Sravika's Books - Reviews and Other Trivia

She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb  (499 pages) (1992)  Genres : Mental illness, Contemporary, Fiction  Rating 4/5  Wally Lamb is one of my all time favorites. I absolutely loved his second book 'I know This Much Is True' about twin brothers, one of whom is schizophrenic - It is invariably my all time favorite book in this genre. 'She's  Come Undone' is his first novel and I thought it showed some amateurish handling of the subject matter. I am not saying I haven't enjoyed it or it is bad but while the title suggested a person - a woman/girl most likely - succumbing to the hold of a mental illness, the story is not exactly that.  Dolores Price is well crafted and moulded - Lamb has breathed life and soul into her character. This is the story of how mishaps,abuse and loss drives a young impressionable girl into the clutches of despair/depression and how she navigates back to a sure footed normal life. She becomes a slave to her culinary urges and gr...

Disturbing the Peace (1975) by Richard Yates  292 pages(Kindle Digital Edition) Genres : Fiction, Mental illness, Contemporary  Rating : 4/5  I have always thirsted to read a book like this one! I read it real slow and lived through every page. The author kind of hints at what is going to come before it does .. and yet I wasn't ready to face it with a stoic calmness. The main character and his quick downward spiral into madness .. his unquenchable drinking problem and subsequent lock down in a mental asylum are very tangible and well portrayed.  A salesman John Wilder from New York with a stable marriage and a son goes berserk in the mind. He has a drinking problem and is easily irritated. He stays for a brief period in a psychiatric ward. He visits a shrink who prescribes him strong medicines and warns him repeatedly to lay off his drinking. He also attends a few AA(American Alcoholics) meetings to help him off the addiction - but uses them as a fro...

The Last House on Needless Street  By Catriona Ward  Rating : 4/5  Genres : Horror, Mental Illness, 2022-read,Psychological Fiction, Multiple Personality Disorder.  Here comes one of the books that's not over rated at all in this genre of fiction. I guess I was 25 percent into the plot and the time was 12 AM and decided to turn in for the night. Fifteen minutes later, I got up and resumed from where I left off  realizing that the plot got deep under my skin. I got hooked to the sensation of peeling off layers of the story and having a different taste with each bite. The plot gets curvaceous and twisted with depth and at the end once everything is figured out and all the bones are laid bare, it seems too simple. I was able to unlock some of the mystery but not all of it. And the author really plays with the imagination and judgements of the reader by playing with her words and writing style .. putting and framing an innocent victim into the role ...

Norwegian Wood  By Haruki Murakami  Rating : 3/5  Genres : Romance, Mental illness, Japanese, Literary Fiction. This happens to be one of the most read novels by Haruki Murakami. It literally lifted him from shadows of obscurity into international stardom.  In this book, he creates a world in itself. He has interleaved elements of love, friendship,hope with those of selfishness, melancholy, depression and shock. This is my second book by him and I guess I will always have a bit of discomfort with his explicit sexual descriptions but he also makes them  very center stage to his stories that without them the depth of his narration will fall apart. Like all his other works i read, this one is gripping and gives a totally immersive reading experience. The main figures in this book are teenagers who are coming to terms with loss/death of their dear ones and their ability to handle the pain without falling apart. The important lesson to take away from this...

Girl, Interrupted  by Susanna Kaysen  Rating : 4/5  Genres : Psychological disorder, Mental illness, Memoir. A girl at seventeen finds no meaning in her life. Has no ambition or desire to pursue anything of importance/purpose. She is depressed and bored out of her wits. Gradually she descends into a state of not being able to distinguish between reality and fantasy. She sees things and then doubts herself if what she has actually seen is the same as what her brain/mind interpreted. She is also constantly bombarded with thoughts of suicide and one day, decides to take her life by consuming an overdose of aspirin. She is rescued in time but is committed to a mental hospital by her doctor. She spends around 2 years in this mental hospital and gives us a glimpse into the inner world of the insane which is otherwise shielded. They have therapy sessions every day..some of the ward incharges are good, some bad..new patients come in and others go out..it sets a daily ...

Flowers for Algergon  By Daniel Keyes  Rating 4/5 Genres : Psychological fiction, Mental illness, 2022-read My God! This is some pretty deep stuff. Makes me look at mental retardation from a totally new perspective. The fear and anathema the main character - who is retarded - feels towards being laughed at and ridiculed is very tangible and visceral through the text that inspired me into absolute  pity for him and hatred towards his perpetrators. Its a consolation that he is not used as a guinea pig by those ruthless and self centered scientists..atleast there was some humane element to the whole plot. Most of the abusive past the main character Charlie recalls is while he is becoming smarter as a result of a brain surgery and it is handled with some detachment and in a non emotional way which I felt took the sting out of the whole past for Charlie but failed to cause a stir in me as a result..I would have liked to read the same material handled by someone els...

I'm Thinking of Ending Things  By Iain Reid  Genres: psychological thriller, 2022-read, philosophy, psyche, mystery, mental illness  Rating 5/5 ☺☺☺ Terrific. Eerie and ominous. A quick and short read but with a lasting impact. This book is a 2006  debut novel from a Canadian author Iain Reid and he makes a definitive mark with this one. Without giving away the secret/twist in the story,  this is a play of psychological guessing game on the reader till the very end. What the narrator is actually describing is not fully grasped/understood without the full context at the end. Ofcourse there are hints all through but they don't strike home the message.  Getting into the plot, Jake is a student in the preparation to become a professor. He meets a young woman at a pub and they begin connecting. While he is tall and wiry in frame, she is short and a bit roundish - contrasting him. They are both introverted, shy and non social people wishing not to talk...

Valis  By Philip k. Dick  Rating: 4.75/5 Genres: Science fiction, suspense, thriller, good vs evil, theology, mental illness, insanity, novel plot, 2021-read, reviewed. Just like living things have an 'aura'  around them with which some could guess their health/well being, books also seem to have a kind of aura around them. If it's a book written by Philip k Dick, one can be assured that it has some element of surprise, novelty, drugs, madness and a promise of a fun ride. Valis is a pleasure to read.I ran through the pages with my eyes glued to my kindle. I couldn't put this book down. Philip Dick is one of the very established authors in the genre of science fiction but for the first 20-30 percent of the book , I wondered if he diverged into a memoir. Yet, his writing is so hilarious that on the one hand I was telling myself  'what a poor fellow this Horselover Fat( an alter ego of Philip, the narrator) is' and on the other hand laughing my head off...