(From Written in History by Simon Sebag Montefiore)

“Letters are the literary antidote to the ephemerality of life. Goethe who reflected much on the magic of letters, thought them to be the most significant memorial a person can leave. And those instincts are right: long after the protagonists are dead, the letters live on”

“I grew up in a Hindu household. Our home always had a prayer-room, where paintings and portraits of assorted divinities jostled for shelf and wall-space with fading photographs of departed ancestors, all stained by ash scattered from the incense burned daily by my devout parents. I have written before of how my earliest experiences of piety came from watching my father at prayer. Every morning, after his bath, my father would stand in front of the prayer-room wrapped in his towel, his wet hair still uncombed, and chant his Sanskrit mantras. But he never obliged me to join him; he exemplified the Hindu idea that religion is an intensely personal matter, that prayer is between you and whatever image of your Maker you choose to worship. In the Hindu way, I was to find my own truth.”

Simon Blackburn’s introduction to philosophy reads very nicely and is easy to grasp for a lay reader such as me.

TJ Klune has a nice way of setting up the scene and describing characters as they are introduced for the first time in the story. The author uses colors, shapes and feel to describe a person. For example (look at thin line, lipstick looked like blood, black pantsuit, skin stretched too tightly in the lines below):

Ian Fleming’s classic work Casino Royale reads as a journey in the mind of Bond. (The movie adaptations are, in comparison, quite detached and rarely explore Bond, the person).

Children of Time delves into the hard scifi genre almost immediately. For example,

The Ninth Rain by Jen Williams starts off with a prologue, highlighting an event occuring 200 years ago. Typically when starting off with an epic saga, the reader often expects hearing about the hero of the tale, while the morally compromised characters are introduced later as the story deepens. This idea is cleverly flipped in the first few pages of the book.