Sid

I would like to agree with ‘The Independent', whose favorable review is written on the cover - ‘A masterpiece. One of the greatest works of our age.'
No review can do this book justice, as I am beginning to see. The ruminations of ‘Humbert Humbert', becoming more and more deranged as the pages fly by, is a chilling echo to the spiralling madness of the main character.
I couldn't put this book down, and it is shameful to realize how most people would not touch this book with a ten foot pole, due to them getting the wrong notion of this book encouraging paedophilia. Read and make up your own minds.
TL;DR - read it, if you haven't already. If you have, then you already know how haunting it is.

What does your soul look like?
This masterpiece novella can be interpreted in many ways – as a symbol of isolation and/or depression, as a literal example of speciesism and so on and so forth. When I started reading this literary piece, I was quickly drawn into Gregor's minuscule world which slowly turns upside-down and larger than he could have imagined.

The ending, while expected, left me with a sense of hollowness – because as the cover blurb states, ‘Kafka is important to us because his predicament is the predicament of modern man.' The story of Gregor is heart-breaking beyond words – the shallow veneer of his ‘happy' existence is cruelly left exposed and Gregor is left gasping for air, as well as the fact that his sister Grete backstabs him – it can be argued that the deuteragonist of the story is so critical to rationalizing the story that she might as well be labelled as the co-protagonist. The subtextual metamorphosis that Grete undergoes, I would argue, is more important than Gregory's own – but that is the beauty of the novella – you can interpret it in many different ways and all of them would be equally valid.
A masterpiece of prose, visual imagery, allegorical storytelling and subtexts, The Metamorphosis truly lived up to its reputation as one of the best short works in modern literature. Another one of those ‘classics' that doesn't disappoint.

TL;DR - a true blue masterpiece, and one that is going to make me start a classics binge shortly.
Whether it is the characterisation, the heady Faustian themes, and a surprisingly great plot - my first foray into Wilde's literature was nothing short of spectacular. Lord Henry's cynicism was laugh-at-loud at parts, and somewhat deep at others, but where the novel truly shines is in depicting Dorian's corruption - first as a charming and uncorrupted seventeen-year old, but then whose countenance grows darker the more he revels in his senses. What I liked the most in this depiction is that we get to know about Dorian's behaviour second-hand, and that too in parts - thus the misuse of the omniscient PoV is kept to a minimum.
A slight addendum - there are slight socialist undertones I got from this (for example, the depiction of vacuousness of the people having inherited wealth is unsubtle), to the point where I began to wonder if Wilde was a socialist - which he was? Unsurprising, but it only added to my appreciation of the text.

I am lost for words after finishing the final entry of this trilogy - it took every expectation I had of it, destroyed it to smithereens, and came up with something unprecedented.
With this concluding work, Cixin Liu has cemented his place among the greats - this is the best hard sci-fi work written since Asimov's ‘The Last Question'. The works of sci-fi landing in ‘unprecedented scope' was generally mutually exclusive with ‘actually mind-blowing for once', but Cixin Liu has demolished those barriers effortlessly.
It moves so much beyond its initial foundations of first contact that it is barely recognisable - but it is all the more better for it, as it is not chained to a particular niche. Exploring concepts as varied as dimensional flattening and time warping, and making sure that the plot stays on track, is an underappreciated talent that potential sci-fi writers would do good to take note of.
This series is the closest I've seen a sci-fi series come to the platonic ideal of ‘sci-fi' - the literature of ideas. The trilogy is a must read for anyone who has ever read sci-fi and would like a more serious take on it.

I was always curious as to why I was named so - my mother tells me that my father started reading this book two to three months before I was born. He finished it a week before my birth - and it made such an impression that I was named Siddhartha after the book's central character. This book, for this reason, has a permanent place in our bookshelf. I picked it up on a whim, and was absolutely blown away. This book is truly timeless - Hesse expresses simple and pure ideas with magnificent elegance.

In Buddhist mythology, Siddhartha Gautama is a man who realises that the world is meaningless, if lived either fully in desire or asceticism - after achieving enlightenment, he becomes the Buddha, and spreads the concept of a ‘middle path'. Hesse takes this concept even further, and separates Siddhartha and Gautama - in his work, Siddhartha is the son of a Brahmin who longs to rise above his mortal shell, and Gautama (stylized as Goutama) is the Buddha, who has already achieved enlightenment by the time Siddhartha steps to find out meaning in his life.

The journey of Siddhartha never stops - whether sinning, repenting or at peace with himself, Siddhartha never ceases to be static. And yet he would not trade these experiences for anything in the world - because they are what has moulded him. Learning that money, love, cowardice and avarice exist - and learning to experience them, while rising above them, is what Siddhartha learns through the course of the novel.

In a sense, Siddhartha is the ultimate existentialist. He loves everyone and everything, warts and all, simply because they are - thus freeing himself from both human and material attachments, and achieving enlightenment. He can be easily dismissed as something to be read about, absorbed and dismissed, because of his philosophy's seeming naïveté.

However, the central theme of Siddhartha is not the protagonist's teachings per se, but his unwavering belief that introspection and self-taught lessons are always better than what a teacher may impart, because secondhand knowledge can be dangerous. And that is a belief that is as valid in a utopia, as it is in ours. This, and other such concepts scattered around the work, makes the book stay with you long after you've read it.