you know? Everything is so splashy these days that to stumble across a book that feels forgotten is almost magical. But it turns out, it’s doing pretty well, which is perhaps because the author is a famous musician in Ireland and also the book is going to be adapted into a BBC series. None of which takes away from the fact that it’s genuinely a good book about two nice people: Leonard and Hungry Paul, lonely men, a little adrift from life, but essentially gentle and kind. It’s a lovely book about friendship and relationships but without descending into twee like what I find Frederik Backman’s books do. I hate books that are manipulative in that sort of way, like where I can see the strings. Leonard and Hungry Paul works precisely because it isn’t.

• The Stand by Stephen King: I first read The Stand, all 1500 pages of it, back in 2017, when I enjoyed it but thought “wow a respiratory virus that kills half of the population? That is SO unlikely, Stephen.”

Reading this book is 2025, however, is reading it as the horror novel it is. The entire first third of the book is dedicated to how the virus spread, and my god, I read it with one hand over my mouth. I couldn’t even read it that fast because my stomach started churning—literally! I had to put the book down and look at soothing things on Instagram! Which backfired because my algorithm is full of pro-Palestine images and text! As it should be because of the people I follow! But it doesn’t help at all in soothing one’s stomach!—anyway, you know those haunted houses that will scare the crap out of you but that you want to go into anyway? No? But persist, because once the first third is over the second third is a lovely if stressful description of how everyone reaches their designated destinations, because this is King, there’s a force for good and a force for evil, both playing out in people’s dreams and you walk towards whichever one compels you more. I think everyone should read it so we can discuss. Here’s one question that always baffles me in these post apocalyptic situations: why does the power always go out? Surely if everyone’s dead, then no one uses the electricity and it should keep running merrily without anyone to turn it off?

And once you’re done with those, you could consider reading these too

• Never Flinch by Stephen King: That’s right, a double Stephen month! This is his latest and continues the adventures of Holly Gibney, a Miss Marple-esque character who runs a detective agency which often butts up against the supernatural. We first meet Holly in the Finders Keepers series, where she’s a sidekick to the main detective and she really gets her best outing in The Outsider which is a CREEPY bit of detective fiction. A nice book, a good continuing of the series, which you should read in order. (Unlike She Who Must Not Be Named’s latest tome which I read, but didn’t log, because I’d rather draw the curtain over it. It was quite bad, plot wise, character wise, and it’s not just me, most of the subreddit dedicated to the lead character feels the same way. Time to give up on this romance novel series which is nominally about murder?)

• Marble House Murders by Anthony Horowitz: Another sequel, this time to his series about a books editor who keeps getting caught up in murderrrrrr. Good, if you like escapist stuff set in London in the publishing world (which I do.)

• Perfect Remains by Helen Fields: The first of a new series I enjoyed about a French Scottish disgraced detective who moves to Scotland and has about one serial killer per book. Scotland seems like a very unsafe place if you think about it through the eyes of this book. I’m always looking for more detective stories so this one scratched the itch nicely but spoiler: the others weren’t as good.

• This Book Will Bury Me by Ashley Winstead: Which is a novel about the very real University of Idaho killings set in the world of online true crime sleuths. Very good.

• Blame by Michelle Huneven: I loved her novel Search which I wrote about here

Blame isn’t quite as good but still immersive. It’s mainly an alcoholic’s story, she accidentally kills two people and then spends her life atoning. For all that, it’s beautifully done, and a lovely slow read. I realise I like Huneven’s style a lot, so I’m actively hunting out her backlist.

• The Birthday Boys by Beryl Bainbridge: For our round-the-world book club we read this, set in the South Pole, detailing Scott’s doomed voyage. A slim, sad book, moving along in time and between characters. I really loved it, I think it was my favourite of what we’ve read so far. But I happen to like icy Polar books, they make me feel warm and cozy and glad to be alive.

• Voices in Summer by Rosamunde Pilcher: As I’ve said before, you either already know Pilcher or you don’t, if you do, this is a nice one on her back list, if you don’t, start with Coming Home but get to this one eventually.

• The Family From One End Street by Eve Garnett: Only logged this zillion times re-read because I want to tell you that it’s one of the BEST books about a large working class family in England in the ‘50s you’ve ever read and you must get it for your nearest child—especially if that child is still alive in you.

Feel free to skip these

• So Thrilled For You by Holly Bourne: A baby shower, four friends in different stages of baby-dom. Rather nicely done on the child free friend, not making her a villain as per uzh, but I didn’t buy the friendship between these women who seem to actively hate each other.

