I am a fan of Agatha Christie’s writing and love her Poirot stories. However, this particular one felt missing the usual mark of her fantastic crime fiction writing. I am not able to put my finger on a thing which is missing, but there’s something which is not quite right about this book.
I read it in a form of Audio book. So for this particular book, the narration done by Hugh Fraser was the thing which kept me going till the end.
Blurb
Thirteen guests arrived at dinner at the actor’s house. It was to be a particularly unlucky evening for the mild-mannered Reverend Stephen Babbington, who choked on his cocktail, went into convulsions and died. But when his martini glass was sent for chemical analysis, there was no trace of poison, just as Poirot had predicted. Even more troubling for the great detective, there was absolutely no motive.
If you are into poetry and want to have a nice short package describing our day-to-day life, go and fetch this book titled “Whimsical Poetry: Fiction and Reality”.
I really loved the way Syeda Javeria Fatima has added small small anecdotes about the poems she put in this short collection. The snippets of the comments she received when she talked about her alma matter, the way she see and feel proud about her mother! It all makes these poems very relatable.
Only thing i would have loved in this is more poems!
Blurb
“Whimsical Poetry” is a poetry compilation penned by a young author Javeria. This book contains fragments of fiction as well as reality. She is certain that this book will take the reader on a rollercoaster ride. Be it happiness, grief, peace, admiration, or sorrow, she will make you feel it all!
Every day we witness so many instances which are part of a story unfolding around us. It is really a difficult thing to pick those instances up and look at them as a third person and narrate a story. Storytelling is indeed a difficult task. You have to know how to build it up to give one of a kind experience to reader or listener of your story. After reading this book, I can safely and happily say Asfiya Rahman has a knack to keep you engaged in her stories.
Life With a Pinch of Salt is her latest collection published in Blogchatter’s Ebook Carnival. I am thankful for them to put it in reader’s hands. Stories included in this very short collection are woven around tiny instances of everyday life which we all experience. This relatability made me finish this tiny collection in one sitting.
Things which I enjoyed
First of all, I can’t stop myself from praising the gorgeous cover design with simple salt and paper shakers. Life is really bland without seasoning of fun, quirk and bizarre. Asfiya has story for everything above and some extra. Even though stories are very short flash fictions, they are complete in itself. I am eagerly waiting for more stories from her. Hope she bring out more and more such books!
Blurb
Life is a wonderful gift that each one of us has been given. We often get bogged down by the mundane routine of life and the weight of our expectations and forget this. This collection of short stories and flash fiction is a small attempt to remind us that life is messy and adventurous and full of surprises.
Life isn’t meant to be perfect, it’s meant to be lived.
About the book
Title: Life With a Pinch of Salt Author: Asfiya Rahman Pages: 38
My review
Story: 4/5 Cover Design: 4.5/5
Overall rating: 4.25/5
You can grab your copy of Life With a Pinch of Saltby Asfiya Rahmanhere.
Should you read it?
I enjoyed this little book and I hope it has picked me up from my reading slump. I hope this will pick you up from yours too if you are having one.
This is a part of Blogchatter’s Ebook Carnival. If you want more book recommendations, click here.
My journey in the world of poetry began quite late. I hardly enjoyed them during my school days. However, when I was in college, something came to me spontaneously and my journey started. My lines were not polished, nor they had a particular form. So I started to read about poetry. After a decade or so, I can dare to say that I write a decent poetry in Marathi with one audiobook under my belt. “चिमुकली स्वप्ने” my first and only poetry collection is available on storytel for you all to enjoy.
However, my understanding of English poetry is that of a beginner’s level. I sometime fail to comprehend if a particular piece is a poetry or just a paragraph. I found Seethalakshmi’s “Dharma Artha Kama Moksha” in Blogchatter’s E-book librabry. This particular book is a part of their Ebook carnival where I have also put up my book ओंजळभर प्रेम.
Who did I like this one?
Let me tell you very frankly that I fail to understand quite a few poems in this book due to my lack of understanding. Yet there are few pieces which grabbed my attention and one of them is “I See a Monster from My Window”. I just loved the way she has created this imagery of continuously growing plastic eating monster which one day will eat us all. My most favorite lines from the poem are
Who feeds the monster, you ask? Oh, to remember every name, is a task It’s definitely me, it’s definitely you, It’s our every neighbour, old & new
She has penned poems covering four aspects of human life and I am sure every poet atleast once have written about Moksh / Mukti in one form or the other. Even I couldn’t stop myself from writing
I liked the way she has designed the book. Yet only think which is missing in the copy of ebook is the cover used in other graphics. Use of the same cover would have improved the appearance a bit. I am enjoying my this learning experience and am sure people who are ahead of me on this path will enjoy this collection for sure.
