7 lessons I learned from Days At The Morisaki Bookshop #booktok

1. Always seek happiness and never remain sad.
2. Confess and speak your heart honestly – don’t worry about what people will think.
3. Don’t judge people, because they might be carrying their own hurts and they might be trying to help you.
4. When you stop chasing love, you get love.
5. (The act of seeing something) To see something is to get possessed by it.
6. Human beings are full of contradictions.
7. Books are magic!

Feeding the Muse - Excerpt from Zen In The Art of Writing #books

It is my contention that is order to Keep a Muse, you must first offer food. How can you feed something that isn’t yet there is a little hard to explain…

The fact is simple enough. Throughout a lifetime by ingesting food and water, we build cells, we grow, we become larger, and more substantial. That which was not, is. The process is undetectable. It can be viewed only as intervals along the way. We know it is happening, but we don’t quite know, how or why.

Similarly, in a lifetime, we stuff ourselves with sounds, sights, smells, tastes, and textures of people, animals, landscapes, events, large and small. We stuff ourselves with these impressions and experiences and our reaction to them. Into our subconscious go not only factual data but reactive data, our movement toward or away from the sensed events. These are the stuffs, the foods, on which The Muse grows. This is the storehouse, the file, to which we must return every waking hour to check reality against memory, and in sleep to check memory against memory, which means ghost against ghost, in order to exorcise them, if necessary.

What is The Subconscious to every other man, in its creative aspect becomes, for writers, The Muse. They are two names for one thing. But no matter what we call it, here is the core of the individual we pretend to extol, to whom we build shrines and hold lip services in our democratic society. Here is the stuff of originality. For it is in the totality of experience reckoned with, filed, and forgotten, that each man is truly different from all others in the world. For no man sees the same events in the same order, in his life. One man sees death younger than another, one man knows love more quickly than another. My muse has grown out of a mulch of good, bad and indifferent.

Run fast, stand still - Excerpt from Zen in the Art of Writing

 

Run fast, stand still. This, the lesson from lizards. For all writers. Observe almost any survival creature, you see the same. Jump, run, freeze. In the ability to flick like an eyelash, crack like a whip, vanish like steam, here this instant, gone the next – life teems on earth.
In quickness is truth. The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping.
Run fast, leap up, turn on the light, but whatever you do, don’t look up. If you look up before you get the light on, it will be there. The Thing. The terrible Thing waiting at the top of the stairs. So run, blind; don’t look.

Zest and Gusto - Excerpt from Zen In The Art of Writing #books

Zest. Gusto. How rarely one hears these words used. How rarely do we see people living, or for that matter, creating by them. Yet if I were asked about the most important items in a writer’s make-up, the things that shape his material and rush him along the road to where he wants to go, I could only warn him to look at his zest, see to his gusto.
If you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer.
For the first thing a writer should be is - excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms.
• Life is short, misery sure, mortality certain. But on the way in your work, why not carry those two inflated pig bladders labeled zest and gusto.

Metaphor of the Well Water - Excerpt from The Courage To Be Disliked

when you drink the well water in

the summer it seems cool and when you drink the same water

in the winter it seems warm. Even though it’s the same water,

at the same 18 degrees according to the thermometer, the way

it seems depends on whether it’s summer or winter.

At present, the world seems complicated and mysterious to you,

but if you change, the world will appear more simple. The

issue is not about how the world is, but about how you are.

 

3 Insights I learned from 'Before The Coffee Gets Cold'

 

1. No matter how much you try to change the past, it won’t change anything in the present moment.
2. Since future hasn’t happened yet, it’s upto you to create it as you desire.
3. Death is like a box of darkness. Until there’s breath in your body, you can always come out of this box. Always look for the light. 

Book Review: Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

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 story of an unusual café where people can order a cup of coffee and take a trip to their past, as long as they’re comfortable with following all the rules. A server pours and fills their cup with hot coffee from a kettle. As the shimmery whiffs of coffee’s steam rise and swirl in the air, the person can visit a specific date and time in their past and once they’re done with what they wished to do, they must return to the present moment before the coffee gets cold.

However, with this metaphor, the book reaffirms the age-old insight that, even if you’re able to visit the past, it “won’t change anything in the present moment.” The only way to be happy and content in the present moment is through acceptance and surrender.

The novel illustrates and repeats this powerful insight by means of four different stories including “The Lovers,” “Mother and Child,” “Husband and Wife,” and “The Sisters.” These stories relate to four people who are among café’s regular customers. They visit their past to meet a loved one and say something they wished they had said but were not able to do, at that time.

The book is a nice little reminder that we can always choose to be happy in this moment, irrespective of our past. I loved the book and I hope you’ll too.

Read all the review pieces written by me! | Follow on Goodreads!
Subscribe: Neha's Notebook | My Little library | Raindrop Stories

Book Review: The Kid Who Came From Space by Ross Welford

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 she could help them bring the girl back. Her planet’s residents had captured Tammy and put her in an exhibit in the “Earth Zoo.”

The story moves forward with tailspins of adrenaline-pumping emotions, which are followed by a tearjerker episode of friendship, love, and attachment. Meanwhile, Ethan realizes the power and privilege of being a human. Nature has endowed humans with a superpower that most of them don’t realize until the end of their lives – feelings. When Ethan walked among aliens, he realized how precious human feelings are, more than any cosmic treasure. Plus, humans have things like luck, attachment, and a variety of emotions that make their life dramatically beautiful.

