The Big Book Blog

                                                Any story from a female perspective has always seemed to be more elegant than their male counterparts. Such eloquent penmanship is the books written by Anita Nair and Ladies Coupé is a story that brings out these nuance detailing of characters. Solely admired by this book, we had a session of our Book Club fully devoted to Anita Nair.  “This is the world. Half of it is lit by the sun and the other half remains in darkness. It is the same with life. There is good and bad and it’s our duty to remain in the light, be good.” - Anita Nair, Ladies Coupé.   The story begins when the protagonist Akhila plans a train journey to Kanyakumari. The story unfolds as she takes her seat in the ladies’ coupe of the crowded train. Through her journey, she tries to find an answer to a question that has been haunting for the past forty-five years of her existence- can a woman be unmarried, independent, and happy all at the same time. The book t

  “And how many deaths will it take till he knows That too many people have died? The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind The answer is blowing in the wind” With tension brewing at the frontier of our nation and the unfortunate death of several military personnel, what could be a better time to remember these haunting lyrics by the pop-legend Bob Dylan? Be it the bohemian ‘Tambourine man’ or the fiercely bold ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ or the flirtatious ‘Just like a woman’, his words never lose their relevance and his tunes flow through every melophile’s veins. You may ask – why bring up a musician in a club that mainly talks about books? In fact, that was probably what was going on in a lot of people’s minds when Dylan was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” That brings us to the question – how can music, break boundaries, to become generation-defining literature? Songs h

                              A nother evening of the book club meeting was spent on savoring “the forbidden fruit”, a discussion of banned books. From dramatic court battles to bundles of books being burned in 1930s Berlin, impassioned attempts to censor the written word are nothing new, and even today restrictions continue across the world. Khaled Hosseini’s Kite runner was accused of offensive content, while the literary sensation Harry Potter series ruffled feathers with some religious groups, and 1945 ‘s  Animal Farm, criticized Stalinism,  to be popular on the ban list, at least in some countries or period. The discussion was mainly focussed on the books Lajja by Taslima Nasrin, D H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Perumal Murugan’s Madhorubhagan owing to limited time. Lady Chatterley’s lover privately published in 1928 before being picked up by Penguin in 1960; storied the wealthy married woman's affair with her working-class groundskeeper, raising eyeb