The Big Sleep

Author: Raymond Chandler

Genre: Detective, Thriller, Hardboiled, Classic

Source: Audiobook

Rated: 5/5

Read: Jan-March 2015

Chandler’s writing is like a slap of crisp, hot breeze on the face, late on a tiring summer’s day – clean, brutal, uncompromising, and unforgettable. Clean, more than anything else. Sparse. Hard. And enough.

You know that this is genre fiction. And while reading it (and I have read only one Chandler earlier), you know that this is literature that is defeating the genre it is part of. You know that this is a classic. You are mesmerized. You are pulled. You carry on. You are carried on.

Raymond Chandler is the writer I want to write like.

Ruaha

Author: Buddhadeb Guha
Genre: Thriller, Young readers, Wildlife, Shikaar
Source: eBook
Rated: 5/5
Read: March 2015

Later

Rijuda Samagra (Part 5)

Author: Buddhadeb Guha
Genre: Thriller, Young readers, Wildlife, Shikaar
Source: eBook
Rated: 4/5
Read: March 2015

Review alongwith the review of with Ruaha

CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

Author: George Saunders
Genre: Short stories, novella, dystropian
Source: Print
Rated: 4/5
Read: Feb 2015

Saunders is a magician of the written word. These are superbly well crafted stories, each a decidedly original take on the world around us, and each does the work of holding up a mirror of our world in all is darkest (Bounty, the novella, is a miracle). Where is separates from the later 'Tenth of December', Saunders' masterpiece in my opinion, is that even though dark, somewhere is Tenth is something very hopeful and life-affirming, while all that you will find in Civilwarland is a sense of overwhelming bleakness and hopelessness. The mirror showed such depressing images that sometimes they made this reader want to just close the book and prefer the placebo of turning away.

The Shadow of the Wind

(The Cemetery Of Forgotten Books, in Spanish)

Author - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Genre - Fiction, Thriller, Adventure, Modern Classic

Source - Audiobook

Rating - 4

January 2015 (started ages back)

Magnificent. Sprawling. Meandering. Rambling. Confusing. Contradictory. Infuriating. Grandiose.
Doomed, defeated, flawed characters. Caricatures. Swathed in Black and White.
This is the novel that Dumas, were he alive today, would have written. and Dumas is (almost) the reason I read.
So... so read. It's a 3.8 on 5 that I will recommend more highly than most 4.8s.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Author - Mary Ann Shaffer and Angie Barrows

Genre - Fiction, World War II

Source - Print

Rating - 4

January 2015

May all books have a soul like The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society.
I have become choosy and selective in my appraisal. Maybe even a bit snooty. That's the only reason I can think of why I would not rate this a 5. But I didn't. 
But read. Do read. 

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

Author - Haruki Murakami

Genre - Fiction, Short Stories

Source - Print

Rating - 4

October 2014

Dated Review:
You know that I am fairly ambivalent about Murakami. I do not get him. 
That is going to get rephrased now.
You know that I am fairly ambivalent about Murakami's novels; I don't get them. 
I do get his short stories. They are special.