Along with insights like these, the story is also peppered with little episodes of humor and science concepts. All in all, the novel takes Ethan through a sojourn into an unlikeable scenario at the alien planet and then prompts him to learn what he is truly capable of. In an almost haphazard ending, he returned to Earth with a knowledge based on experience; fears dissipated through action, still reflecting on the sacrifice Hellyann made for the three of them. The story wraps up with the core message, “love triumphs all.”

Read all the review pieces written by me! | Follow on Goodreads!
Subscribe: Neha's Notebook | My Little library | Raindrop Stories

Book Review: A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen

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 educational curriculum, and is required reading by the students.

 

The play is divided into three acts that are enacted by a small set of characters including the housewife named Nora, her husband Torvald, their friends Dr. Rank and Christine Linde, and a man named Krogstad. Although much of the play runs smoothly, without any extreme emotion or aggression, however, it’s in the description of the routine itself that illustrates the restrictive life of a 19th century married woman.

Nora’s husband treats her like his very own priced possession, but the pleasantries last only as long as she behaves in a way that is morally good, loyal, and nice according to him. As soon as she tries to exert her independence, eat the things she desires to eat, and make decisions by herself, her husband’s demeanour takes a shift, and he turns aggressive and entitled.

The story mainly delves into an instance of Nora’s life when she borrowed money from a man to save her husband’s life. She did it all for him, but her husband didn’t see this. Instead, what he saw was her independent decision, her free will, and her doing something without his knowledge. As they come face to face with each other, and things began to unravel, Nora realizes that she was never happy with him. She always felt as if she was living as a doll in her husband’s house, just the same way she used to live in her father’s house, as a doll.

That’s when she experiences this brutal awakening, and sets out to make things right for her, perhaps for the first time in her life. She decides to leave the doll’s house, and embark on a journey of self-discovery. Her husband, though, doesn’t seem to be pleased by her decision. He warns her that leaving him and his children wouldn’t do good to her, because she was running away from her duties. According to him, she needed to be a loyal wife and a dutiful mother. But she didn’t give into his persuasion any longer.

She left, never to return to the doll’s house, again. And that’s the best part of the book, probably that’s why it was so controversial during the time when it first came out. In the end, the main thing is that whether men or women, everyone needs to feel loved and respected, irrespective of their unique personalities. So even though this story is about a woman, the same goes valid for men too. Men can feel restricted, violated, and hurt as well. The crux is to look at the other person, not according to their gender, but simply as another human being. The awakening is not about being a man or a woman, the awakening is about what it means to be a human.

Ultimately, you are only as powerful as you think you are.

Read all the review pieces written by me! | Follow on Goodreads!
Subscribe: Neha's Notebook | My Little library | Raindrop Stories 

Book Review: Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa

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 hurt each time she saw him. He had, one day, suddenly told her that he was going to marry someone else. She was obviously shattered. Her life came to a standstill where she didn’t know “what next?”

Her uncle Satoru’s secondhand bookshop was called “Morisaki bookshop.” Although the name of this bookshop is fictional, the setting depicted in the story has been derived from real-life town called Jimbocho. In real life, Jimbocho is referred to as the “Japanese book town.” In the story, the setting takes readers through a street sprawling with cosy cafes and antiquarian bookstores that are slinging with Japanese authors’ books.

When Takako accepted her uncle’s invitation, and stepped inside Morisaki Bookshop, the first thing she noticed was the musty smell of books whiffing from the bookshelves and cabinets inside the shop. Takako set up her luggage on the second floor of the bookshop and was disinterested in everything. She spent her day sleeping all day and night, until one day when her uncle took her to a nearby café.

Soon enough, she started becoming familiar with the neighbourhood. She started reading books, and felt her bliss returning. At this point, the book gave me the feeling of “cosiness,” that made me want to curl up in my bed and read further. The story is set in the season of autumn, and coincidentally, I read it in autumn myself. So, the descriptions of autumn leaves, soothing afternoon sunlight, and cool evenings felt invigorating to flip through.

Just the moment Takako began to heal from her grief, she found herself receiving a message from her old boyfriend. She burst into tears and realized that her pain had never healed. It just got buried under the layers of new experiences. All the anger, hurt, and fear was fluttering in the background. Seeing her somber, her uncle came upon an instant idea. He took her to the man who dumped her, and almost commanded her to express her feelings and tell him what she needed to tell. Reluctant at first, Takako’s voice cracked up and erupted into a torrent of emotional sentences, one after the other.

Afterward, she felt lighter, released, and free, which is another lesson from the book. That, if you want to heal your hurts, just communicate your feelings and speak directly, not bury or numb your feelings with distractions. In the following scenes, Takako fell in love with reading books. She often visited her favourite café with a book tucked under her arm, and she read these books sitting inside the café, sipping hot coffee while cool autumn air brewed outside. In the days following, she left the bookshop fully healed, and joined a new job.

The chapters that follow relate the account of uncle Satoru’s wife Momoko. Momoko had left him abruptly five years earlier. And a few months after Takako joined her job, Momoko returned to Satoru as abruptly as she had eloped. She invited Takako for a girls’ trip in a nearby hill station. Takako wanted to know more about her, and so she said yes. On the trip, they visited a shrine, and had an emotionally cathartic experience.

