#20// huge talking cats, japan & biscuits

what a magical hotel!

Dear Reader,
They say coffee saves the day and it is absolutely true. My filter coffee-s have been giving me my battery-recharge yesterday and today. Between not giving in to the temptation of watching Crown (I guess you love it, going by Twitter updates) and realizing that I am getting olderrrr because I’ve up-ed the font sizes in all my devices (you def know your eyes are shaky when you kind of like 14pt and 16pt on Word. Give me back my 10pt days!), this week has been gloriously ordinary. Oh! There was the incident about my light switch going bad which meant no proper light source (fancy! tubelight I mean) for two days but my eyes did cooperate with no strains and aches. But we aren't here for my eye-rants, are we?
 

Read

The best antidote to pandemic blues are middle grade books. And middle grade fantasy is the best at that. I don’t make the rules. I sped through Jessica Townsend’s Trials of Morrigan Crow series about a cursed girl, inconsequential to her family, being sent to a magical school. Wait, isn’t that Harry Potter, you ask. Well, kind of, not exactly. Let me fight my case.
 

Nevermoor! You’ll find many Harry Potter tropes in the book. Hagrid saving Harry, friends who stick together, the Hogwarts letter. But these are popular middle grade tropes, not exactly HP tropes. Just that HP was a hugely popular series. Read Nevermoor only if you can set aside your HP expectations. It isn’t as expansive as HP but you’ll find the similarities I mentioned above.

Morrigan Crow is a cursed child. Which means everything that goes wrong in her Jackalfax town run by her Mayor father, is her fault, whether it be marmalades going bad, or someone losing a spelling bee or heartattacks or weather stuff or bigger problems. Everything! My! she does write alot of apology letters. Cursed children die by the age of 12. And her family—father, stepmom, grandmother—aren’t exactly the loving type. But when the bids happen—this is where patrons sponsor children’s education—she gets four bids!—a number unheard of. Then its Hagrid, sorry Jupiter, swooping in, and taking her to The Hotel Deucalion—a magical hotel in another world home to Fenestra the talking Magnificat and housekeeper (I love Fenestra, she is amazing!!), a vampire dwarf who is more of a DJ, a smoking room with scented vapour (I would like this for my new house please). She also gets a new very naughty friend and dragon-rider (that’s his talent). Slight problem—In this new magical world Morrigan has to pass trials to be part of the highly selective Wondrous society school (if she doesn’t it might be a BIG problem because technically she is illegal and also they select just NINE children), but the thing is she has to perform her  ‘knack’ which is the last of the trials. And being an ordinary girl from Jackalfax, she has no knack or magic. So how? how? how?
 
Book 2, Wundersmith is my favourite. It is less Harry Potter-y so now the kids are in school and divided into Arcane and other (i forget the title) levels of learning. But Morrigan is given a bland syllabus because (oops spoiler, can’t say). You can read this without reading Nevermoor since Townsend sums up the gist anyway. There are black market bazaars, angels, kidnappings, homework and maybe the evil guy has new plans too. In school, there are also dragons, a gourmet expert girl in school (cakes!!), a memirist who can manipulate your actions, blackmail-letters (ahem!) and lots more absolutely fun, i-love-middle-grade stuff. V enjoyable and highly recommended. This is a brief para but you really can’t say much about the second book in a series. It has popular tropes, yes, but Morrigan is such a spunky, believable, relatable heroine and the story is full of surprises and humour—you can’t go wrong.

 I haven’t read the third, Hollowpox yet but I reckon it must be good if Wundersmith is anything to go by. I keep fiddling Nevermoor between 3.5 and 4 stars but Wundersmith was a 5. Or was it 4.5. It is GOOD, you get it.
 

What’s new?

This booklist of my favourite books from Japan in 2020 has all my heart (well, I wrote it, so..). Women who think they are aliens? Three women talking about breast enhancements and child bearing? Reconstructed men? Wakanesaseya where a husband hires a man to have an affair with wife so that the divorce deal turns in his favour? Murder?—there’s something for whatever you are craving for. Trust me, there's more to Japan than Murakami. (There's something for Murakami lovers too in the list)
 

Get your highlighter ready

I interviewed the brilliant Sharanya Manivannan for Writers on Reading for Soup. We chatted about mermaids, folklore, writing, pandemic, in short all the good things you need to read today. She talks about her new projects—very exciting btw. Read it for too-many-book recommendations and for gems like this:

“When money or manufactured drama create influence, those who care about their work must return to what is real…Otherwise, the absurdities of capitalist-driven validation will overshadow the rest”
 
and this:

“I’ve known some women who are content within their spaces, however small. I envy their contentment. Then there are others who are in denial; I do not envy them.”
 

Watch:

The Queen’s Gambit because don’t we all love chess? We don’t. But whether you like or hate or are indifferent to the game, this is the show for you. I played chess as child—hobby mind you, I am not the secret grandmaster. And every time I lost (which is mostly all the time), I would feel like bawling my heart out. But here’s Beth Harmon. Stylish and elegant, born to win. I was in it for the long haul—the gorgeous outfits, the adrenaline rush of the chess tournaments OH THE RUSH, and the awesome colour tones.
 

Amazing links

- Biscuit lovers, note the layered history of biscuits in India (Anubhuti Krishna, Goya)
“The (Bhopal) biscuit is a mix of all possible things and seems like the handiwork of a bored local baker. Since people had no name for it, they called it aflatoon, a common word used in Bhopal for things that are abnormal.”
 
 - I hope you wouldn’t burst into tears like me (chances are you might) reading this beautiful essay by Yiyun Li  - The Ability to Cry (The New Yorker)
"Not saying anything, not letting my father into my sorrow—and not knowing how to. Perhaps one, acting out of kindness, acts out of cruelty, too. Had he known that I had excluded him from the most astonishing loss of my life, he would not have been surprised."

 - Ukrainian artist,Alexey Kondakov’s  project titled The Daily Life of Gods features people from classical paintings in modern life situations is lovely (Demilked)

- I’ve been reading Vijetha Kumar’s personal essay ‘Give a Dalit man a pair of scissors and he will show you what freedom is’ again and again and again. (Huffpost)
"During the lockdown, I often see Appa standing by the window, watching the neighbours every time they gather near the katte in the morning to read newspapers, laugh, and talk. I wonder if he ever desired that kind of companionship but then I see him with his pigeons and his hawks and his crows and I have an answer."

Until next time,
Resh x

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