THE SHELF / 6 books that I read at the end of last year… I hated 5 of them

Fifty years old this year, the country represented in 'Golden: Bangladesh at 50' (UPL, 2021) is haunted, still, by all that it has survived, and it takes a look at all that it continues to breed, ranging from the festering to the hopeful. And so it follows that the collection feels wonderfully young, even as it comprises some of the most experienced and eminent of our writers, from Neeman Sobhan and Lubna Marium to Arif Anwar, Shazia Omar, Nadeem Zaman, Sabrina Ahmad, and many more.

Journal for Service Quality Enhancement (JSQE), a new international academic journal devoted to the development and improvement of service quality in business and commerce, was launched on July 31, 2021.

Over the years, Dahl’s work in children’s literature has amassed quite the legacy in pop culture, with actor-director Danny DeVito’s silver screen adaptation of Matilda only adding to the novel’s popularity. Looking at the anniversary today, I can’t help but wonder if the magical children’s icon from the late ‘80s can continue to exert the same amount of influence over young minds. Fourth-grade Rasha would have gleefully said ‘Yes’ in a heartbeat, but as a young adult, I believe there is some reflecting to be done. 

This year, British Asian book blogger Minaal Reid, known on Instagram as @minaal.reads, brought the celebration of South Asian Heritage Month to bookstagram by hosting a collaborative project featuring several South Asian content creators on Instagram. The hashtag #SouthAsianHeritageMonth was launched by Minaal with a seven-slide post outlining the scheduled programmes programs and participants, with the goal of having South Asian communities all over social media interact with each other through online content creation, while simultaneously diversifying the concept of South Asian identities on the same platforms. 

Good Touch Bad Touch, written in Bangla, is a 30-page book filled with stories, illustrations, and charts that are designed to be emotionally interactive for parents and their children; the prose comprises bedtime stories that seek to clarify how a child can identify abuse.

Shaheen Akhtar’s 'Beloved Rongomala', translated from the Bangla novel, 'Shokhi Rongomala' (Bengal Publications, 2015), by Shabnam Nadiya, will now be published by India’s Eka imprint of Westland Publications. The novel tells the story of Queen Phuleswari, a child bride, and of Rongomala, a woman of legend—a low caste mistress to the king who protested the limits to which her rights were confined by the class and caste prejudices of 18th century southern Bengal.

In Metaphor, David Punter reads Chinua Achebe’s postcolonial novel, Things Fall Apart (1958) which draws upon Yeats’s “The Second Coming” (1921) for its title, arguing that the centre is “responsible for the very social, political and cultural problems now being encountered in Africa, and perhaps globally” (117).

In this addition to this series, following up on the previous installment’s focus on nonfiction narratives of Birangonas’s lives and experiences, we recall Tarashankar Bandopadhyay’s '1971' (2015) and Shaheen Akhtar’s 'Talaash' (2004), two books that can be considered as significant exceptions to the trend mentioned above, and also as examples of the politics of representation, objectification of women, and the desensitisation of lived experiences of trauma.

In a brief but insightful episode of Star Book Talk last week, Bangladeshi-Australian chef Kishwar Chowdhury, runner up of MasterChef Australia 2021, revealed her fascination with cookbooks and books related to food as an artform. Here we find out more about the three books Kishwar highlighted as personal favourites—even, at one point, pulling out one of them from her shelves!

On June 30, a virtual ceremony for the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize was held, and for the first time in its history a Sri Lankan writer was announced as the overall winner.

The second volume of Dhaka University: The Convocation Speeches, 1948-1970 (Dhaka University Publications, 1989), assembled assiduously by Emeritus Professor Serajul Islam Choudhury, is an important publication like the first one for anyone trying to understand Dhaka University’s extraordinary role in the genesis and identity formation of Bangladesh.

Before I knew it, I developed a personal relationship with the book. I was glued from beginning till end. I read slowly. Sometimes I read the same section twice. I could not focus on anything else till I finished. The experience was psychedelic: an expansion of the mind (imagination). In the end, the second omen worked. I was out of depression. Ricardo was right: “a good book (or film) can pull you out of depression”. 

This year’s Booker Prize longlist, the most prestigious literary award for fiction published in the UK, was released yesterday, with well-loved names such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Rachel Cusk, Patricia Lockwood, and Richard Powers making the cut alongside the critically acclaimed Anuk Arudpragasam, Sunjeev Sahota, Damon Galgut, and others. 

The past one year has inclined our lives towards a virtual medium as we work from home and attend classes online. Subsequently, binge-watching shows and films has become the premier mode of relaxing for many. For readers who cannot take out the time to sit with a book, their adaptations—particularly of young adult stories—can be a welcome solution.    

Karina’s experiences are conveyed with compassion, emphasising the real issues of gender inequality in South Asian communities. The fact that parents continue to force their dreams on children instead of letting them pursue their own speaks volumes about the family dynamics existing in our households. Karina is seen to experiment with various ways of coping with anxiety instead of seeking professional help. Her experiences represent the glaring lack of mental health care in our community, even beyond national borders. That being said, the techniques Karina employs could be a helpful resource for readers suffering from similar issues. 

At every step of her journey in the MasterChef kitchen—from her fried sardines with beetroot and blood orange to a date-nestled, ice cream infused paan and panta bhaat with aloo bhorta—Kishwar Chowdhury has talked about writing a cookbook for Bangladeshi recipes as her ultimate dream. In this episode of Star Book Talk, Daily Star Books editor Sarah Anjum Bari talks about food, books, and cookbooks with Kishwar Chowdhury.

To me, he was a weaver of stories from lands and cultures, all within Bangladesh, that I would never have heard of otherwise. Growing up abroad amidst mixed cultures and languages, Humayun Ahmed kept Bangladesh within me and in thousands of others like me.

There is no better way to show someone that they are on your mind than to recommend a book you think they would love.

Amitav Ghosh’s passionate engagement with the Sundarbans has brought out his best as a socially conscious fashioner of narrative in The Hungry Tide (HarperCollins, 2004) and Gun Island (John Murray, 2019); enriched his intervention in the discourse on ecology, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Penguin, 2016); and perhaps most felicitously, has brought to light the poet hiding behind his voluminous prose.

Be it the desolation in Tahrir Square or the barbarity of Islamist jihadis in Syria, what is the one thing common to each of these instances of violence and fury?