![]() Dewdrops are short, sweet, selfless, and delicate, while banyan tree depicts shadow, long spells of life, power, and authority. My personal favorite is the titular poem: Dewdrop and Banyan Tree that talks about two aspects of life – delicacy and being strong. He is of the opinion, in many poems, that we humans have defiled the earth that may push the upcoming generations into the tunnel of darkness.Īlso some of the poems are translation of Malayalam poems written by his mother, which is a unique way to pay tribute to her. ![]() One thing that I found strongly in this lovely book is that the poet misses his past life of youth and childhood, and he is equally concerned about the future of his grandson. On a pros note, the book has that undercurrent of optimism and positivity. On offer are 50 short poems on life lessons, memories, nostalgia, tribute to parents, motherly love, vagaries of life, and Covid pandemic. This book is straight, meaningful, enjoyable and extremely lucid and delicate within its language flow. ![]() ![]() Ramachandran Rajasekharan’s debut book of poetry, Dewdrop and Banyan Tree finely expresses its concern and raises voice that echoes within the heart of the poet. Rightly said in the beginning, poetry is the finest form of literature. ![]()
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![]() ![]() The sheer secrecy of the event is astonishing to modern readers. Not even the vice-president knew of operation, and the truth of the affair was not confirmed until nearly 25 years later. What’s astonishing about this story is not so much the event but the unlikeliness of such a thing happening in 2011 - those who knew about Cleveland’s surgery were limited to perhaps a dozen people. Upon discovering the growth of a cancerous tumor in his mouth, the president arranged for a secret surgery to take place upon a yacht, away from prying journalists and scheming politicians. The President is a Sick Man is nominally concerned with a small, covert event that happened during Grover Cleveland’s second administration. It’s enough to make previous eras, eras when the public didn’t know every last detail about their leaders, somewhat quaint. ![]() Nothing is forgotten in the digital age, and so we have grainy videos and out-of-context statements from decades prior being used during campaigns as ammunition against the other side. In this day and age, where politicians are expected to have a presence on YouTube and Twitter as well as Capitol Hill, we’ve become accustomed to being over-saturated with meaningless news about our leaders. ![]() ![]() ![]() With all the fun and camp of a drag show (of which this novel features more than one) but grounded in the tenderness of first love, this time-slip rom-com is an absolute delight. Together with her found family of queer misfits, August sets out to save Jane and find herself. Worse, she’s stuck on the bizarrely malfunctioning Q line, doomed to ride the Subway forever in an amnesiac’s fog-unless August can find a way to rescue her. McQuiston’s joyful sophomore romp mixes all the elements that made Red, White & Royal Blue so. Jane’s circumstances are also far from ordinary: she’s from the 1970s, displaced in time by a mysterious event. Griffin, 16.99 trade paper (432p) ISBN 978-1-250-24-449-9. Description : From the New York Times bestselling author of Red, White & Royal Blue comes a new. But before long she finds herself falling for Jane Su, a punk lesbian she sees everyday on her commute. She is, as her new roommate puts it, “a reformed girl detective,” and she’s jaded and bitter enough to earn the title. At 23, August Landry moves to Brooklyn with few belongings but heaps of emotional baggage from a childhood spent helping her conspiracy theorist mother work to track down a long-missing relative. McQuiston’s joyful sophomore romp mixes all the elements that made Red, White & Royal Blue so outstanding-quirky characters, coming-of-age confusion, laugh-out-loud narration, and hilarious pop-cultural references (“Bella Swan, eat your horny little Mormon heart out”)-into something totally its own. ![]() ![]() During practice, Spud meets Amanda, a girl from the nearby school St. He ends up landing the lead role of Oliver. ![]() Spud decides to audition so he can fit in. While back at home for the holidays, Spud falls in love with Debbie, the daughter of one of his mother's friends, whom he nicknames "The Mermaid." When Spud returns to the school, he sees a flyer for the school play Oliver Twist. But Spud soon realises that Edly has marital problems, and is an alcoholic. The Guv frequently lends English literature books to Spud and invites him to lunch regularly. He befriends Mr Edly, a teacher nicknamed "The Guv", after he is the only one in the English class to pass an exam. ![]() Spud finds it difficult to make friends and fit in. All eight boys in his dormitory get nicknames. ![]() When John arrives for the first time at the school, he gets nicknamed "Spud" by the other boys because he has yet to experience puberty. In 1990s South Africa, fourteen-year-old John Milton ( Troye Sivan) spends his first year at an elite boarding school for boys. It was released in South Africa on 3 December 2010. The film stars Troye Sivan as the title character, alongside John Cleese, Jason Cope and Tanit Phoenix. ![]() Spud is a 2010 South African comedy-drama film written and directed by Donovan Marsh, based on the novel of the same name by John van de Ruit. ![]() ![]() Read Riley’s review of John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band - The Ultimate Collectionand Johannes Brahms: Piano Concertos. “This recording begs new questions: how much of the heavy, molten Brahms we’re accustomed to came from the industrial scale of instruments he never wrote for? When we encounter this new Brahms, this more original and detail-oriented line writing provides new appreciation for the originality of his voice and a more relaxed conversation with history. “ In “Born-Again Brahms,” Riley takes on Hungarian-British pianist Andras Schiff’s recording of Brahms concertos on period-appropriate instruments. ![]() This makes it the most unconventional of rock classics: not swift, digestible and expedient pop, but burdened, dense, difficult, and hard to fathom even fifty years on…” “The songs’ irreducible simplicity masked oceans of complicated feelings expressed with utmost economy, impossible to grasp in a single hearing. In “White-Knuckling It: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band - The Ultimate Collection,” Riley reviews the 50th anniversary reissue of Lennon’s debut solo album. In his commanding new book, the eminent NPR critic Tim Riley takes us on the remarkable journey that brought a Liverpool art student from a disastrous childhood. ![]() ![]() ![]() Journalism Associate Professor Tim Riley has two reviews out in Copper Magazine. ![]() ![]() ![]() … love is regarded as the best and most beautiful thing that a human being can give and experience, and it is supposed to make us capable of the greatest and highest that we can achieve.