JustBooks Kharkhana

Book of the day:
And The Mountains Echoed
by Khaled Hossein

And the Mountains Echoed begins with a fable that a father tells his two children: A farmer who works hard to eke out a living for his family is forced to give up one of his five children to an evil giant. He and his wife decide to choose randomly, and the unlucky one happens to be their favorite son. Eventually, the farmer, half mad with grief, tracks down the giant and finds his son in a lush garden full of happy children, with no memory of his birth family. The farmer, unable to summon the will to take the child from this place of plenty back to his own arid, desperate land, leaves without him. As a gesture of kindness, the giant gives the farmer a potion that makes him forget he ever had this son.

It's a devastatingly simple story, but it captures the essence of the complex moral equations that Hosseini spends the rest of the novel teasing out. To what lengths should parents go to protect their children from a life of suffering? Is being torn from one's family a better fate than grinding poverty? What acts of mercy do the fortunate owe the less so?

Book of the day:
The Indian Epics Retold
by R.K. Narayan

This book, The Indian Epics Retold: The Ramayana, The Mahabharata, Gods Demons and Others, contains three of R. K. Narayan's books in one volume. The Ramayana and The Mahabharata are an intrinsic part of the Indian minds. They form the foundation of the millennia old Hindu culture and tradition.

R. K. Narayan based his version of Ramayana on the Tamil version of Poet Kamban. Narayan's love for Rama's character and his admiration for Kamban's beautiful poetry is conveyed through this work. He was proficient in the Tamil language and so could read the original version of Kamba Ramayanam in Tamil.

For The Mahabharata and Gods, Demons and Others, Narayan referred to the original Sanskrit version of Mahabharata and other puranas. As he did not know Sanskrit, he had to learn the epics and puranas from a pundit. He did this diligently and then asked the pundit to go through his English version of the stories to verify that they followed the original versions as closely as possible.

While R. K. Narayan had deep rooted beliefs in the Hindu culture and tradition, he also had the average person's questions and conflicts over some situations in the epics.

Book of the day:
Waiting For Sunrise
by William Boyd

Lysander Rief is a young actor in Vienna who has come to the city to seek a psychiatric cure for an illness – anorgasmia – from an English doctor, Bensimon. Bensimon has developed his own adjunct to the main line of Freud's psychoanalysis called Parallelism. Whilst sitting in the waiting room, he encounters Captain Alwyn Munro DSO, an English friend of Dr Bensimon’s, and a Miss Hettie Bull who is another patient. During the consultation, Bensimon encourages Rief to write a journal. Rief is the son of a famous stage actor, Halifax Rief, and an Austrian chorus singer.

Hettie Bull invites him to an exhibition of her partner, Udo Hoff, and there says she would like to sculpt him. He visits her at her studio in the countryside and s*x takes place. They continue to meet in secret and Lysander breaks off his engagement to his fiancée. Despite being cured, he decides to stay on in Vienna but his resources are running low. One day his pension is visited by the Austrian police and he is arrested and charged with the r**e of Hettie Bull. He is finally taken to the British Consulate where he learns, by letter, that Hettie is pregnant with their child. An escape with the collusion of the British diplomats is arranged and Lysander ends up in Trieste.

Book of the day:
The Rainbow Troops
by Andrea Hirata

Ikal is a student at Muhammadiyah Elementary, on the Indonesian island of Belitong, where graduating from sixth grade is considered a major achievement. His school is under constant threat of closure. In fact, Ikal and his friends – a group called The Rainbow Troops – face threats from every angle: pessimistic, corrupt government officials; greedy corporations hardly distinguishable from the colonialism they’ve replaced; deepening poverty and crumbling infrastructure; and their own faltering self-confidence. But in the form of two extraordinary teachers, they also have hope, and Ikal’s education is an uplifting one, in and out of the classroom.

Book of the day:
All the Light We Cannot See
by Anthony Doerr

This novel won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2015 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.

Set in occupied France during World War II, the novel centers on a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths eventually cross.
In 1934, 6-year-old Marie-Laure LeBlanc is the daughter of a widowed master locksmith at the Museum of Natural History in Paris, and she often accompanies him to work. Marie suffers from rapidly deteriorating eyesight secondary to juvenile cataracts, and becomes fully blind at the age of 6.

