Books I've read recently

April has been a quiet, peaceful and a lonely month for me. For reasons unknown, the blossom of spring failed to set my heart aglow as it used to when spring was in the air. 

May started. My heart did not progress well in the happiness index. I continued to grow lonely. I stopped going out of the house except to work and to the grocery store. 

I took a weekend off to go to the village for this ailing heart to heal. It did help for a while. I returned to Thimphu; to my work and to my life hoping for a fresh start. Yet I was there where I left. 

During these months, I escaped to the world of fantasy, sunk into it, away from the harsh realities of life. Between the pages of the books, I found a lovely place to stay. There hasn’t been a night I went to bed before midnight no matter how tired and exhausted I am.So that’s when I got lost in these books:

And the Mountains Echoed: Khaled Hosseini, the author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns comes up with another riveting tale about love in his new book And the Mountains Echoed. 

It’s about how we take care of one another and how the choices we make resonate through generations. The tale in this book revolves around not just parents and children but brothers and sisters, cousins and caretakers. 

Hosseini explores the many ways in which families nurture, wound, betray, honor and sacrifice for one another; and how often we are surprised by the actions of those closest to us, at the times that matter most. 

From Kabul to Paris to San Francisco to the Greek island of Tinos, the journey in the book takes us gradually outward, becoming more emotionally complex and powerful with each turning page. A great story teller he is. 

The catcher in the Rye: Published in 1951, J.D Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye remains one of the best books about adolescence ever written. Holden Caulfield, a seventeen year old prep school adolescent relates his lonely, life-changing twenty-four hour stay in New York City as he experiences the phoniness of the adult world while attempting to deal with the death of his younger brother, an overwhelming compulsion to lie and troubling sexual experiences. 

Salinger, whose characters are among the best and most developed in all of literature has captured the eternal angst of growing into adulthood in the person of Holden Caulfield. Anyone who has reached the age of sixteen will be able to identify with this unique and yet universal character, for Holden contains bits and pieces of all of us. 

It is for this very reason that The Catcher in the Rye has become one of the most beloved and memorable works in literature world. I just wish I had come across this book when I was seventeen and yeah I had a hearty laugh over this book. 

The Husband’s Secret: There was much hype about the book and I wanted to know what the hype was. Set in Australia, Sydney, The Husband’s Secret tells the stories of three families: the Crowleys, the Fitzpatricks, and the O’Learys. 

It’s about a letter from the husband which is supposed to be opened only on his death. Just like Cecelia, I would have opened the letter out of curiosity. Curiosity kills the cat. And the real plot unravels leaving the readers at grip. 

The Hypnotist’s Love story: A wonderful friend sent me this book. Patrick must be the best boyfriend, Ellen O’Farrell, the hypnotherapist has ever had. Patrick is attractive, single, enthusiastic, and active and is a Surveyor. But along with this package of his, there comes another complete package; his former girlfriend turned stalker, his eternally young and beautiful dead wife. How is an ordinary hypnotherapist to cope with this sort of competition? 

I loved the fact that Patrick is a Surveyor since I’ve to deal with Surveyors always at work. It helped me to understand him more. It’s an exquisitely spinning and intense unfolding of the viewpoints told from both the stalker and the hypnotherapist. A must read best-seller. 

I am Malala: The story took the world by its grip when the girl who stood for education was shot by the Taliban. Malala tells of that life shattering moment in a fearless riveting memoir I am Malala, co-written with journalist Christina Lamb. 

Educate a man, you educate an individual. Educate a woman and you educate the whole family. In this part of the world, education is taken for granted. I just wish our teenagers value the rights to education and pursue its sweetness and its fruit. This is one book which should be read by every teenager.

Especially towards the end of the story when Malala was reuniting with her family in the hospital, my thoughts choked. I simply couldn’t put down the book. I closed it, went out in the balcony, took a breathe of fresh air and returned to continue. It was a little after midnight that I finally read the last page and fell asleep. I had a dream that night, a dream which was not a pleasant one. 

Norwegian Wood: Last night I finished the Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami.I’m at loss for words to describe Murakami’s writings. And I know I will never find the perfect syllable to describe it. This man amazes me in his writings. I’m in love with his words. 

Norwegian Wood is a nostalgic story of love, loss and burgeoning sexuality. For that nostalgic person in me, this book brought me leaps of joys and faith. At the same time, it left me emotionally crippled. Sometimes I had to put the book down, lie on the bed with my hands supporting my head and get lost in the story. I smiled to myself sometimes and banged my head other times when the plot was going haywire. He is a writer after my own heart. 

Apart from these, I read The Bell Jar and Looking for Alaska. Woah! that’s quite a lot of books. Currently, I’m reading The Happiness Project. 

Have you read any of these books? How was it? Any book you’d like to recommend me? I’d love that. A good book recommendation is what I need now.