Happy Fourth of July to our members in the US! Hopefully, you’ll be able to squeeze some reading in around the festivities. What are you reading? I’m reading our group read, On the Rooftop by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton. It’s 1950s historical fiction about a trio of Black singing sisters.

This is historical fiction. All guesses are encouraged (no googling, though!). This is meant to be fun. Don't be dismayed if you disagree with the review. Any spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors are copied directly from the review. I’ll post the correct answer tomorrow (20th May 2026) ⭐ Seven hundred pages of historical fiction would usually be a hard pass from me, especially something that is admittedly less ambitious in terms of its literary aims. But I am a fan of Malayalam fiction, particularly works that are socially engaged and in conversation with writers and thinkers throughout India. So I gave this a shot. Alas, this book was none of those things, except for the length. It was quite problematic in places: child marriage was romanticized, the legacy of Christianity was largely unexamined, the history lessons were rudimentary, and we had a few characters serving as white savior figures. In conversation with others, I found I wasn’t the only one picking up Gone With the Wind vibes. [Author] has indicated in interviews that he wasn’t interested in engaging these topics on a political level; he was just out to tell a good story. I find that to be a very limiting approach and not at all what I look for in literary fiction. The unfortunate reality is that great works from Kerala and elsewhere in India struggle to find publishers outside the country, even after they are translated. I hope people who enjoyed this, for whatever reason, will be inclined to read work from the region instead of work merely about the region. ⭐ What do you think? What's the book? (In this case, if you can think of only the title, but not the author, that's ok!)

I'm reading The Shining by Stephen King. What are you reading (title + author, please)?

Even well-loved, super-popular, award-winning books have their serious haters! 😂 This is historical fiction. All guesses are encouraged (no googling, though!). This is meant to be fun. Don't be dismayed if you disagree with the review. Any spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors are copied directly from the review. I’ll post the correct answer tomorrow (13th May 2026). ⭐ Tedious and pretentious, I consider this to be the ultimate “Oprah book.” (Not surprisingly, it was a reading group selection.) It has all the elements of Ms. Winfrey’s brand of rah-rah self esteem promotion, including a girl who heals herself of a congenital defect by determination, dammit; and pie-eyed “answers” to the meaning of life (we don’t really die, because our molecules live on and stuff!) Fellow members of a vegetarian discussion forum have told me that [Author] is smugly dismissive of vegetarianism in her book [Title] (an account of the author’s odyssey raising her own food—including animals). I can’t comment on this, because I have not read [Author's] more recent work. However, I daresay it wouldn’t surprise me after seeing the attitude displayed in [this book]. After an especially odious description of a tribal hunt, the whiniest and most unsympathetic sister briefly becomes a vegetarian. Meanwhile, the wisest and most mature sister takes it all in stride with “intellectual” omni arguments which essentially boil down to It’s the Circle of Life and Plants Have Feelings Too. Come on! I realize that this book is beloved by many; my book group couldn’t stop raving about it. Sorry, I just don’t get it. ⭐ What do think? What's the book? (In this case, if you can think of only the title, but not the author, that's ok!)