The Moony Girl

"Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?" 🛰️ 'Sputnik Sweetheart' by Haruki Murakami 🛰️ Does it ever happen that you like an author's work very much, so much that you dread reading other works fearing you might lose the charm by overexposure, or the author may not be able to live up to the last work? Or am I the only weird one? I'm kinda sure 🤓 that it's the latter. I loved Murakami last when I read 'Kafka on the Shore' 4 years back. But then I dropped the idea of doing  a Murakami spree. But last week, I watched Prajakta Koli and Babil Khan talk about their book preferences and Sputnik Sweetheart came up. I had to pick it up. 🛰️ SS is a love triangle. A lonely love triangle. Lonely because the story has hardly any other charac

Good books I just dive into.  But better books I save for good occasions. Like this one, that I saved for my trip to the mountains. 🌸 'Delhi through the seasons' by Khushwant Singh 🌸 Having aptly been called the modern Barahmaaha, with a theme of nature, DTTS talks about the rotating wheel of seasons in Delhi and North India, in general. Having been written by the maestro Khushwant, based on his diary entries and his observations as a bird watcher (it was a surprise for me too to find another feather in his hat), it addresses one aspect that all other Barahmaaha treatises of the past chose to ignore - nature - flowers and birds and animals. I'm not an outdoorsy person per se, and my meagre knowledge of flowers and trees is something I've given up my hope on. But thanks to the divine illustrations by Suddhasattwa Basu, I felt as if I was sitting in Lodi Gardens while reading this one, surrounded by fragrance and chitterings.  🌸 So read this one to get to k

"Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them." And this is how this book can be (Spoiler alert ⚠️) Summarised!  👨‍👩‍👧 "The Conscious Parent" by Shefali Tsabary 👪 My toddler (guess I can call him that now) is barely 16mo and God! He's ready to snatch my Drama Queen Crown already. As he gains more awareness each day, more challenging tantrums, tricks and ticks show up. And that was enough to shake me up from my comfort zone of fiction reading and pick up another 'informative' book. So here goes...  👪 TCP is a 17 chapter, medium sized, feel good read whose main focus is ground zero of parenting - before attempting to raise good humans, fix yourself first.  If you come from a good place, believe in the inherent goodness and wisdom of human beings, you'll find it much easier to understand your babies and grow up and grow them well.  It addresses topics like handing out chores

  'Becoming is never giving up on the idea that there's more growing to be done.' "Becoming" by Michelle Robinson Obama Michelle mentions at the beginning of the book that she started taking Piano lessons from her very strict Aunt Robbie at the tender age of 4. And the first step of learning Piano is to find the key middle C. You find it, and you have the whole perspective lying clearly in front of you. You lose it and you lose the whole plot. Life is like that too. To become your best version, you need to keep your Middle C in view. Becoming is the autobiography of Michelle Obama, and very powerfully captures her journey from a middle class rental home at Southside, Chicago to entering Princeton, her career in law, relationship with Barack Obama, juggling motherhood with her campaigning duties and finally her life as the FLOTUS. Such books are very hard to write as there is a heavy risk of them ending either on the boring or frivolous end of the spectrum. But Mic