• Don’t Let Him In by Lisa Jewell: Eh. Very Tinder-Swindler. One day I’ll tell you the story of a con man who entered my life once, that’s more interesting than this book.

• The Crash by Freida McFadden: Honestly, do not get the hype.

When I wasn’t reading

Do I remember all the things I did culturally in September which weren’t just “Went to a bar”? Luckily, I put most things in my Google Calendar.

Sammlung Hoffman which I mentioned in my last post about the mehnaissance.

Not entirely fair to Sammlung Hoffman though, which is an experience I enjoyed. Once a week, on Saturdays, the owner of the collection and the house (in which the family lives) is open to guided tours both in English and German. Every month, she changes the theme so she can cycle through her massive collection. We were lucky enough to catch the last of these installations as she’s retiring and her daughter is taking over. Cool stuff, full of artists I’ve never heard of before and I was happy to get a chance to explore.

Trauma debate event was part of Berlin Art Week, an event in a converted church. There were four debaters on stage in teams of two and they had to switch positions at the halfway mark. The proposition was: should art be commercial and afterwards, discussing it with people we found ourselves at a bar table with, we found we couldn’t come to a conclusion. The event was quite odd, because it included a warm up and cool down by Berlin’s only American football team? I guess to draw the comparison between competition in sport and in the arts. Quite odd, quite Berlin.

Book launch Irawati Karve biography was a discussion and reading of a bio published by Speaking Tiger, written and presented by her granddaughter. She (Karve) spent several years studying in Berlin and as I’d used Yuganta as one of the texts I referenced for my Girls of The Mahabharata series, I was interested in what her life was like. Afterwards we went out far too late to a gay bar round the corner, making me feel about as old as Karve would be in 2025.

My Kingdom for a Joke, a play recommended by an actor friend was a sort of meta commentary on jokes and comedy. We really enjoyed it, K and I. I liked how they dragged out each punchline, from the actor farting into the mic (with her armpit) for ages, while the other one did a dance on the stage, to the actor who did a bit about the Church of Satan. Each “bit” lasted longer than was comfortable, which I think was the point. Very enjoyable.

And that’s all she wrote! Buy me a coffee if you liked this post or any of my others.

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xx

m

Who are you? Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writer of internet words (and other things) author of eight books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.

Follow me on Instagram. (Plus my book recommendation Instagram!) (Although I’m off Instagram these days, so really, this is the only place I come to chat.)

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Let’s take literature as the first example, since that’s my particular area of expertise. In 2012, a mere thirteen years ago, the book that spent the longest time on the bestseller list was Fifty Shades of Grey. People went apeshit for this story of.. I want to say her name was Anastasia? An innocent college student, who gets drawn into a relationship with billionaire Christian Grey, who happens to have a fetish for whips and chains, and also has what he calls a Red Room of Pain. Anyway, love story with whips. Fifty Shades is empirically not good literature, and also not a new idea, being based on Twilight fan fiction and also BDSM smut which you can find in abundance online both in text and video form. People who don’t read were reading it and congratulating themselves for getting through the most popular book of the year, and I’m not trying to be snobby about it, but I do believe that’s when our standards collectively dropped.

Of course, you’ll say, but what do bestseller lists have to do with actual good books. It’s not fair to judge standards by the NYT Bestseller list, let’s have a look at the Booker longlists for the years following. Okay, I looked. Now most of you know I’m a power reader. I read, and I read and I read. I read obscure books and popular books and books one guy mentioned one time in an interview behind a paywall which I managed to get access to, and books that someone who is someone else’s favourite author said they couldn’t stop reading over Christmas 2015, so it’s unlikely that most popular books from the preceding years have skipped me. I even read Fifty Shades of Grey! (The book everyone was talking about in 2013’s bestseller list was Gone Girl with the famous Cool Girl passage and the sneaky twist, and while it is a good thriller, I don’t think it should have been the only book people read.) I haven’t read a SINGLE book on the 2013 Booker Longlist. I began the winner: The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton and couldn’t finish and of course, a new Jhumpa Lahiri is an event in India, but I can’t remember anything about the plot of The Lowland, which was also on the longlist that year I realised just now. 2014, ditto.