This part of the book paints picturesque descriptions with words. For instance, the description of the mountaintop, the sacred shrine, travellers, and the boardroom inn are beautiful, and almost spiritual. I felt transported into a spiritual retreat myself reading about the snow outside the inn, the long-stretched and challenging mountain trail to the shrine, and Takako roaming with the innkeeper girl in the midnight, watching sparkling stars.

The story concludes with Momoko and Satoru’s heartwarming reunion. Meanwhile, Takako also falls in love with a man named Wadi, who she met while visiting the café near the Morisaki bookshop. Once Takako forgot her book on the café’s table, and when she returned after a few days, Wadi had kept her book to return. They also often had long discussions about books they were reading and that they liked. This also illustrates how books and the love of reading can make people bond with each other. For this reason, the book is a treat for all the bibliophiles.

There are some other lessons I learned from the book. For example:
1. Always seek happiness and never remain sad.
2. Confess and speak your heart honestly – don’t worry about what people will think.
3. Don’t judge people, because they might be carrying their own hurts and they might be trying to help you.
4. When you stop chasing love, you get love.
5. (The act of seeing something) To see something is to get possessed by it.
6. Human beings are full of contradictions.
7. Books are magic!

It is also a sweet reminder to look inwards and be honest about what you really feel and think. When I finished the book, it gave me the feeling that it was a cushiony pillow or a palette of soft pastels or a tender, succulent piece of life - breathing, dreaming, loving – with all its heart.

A luminous story!

Read all the review pieces written by me! | Follow on Goodreads!
Subscribe: Neha's Notebook | My Little library | Raindrop Stories 

Book Review: Verity by Colleen Hoover

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 snakes and lurches forward into a tailspin of complex emotions like fear, terror, curiosity, romance, and sympathy. Although the writing of these books is not detailed in the story, the things that the writer discovers during the writing of these books, leaves her shocked, almost to the point of terror.

Apart from moments of suspense, elements of horror are punctuated throughout the book that initially made me wonder whether the book was just suspense or suspense-plus-horror. These elements only add a sinister touch and a wispy daze to the overall feel of the story, which is interesting.

The world Hoover’s mind has spun inside this book flutters with frissons of descriptions that range from basic to utmost eerie. Plus, the technique of story-within-story has been employed in many places, which makes the overall read more immersive.

The immersiveness of the story is further fuelled by romantic elements studded into it. As the struggling writer resides in the famous writers’ house to pore through her book-related notes, she eventually falls in love with her husband, who falls in love with her too, and together they stumble upon an unsettling reality.

The ending wraps up on a mysterious note about the characters: who they were, and what were they trying to do. It will make you think long and intense about what might have happened to these characters, as if they were alive and real humans, even though they are not. Through this novel, Hoover has cast an intelligent spell on the mind of the reader, something that makes us feel wanting to read more of it, to know more about where these characters came from in her mind, how she created them, and what happened to them long after the book ended.

Read all the review pieces written by me! | Follow on Goodreads!
Subscribe: Neha's Notebook | My Little library | Raindrop Stories 

Book Review: A Writer's Diary by Virginia Woolf

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 suicide. Her posthumous book “Writer’s Diary” chronicles her diary entries spanning from 1915 to 1941, although many details from her original notebooks have been edited and erased as they’re too personal.

According to her diary, she doesn’t consider “writing diary” as “actual writing,” but she says it surely is an allowance for days when you can’t really sit down to write. And if you let your mind “gallop” and “swing” on the notebook’s page, you may as well end up discovering some “diamonds in the dustheap” of your subconscious mind.

Her writing was based on the inner joy she derived from the writing process. The early diary entries in the book illustrate that she found writing to be “hard work,” but despite that she felt it was pleasant, something she believed was the secret to getting the most out of one’s brain.

“At forty I am beginning to learn the mechanism of my own brain—how to get the greatest amount of pleasure and work out of it. The secret is I think always so to contrive that work is pleasant.”

Although her diary depicts that she was highly affected by both positive and negative reviews, she innately believed that she would never write to please anyone.

“I shall never write to ‘please,’ to convert; now am entirely and for ever my own mistress.”

“I am an outsider. I can take my way: experiment with my imagination in my own way. The pack may howl, but it shall never catch me. And even if the pack—reviewers, friends, enemies—pays me no attention or sneers, still I'm free.”

She also mentions sometimes reading her diary with a slightly “guilty intensity” as one often reads one’s own diary. But she says that the habit of writing diary is a good practice. “It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles. Going at such a pace as I do, I must make the most direct and instant shots at my object, and thus have to lay hands on words, choose them and shoot them with no more pause than is needed to put my pen in the ink.”

Although the detailed process of how she actually wrote was not recorded in her diary, but sometimes she wrote according to a daily word count, while other times, she just decided to finish a piece such as a poem or a magazine article. She also didn’t seem to record her story ideas in her diary, or if she did, they have been edited out. She often took feedback of her drafts from her husband who regularly read her writings.

Overall, I found the “Writer’s Diary” by Virginia Woolf to be an interesting read. Even though I don’t yet completely know about how exactly she got her story ideas and how she actually wrote her books, but I certainly learned the way to write my own diary, in a way that reflects my writing-related processes, my thoughts after reading a book, and tidbits expressing my thoughts and daily experiences.

