Books shelved under “Historical Fiction”

I read this on a train back to where I’m living in England from a trip up to Scotland for a holiday. It didn’t take me long to read, and I can see now why it is so relentlessly studied in schools. The story itself almost seems designed not to be imposing, and the physical volume is much the same. The way my copy—a Longman edition for students, with extra notes and questions for consideration—was…

This is the second work of historical fiction I’ve read in a month that has a colour in its title and features art as a significant component of its story. The other, Sacré Bleu, was an irreverent “comedy d’art” by Christopher Moore. My Name is Red definitely isn’t that. Good thing I like to read widely!

My Name is Red opens with the voice of a dead man. Elegant Effendi describes the sensations of…

Time travel poses a host of complications, no matter which set of rules one follows. Plus, I mean, as cool as it might be to pop back to ancient Egypt or Rome or Tudor England for afternoon tea, I wouldn’t want to live there. Hello, indoor plumbing much? Flush toilets and high speed Internet? I like my “modern” conveniences, and I can understand why the first employees of the Company didn’t enjoy their duties much.…

I don’t abandon books lightly, but it had to be done. If I hadn’t borrowed enough books from the library that I have to read about 1 per day to finish them before I move to England, I definitely would have finished this. I don’t think I would have liked it, mind you, but it’s not horrible enough to abandon.

I should have paid attention to Jeet Thayil’s biography. Poets-turned-novelist rarely work for me.…

Fans of Christopher Moore may be shocked by this book. Exclamations of “Sacré bleu!” followed by monocles popping out from eyes and spilled cups of tea are probably going to be the norm. For, you see, I enjoyed this book thoroughly. It was an excellent supernatural mystery set in Paris and involving great artists and their muses. But it is not very funny, or at least, it doesn’t have the same, non-stop humorous dialogue and…

Well, I liked this better than In the Skin of a Lion. Michael Ondaatje doesn’t quite terminate quotation marks with extreme prejudice in The Cat’s Table, and the story is more straightforward. Call me boring, but I like that.

The protagonist is also named Michael, and certain elements of the plot are apparently autobiographical (but only just). Michael is eleven years old and travelling from Sri Lanka to England, where he will live…

My experience with The Kite Runner is almost the reverse of my experience with A Thousand Splendid Suns. Instead of starting dubious and warming up to the book, I started very invested and gradually felt more distant. Khaled Hosseini is skilled at manipulating emotions—but when you strip away this manipulation, what’s left is rather unimpressive. That is to say, while reading The Kite Runner, I was moved. I felt for Amir and his…

With its hundredth anniversary just last month, Titanic was all over the media, much to my dad’s chagrin. He doesn’t understand why everyone seems so fascinated by Titanic (the ship or the James Cameron movie). I personally don’t care much for the movie, but I can see why the ship has captured so many imaginations. It was a huge testament to human ingenuity—and hubris. Its sinking was a monumental event in the early twentieth century.…

Have you ever taken a good, long look at the Napoleonic Wars and thought, “These are cool, but they could really use more dragons”? Naomi Novik did, so she wrote a book about it.

That’s really all you need to know about the Temeraire series: if it doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, then it’s not going to change your mind about dragons or about the Napoleonic Wars. But if it sounds awesome, then…

Our capacity for language is one of the attributes often cited as what makes humans so distinct from other animals. It’s a controversial distinction, because we’ve observed other species communicate in very interesting and effective ways: whales sing, dolphins whistle, birds do whatever it is they do to switch places while in formation. Parrots, of course, can be trained to mimic human speech! But there’s a difference between replicating instinctual sounds with fixed meanings and…

It’s never a good sign when the first thing you do after finishing a book is to go to its Wikipedia page and scrutinize the plot summary for some hint of what happened.

For some reason, I always choose to read a complex or very “literary” type of novel on what turn out to be my busiest weeks. When I started In the Skin of a Lion, I was neck-deep in my unit planning…

Much like The Burning Glass, I don’t think it was a good idea trying to read this during the school year. After four days I got less than 60 pages into the novel. Just no traction whatsoever.

The romance aspect of this novel was not enough in evidence for me to comment on it—we hadn’t even jumped back to the Tudor part yet. I mean, Celia and Richard’s relationship was shallow and fraught with…

My dad occasionally wanders into my room with that look on his face communicating the depth to which the books he borrowed from the library have disappointed him, proceeds to the shelf where my to-read books live until I devour them, and borrows a book before I read it. That happened with The Night Circus. Afterwards he commented that it reminds him of World of Wonders. I can see why. Both books are…

Reading is one of the best ways to expose oneself to new perspectives. Good literature summons pathos for characters, even when their situations differ from our own—perhaps especially when. I’m not just talking about science fiction and fantasy, spaceships and magic wands; all literature is ultimately about experiencing the Other through an author’s prose. This is the transformative act that is reading.

I’m getting all literary critic here because As for Me and My House…

At the beginning, A Thousand Splendid Suns did little to win me over. Its characters seemed shallow, transparent: Mariam’s mother was vindictive and manipulative, her actions and reactions shockingly outsized. Mariam marries Rasheed, who turned out to be exactly the kind of one-note bully I expected him to be. Even when Laila entered the story and began her slow, awkward, inevitable dance with Tariq, I was still not convinced. But then the communist regime fell…

Much like Cat’s Eye, I’m finding The Blind Assassin difficult to review. It won the Booker Prize, one of only three Canadian books to do so. And this Margaret Atwood person, she’s no slouch either. Apparently she’s some bigshot Canadian author with plenty of novels and short stories out there, somewhere, just winning awards and acclaim left and right. But even if one stripped away all such accolades and attempted to deal with the…

I like to try to pretend I’m not a literature snob. I like to try to pretend that all I care about in a book is a good story, that genres are meaningless, and that authors who are experimental or who go to great lengths to show off their vast intellects are, generally, more trouble than they are worth. I like peeling back the layers of hype and praise piled upon popular books and to…

Two years ago my friend Vivike gave me Kafka on the Shore for Christmas, assuring me that I would like it—and she was right. I also found it confusing and daunting and knew that, in Haruki Murakami, I had found yet another author whose works I will continue to digest long after I devour them with all the tenacity my love of reading requires. So for this Christmas as I considered which book to inflict…

Without a doubt the Second World War is one of the most influential and significant events to occur in the past hundred years. The scope of this war was magnified and bigger than ever in every way: in the countries involved, in the technology and tactics developed and deployed, and in the atrocities committed. And so World War II has seared itself onto the collective consciousness of our species as something never to be forgotten.…

I have had Kate Quinn’s debut novel, Mistress of Rome, on my to-read shelf since January 2010! And I totally forgot about it—this is why I love my to-read shelf. I don’t remember how I learned about it, so it’s serendipitous that I found Daughters of Rome, which has whet my appetite even more for Mistress. I saw this book on the “New Books” shelf at my library and decided to “give…