On the depiction of patriarchal tyranny in Jane Austen’s fiction — At 11, Austen seemed like a dream come true. Freshly graduated from a schoolyard Meg Cabot craze (a classmate in primary school had gifted us all a slim paperback volume of one of the Princess Diaries novels on her birthday), I was primed for romance and Happy Endings. The surface…

Catherine Tilney is the naive heroine who dares to think for herself — I don’t remember when I first read Northanger Abbey. Like many Austenites, I was hung up on Pride and Prejudice. Mrs. Bennett seemed like a caricature of my Indian mother, well-meaning, harried and endlessly pre-occupied with getting her daughters married to eligible, well educated young men of sound morals, devout…

Opticians cite quality and service but no one wants to talk about the business monopoly that enables cutthroat pricing — The Common Price for Glasses I’ve been wearing glasses since primary school. Growing up, that meant sporting an inevitably geeky look (at 10, I obviously had no clue how to make a fashion statement with my frames!). Now, wearing glasses means slight marks on the sides of my nose. Being blinded by heavy rain or…

Pulling novels from shelves is the sign of a self-destructive society. — ‘It has way too much violence for someone your age. You shouldn’t read that. Why don’t you read this instead? I loved it when I was a little girl-you will too!’ Sprawled on a squishy plush orange armchair fronting the graphic novel section of the library, my copy of Fables…

The morally grey spin on the ‘monstrous horde’ is deeply rooted in Tolkien lore — *Spoilers for Episode 3 and Episode 8 of Amazon’s The Rings of Power* ‘In my story, I do not deal in Absolute Evil. I do not think there is such a thing’. J.R.R. Tolkien’s private note on The Lord of the Rings, the epic trilogy that birthed modern fantasy as…

It’s not because a Nobel Prize winner is necessarily dull — When I first read Lord of the Flies at 15, I finally understood how some people could claim that ‘reading wasn’t really their thing’. It bored me to death, this 200-page story with the intriguing if slightly worn out premise-teenage boys stranded on a deserted island, rapidly descending into brutality…

This fairy-tale based fantasy novel shows that a good outcome is earned and not destined — A heroine doesn’t have to be an elven warrior princess or the Mother of Dragons. Sometimes, a timid, 30-year-old nun with a heart of gold will do the trick. Ursula Vernon’s (who writes as T.Kingfisher) dark fantasy story places Marra, the third daughter of a minor royal house, at centre…

Arthur Dent showed us how to ‘choose to see the beauty of this world’ long before Westworld’s Dolores Abernathy did — Douglas Adams’ A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was the first science fiction novel I read in my life. I thought it would make a good birthday present for my older sister. If you were an impressionable eleven year old with a taste for both the lurid and the fantastic…

Victorian era street urchins, sideshow ‘freaks’ and so called monsters take centre stage in J.M. Miro’s alternate history — ‘This is not a romance, but an adventure.’ It’s a striking quote, taken from a Goodreads review of Ordinary Monsters. These days, most novels have some kind of romantic sub-plot that serves to endear them to the reader. Maybe, you were ‘Team this or Team that’ (no judgment!) as teenagers…