“I can write and write and write now; the happiest feeling in the world!”

Read all the review pieces written by me! | Follow on Goodreads!

Subscribe: Neha's Notebook | My Little library | Raindrop Stories 

Book Review: Art Matters: Because Your Imagination Can Change the World by Neil Gaiman

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 learn from those who are no longer there with us. By writing books, these writers made the knowledge accessible and incremental. Just imagine if people in history hadn’t written diaries and journals. Life would be so empty and boring with just the current affairs. We wouldn’t know anything about historical empires, inspiring stories of people, and lives of people in old times, without having read all these ancient bookrolls and paperbound journals.

“If you want to be intelligent, read fairy tales. If you want to be more intelligent read more fairy tales,” Einstein said it quite precisely.

At the same time, although we look to the history to have glimpses of human past, creativity, paradoxically, lies in the present moment. Storytellers use memories of the past to create heartwarming stories in the present moment. Its just like making a chair. It comes with a set of instructions and a rulebook. Failing to follow it can leave some hinges loose, which will cause the chair to topple when someone sits in it, making the person trip & fall, perhaps even causing injury. So, art requires following of rules. But once we learn to follow these rules, we can then learn to break them too.

 

In the book, the author also talks about “ideas.” Even though most ideas stem from imagination, they are not always false or illusory. Sometimes they can be true. And they need to be expressed, otherwise, they just linger in space, hovering above our heads like clouds or question marks. Stories need to be told. That’s why both writing and reading fiction are so cathartic.

Fiction is not just a story spun and woven from the wizardry of a writer’s mind, but is also a tool to cultivate empathy. When one reads a book of fiction, it proffers them the feeling that they aren’t alone; in their struggles and sorrows, in their pains and plights, and all the bittersweet melancholies that weep in their hearts from remnants and impressions of everyday lives.

“Make interesting, amazing, glorious, fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here. Make good art,” the author writes.

And when you do, you need to be thick-skinned, because there will always be things like failure and criticism. A lot of these. We must let people be free to think whatever they want to think, about the story or a poem that we have written, or anything else.

And whatever happens, remember to enjoy the journey. Love your job. In the book, Neil Gaiman says, “I didn’t have a career. I just did the next thing on the list of things I wanted to do. I learned to write by writing.” He said he worked like it was an adventure. He did the things until he loved doing them, and when he stopped loving them, he stopped doing them. “Life didn’t feel like work,” he wrote.

The main thing, in the end, is to be an artist - the artist who expresses their heart’s deepest song, who carves the world they desire to witness, and who is not afraid of getting rejected. Looking at the process of writing, storytelling or art creation as a metamorphosis or as a cosmic phenomenon, one can remain detached from one’s own creation, which is important.

So, make good art, tell stories, weave poetry, and enjoy what you do, because life is too short to do anything less than that!

Read all the review pieces written by me! | Follow on Goodreads!
Subscribe: Neha's Notebook | My Little library | Raindrop Stories

Book Review: The Hollow by Agatha Christie

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 right at the beginning. Rather, a few initial chapters are dedicated to introducing the characters; their daily lives, their thoughts and feelings; their opinions about each other. Its only when the reader has clear picture of these characters, is that the story swishes forward quickly.

It stirs into momentum when all these characters are invited as guests in Lucy’s home for a weekend get-together. From there, the story moves at a fast pace, delving into dramatic action that will take the reader through a lot of mystery unfolding and thinking. A guest named John, who is a doctor, is found dead one morning, his body slumped at the edge of a swimming pool, blood dripping into the pool’s water.

Since it is a closed circle mystery, there are a limited number of characters, all of whom look like suspects, each with their own motives for killing the doctor. At this point, the novel features the entry of Hercule Poirot. But in this book particularly, the detective has a shorter role than Christie’s other novels like the “Murder on the Orient Express.”

As the investigation for John’s murder proceeds, Poirot senses that the answer is either too simple or too complex. This is because when John was found dead, his wife Gerda was standing in front of the pool, holding a revolver in her hand. But the character of Gerda is depicted to be meek and unadventurous. For this reason, it becomes difficult to suspect her for murdering John.

Apart from Gerda, John had multiple women in his life, including a sculptress named Henrietta, and a former lover Veronica, who had left him to become a Hollywood star. Written in a simple vocabulary, the book also features love triangles. A character named Midge loves a character named Edward. But Edward loves Henrietta, and Henrietta loves John; the part that makes the mystery somewhat more intriguing.

Added to the relatable character sketches, the novel is dotted with small descriptions here and there, such as the “gold and red autumn leaves,” and the creepily gazing sculptures in Henrietta’s art studio, etc.

Characters make up the highlight, with some being stereotypical while others drawn out as strange and unusual. When it comes to the props, objects like revolvers, boxes of matches, doodles, and sculptures are used in the story. Wrapping up with an abrupt ending, the novel is an entertaining read that illustrates Christie’s brilliance in cooking up intriguing plots from sets of empirical, real-world characters.

Read all the review pieces written by me! | Follow on Goodreads!
Subscribe: Neha's Notebook | My Little library | Raindrop Stories

Book Review: The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

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 first-person narrative, following the inner monologues of three women – Rachel, Anna, and Megan.

