Udhaya's Reviews

This novel interested me for its thorough indictment of Google and the Uber-social, share-everything-with-everyone society that we're becoming. Many of the points were well honed and aimed. The writing itself was staggeringly plain like a blog. While the depth of technological excess is well addressed the protagonist is such a sorry-ass ditz that it outrages one far beyond the intended reasons. It's still worth a look for those who have thought that all this technology is wonderful.

I arrived at this tome long after the missives had piled up either anointing it or debasing it. Reading Shantaram is not just a journey or a launch to a faraway place, it is a committed residence at an exhilarating vantage point. The mind that I followed, the voice that I listened to, the heart that I bled for, the shoulder that I leaned on, the spirit that I inhabited, the humil iation I shared, the despair I felt, the joy I embraced, the exhaustion of letdowns I endured as my own, the anger I expressed for his unlearned mistakes as if he were my own were all palpably real. Yes, that was the most remarkable thing, the unmistakable feeling like the narrator were my own. The kinship I felt with the narrator, I have never felt in any other book I have ever read. A dreamer soul beats at every turn and save for a few self-destructive turns, the narrator and central character always forges ahead and never shies from life. The way he treasures the little gestures of people and the wa...

This novel, inspired by an iconic photograph of a lesbian couple in 1920s Paris, uses multiple narrative styles and perspectives to overlap, contradict, insinuate, guess, and sum up history in many versions. The strain of Nazi occupied Paris is told from every social strata. Some characters resemble real life figures, some are entirely fictional, and yet others like Picasso and Hitler appear as themselves with talking parts. The scope is ambitious while the narrative is self-aware and academic in parts. Ultimately, I enjoyed it like a substantial hike after gliding through a string of malnourished e-books by self-published authors. Any form of art that inspires me to practice my own has achieved something. That said, it's a bit like after eating Kale; you know it's good for you but damn, some garlic fries sound good right about now.

I just finished this dystopian novel that comes on like a torrent of hip tweets--only it's more elegantly written without a preoccupation on brevity. At 334 pages, it's shorter than most contemporary novels but like espresso to regular coffee, less packs more here. At turns satirical, unabashedly romantic, and scathingly political, this futuristic vision of New York (where live-streamed apparats rate everyone's acceptability and social value) lays bare the aching souls yearning to live, love, and thrive in a police state that favors the one percent. This novel isn't for everyone, but if you want an original book with a passionate heart beneath it, check it out.

Donald James certainly can’t be blamed for lacking ambition. His Monstrum is set in a future Russia where a new party is in power with the promise of change, but people’s loyalties rest uneasy. While this grants enough drama as it is, stirring up this potent setup is a plot about a heinous serial killer who cuts up victims in puzzling ways, a subplot about an underground (literally) sex-cult, and the subversive rebels threatening the new government. Populating this universe is a gallery of colorful characters--an American profiler, an opportunistic police chief, a smitten doctor, a reluctant police force, the elusive monstrum itself, and of course the bumbling cop protagonist. Because of his political connections or despite them, a drunken cop is assigned to catch the serial killer. The doctor and profiler both pine for the cop, insisting on his affections, while the cop yearns for his ex-wife who abandoned him to lead a rebel group in guerilla warfare. More interested in a failed...

This book is a special find for many reasons. The book is at once an in-depth account of a war from within its battlefields, an exquisitely drawn graphic report that betters graphic novels (to use the term "comic" or "illustrated book" betrays the gravity of this effort), or even the best war fiction for that matter. War photographs depict the physical destruction; magazines and TV news editorialize; novels make war poignant; but Sacco has surpassed all other available venues in capturing war with its historical, political, social, background statistically and spiritually intact that the effect on the reader is devastatingly personal. Sacco clarifies what mainstream media stylizes. He puts the Bosnian war in objective context as a culmination of religious animosity that had been brewing for generations with each side taking its turn as victim and oppressor. In a very telling segment he mentions: Croats are predominantly Roman Catholic, Serbs are Orthodox Christi...

This is a high-tech thriller set in the U.S. government's shadow agency, NSA. Deep in the secure nest of the cryptographers' infallible decoding machine there's trouble in the form of an undetectable code. A rebel ex-agent has brought the proud big brother's, snoopy watchdog to a screaming halt. The premise pits us in an increasingly relevant dilemma: government's privacy-invading protection of its citizens versus the individual's unbridled freedom. Interestingly, the book's protagonist depends on which side you lean. Until midway, the author does a nice job of not picking a side. And until the last third, the search for the missing key is strictly trial and elimination of leads. The swift pacing assures us that characters will barely register their agendas, let alone their characteristics or distinctions. Whenever characters ruminate or converse they betray every aspect the author lauded on them. Clearly, Brown would rather feed us tidbits on Japanese hi...