Roddy Doyle, who is on this year’s Booker jury—along with Sarah Jessica Parker, which by the way, no shade to SJP, she is a brilliant actor and I’m sure she reads, but COME ON. This is such a deliberate bid to make the Booker fashionable or Instagrammable, which it never used to need by the way. It used to be a very prestigious and cool award and the book longlist used to be my wishlist every year for my birthday, and it is still my goal to win one one day, because that’s what I grew up idolising. I was going to say re: Roddy Doyle though. He just gave an interview at the Southbank Centre in London where he said “that many of the 153 novels submitted for this year’s prestigious award were a waste of his time and that he and his fellow judges had often wondered “why we had been asked to read” them. I can only imagine what he really said behind the scenes.”

The author of the article, Johanna Thomas-Corr, the chief literary critic for The Times and The Sunday Times goes on to say:

However, Doyle’s comments do also reflect a deeper issue with the fiction market. It’s been thin scrapings in 2025. Take this autumn. After years of women dominating literary fiction, we’re seeing fewer big-name female authors publish fiction, with many of them — Anne Enright, Arundhati Roy, Margaret Atwood, Sarah Perry, Zadie Smith — turning instead to non-fiction and essays. There’s nothing wrong with that and it could also just be a weird blip.

But I would say that the novels that have been published between last autumn and this September have not inspired much excitement in me or my colleagues. We’ve often stood in our poky book cupboard, scratching our heads. Are all the good novels buried underneath the fat history books (perfectly possible, you should see the state of it in there)? “There’s nothing!” we’ll wail. When we were trying to predict the Booker longlist we struggled to come up with even 10 of the necessary 13.

Recently it’s been a case of the cupboard really is bare. After years of literary editors and critics complaining that too many books are being published, some corners of the publishing world have — possibly — taken our advice to heart. Meanwhile, there’s plenty of derivative, celebrity-authored cosy crime, as well as romance, fantasy and their hybrid, romantasy, dominating the bestseller charts.

The bigger issue is that publishing houses seem to be pouring much of their energy and resources into the commercial divisions that produce these mass-market books in the hope they will get BookTok hits. And while the BookTok crowds are swelling in number, reading has slumped among most age demographics. We are clearly in a reading crisis.

In this climate literary fiction is increasingly neglected or made to sing loud for its supper. In a romantasy world of dragons and fairies, it is seen as Cinderella in need of a prince. You could say that the lighter commercial hits help to fund the harder, meatier fiction. But for more than a year I’ve been hearing from top book agents that this is the toughest environment in which to sell a literary novel they have known. This isn’t just the usual grousing, it’s agonised panic. There seems to be a crisis of confidence about how literary fiction is sold without the kind of searchable tropes #enemiestolovers or #cunningfemmefatale that helps genre fiction to connect to its audience. Publishers are frightened to take risks because they can’t see how a book will find its reader.

(Which as a writer of literary fiction is terrifying to hear, but let’s put aside my own existential crises for the moment.)

We are in the middle of a mehnaissance.

Everything is meh—books, film, tv, art. Things that are trying not to be meh often are terrible because their only motivation is to be Not Meh and that’s not a good enough reason if you ask me.

I have been going to quite a few contemporary art exhibitions here in Berlin and the state of the modern art world is leaving me quite cold. As compared to classical art, which I’ve also seen a lot of, since I’ve been travelling so much and hitting up the major museums in big European capitals. Classical art makes you either feel things or enjoy looking at them for a long time, which should be the purpose of a painting or a sculpture. What are they for if not for a) enjoyment and b) making a statement? So often contemporary art ignores a for b and in doing so, doesn’t manage to make a statement at all. The other weekend we went to Sammlung Hoffman which is this private collector’s house, she throws it open to visitors every Saturday and you take a guided tour through the stuff she’s collected. Only, she’s bought so much art, that most of it is in storage so you only see what she’s selected for that particular month. And if you’re looking at say six close up photographs of a river, quite unremarkable except they’re hanging on a wall, without the tour guide’s excited voice, would you be interested at all in what you’re seeing? Does art exist outside rich and important people wanting to own it and put it in their own storehouses? Does art have any value if no one wants to buy it? Someone I met at an event was telling me about an exhibition she went to where you had to enter without your shoes onto a pink furred carpet. The whole exhibition was videos of a vaginal ultrasound the artist had accompanied by the sound of her heartbeat piped through speakers. What was the point, I asked her and she shrugged. Last year we went for an exhibition at a famous club turned event space, a massive warehouse with really cool interiors. The exhibition had something to do with physics? But not really, because every piece we saw seemed designed only to be photographed by your cellphone and posted to Instagram. I have this same feeling when I see cheeky words across a map, for eg, the words No More Gentrification across a map of London, propped up in a gallery window lit by an artful spotlight. People pause, take its photo and move on. The point is we all consume art all the time on our phones, and if it’s not on our tiny screens then it may as well not exist. Literary criticism has been overtaken by BookTok, even film criticism exists on Letterboxd, Goodreads ratings are the ultimate in whether a book is good or not.