Īnd I rethink the relationship I’m in now, and I wonder if that’s true. ![]() Halfway through the book, I was almost forced to examine the different relationships I’ve had in my life, and see them from a completely different perspective.ĭo we need love in our lives? And is this love really what we think it is? But I don’t think about it, not in a navel-gazing way anyway. I’ve never read Süskind before this, though I’ve been meaning to track down Perfume for quite some time now, and after reading this little thing, I’m convinced that I need to put more effort in getting the book somehow. You see, despite this being an essay of sorts, it read like a jigsaw puzzle of little nuggets of stories, all fitting together just nicely. So thin in fact that I finished it in one go, and nearly didn’t know what hit me when I was done. ![]() The less we think about it, the more self-evident it seems, but if we begin reflecting on the subject we find ourselves in deep trouble. What St Augustine says of time is equally true of love. ![]() ![]() ![]() Shadow Scale, however, is a bit more ambitious, and that’s a problem. Seraphina had a pretty trite plot, but it was neat and well-formed and moved the action on – that’s why pretty trite plots are used, and why they become clichés. There are also some really effective elements here – particularly the oozing menace of mind control.Īnd yet, Shadow Scale isn’t as good as Seraphina, in my opinion, and seemingly in that of others too. As she is, I suppose for finding the only vaguely acceptable solution to the irritating love triangle element, even if she doesn’t handle it particularly well. It’s also really striking in just how much it diverges from the first book, into something really quite unexpected, and the author is to be congratulated for that courage. In fact, looking at it sensibly, Shadow Scale is clearly a more ambitious and more complicated novel. ![]() ![]() And also, to be fair, the incredibly creepiness of the romance has been toned down too, mostly by keeping the love interest off screen and silent as much as possible. Most of what was bad about Seraphina is still bad about Shadow Scale, though thankfully the valorised self-harm body-image thread has been set to one side. Most of what was good about Seraphina is still good about Shadow Scale. It was a fresh, attractively written novel, albeit one with some real irritations about it. ![]() I read the first novel in this duology, Seraphina, and rather liked it, despite myself. ![]() ![]() ![]() And if she doesn’t face them head on, she might not survive to tell the tale.įrom Hugo Award–winning author Ursula Vernon, writing as T. That would be horrific enough, but there’s more-Mouse stumbles across her step-grandfather’s journal, which at first seems to be filled with nonsensical rants…until Mouse encounters some of the terrifying things he described for herself.Īlone in the woods with her dog, Mouse finds herself face to face with a series of impossible terrors-because sometimes the things that go bump in the night are real, and they’re looking for you. Grandma was a hoarder, and her house is stuffed with useless rubbish. After all, how bad could it be?Īnswer: pretty bad. ![]() ![]() When Mouse’s dad asks her to clean out her dead grandmother's house, she says yes. When a young woman clears out her deceased grandmother’s home in rural North Carolina, she finds long-hidden secrets about a strange colony of beings in the woods in this chilling novel that reads like The Blair Witch Project meets The Andy Griffith Show. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The turbulent multicultural nature of this world - so like our own - is apparent from the book’s opening: On a foggy morning in Rohatyn, a backwater market town in Lesser Poland, a priest arrives seeking new books, offering in exchange his own, the encyclopedia “New Athens.” Nearby, a carriage carrying two Catholic women breaks down, all while the Jewish community, roiling from a controversy over a previous supposed messiah, prepares for a wedding. At least, that’s the lesson of Jacob Frank, a charismatic 18th-century Polish Jewish mystic, whose real-life rise and fall - along with its dozens of twists along the way - form the heart of Olga Tokarczuk’s massive “ The Books of Jacob.” Basing her nearly 1,000-page masterwork on Jacob’s travels, teachings, loves, and political intrigues, the Nobel laureate uses the historical figure as a lens through which to view a world in flux.įunny, tragic, comprehensive, and at times hilariously graphic, “The Books of Jacob,” spans Eastern Europe, from the Kingdom of Prussia to the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, during the tumultuous second half of the century. For a self-proclaimed messiah, any twist of fortune can be interpreted as preordained. ![]() ![]() ![]() Whether in science (Q: What is the highest frequency noise that a human can register? A: Mariah Carey), the humanities (Q: What did Mahatma Gandhi and Genghis Khan have in common? A: Unusual names), math, or other subjects, these 250 entries prove that while everyone enjoys the spectacle of failure, it's even sweeter to see a FAIL turn into a WIN. Celebrating the creative side of failure in a way we can all relate to, this book gathers the most hilarious and inventive test answers provided by students who, faced with a question they have no hope of getting right, decide to have a little fun instead. "F" stands for "funny" in this perfect gift for students or anyone who has ever had to struggle through a test and needs a good laugh. This work is a collection of some of the more creative and hilarious ways that students have tackled challenging exam questions. "First published in the United Kingdom in 2008 by Summersdale Publishers Ltd."-T.p. ![]() |