The protagonist, Rachel, is depicted to be a depressed alcoholic and a divorced woman who is prone to memory blackouts and drunk dialling. Her character is self-pitying, needy, overweight, apologetic, and always feeling sorry for herself. But despite everything, she has an active imagination. She is always daydreaming and building fantasies. Often, she wakes up feeling fright of nightmares, and has flashbacks, something akin to post-traumatic stress disorder.

Rachel takes a commuter train everyday to London to hide the fact of her joblessness from her landlord Cathy. Each day, while sitting on the window seat of the train, she notices the houses and gardens spread on the other side, mostly a place called Witney Street.

Most of the time, she tries to avoid the house number twenty three, where her ex-husband happily lives with his new wife Anna and their baby daughter. So, she directs her attention on another house nearby, house number fifteen. Every day from the train’s window, she spots a couple sitting on the porch of this house, drinking coffee together. Over days, she starts spinning imaginary versions of this couple, thinking how happy they seem to be. Even though she doesn’t know them, she secretly names them “Jess and Jason,” and fantasizes about their happiness, what if she could be as happy as them. But, she is not.

So, she spends her days drinking, drunk dialling, and hiding her joblessness from her landlord. She fakes going to her job everyday, and becomes almost obsessed by the couple she calls “Jess and Jason.”

But one day everything changes. Her obsession for getting involved in their life manifests itself into reality, and soon she becomes a part of a police case involving the missing woman Jess, whose real name was Megan.

The story in the novel is told from the perspectives of these three women, Rachel, Anna, and Megan. Rachel’s ex-husband Tom is a character portraying a man who likes to dominate women. He plays with the lives of these three women, influencing their versions of reality, through gaslighting, fear, and lies. “I’m a good liar,” he often says. But when Rachel discovers what hides behind his beguiling charisma, she grapples with her own vulnerability, and fights, probably for the first time in her life. She fights for all the three women who had been the object of Tom’s deception, gaslighting, and betrayal. Yet, police dismisses her as a psychologically unstable witness and a rubbernecker. So she takes the matter in her own hands.

The book reminded me of Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl,” another story that describes the sneering jumble of agony and anguish that these gender differences can spew in these close interpersonal relationships.

The character of Rachel, is especially interesting, for the fact that it is tough, quite very tough to write from the perspective of a woman like her, who is a flawed and dejected sack nobody likes to be around. Her character remembers the memories in flashbacks that hit her like thunderbolts out of the blue. Apart from Rachel, all the other characters are also brilliantly crafted, something that highlights how their personalities are so different from each other, yet all but the same. Their voices, tones, and dialogues scrupulously follow their personality sketches.

On the whole, the novel is not only an entertaining read, but also a frightening revelation, that love is not always sweet.

 

Read all the review pieces written by me! | Follow on Goodreads!
Subscribe: Neha's Notebook | My Little library | Raindrop Stories

Book Review: Inferno by Dan Brown

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 officers and a spiked-hair woman with a bike. Another woman from the hospital, the doctor who told him he had been shot by a bullet, helps him to escape, only to set off on a trip that takes them through the citystreets of Florence, causing them to traverse secret tunnels, old palaces, and museums to run away.

Like every novel of Brown, this one too is teeming with belfry of descriptions, mainly relating to the three cities in which the plot is crafted – Florence, Venice, and Istanbul. Langdon finds himself abruptly in Florence, where this bald woman doctor aids him to escape. Then following the clues, they take a train to Venice, where the woman leaves him and flees away when the black-uniformed officers capture them; thereupon the professor visits Istanbul.

Apart from descriptions, the book appears to be written from a comprehensive and elaborate research. In fact, some of the characters, and places in the story are not entirely fiction but real with names changed. For example, the WHO director, the secret Consortium organization, and of course, Dante’s verses.

Although it is very common for Brown’s novels to feature the themes of symbolism, history, and arts, but this book, in addition to all these themes, also contain glimpses of paranormal, which makes it slightly spooky. For example, the character of the underworld creature named “Shade,” described in the beginning of the book, is something that will send creeps down the readers’ spine, and make them want to read the book further.

Devoted to this dark energy of Shade, there is a cranky man named Bertrand Zobrist who is a genetic manipulator, obsessed to a horrific extent, about curbing the issue of overpopulation. When he is not able to convince the WHO’s director, he sets on a lone journey to create a virus. Hell breaks loose as the employees of WHO and Langdon come to know what has spawned from the infernal mind of this devil man. Zobrist releases this contagious virus in a lagoon, from where it spreads throughout the population, making people infertile. But he is no longer there to witness the aftereffects of his virus, for, he committed suicide long before the virus bag burst open inside the underground lagoon slooshing with illuminated red waters.

In one way, the entire story is Langdon’s journey of arriving at the lagoon so that he could help WHO’s team to contain and stop the virus. He follows clue after clue to step forward in this journey. But when he arrives there, he’s too late. Adding to it, the betrayal from the bald woman who posed herself as his doctor shakes him off into a whammy of delirium.

Like Brown’s other novels, this book too is a masterpiece rolled out of the enigmatic lair of his brain. Deceptions at every step; play of words, symbols, and names; stories behind antique artifacts; squabbles of endless twists; there’s just too much to engross the attention.