You can grab your copy of Dharma Artha Kama Moksha by Seethalakshmihere.
This is a part of Blogchatter’s Ebook Carnival. You can read more of my book recommendations here.
Indian mythologies have such a strong characters and folklore surrounding it, that any fiction author will get enticed to work on them. Some try to retell the story from different character’s perspective or some try to take the characters to entirely different era and see what will happen to them. Shubira tried the second thing.
Review
Plus point of The Demons of Jaitraya is a very strong plot to work with. However, I find the book an okay read for one time read. Her book couldn’t keep my eyes glued to words she has written. But i would not attribute this to her writing or storytelling. I think this book could have been more crisp and enticing with a better editing. There was a lot of repetition. Some things were told again and again which almost felt like copy paste of earlier paragraphs. I hope other books of this series have taken care of this. Cause I don’t want to lose out on this wonderful plot of events happening when Demons escaped from past wreaking havoc in today’s time and age.
Blurb
The epics say, in the great War of Ramayana, a number of rakshasas escaped. They hid in the bowels of the Earth, in the water and in space and remained dormant for eons. In the 20th century of the Christian era, however, some of them reappeared in different forms to plague the Earth with Wars and illnesses. At the end of his war with Ravana, Rama had asked Hanuman to raise and train a contingent of warriors who would take birth multiple times on Earth, to contain the demons. Aishani and adheesh are two such warriors, blessed with divine weapons and powers to fight the world’s evils at present times. Read this exciting story to know who finally wins. The good or the evil? The demons of jaitraya is the first book of the trilogy of the war between demons and humans.
About the book
Title: The Demons of Jaitraya Author: Shubira Prasad Publisher: Vitasta Publishing Pvt Ltd Pages: 242
Personally, I think book has missed the mark and is ok to read once if you are into mythological fictions. Overall, strong story, poor editing, ok cover. Pick up at your own risk.
If you want more book recommendations, click here.
Today, we all rely on gadgets and apps to help us through our day-to-day activities. From keeping our appointments to ordering food, we use hundreds of mobile applications and computer softwares. Widespread internet connectivity on the go has revolutionized the way we live in the twenty-first century. This digital revolution came into cartography (science and art of mapmaking) too and mapmaking saw a change by leaps and bounds. This transformation started with the basic activity of digitization.
What does digitization mean?
New digital platforms and softwares were designed to map maps. But to build this virtual world of online maps, the real world needed to be converted into digital form from old paper forms. This process of bringing old maps into the digital environment is called digitization. Digitization helped mapmakers to bring all the old efforts of their forefathers into the new environment. It helped to keep the body of knowledge relevant even in this new digital era.
How to digitize?
There are two types of digitization of the old paper world. One is to just scan it and store it online to put on the display. Other one needs more work and concentration. Do you remember using tracing papers to trace your favourite artwork or pattern to replicate it? This type of digitization is nothing but the digital tracing. Here, user imports the scanned map / image in a map making software and then traces the various elements meticulously to capture all the details.
When I was studying geoinformatics during my Masters degree, one lab course was about digitization. One of the very tedious task of digitizing a toposheet. It was taxing on the eyes, especially when we were digitizing contours (lines which join the same elevation of the ground) on toposheets. Pune region is especially hilly and undulating putting those contours very close to each other and we often used to start digitizing one contour and unknowingly jump to adjacent contours in between. But all in all, it was a fun exercise, if your file doesn’t corrupt during the process.
It’s fun, when you become “pro”
After my masters, I got a chance to see cities all over the world. I saw Melbourne and Sydney in Australia,Paris, London and Lisbon in Europe, New York and Los Angeles in the USA. No no, I didn’t travel to all these cities. I was working in a company where our team digitized building footprints from various aerial photographs of these cities. Our group of 5-6 guys working in the second shift was famous for getting any complex image processed in record times. We used to get the images to process where others would have failed. I enjoyed this task for some time and left that company for better and challenging opportunities.
Census 2011 map of Mawal Taluka, Pune
Digitized Mawal taluka boundaries by CDSA, Pune
However, digitization remains one of the basic tasks of any mapmaking project which has some connection with the historical data. (Which happens almost every time). In the online interactive map shown above I have digitized some of the institution buildings in Pune and around them have created a buffer of silence zone as per the noise pollution control rules. While the static map below shows the village locations, boundaries of Mawal Taluka of Pune District digitized from census 2011 maps.
So, hope you enjoy the hard work done by some of us in the form of navigation systems of your cars or phones. (Bas google navigation ki galti ki galiya hame mat dijiye…)
I’m participating in #BlogchatterA2Z. You can read my other posts about maps and map-reading here.
