Birthday Stories

February 22, 2026 Leave a comment

Edited by Haruki Murakami | 224 Pages | Genre: Fiction | Publisher: Vintage Books | Year: 2006 | My Rating: 8/10

“No matter how far you go, you can never be anything but yourself”
― Haruki Murakami, Birthday Stories

I’ve always loved receiving books on my birthdays, as far back as I can remember. When I was in elementary and middle school, my parents used to gift me books, and for several years, since I can recall, I often used my saved pocket money to buy myself the best books, something I still do on my birthdays. On my last birthday in 2025, a few friends and family members gifted me books that could keep me occupied for six months. Among them was “Birthday Stories” by Haruki Murakami. What an amazing way to start my birthday year!

Something is mesmerising about beginning a new year of one’s life with a book that itself revolves around birthdays, those strange markers of time when we pause, introspect and reflect, and sometimes feel the weight of becoming. Birthday Stories is not a novel by Murakami in the conventional sense, but a curated collection of short stories written by various authors, commissioned by Murakami for the Japanese magazine Monkey. The book is a rich anthology that explores how a single day in one’s life can hold joy, dread, memory, regret, longing, and transformation.

A birthday is such a universal ritual of cake, candles, wishes, gifts, and phone calls. Yet, through these 13 stories, the birthday becomes a moment where ordinary life tilts, revealing hidden fractures or unexpected openings. Some stories are gentle and reflective, others unsettling, a few laced with humour or quiet absurdity. As a reader beginning a personal ‘birthday year’ of reading, I found myself slipping into these stories with a peculiar intimacy, as if each one was asking me to examine my own relationship with time and personal evolution.

Murakami’s presence is felt more as a curator than as a dominating voice, which is refreshing. He resists the temptation to turn the anthology into a showcase of ‘Murakami-esque’ surrealism. Instead, he assembles a diverse range of voices that are playful, melancholic, and even experimental. The result is a collage of sensibilities that mirrors the many ways people experience birthdays, often not as a single emotion, but as a spectrum of moods. This diversity keeps the collection from becoming repetitive. Each story feels like a different room in the same house of memory and anticipation.

One of the pleasures of Birthday Stories is how subtly it captures the loneliness that can accompany birthdays. Even when surrounded by people, birthdays can heighten our awareness of time passing, unmet expectations, and relationships that have shifted gears. Several stories linger in this emotional space, portraying characters who are quietly dislocated on their special day. A birthday becomes a reminder of what has not happened as much as what has. This emotional undercurrent resonated deeply with me. Birthdays, after all, are checkpoints reviewing the year that has finished, and not just celebrations. They ask uncomfortable questions, like ‘where am I in my life? What have I become since the last candle was blown out?’

The collection of stories has a playfulness about it, a recognition that birthdays can be absurd social performances. Some stories gently mock the rituals we perform around ageing: the forced cheer, the obligatory gratitude, the awkward gifts. Others find wonder in small moments of a conversation, a remembered taste, a fleeting encounter that feels more meaningful than any grand celebration. This balance between lightness and introspection makes the book an easy yet thoughtful read. 

The anthology format also invites a particular kind of reading rhythm. I found myself reading one story at a time, allowing each to settle, and eventually taking 13 weeks to complete the book. It felt like savouring my favourite Lindt Intense Orange, one piece at a time. In doing so, Birthday Stories began to feel less like a book to be finished and more like a companion to the year ahead with short meditations on time, chance, and the quiet dramas of ordinary lives. It suited the idea of a reading calendar stretching over weeks, not rushing through but returning to in small, reflective doses.

Reading Birthday Stories at the start of my birthday year felt quietly symbolic. It reminded me that growing older is not a singular narrative of progress or decline, but a series of small, often unnoticed stories we accumulate. Some are strange, some tender, some unresolved. Murakami’s editorial touch brings these fragments together on how time moves through us. The book does not offer grand revelations about ageing or purpose; it brings an honest recognition of the ordinary magic and quiet unease that accompany the simple act of marking another year lived. In that sense, Birthday Stories was the perfect birthday gift. Not because it dazzled with literary fireworks, but because it sat beside me, nudging me to notice the emotional textures of passing time. As the months of my reading calendar unfold, I don’t think I will remember this book less for specific plots and more for the reflective awareness it left me with that every birthday, like every story, is a small doorway into who we are becoming.

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Cloud Atlas

September 22, 2025 Leave a comment

by David Mitchell | 544 Pages | Genre: Fiction | Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton | Year: 2004 | My Rating: 9.5/10

“A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

Some novels entertain, others provoke. David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas does both and then something rarer still, it bends the time itself! Since its publication in 2004, this novel has become a cult classic, not only for its intricate structure but also for its audacious attempt to string together the vast tapestry of human existence from past, present and future. The book is one of the most original, unusual, and polarising works on this century.