The novel demonstrates how no one could have imagined that Zobrist, a Dante frantic would use his poem in such a twisty way, molding it for his own dark-ish agendas. Not only he misinterpreted Dante’s poem, but also modified Italian painter Botticelli’s famous painting “La Mappa dell'Inferno,” also called “The Map of Hell,” which was based on Dante’s Inferno. 

In a video he made for people to watch, he outlined no clues except for a set of Dante’s verses which offered little hints to Langdon about where the virus bag was hidden in the first place.

And even though he failed in his attempt, even though he was behind time, he didn’t succumb to inaction in the times of crisis, because, as Brown quoted in the book, “The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.”

Read all the review pieces written by me! | Follow on Goodreads!
Subscribe: Neha's Notebook | My Little library | Raindrop Stories

Book Review: Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

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 reality in an ear-splitting manner.

The story also revolves a lot around the weekend gatherings that Dixon attends in Welch’s house, often arranged with musical performances of violin and madrigals, which prove to crop up gargantuan boredom in Dixon’s head.

Apart from Dixon and prof. Welch, another character presented in the novel is Margaret Peel. Dixon has an on-and-off relationship with Margaret. Margaret is shown to be a manipulative woman who battens on Jim’s pity and guilt-stricken demeanour. Margaret did a suicide attempt telling everyone that her fiancé had betrayed her. At first, Dixon seemed to get drawn into her emotional blackmail, but when he met her fiancé Catchpole, he came to know that he was not her fiancé at all. She was just making up the story to keep both Catchpole and Dixon unhinged.

On the other side, while attending Welch’s dinner get-togethers, Dixon comes across another woman named Christine. He instantly feels attracted towards her as she appears to be unpretentious. But Christine is the girlfriend of professor Welch’s haughty son Bertrand. Bertrand, a painter and a cranky man, is using Christine to secure a job with his Scottish uncle Julius Gore Urquhart.

During one of these parties however, Dixon sneaks away with Christine giving a flippant punch to Bertrand’s ego who warns him that he wouldn’t continue his job in the university. He also mistakenly burns holes in Welch’s bedsheets from his burning cigarettes, which infuriates Mrs. Welch when she comes to realize what happened. Dixon seems to be on the track where he is obvious to lose his job.

Everything changes in Dixon’s life one day when he is invited to give a lecture. Owing to nervousness, he drinks a little too much before the lecture. During the lecture, the inebriated man faints. After his conduct, Professor Welch secretly tells him that he wouldn’t be able to continue his employment in the university. But in an auspicious twist, Christine’s uncle offers him a job at his office in London.

Meanwhile, Christine breaks up with Bertrand knowing that he was having an affair with the wife of one of the Dixon’s colleagues. The novel wraps up with a happy ending as Dixon is seen romping with victory over both his career and his romantic life.

From the writing perspective, the novel is written in a straightforward tone with a third-person narrative and lots of descriptive similes. There are hilarious moments sewn throughout the story along with skewering remarks and satirical snippets. But as Amis quotes in the novel “If you can’t annoy somebody, there’s little point in writing.” And so, this novel will annoy you a little bit, make you laugh a lot, but most of all, it will be entertaining and immersive to read!

Read all the review pieces written by me! | Follow on Goodreads!
Subscribe: Neha's Notebook | My Little library | Raindrop Stories

Book Review: 1984 by George Orwell

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 letters, “Big Brother is watching you.” Every house, building, nook, and corner of the state is flecked with secret microphones, cameras, and telescreens through which the members of the Party maintain constant surveillance over the masses.

There are four ministries in the Party. The Ministry of Truth deals with lies by altering past and history; the Ministry of Love deals with torture, psychological manipulation and deception; the Ministry of Peace deals with wars; and the Ministry of Plenty deals with cutting off ration supplies and starvation. These ministries work on the principle of “Doublethink,” which refers to holding two contradictory thoughts in the mind at the same time and accepting both of them. The Party uses “Doublethink” to bumfuzzle and confuse the minds of the people to gain control over them.

There are mainly three parts of the state. The members of the Inner Party, who are most loyal to the Party; the members of the Outer Party, who are lower than the Inner Party members; and the rest of the people, the common masses, called “proles.” Proles are believed to be dumb-minded, foolish and useless. The Party believes that proles would never rebel against it till they are provided with food, clothing and shelter, and their thoughts are constantly monitored by the telescreens.

The children of the families living in Oceania, are trained from the very young age to discard their feelings, distrust their basic instincts, and become members of the Spies. After becoming the Spies, they would abandon their loyalty to their family and to their parents, and remain loyal only to the Party.

There are three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
which are again based on the principle of “Doublethink.”

The Party has invented a gibberish language called “Newspeak,” the goal of which is to erase most of the words from the English language dictionary. This is done to limit the mass communication by manipulation of language. Since language and human thought are closely connected, the Party utilized the weapon of language for the purposes of mind control, breakdown of identity, limiting people’s capacity of reasoning and intellect, and prohibition of freedom of expression.

The Party includes a troop of “Thought Police” who catch and punish the people who betray, oppose or disobey the rules of the Party. These persons are then purged out of the state and they become “unpersons.” They cease to exist any longer. All their records are meticulously erased and wiped off from the state’s history. And any person who tries to rebel against the Party, even in their thoughts, is said to do a “Thought Crime” for which they would be punished sooner or later.

