Sravika's Books - Reviews and Other Trivia

The Old Devils [1986] By Kingsley Amis  Winner of Booker Prize 1986 Rating : 5/5 🎉🎉🔮 Genres : Humor, Dry, Fiction, Booker Prize, Welsh people.🎃 340 pages, Digital Kindle Edition  I enjoyed this book very much. The dry and brutally honest wit,humor and open satire on the nature of relationships and superficiality between a bunch of so called life long friends by the author is very appetizing. They backstab each other. They poke at each other. They often booze and snooze and share far too many secrets than they should. They are there to empathize. They are there to offer shoulders to cry. And despite being really old - too much that they can't even bend properly or chew without help of aids - they are there to romance and show off to the opposite sex. 😄🤣 I can understand where some of the negative reviews find their roots and soil for the novel. It deals in less than idealized settings where romance is supposed to be flying high between a bunch of old peop...

Dead Souls By Nicolai Gogol  Rating : 5/5 Genres : Classics,Social Message, Satire,Humor,Philosophical Fiction, Russia This is a story with profound spiritual and philosophical message. I loved it so very immensely. For a deviation, the main character (the hero) of the plot is not glorified as a man of all virtues but is exposed for all his deep flaws, dishonesty and his very imperfect soul is laid bare to the reader so that he may become the one important lesson of how not to behave/act in life - with immorality. It depicts so well that what one should try to save and cherish cannot be stolen by another person - because it is not of a materialistic nature but rather spiritual. It is also a call to each one of the humanity to awaken their sense of self justice and honesty and not fall into the temptation despite peer pressure. 💜 So, so, so enchanted with the depth of human character and nature the author was able to uncover through the several other different personali...

The Promise  By Damon Galgut  Rating : 5/5  Genres : Hilarity, Fiction, Africa  A White family and a black servant. The matron before death promises land to the servant which takes over three decades to attain fulfillment. Times have changed, people have changed but one thing remains the same. The promise made.  I dont know what i like the most in this book..the humor? - yes, it is damm witty and spilling with sarcasm at every turn. Or the seriousness and death, loss that is sprinkled under the light weight detached humor? - there is a natural death,a  murder, an accident and a suicide..he has covered all means of death possible and heaped them onto the heads of members of one family. One ungrateful family .. that clung to its property instead of honoring a promise its dame made to her servant on her death bed. Until the very end..when the only survivor of the family, an unusual woman/girl sacrifices all her ownings to appease a long serving and...

Death With Interruptions Jose Saramago  Genres : death, speculative fiction, humor, satire,2021-read Rating 5/5  💕💕 Loved it!! "Death" is conquered. By Love!! This is an abnormally endearing book. Its ripe with impossible hypothetical possibilities and they are just mind blowing!  The reader along with the citizens of a lucky/unlucky country are taken for a ride by Death which wants to test human fragility. Then Death comes up with some ideas of her own - because she can and who is there to question or deter her? Yeah! Its a very hilarious write up and the comical timing is so apt!  I didn't anticipate this to be a love story but that's what it has turned out to be and a pretty touching one too - in its authenticity, honesty and it just had my knees go weak. I waited with baited breath as to how it would end - for how many can have a successful love affair with Death? Little bit into the story. For a brief period of seven months, death takes a break. People of a ce...