What our phones have killed, more than our attention spans, is what artists are bringing out. We’re so terrified of AI that we’ve forgotten to look at the closer danger, what happens when every TV show is designed to be watched with a phone in our hands, when every book has short sentences and a basic plot, when every movie is trying to be the next Marvel cinematic universe thing? I watched the Barbie movie on a flight and was distinctly unmoved. Was this what people were going on about? This Feminism 101 that somehow was supposed to speak truth to power? Movies I like these days are only because they’re unexpected, something happens that I can’t predict. (Like Sirat, which is not a perfect film but held my attention from beginning to end which I realise is all I’m looking for in a movie these days.)

I’m not surprised that a lot of trends I’m seeing are harking back to the past. Thanks to Netflix and Prime acquiring back catalogues of things, Gen Z, who weren’t of TV watching age in the glorious 90s have discovered Sex And The City for the first time. People are watching Gilmore Girls, people are watching The Office and Friends. We had a brief Golden Age of Television, when Mad Men and Breaking Bad and The Americans and True Detective came out, all glorious watchable event TV shows, and then we have now, 2025, The Residence (which I started but couldn’t get into because it felt too… trying to be clever) or The Girlfriend (which I actually binge watched but it’s not great TV, just a nice playing off of the two female leads against each other) or one of the many variants of Love is Blind. In twenty years from now, when Gen Beta or whoever is looking for nostalgia television, I can guarantee they will skip past our current age and go straight back into the arms of Friends, which was yes, just another comedy about friends living in a big city (another sort of show they don’t make anymore) but it had heart and it felt real.

I’ve started talking about slightly obscure books on my Instagram now. (WELL, I made ONE video but I have plans for more!) I realised almost all my reading choices were books published years ago. I went to the bookstore the other day, K’s mum had given me a voucher for my last birthday which I have to spend by December, and each time, I struggle with what I want to buy, never managing to use up the whole voucher on one trip. (I wound up with a Hilary Mantel novel set during the French Revolution and Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower.) The new books don’t appeal to me, I don’t have to own them as I used to want to. I get them from the library or on my e-reader, and most of the books I’ve loved this year are very old and the authors are mostly all dead. There are many living authors I love, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve read almost everything they’ve put out and have now run out. Meanwhile Penguin Random House publishes 15000 (FIFTEEN THOUSAND) new print books every year, Harper Collins publishes 10,000 and Hachette another 10,000. That’s only three out of the Big Five publishers (the other two are Simon & Schuster and Macmillan). That’s not counting the indie publishers and all the self published books. And I’ve still run out of the living authors I love. Books are not coming to my attention. Books that do come to my attention sometimes do not hold it. The big books of the year are more often than not debut fiction so there’s no backlist.

The renaissance didn’t last forever and it’s unlikely the mehnaissance will either. What it will do, however, is have a lasting impact on future art and artists. There’s no getting away from our phones now, they’re here to stay, no one will give them up. The only way to fix this is to replace them with things that might hold our interest for longer. I feel very lucky that I was born in the ‘80s so I was able to develop a reading instinct which led to a writing one. If I’d been born even ten years later, I’m not sure books would have stood a chance in my life against everything else fighting to be number one in my life. It’s so easy to zone out in front of the TV, mindlessly swapping through apps while something plays in the background. I’m so tired by the end of the day, why would I fight it if I didn’t already have a robust reading habit built it?

Nope. I probably wouldn’t. I still watch way too much TV and I think books are more interesting than almost anything else. I still spend too much time on my phone, especially when my mind is not occupied.

But look, this is not a “put down your phone!” rant. This is just a state of the nation address. That’s why everything feels mid. That’s why you’re not excited about the Booker prize or the Academy Awards. The mehnaissance is here and it’s settled in and now we just have to wait it out and see what stands the test of time.

I finished the first draft of my novel and light is at the end of the tunnel! Buy me a coffee so I can celebrate :) (And also write more things for you, as un-meh as I can make them.)

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I’m not proof reading this so shout at me about typos and bad arguments in the comments section.