The plot of the novel revolves around the character of Winston Smith, who is a low-level worker of the Outer Party, and who secretly hates the Party. He expresses his rebellion to the Party by keeping a secret diary, which is forbidden and a “Thought Crime.” Winston works in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth where he works in altering the records from “The Times” newspaper and replacing them with the lies that are convenient to the Party. If he is ordered to remove the name of some unperson from the records, he does so by dumping the records in something called “memory holes,” where the records are vanished, and the history is altered for the entire state. This is how the Party controls the past.

The novella is divided mainly into four parts. The first part describes the daily life of Winston Smith as he spends his life working in the office of the Party. The second part delves into his life when he falls in love with a woman named Julia. The third part deals with the time when he gets arrested by the Thought Police and he is tortured. The fourth part deals with how his mind begins to change and transform as a result of Party’s psychological manipulation and mind control techniques.

While Winston dreams of the Golden Country, sunlit meadows, singing birds, and happiness, wherever he moves his attention, he finds terror, surveillance telescreens, and wars with the neighbouring states. He secretly wishes to rebel against the Party, knowing very well that he is already a Thought Criminal, and one day, he will be arrested and punished for his Thought Crime.

To express his rebellion, he maintains a secret diary that he keeps in a drawer which is slightly away from the vision of the telescreen. He writes in his diary, his childhood memories, his thoughts, and his experiences of everyday life, although he knows that one day he and his diary will be caught by the Thought Police.

One day in his office, while he was returning to his cubicle after having lunch in the grimy cafeteria, a woman employee, named Julia secretly slipped a note in his hands. In the note she had written that she loved him. Julia worked in the Fiction Department of the Ministry, operating the novel-writing machines there. She too secretly hated the Party.

Gradually, Winston and Julia fall in love with each other. But love is forbidden and a Thought Crime, according to the Party. Soon enough, they come across a secret resistance group called The Brotherhood dedicated to another mysterious leader called Goldstein, who is the rival of the Big Brother.

Both of them start meeting secretly in a room located above an antiques shop run by a man named Charrington, who is a prole. They also meet a Party member named O’Brien who tells them that he too is against the Party and works for the Brotherhood. He also gives Winston a book by Goldstein, which makes Winston become certain that O’Brien is indeed against the Party. He starts liking O’Brien as a guide and a guardian.

However, one day, Winston and Julia look shocked with horrifying glances when they discover that Charrington was an undercover agent of the Thought Police, and O’Brien too was a loyal member of the Party. O’Brien was just trying to deceive them by extracting information about their thoughts of rebellion against the Party.

So Winston and Julia are separated. Both of them are arrested. The following part of the novel describes Winston’s experiences as he is taken to the Ministry of Love, a building where there are no windows and where Thought Criminals are tortured and psychologically manipulated.

In the first few days, Winston is ruthlessly tortured, beaten and psychologically broken by the Thought Police. All his screams and whimpers go into a void, and he completely breaks down, confessing even the crimes he never did. In the next few days, O’Brien takes him to another room, where there are huge dials and levers attached to Winston’s body. If Winston disobeys O’Brien, he immediately presses the dials, which hurts Winston’s spine, and he screams out in pain.

O’Brien tells Winston that he was brought in the Ministry of Love so that his mind could be broken and erased, and in place of it, a new mind, a reprogrammed mind would be created so Winston would surrender to the Party with his own free will. Their mission was to control his thoughts so not even a single thought distortion could exist in the universe against the Party. He also told Winston that by the time his training would be complete, he would totally lose all his humanly feelings, the instinct of love, and his capacity to think and reason against the Party.

For days and days, O’Brien bombards his mind with confusing thoughts, blasting his existing mind and reprogramming it with new thoughts. For instance, he tells him that “two plus two equals five.” When Winston disagrees to this, O’Brien presses the dial, and Winston’s spine tilts and bows down. Eventually, after some more days, Winston accepts the fact that “two plus two equals five.”

O’Brien tells Winston that with secret surveillance equipment, he had been tracking Winston’s actions, and thoughts for seven years. And now that he was caught, he would have to surrender to the Party with his own free will. He must not have a thought of rebellion against the Party, no feelings of love or loyalty towards anyone except the Big Brother, and no identity of his own. He tells him that the goal of the Party is to preserve its power.

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing,” he tells Winston.

He programs Winston that the memories he has in his mind are all false memories, including his childhood memories. He brainwashes him to think that God is nothing but Power. He also educates him to think that the state, the thoughts, the reality, the past, and even the physical matter, all is controlled by the Party only. He breaks down Winston’s willpower by telling him repeatedly that he can’t do anything even if he wishes or thinks to, and proles won’t help him either. So, he has only one choice, to surrender to the Party and to love only the Big Brother, nobody and nothing else.

After a period of repetitive psychological manipulation, brainwashing and extreme physical torture, Winston becomes totally broken, with no will or identity of his own. He looks in the mirror and find that his body has reduced to an old man’s skeleton, and he begins to cry.

For the next few days, O’Brien shifts Winston to another room where he starts to get food, fresh clothes and supply of water to bath. He starts regaining health, building muscles and looking younger. But then one day O’Brien catches him murmuring Julia’s name, expressing his love for her. Winston is then taken to a grimdark room called “Room 101”. O’Brien brings a cage filled with wild mouses. He threatens Winston that he is going to open the cage and release the mouses on Winston’s body that was tied with strings.

