Hello guys! 🙂

I hope you are all doing super good, and, if not, I am praying that 2017 brings tons of happiness for all of us.

I went through a huge uninspired phase where I just did not feel like writing here. I visited so many places in the last few months before coming back to India, but I was in such a trance of missing India that I did not feel like blogging it all. I will get to it pretty soon and hopefully we will have a fun ride in bringing back all the memories!

Now coming to a book roundup of 2016, I read very less this year for reason mentioned above. It’s funny because the circumstances were so conducive for reading. Anyway, I read less but I wanted to share it all. So, here are all the 6 books that I read in 2016, irrespective of whether I liked them or not. I am talking below how I found them to be:

1. East of Love, West of Desire by Dinesh Prasad: I have written a whole blog post (which is one of my favorites on this blog) about this book. I loved it to the core, it was a pretty book to hold first of all. Secondly, it was one of my favorite themes – India Pakistan partition. Thirdly, I love reading short stories, these were stories woven around partition. Naturally, I loved it. I wholeheartedly recommend this to anyone who likes partition tales of love and emotions.  
2. If You Could See Me Now by Cecelia Ahern: Okay, it was a positive book and a light read, so all was good with the world. I quite enjoyed reading it but it is definitely not a must read.
3. Premchand ki Shreshtha Kahaniyan (Hindi): You know how much I love his stories, it’s a surprising thing even for myself that I have not read any of his novels so far. This year I am definitely going to change that. I am going to start reading his novels finally. As always, I thoroughly loved this collection of short stories.
4. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Oh my God! Where do I even start? Can someone please take a moment to tell me why exactly is this book so famous? It was so painful to finish this book. There came a point when I started liking it and it had its share of good moments but, overall, it was just about okay. Its a love story, so to say, but as far as I am concerned, I found it so difficult to feel connected to the protagonists or feel their pain or whatever.
5. The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh: I finally read something by him, can I now qualify for the serious readers tag? 😛 Kidding, okay! It is a good book and if you are reading it away from your home (whatever it is that you consider home 🙂 ), this will strike a chord at so many levels.
6. The Calcutta Chromosome by Amitav Ghosh: Here’s to my favorite book of 2016 which I happened to read right before the year ended. It is only a coincidence that my 2 books were back to back Amitav Ghosh’s. The first one I picked in a lovely bookshop in Berlin and the second one is from MDI’s library. This one is a medical thriller, building fiction around the fact that Dr Ronald Ross discovered the malaria parasite in India. It is an excruciatingly confusing read but, for me, it all paid off well in the end because I loved it thoroughly. Such an amazing read!

And with this,  I wrap up 2016 in this space. I cannot wait to talk to you again in 2017! Wishing you all a very Happy New Year!