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Have a great week! Let me know if you’ve watched/read something nice.

x

m

Who are you? Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writer of internet words (and other things) author of eight books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.

Follow me on Instagram. (Plus my book recommendation Instagram!)

Forward to your friends if you liked this and to the living breathing entity that is your cellphone if you didn’t.

Also, write back to me! I love to hear from you.

So that’s the most fun I had in August, back from my holiday. Some friends visited for a weekend and we walked them round town for ages, stopping off, at one point, at the Berghain entry queue on Sunday morning, to see who got accepted and who got turned away. Not much in terms of culture except for one excellent movie which I will talk about a little lower down.

Also I continue doing my fun travel guide for Europe over at Splainer, which I forgot to link to last time, so have two in one: here’s my guide to the Spanish coast (amaze!) and to Warsaw (even more amaze!)

On to the books! Since I was travelling for the first half of August, I read more and more deeply as well. No bad books at all this month, which is incredible. I overshot my reading challenge of 105 books last month, and am now at 120, so I’ve upped the challenge to 150 to be finished by the end of the year. I would’ve made it 200, but now that the lazy days of summer are over, who knows how much reading time I’ll get?

And, in case you missed it, here’s what I did on my summer vacation.

Best Books I Read in August

• The Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Arnim: Technically a re-read, but I didn’t remember the plot at all, so I was glad to have a fresh look. Since I was in Italy, I thought I’d read about a woman going for a holiday to Italy, which this small novella offers. Mrs Wilkins is cold in England and bullied by her husband, so when she sees an ad for a house to rent in Portofino, she teams up with another lady to rent it out. They’ll afford it if they invite two others as well. Mrs Wilkins is classic manic pixie dream girl (woman?) which could get a little irritating and sometimes does, but the book is so funny and swift and the ends tie up beautifully, and Portofino is perfectly evoked, so I found the book warm and light, like the best kind of dessert.

• Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann: I was obsessed with this book as a teenager, after I found a worn and tattered copy at the Sunday book bazaar in Delhi. So worn was my copy that I lost the last four pages several years ago and never remembered what happened to the characters in the end. WELL, of all the gin joints in the all the world, it turned out that a copy of this was waiting for me at the Oxfam bookstore in Munich of all places so I spent a pleasant time in old Hollywood with pills and Broadway stars while lounging around in my hammock. When I posted a picture of the book jacket on Instagram I got tons of messages from other readers who also remembered it fondly. Happy to tell you that it holds up. It’s still dissolute trash of course, but uff, it goes down as easily as the pills all the characters wind up addicted to. Not at all feminist, but somehow in every bookish teen’s library.

• Beauty by Robin McKinley: This is a YA retelling of the story of Beauty and the Beast, and when I tell you I loved it, this is how much: I read it in a day and a half, staying up way past my bedtime to read “just one more chapter,” I walked around all day singing the only two lines from the Disney movie I remembered: tale as old as time/beauty and the beaaaast. You know the story: a merchant has three daughters, the youngest is special, she asks him for a rose when he’s travelling while the others are mean and greedy and ask for jewels, he picks her a perfect rose, but it’s stolen from a man who has been enchanted to live as an animal, in exchange for the rose, the Beast demands the merchant’s daughter as payment. She goes to live with him and finds him gentle and cultured. Soon, she loves him despite his appearance and his beastly form is lifted, the spell is broken. This is that story, sort of, except, in a nice twist, Beauty’s sisters are also good people, everyone is a little bit flawed, the enchanted castle is just as lovely. The story wraps up in a fairy tale way, which is my only complaint, I’d have liked a little more pushback from Beauty, but you know, can’t have everything.

• Larry’s Party by Carol Shields: A new-to-me book by a favourite author. I love Carol Shields’ quiet books that reveal so much while taking a microscope to someone’s life. She did it very well in The Stone Diaries, and Larry’s Party is sort of the masculine inversion of that, interlinked stories set over the titular Larry’s lifetime. There’s all sorts of themes, from Larry’s work to Larry’s loves and even Larry’s penis. You grow to know Larry, and through the knowing, love him.

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Good books I read in August

• All That Man Is by David Szalay: Continuing both my Szalay kick and my reading novels with male narrators kick—would it surprise you very much to learn the protagonist of my new book is also a man?--I found this at my favourite second hand bookstore/coffee shop. I remember having a copy on my shelves in Delhi for YEARS and I never finished it, so now I have two. I could very much see the origins of Flesh, a book I raved about last month, coming from this one. After a while though, unlike Flesh, which stuck with a single narrator, all the narrators here began to merge. However, I very much enjoy the interlinked short story format, and one of the stories was set on a super yacht, and immediately after, I came across a New Yorker article about people who own super yachts, so I fell down a fun rabbithole for a while.