Mitchell presents us with six interconnected stories that span centuries and genres, a 19th-century Pacific voyage, letters from a young composer in Belgium, a taut thriller set in 1970s California, a satirical farce about a vanity publisher, the interrogation of a genetically engineered clone in a near-future Korea, and a tale told in a fractured dialect after civilization’s collapse. At first, these stories seem like discrete novellas. Yet as each thread is interrupted and later resumed, patterns begin to emerge, as symbols, names, and echoes that ripple across time.

Reading Cloud Atlas is like listening to a symphony in six movements. Each section has its own rhythm, its own instrumentation, yet together they build a haunting, resonant chorus about power, exploitation, love, and resilience. The stories have drama, thrill, humour and fantasy, and takes a deep look into the nature of humanity and moral choices. Mitchell’s message is clear but never heavy-handed, history is cyclical, cruelty and greed recur, but so too do acts of kindness, rebellion, and hope.

A movie was released in 2012 based on the adaptation of the book by the same name featuring Tom Hanks and Halle Berry. The main difference between the book and the movie is the structure and depth, with the book offering distinct, in-depth narratives and complexities, while the movie uses a faster, intercutting cinematic style that emphasizes visual connections and emotion over intellectual understanding, though sometimes oversimplifying plot points like Sonmi-451’s ending. 

This brilliantly written book’s shift in style across the stories can be dizzying, and the patience it demands is substantial. But when the final notes fall into place, the reward is profound, a recognition that our lives, however fleeting, echo forward and backward, part of something infinitely larger.

Cloud Atlas is not just a novel, it is a meditation on the human nature, a daring cartography of time.

I am including some of my most favourite quotes from this book, which is totally worth mentioning with this review.

  • “Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.”
  • “My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?.”
  • “Anticipating the end of the world is humanity’s oldest pastime.”
  • “Nothing is as eloquent as nothing.”

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The White Tiger

April 23, 2013 Leave a comment

whiteThe White Tiger

by Aravind Adiga | 318 Pages | Genre: Fiction| Publisher: HarperCollins India| Year: 2008 | My Rating: 9/10

“You Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don’t have entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, does have entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of them. Especially in the field of technology. And these entrepreneurs – we entrepreneurs – have set up all these outsourcing companies that virtually run America now.”

– Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

In his debut novel, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2008, Aravind Adiga has brilliantly portrayed the modern India with its newfound economic prowess through its narrator, Balram Halwai aka Munna with an obsession for China, Chandeliers, and Corruption, rising from being a ‘country mouse’ from a nondescript village of Bihar to a business entrepreneur in technology driven Bangalore. Balram’s narrative is framed as a letter to the visiting Chinese Premier, written over seven nights while sitting at his office in Bangalore. In his letter he talks about the initial years of his life spent in Laxmangarh attending school for few years before moving to work with a tea stall, and later moving to Dhanbad with his brother Kishan, where he learnt how to drive and became a driver for a weak-willed son of a feudal landlord from his village. For him ‘the darkness’ represents the areas around river Ganges deep in the heartland marked by medieval hardship, where brutal landlords hold sway, children are pulled out of school into indentured servitude and elections are routinely bought and sold. Later he moved to Delhi with his employers, which he has described as moving from ‘darkness’ to ‘light’, and one rainy day he slit the throat of his employer with a broken bottle of Johnnie Walker Black, which he justifies as an act of class warfare, took seven hundred thousand rupees in cash and fled to Bangalore. His life in Delhi has taught him the corruption of government and politics, inequality between rich and poor, which he uses to set up his business of transportation for call centers with a motto of ‘driving technology forward’.

This novel as a penetrating piece of social commentary, attuned to the inequalities that persist despite India’s new prosperity is my Read of the Week.

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The Shadow Lines

April 17, 2013 3 Comments

shadow-linesThe Shadow Lines

by Amitav Ghosh | 288 Pages | Genre: Fiction| Publisher: Penguin Books India| Year: 1988 | My Rating: 8.5/10

“He said to me once that one could never know anything except through desire, real desire, which was not the same thing as greed or lust; a pure, painful and primitive desire, a longing for everything that was not in oneself, a torment of the flesh, that carried once beyond the limits of one’s mind to other times and other places, and even, if one was lucky, to a place where there was no border between oneself and one’s imagine in the mirror.”

— Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines

Amitav Ghosh captures the lines connecting time and events, and people with each other bound by ties of blood and history. This work of fiction is narrated by and follows the life of a young boy growing up in Calcutta with his grand mother and parents, and later in Delhi and London for his higher education. His Grandmother and Mayadebi are sisters, who grew up in Dhaka pre-partition. After the death of her husband, grandmother works at a school to raise her son without depending upon any charity, while Mayadebi marries a Diplomat and lives a life of luxury. Two characters plays pivotal role in the narrator’s life are Ila, a distant cousin of his from Mayadebi’s side to whom he is attracted yet his yearnings go unrequited, and Tridib, who’s Maya’s son. The story unfolds through flashbacks, then progresses occasionally in the present.

This book with numerous characters and intricate web of memories moving back and forth, is my Read of the Week.

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