Her father Daniel enriches her environment, crafting a wooden scale-model of their actual neighborhood and supervising her so that she is eventually able to navigate independently. He uses her birthday as an opportunity to develop her sense of touch, providing increasingly intricate puzzle boxes for her to solve every year. He also provides new novels in Braille to read. She becomes entranced by the imagined worlds like those that she explores in her edition of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

Book of the day: Panchali`s Mahabharat
The Palace of Illusions
by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Narrated by Panchaali the wife of the five Pandava brothers. This books finnaly gives a woman`s take on the timeless tale that is the Mahabharat. Tracing Panchaali`s life- from fiery birth and lonely childhood where her beloved brother is her only true companion;through her complicated friendship with the enigmatic Krishna;to marriage motherhood and her secret attraction to the mysterious man who is her husbands` most dangerous enemy- it`s a deeply human story about a woman born into a man`s world.

Book of the day:
New york Actually
by Sarah Morgan

Meet Molly

New York’s most famous agony aunt, she considers herself an expert at relationships…as long as they’re other people’s. The only love of her life is her Dalmatian, Valentine.

Meet Daniel

A cynical divorce lawyer, he’s hardwired to think relationships are a bad idea. If you don’t get involved, no-one can get hurt. But then he finds himself borrowing a dog to meet the gorgeous woman he sees running into Central Park every morning.

Book of the day:
Target 3 Billion
by A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, and Srijan Pal Singh.

The book highlights the issues prevailing in rural India and suggests measures to improve standards of living. It focuses on the inclusive development project called PURA (Providing Urban Amenities in Rural Areas). The book plans to improve the standard of living amongst the poor rural population through voluntary campaigns such as community participation and entrepreneurship.

It cites like Fabio Rosa who helped in changing the structure of Palmares, a rural district in Brazil, by rural electrification. The access to water and electricity and better agricultural methods had led to prosperity in the region. Further, it describes Magarpatta, the organisation of Magarpatta city, which now provides home to over 35,000 people and the development of an IT park.

Book of the day:
Stumbling Into Infinity
by Micheal Fischman

It is the intimate and sometimes startling account of Michael Fischman’s spiritual journey and the encounter that changed his life forever.

His story opens on a flight to India, as he reflects on the unusual chain of events that led him from a challenging childhood to his unexpected role as friend and helper to a renowned humanitarian and spiritual leader.

Michael Fischman’s fascinating and personal memoir takes us into the compassionate and mysterious world of an enlightened seer. It is a compelling narrative that blends remarkable experiences with an inner struggle and search for meaning.

Book of the day:
The Associate
by John Grisham

As an idealistic graduate of Yale Law School, where he was editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal, Kyle McAvoy has the promise of a highly successful career, although after graduation, he intends to devote three years to public service before applying for employment with a prestigious firm.

His plans are derailed when he is approached by two FBI agents (or such they seem) who interrogate him and then pass him on to a mysterious man known only as Bennie Wright. Bennie has a videotape of a party that took place in Kyle's apartment five years earlier, when he was an undergraduate student at Duquesne University. In it, two of Kyle's fraternity brothers, Joey Bernardo and Baxter Tate, are seen having s*xual relations with Elaine Keenan, a co-ed who later claimed she was r**ed while unconscious, a charge seemingly supported by Joey's asking Baxter, "Is she awake?" on the tape.

Book of the day:
Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice is set in rural England in the early 19th century, and it follows the Bennet family, which includes five very different sisters. Mrs. Bennet is anxious to see all her daughters married, especially as the modest family estate is to be inherited by William Collins when Mr. Bennet dies. At a ball, the wealthy and newly arrived Charles Bingley takes an immediate interest in the eldest Bennet daughter, the beautiful and shy Jane. The encounter between his friend Darcy and Elizabeth is less cordial. Although Austen shows them intrigued by each other, she reverses the convention of first impressions: pride of rank and fortune and prejudice against the social inferiority of Elizabeth’s family hold Darcy aloof, while Elizabeth is equally fired both by the pride of self-respect and by prejudice against Darcy’s snobbery.

Book of the day:
As the crow flies By Jeffery Archer

The grandson of an “honest trader” who became a legend in London’s East End, Charlie Trumper is driven to fulfill a destiny even more spectacular than his forebear’s. With the help of his wife, and a few unexpected friends, Charlie is able to achieve success beyond even his rather grandiose dreams.

Unfortunately, along the way, happenstance allows Charlie’s rise to fame and fortune to intersect with the dreams and ambitions of Guy Trentham and his mother Ethel. Ethel Trentham has plans for herself and her oldest son, but Charlie gets in the way—disastrously so. In consequence, Mrs. Trentham enters into a vendetta of cataclysmic proportions.