Neha's Notebook

Is the world you are living in, real? And if it is, are you happy with it? Dark Matter by Blake Crouch is a stem-winding dive into the unfathomable world of human mind where one thought, just one thought can branch off into a new world, and spin a zillion different realities, most of which are merely alternate realities that have nothing to do with the present moment. All it takes is one thought. Like a sticky ghost, this thought clings to the person and pulls their attention away from the present moment, luring them into parallel universes that mimic their greatest desires and fears. The person is choicelessly yanked into these alternate realities, and they need to navigate, traverse, and cross them in order to return to the present moment. In the fictional world of this book, a man named Jason Dessen was the person who found himself lugging into this bizarre and ambiguous world of parallel, alternate realties. It started on a hearty family evening, backslapped wi...

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi Every moment is different. Some are pleasant and smooth whereas, some prompt us to wish that perhaps we could revisit our past and change something – a hurtful moment, a rejection, an instance where we felt injustice or unfairness, a loss dream, a failure or a disappointment. It could be anything that we may like to change or alter or reprogram, so we won’t have to deal with the experience we’re having in the present moment. But despite our most wholehearted wishes, the cold hard fact is that past is but a shadow. Once a moment passes away, it won’t come again. Even the previous moment is now a long gone wave that crashed and dissolved into the ocean of time. But what if, what if there was indeed a way to travel back in time, even though it may sound strange. Before The Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi explores this question with the metaphor of a “hot cup of coffee getting cold.” The novel delves into the ...

The Kid Who Came From Space by Ross Welford Imagine entering a spaceship, getting knocked out, and waking up to find yourself in interstellar space, gazillion miles away from Earth, surrounded by stars. The Kid Who Came From Space is a heartwarming, and slightly creepy, tale of science-fiction in which two boys are thrown into an unplanned adventure far away from their home on Earth. They are accompanied by an alien named Hellyann who calls herself a “Hearter.” On her planet, a Hearter is someone who “has feelings” while most of her fellow creatures, who don’t have feelings, are called “Hunters.” The central part of the story revolves around a boy Ethan and his friend Iggy, who find themselves rolling in an unplanned journey to an alien planet to save Tammy, Ethan’s twin sister.   Just when all the efforts of earthlings to find Tammy were unsuccessful, Ethan and Iggy had come across a hairy creature prowling the beach in their small village. She told them that...

A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen When it comes to physiology, no wonder, men and women are designed differently, each with their own unique characteristics and features. The true power, however, doesn’t lie in the body, rather in the mind. But it usually takes a brutal awakening to arrive at this conclusion. So was the case with 19th century married Victorian women. These women were considered weaker than men, but were expected to be morally superior, dutiful, and loyal towards men in their families. These women remained reserved to their domestic lives, and had little control over their finances. In such cases, it became difficult for them to leave a marriage in case they felt violated or hurt. A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen is one of the most famous playwrights of the 1880s. The play depicts the story of awakening of a 19th century middle-class household woman in Norway. In most schools and colleges around the world, this play is a compulsory part of the educa...

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa The greatest risk in loving someone is that it always comes with the possibility of heartbreak. And heartbreak, hurts. Heartbreak is a passage that leads to one’s metamorphosis, and a person is changed forever. Days At the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa is a beautiful story of heartbreak, love, loss, and change. Looked from another perspective, it is also about the cathartic power of books. When I read this book, it stirred within me, a colorful palette of feelings and emotions. The first feeling I had when I read the book can be described with the word “vellichor.” Vellichor is an invented word that means “the strange wistfulness of secondhand bookstores.” In this novel, the protagonist named Takako is invited by her uncle to his secondhand bookshop in the Tokyo town of Jimbocho. He invited her on the accord that she was dumped by her boyfriend and colleague, and so she had to resign from her job to not get...

Verity by Colleen Hoover Within the 336 pages of Colleen Hoover’s Verity, she conjures a world brimming with tantalizing romance and gripping descriptions. The novel drips with moments of suspense that are sprinkled skilfully throughout the content of the book. Chapter endings are exceptionally brilliant so much so that it leaves readers hanging on the edge of a cliff, salivating, hungry for more. Finishing the novel left me even more curious to catch a glimpse into the writer’s mind who has penned this clever text. In a captivating storyscape, the book paints a picture consisting of two writers – one famous and one struggling. The struggling writer, who is also running out of money, is hit by an abrupt twist during a publishers’ meeting as she is asked to write some books for the writer who is famous. She is told that the other writer, the famous one, has slumped into coma and cannot continue her book series anymore.   Carrying from there, the story rolls and...

A Writer's Diary by Virginia Woolf As I sifted through the paraphernalia of Virginia Woolf’s diary, I caught a glimpse into the mind and life of a writer. I peered into the vast lair of her restless mind and collected bits and bobs to accommodate in my own writing process. Some days, her diary bubbles with enthusiasm while other days she is feeling dark, depressed, and melancholic, often resting in her bed for days and days, reading a book and enjoying her favourite coffee, cigarettes, and biscuits with her husband Leonard. “If one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy,” she wrote in her diary. She also wrote about her nature walks, tea times, excursions on London city streets, her observations of people around her, and newspaper reviews of her books. She liked to read a lot. Woolf started writing diary in her young thirties and wrote till 1941. Her last diary entry dates to four days before she died of ...

