Bookworm's Nook

The Midnight Library   Matt Haig      "It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga. It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do the people we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out. But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's wors...

The Palace Of Illusions CHITRA  BANERJEE  DIVAKARUNI "Can't you ever be serious?' I said, mortified. 'It's difficult,' he said.'There's so little in life that's worth it." -Draupadi & Krishna      The Palace of Illusions by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is a breathtaking reimagining of the Mahabharata , one of the greatest epics ever written. Most of us have grown up hearing the story countless times, but this novel completely transforms the way we see it. Instead of following the familiar narrative shaped by male voices, we experience the epic through the eyes of the woman history has so often blamed for the devastating war that changed the fate of entire kingdoms: Draupadi. The novel takes us deep into Draupadi's mind, revealing her fears, ambitions, desires, anger, and resilience. From her secret attraction to the one man she can never have, her husbands' greatest enemy, to the humiliation she suffers at his hands; from sharing an...