Winston was to betray Julia by transferring his punishment to her, or he would die getting scratched, and bitten by the wild hungry mouses. Frightened horrifically, Winston sees the cage coming closer and closer to him. Finally, he betrays Julia, and he is spared. To torment him even more, O’Brien then tells him, “Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes.”

After betraying Julia, Winston really feels empty and hollow, with no feelings or identity of his own. He becomes a shadow, and then after all this torture, he is released by the Ministry of Love.

In the latter part of the novel, Winston is shown to be living a life where he falls in love with the Big Brother, which showcases that the Party’s mind control over him was complete. When he meets Julia, he finds that she too has changed in body and mind, and she too had betrayed him to avoid the torturous punishment. They no longer feel love for each other.

In a nutshell, the novel represents a harrowing world where the people don’t even have authority over their own thoughts and feelings. The main themes illustrated through the novel include totalitarianism, dystopia, reality control, psychological warfare, and brainwashing. The story of Winston is a cautionary tale describing how language, which is so strongly interconnected with thought, can be easily corrupted to gain authority over someone’s entire thought process.

If you remove words from someone’s dictionary, it also erases their capacity of freedom of expression, and the capacity to think critically. Once a person loses the power of critical thinking and intellectual contemplation, they lose the power to create their own life too. It is then that the external agency interferes, establishes its agenda of power, and gains complete control over another’s mind.

The novel, although, might just be a piece of fiction, but it actually is a warning for the human race; to wake up and know who you are. Because, as a quote reads from the book,
“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”

Read all the review pieces written by me! | Follow on Goodreads!
Subscribe: Neha's Notebook | My Little library | Raindrop Stories

Book Review: Diary of a Wimpy Kid - the Long Haul by Jeff Kinney

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 last, they set into motion, and start their road trip.

Greg, who sits in the back seat of the van, feels utterly bored without the aid of any entertainment video games, gadgets, or electronics. On top of this, his mother is determined to make this trip an educational adventure. So, she puts on a tape of Spanish language lessons on the car radio, which freaks him out.

He wonders when they might get to stop at a restaurant to eat something tasty, but then their mom hands each one of them a paper package containing homemade meals she had prepared with healthy food items. So, no restaurant for Greg either.

They stop at a cheap motel to spend the night. The family has taken only one room in the motel, a room that is totally nasty. Both Greg and Rodrick go berserk at this, so they leave the room to have a hot tub bath in the motel. When they reach the hot tub spot, they find a family of kids already squirming inside. They wait and wait some more, but the kids don’t seem to be moving from there. Wracking with frustration, they return to their room.

Greg has another obstacle that prevents him from falling asleep. There is a nasty smell coming from somewhere. He thinks it’s oozing from a dead mouse somewhere. But later on, it is revealed that the smell was coming from his elder brother Rodrick’s socks. The next day, they visit a carnival and snack on tons of fried butter sticks. Coincidentally, there is a competition going on in the carnival for the “foulest socks.” Hilariously, Greg, from his past experience, suggests Rodrick to participate in the competition. Rodrick participates and wins it too, unsurprisingly.

Meanwhile, Greg’s toddler brother Manny wins a Spanish language competition in the carnival. The winner’s prize is a little pig. His mother tells them that they don’t want to keep the prize. The people there are enraged, and so they have to load the pig along with them in their already-stuffed minivan. They empty their water bottle cooler and toss the pig inside it. As Mr. Heffley drives, at one point the cooler tumbles down and pig falls on the van’s floor. As pigs’ nature, the pig makes a mess of the stuff inside the van. In another instance, the pig bites Greg’s toe finger.

The family stops at another motel for the night, a nicer and cleaner one than the previous one. This time they take two rooms. In each room is a snack minibar. The pig wakes up during the night and eats up all the snacks from the minibars of both rooms, which costs them a whopping big money in their hotel bill.

At last, they decide to get rid of the pig. On the way, they donate the little animal to a pet zoo. But Greg’s youngest brother, Manny becomes furious at this, he had apparently become too attached to the little animal. He tries to run away from the car to retrieve the pig.

The following day, on the way to the beach, Rodrick’s giant bubblegum blasts a hole in the van’s roof. In an instance, when Rodrick is driving the car and their car is on the bridge, they spot a seagull outside. Greg tosses bits of a snack for the bird, but the bird flutters atop their car’s roof and through the hole bursts inside. The situation becomes chaotic as the bird starts banging its wings in order to get out of the car. Greg is reluctant to part with the packet of his favourite snack as seagull snatches it from him and to their relief, flies out of the car.

All this time, Rodrick had pressed the gas pedal of the car by mistake. Their car runs out of gas and a mechanic nearby tells them that it’d take four to five hours to repair. Besides, they end up losing their mobile phones and credit cards in an adventure park they visit where Greg loses the key of their locker.

They don’t have money to pay for the mechanic, so they ask for a lift from a car passing by. Miserably enough, the people in the car can only understand Spanish. And only the little Manny knows Spanish. So Manny communicates with them and it seems they have agreed to their request. However, when they stop the car in front of the pet zoo, they understand what Manny had told them.

As they return home, Greg describes his new life with the pig who bit him. He feels though, that this part of his life doesn’t have a happy ending.

Read all the review pieces written by me! | Follow on Goodreads!
Subscribe: Neha's Notebook | My Little library | Raindrop Stories