Beyond the Book

To base one's first novel on a story as famous and repeatedly told as that of "the best of all Greeks",  Madeline Miller has achieved a tremendous and courageous feat.  Achilles, the hero of the legendary Trojan War, was the son of the fierce sea-nymph Thetis and the renowned King Peleus. Prophesied to become one of the greatest warriors to be born, he was prepossessing, alluring, and charmingly humorous.  The novel begins with the story of Patroclus an awkward Prince and son of Menoetius, who was exiled to Peleus' court after killing a nobleman's child in anger. Thus, Patroclus meets Achilles and as fate would have it, goes on to become his life-long companion, friend, and lover much to Thetis' dismay.  Patroclus and Achilles are trained by the wise centaur Chiron in the art of war, medicine, and survival. After the kidnapping of Helen of Sparta, Achilles and the Kings of Greece are forced to join the King of Mycenae, Agamemnon's army to fight the Trojans...

Beautiful World Where are You is Sally Rooney's latest brainchild. The contemporary novel revolves around the complexity of relationships just like her previous works, Normal People and Conversations with Friends. You essentially know the sight of a good book when it's aggressively tagged and highlighted, and with this one, I went as far as making notes because Rooney really hits you in the gut with her observations in this book.  The book revolves around the lives of four people, Alice, Eileen, Felix, and Simon who want to experience life to the fullest yet, like most people it soon turns into a hazy bundle of the mess that you endlessly start despising. Alice a novelist, is an eccentric woman who suffered a mental breakdown due to the newfound fame of a celebrity novelist and now lives alone in a huge rectory in Dublin. Her best friend, Eileen, often lonesome, is an excellently witty and intelligent female who works at an extremely low-paying literary agency. Unlike the usu...

  I'm not a big fan of self-help books (I'm rather bad at following advice and I tend to forget the previous chapter) but Atomic Habits managed to change my opinion.  Written by James Clear, an American journalist and author who proudly calls himself an advocator of useful ideas, the book is an essential framework towards building better habits through simple yet effective strategies. Through the book, the author tries to reveal how making small changes however minuscule in nature, can lead to greater outcomes. The best part of the book is that Clear uses stories of successful CEOs, athletes, musicians, artists, etc in order to prescribe an evidentiary value to his theory of building better habits. An interplay of psychology and neuroscience opens your eyes to the working of your own lifestyle and what changes you must make in order to live a more fulfilling and desirable life. Clear has the astounding ability to make the process of habit formation seem simple and easy to achi...

  "Brains give rise to our ability to form relationships and make life meaningful. Sometimes, they break." When Breath becomes Air is a gut-wrenching, inspiring, and heartfelt memoir by a young and brilliant neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi, who at the age of  36 comes face-to-face with a life-altering diagnosis indicating terminal cancer.  Paul Kalinithi was a neurosurgeon-neuroscientist with a burning passion for literature which stemmed out of the need to find and fully understand the meaning of the question that burdens most of us, "What makes life worth living?" He pursued his doctorate in literature from Stanford University and went on to study medicine at Yale. Paul explains in the book how medicine was never the path for him. Medicine to him was an absence, primarily in the form of the absence of a father who as a doctor had to work strenuously for long hours. However, the question that introduced literature to him, now led him towards biology and medicine. ...