Barefoot and Gun Island

Barefoot is the Collected Poems of Scottish poet Alastair Reid edited by Tom Pow. I found the book in Barnes & Nobles one evening while browsing the poetry section. The poems are skillful and reflective, sincere and nostalgic, but not terribly memorable, to be honest. The stakes in the poems are not raised very high.

Gun Island is my first Amitav Ghosh. I bought it from Book Culture to support the bookstore. The novel is humane and well-plotted, although the writing slips into cliches at times. The protagonist, Deen a rare books dealer, remains a bit of a cipher. The two sections are interesting for me in different ways. The first section is set in the Sundarbans, a mangrove delta of the Ganges that I got to know from Rushdie's Midnight's Children. The second section is set in Venice, which we visited for the first time last summer. I could vouch from my personal experience that the Bengalis have been in that city for a long time: we had dinner at what looked like a very local pizzeria, which was owned and run by Bengali immigrants.

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