• The Compound by Aisling Rawle: I tend to avoid buzzy “book of the moments” because so often I feel the hype blinds us to the merits or demerits of the story on the whole. However, I was so curious about this one that I got it before my usual period of a year to five years to let the book simmer and sit in its own juices. It’s set in this future dystopia where there is a dating show, sort of Love Island-esque, men and women in an isolated villa and they have to pair up and they’re constantly being filmed and there are daily challenges you have to play to get stuff. But, told entirely from the point of view of one of the contestants, it’s that and it’s also deeply disturbing at the same time. As a commentary on dating shows and also late stage capitalism, it’s terrific. But I felt it might’ve done better as one in a collection of short stories around the same theme instead of being stretched into a whole novel. Also reminded me of UnREAL, a favourite TV show, which, if you have a VPN and an active Netflix account, you can watch in the USA.

• Bring The House Down by Charlotte Runcie: Having already broken my rule for The Compound, I then did it for this one (and the next and the next) on this list, which isn’t receiving quite as much press but still has a premise close to my heart. A theatre critic gives a show at the Edinburgh Fringe a one-star review, but the review is only published after he sleeps with the woman whose show it is. She then takes revenge by turning this experience into another show, the critic is cancelled, press is high, and the whole thing is told from the point of view of the critic’s colleague, a woman you can’t quite trust. Quite a ride and very propulsive in a cringe-fest sort of way which I adore but the reason it’s in my good books and not best books section is that I was dissatisfied with the final third of the book, a bit of a whimper after all that excitement.

• The Names by Florence Knapp: This book, a Sliding Doors style set of parallel narratives, has gotten SO many good reviews since it came out in May I didn’t even have to look up the name of the author. Nicely done, it covers what happens to one man if he was named three different things: Bear, as his sister chose, Julian as his mother wanted or Gordon, after his violent and abusive father. The story does cover domestic violence in detail, but my problem was that the whole propulsion of the plot hinged on the violent father. So once he was dealt with, I didn’t care much for the characters. Sigh. Maybe this is why I should always listen to my instincts and let popular books breathe. It reminded me though that I loved Paul Auster’s 4321 and that I should re-read my copy of that.

• Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley: This was described to me as this year’s version of Tomorrow And Tomorrow And Tomorrow, and I guess it’s similar-ish? Also features a male-female friendship, also screwed up. But I think it’s less charming than Tomorrow etc because the main character, our narrator, is a music critic who is so unlikeable and yet the author is trying to sell us on her being only “quirky” that it’s a little hard to read. I mean, I’m all for terrible women and terrible narrators and I don’t have to go for a drink with every woman POV character but can we just let them be nasty little whining bitches then? On the other hand, it had some good thoughts on music and a matching Spotify playlist so I’m bumping it up my list.

• Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan: A Very French Novella for my Around The World Book Club. This book should be wearing a striped boat-neck shirt and wearing a beret and smoking Gauloises. This book should be pouting and shrugging its shoulders when it doesn’t like what you said. This book is all steamy 1950s French feminism which is odd to read from 2025 but still an EXPERIENCE.

Average Books I read in August

• The Good Lie by AL Torre: So little did this book register with me that even after I looked it up and re-read the blurb, I can’t quite remember how it ended.

• Saints for All Occasions by J Courtney Sullivan: I’ve read other books by this author before and enjoyed them, but this one left me limp.

• Victoria Line, Central Line by Maeve Binchy: Another find at the Munich Oxfam! But Binchy’s skill is going deep into her character’s minds and lives which she can’t do in a collection of short stories. However, I liked the format of this, each character lives in a different part of London all set along the tube stops.

• Table for One by Emma Gannon: I like women who become suddenly single learning how to live lives alone narratives as much as the next person but why do they all become such horrible friends suddenly?

And those are my books for August! What have you been reading?

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I promised you a good movie recommendation and it is Sirat, the story of an end-of-the-world event where a father looking for his daughter falls in with a bunch of itinerant party-goers and travels across the Moroccan desert with them looking for the next rave. It’s truly harrowing and I can’t stop thinking about it.

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Who are you? Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writer of internet words (and other things) author of eight books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.

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