Art Matters: Because Your Imagination Can Change the World by Neil Gaiman Writers are artists who tootle along the tendrils in their brain to unearth stories that will stir their heart, and the hearts of people who read them. Equipped with a paintbucket consisting only of twenty-six letters, and just a sprinkling of punctuation marks, they construct new worlds and scenarios that immerse and absorb readers’ attention; a healthy distraction from everyday frenzy. “Art Matters: Because your imagination can change the world” by Neil Gaiman is a non-fiction book that describes the significance of making good art. Although the book is mainly about writers, its insights are also valid for other kind of artists as well, such as dancers, musicians, actors, painters, etc. Featuring expressive illustrations by Chris Riddell, the book is divided into three parts: Importance of libraries, making a chair, and making good art. Libraries, he says, are like safe havens that enable us to l...

The Hollow by Agatha Christie There is a subgenre of detective fiction, known as the “closed circle mystery.” It refers to a situation in which for a given crime (usually a murder), there are a limited number of suspects, each with credible means, motive, and opportunity for committing the crime. Most of Agatha Christie novels are “closed circle mysteries,” that her signature detective Hercule Poirot solves during the course of the story. The Hollow too is a closed circle mystery, set in the English country house of a character named Lucy Angkatell, who lives there with her husband Henry and a couple of loyal servants. She is portrayed to be a woman with an overactive mind with which she spins imaginary scenarios, which lends a bizarre feeling to the story from the very start. The minds of the other characters in the book are also shown to be steeped in psychological complexity. However, unlike most detective and mystery novels, this book doesn’t jump into action ...

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins Since the earliest timescale of human evolution, men have been designed to be more aggressive than women. In ancient and medieval history too, it was men who dictated and influenced women’s position and status in the society. Even though, much has changed today, but gender differences, undoubtedly, prevail. The fundamental nature is just the same. It is not a bad thing though, unless, men start to confuse this aggression with power. The purpose of men’s trait of belligerence is protection and embrace. But when they mistake this emotion with power and dominance, that’s when humanity begins to become ravaged with things like power games, emotional disturbance, and psychological warfare. The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins is a psychological thriller that is a paradigm of this, and throws light on how these gender differences can take the form of conflicts and suffering in interpersonal relationships. The book is written in f...

Inferno by Dan Brown More than 700 years ago, Dante Alighieri, the Italian poet, penned down a long narrative poem entitled “The Divine Comedy” in Italian. This poem describes his journey through hell towards paradise. It is divided into three parts – Inferno, Purgatrio, and Paradiso. The first part “Inferno” depicts his descent into hell where he had to cross nine concentric circles of hell, oozing with torment and suffering. Dan Brown’s novel Inferno illustrates an intriguing story that revolves around Dante’s poetry Inferno. The beginning of the novel erupts into outbreak of tense action as Brown’s signature character Robert Langdon finds himself in a hospital having amnesia. Langdon, who is a professor of symbology, discovers a tiny, mysterious biometric cylinder hidden by someone inside his tweed jacket, but he recollects nothing about it whatsoever. Before he can churn his memory to think, he realizes he is being chased by hordes of black-uniformed off...

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis The debut novel of Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim, is a satirical campus novel that illustrates the everyday life of England during the 1950s. In 1955, the book won the Somerset Maugham Award for fiction. The chucklesome book portrays the life of a man named Jim Dixon. Dixon is the bespectacled protagonist depicted in the role of a medieval history professor. Considered foolish and dumb by everyone around him, Jim is rambunctious in his own unique way. Since he is on his probation period in a local university, he is unsure whether he’ll be able to continue with the job or not. And so, in his attempt to secure a permanent position in the university, he strives to maintain a good relationship with his senior nudnik professor Welch. In addition, he is required to submit a scholarly article for a magazine. But later in the story, he comes to know that the person he submitted his article to, had published it on his own name. Dixon reacts to the rea...

1984 by George Orwell “If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable - what then?” 1984 by George Orwell portrays a nightmarish world of dystopia, psychological manipulation and reality control. Dystopia refers to an imaginary place where people are unhappy and terrorized. In the dystopian world of the novel 1984, Mr. Orwell depicts what it truly means to live in a world where people spend their lives in fear and above it, they are ignorant of their own fear, so they never try to fight against it. Written in 1948, the book is so defiant in its content that it has been banned several times across various countries, and is still one of the most popular bestsellers. The novel illustrates an imaginary superstate called Oceania. Oceania is controlled by “The Party” called Ingsoc with the mysterious cult leader called “Big Brother.” The streets of the state are daubed with the posters which read in big bold letter...

Diary of a Wimpy Kid - the Long Haul by KINNEY JEFF A super hilarious storybook, Diary of a Wimpy Kid – The Long Haul depicts the account of Greg Heffley’s experiences as he goes on a road trip with his family. The book illustrates a series of instances that are punctuated with a lot of cringey moments, a runaway kid, and a piglet who wouldn’t leave them.   During Greg’s school summer vacation, his mom announces that the entire family will be going on a road trip the next day. There is a total of five members in Greg’s family, including his parents, his elder brother Rodrick and his younger brother Manny. All of them pack their bags, and the next day, they set out on their adventure in their minivan, with a boat towed at the back of it to carry extra luggage. They scoot to their backyard, clear the junk from the boat, shoo away the raccoons hiding inside, clean it up, and then tie it to the back of their minivan, bundling the rest of their luggage in it. At l...