SunstarTV Bureau: With the world being shut down for more than six months for the first time in ten decades, books were one of the windows through which people were looking at the world outside.
The lock down 2020 was a blessing in disguise for the book lovers. Inside the pages of books they could go on a voyage unexplored.
Stories can be both entertaining and educative. They can also be insightful and illuminating, especially when they have travelled down the generations, through the centuries, taking on and eliding new meanings with each retelling.
Here are the handpicked top five fictional and non-fictional books, which made our depressing year a little tolerable.
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Yash Tiwari’s ‘Pandemic 2020: Rife of the Virus’
Ironically the book based on pandemic could create buzz amongst the readers and critiques as well. Completing the book in 25-30 days the 18-year-old earned himself a spot in Asia Book of Records for being the youngest to write a fictional book on COVID-19.
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Amish Tripathy’s ‘Dharma: Decoding the Epics for a Meaningful Life’
From the writer of ‘Meluha: trilogy’, Dharma is a extension into the verse of What is the ideal interplay between thought and action, taking and giving, self-love and sacrifice? How can we tell right from wrong? What can we do to bring out the best in ourselves, and to live a life with purpose and meaning, not just one fuelled by the ego and material needs? The answers lie in these simple and wise interpretations of our favourite stories by a lovable cast of fictional characters who you’ll enjoy getting to know.
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Harper Lee’s ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’:
The book is an immortal classic which has never let dust to settle on its cover. The novel was published in 1960. Instantly successful, widely read in high schools and middle schools in the United States, it has become a classic of modern American literature, winning the Pulitzer Prize. The plot and characters are loosely based on Lee’s observations of her family, her neighbors and an event that occurred near her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, in 1936, when she was ten.
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Rituparna Chatterjee’s ‘The Water Phoenix:
A memoir of childhood abuse’, is a new release on 28 October 2020. But you cannot turn your head away from the book. The story revolves around the protagonist Rituparna. When Rituparna suddenly loses her mother at the age of five, she is shipped off to a trusted relative so she can grow up in a loving family. Instead, she finds herself bullied, sexually abused and has the first of several near-death-experiences. She grows up unsure of where love ends and cruelty begins and struggling to process the world without the dark lens of abuse.
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Mandira Bedi and Satyadeb Burman’s ‘Happy for No Reason’
The book is all about being happy without any particular reason. Mandira Bedi is a fitness icon. But behind the six-pack is also a snotty, complaining, can’t-get-out-of-bed-today girl who, in her own way, is still searching for true happiness. Not conditional, materialistic, transactional happiness, but just happiness. So has she cracked it yet? Mandira says ‘No’. But she genuinely believes that she’s headed in the right direction. In her own chaotic way, she seems to have discovered some kind of non-scientific, non-spiritual and as-yet-non-existent formula for finding peace in everything. Just being happy-for no reason. This book is about that.
