Goodreads Monday is a weekly meme that was started by @Lauren’s Page Turners but is now currently being hosted by Emily @ Budget Tales Book Blog. This meme is quite easy to follow – just randomly pick a book from your to-be-read list and give the reasons why you want to read it. It is that simple.

This week’s book:

The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara

Blurb from Goodreads

In an Indian village in the 1950s, a precocious child is born into a family of Dalit coconut farmers. King Rao will grow up to be the most accomplished tech CEO in the world and, eventually, the leader of a global, corporate-led government.

In a future in which the world is run by the Board of Corporations, King’s daughter, Athena, reckons with his legacy—literally, for he has given her access to his memories, among other questionable gifts.

With climate change raging, Athena has come to believe that saving the planet and its Shareholders will require a radical act of communion—and so she sets out to tell the truth to the world’s Shareholders, in entrancing sensory detail, about King’s childhood on a South Indian coconut plantation; his migration to the U.S. to study engineering in a world transformed by globalization; his marriage to the ambitious artist with whom he changed the world; and, ultimately, his invention, under self-exile, of the most ambitious creation of his life—Athena herself.

The Immortal King Rao, written by a former Wall Street Journal technology reporter, is a resonant debut novel obliterating the boundaries between literary and speculative fiction, the historic and the dystopian, confronting how we arrived at the age of technological capitalism and where our actions might take us next.

Why I Want To Read It

Happy Monday everyone! Congratulations fellow accountants and to auditors as well! I hope you were all able to file the income tax returns. Although it is not done yet, I congratulate everyone for surviving yet another challenging busy season. I know many of you are already chugging down bottles of beer. Enjoy it because you deserve it. To non-accountants, I hope that you were able to meditate, rest, and recover during the weekend and that you had a great start to the week. I hope everyone is doing well in body, mind, and spirit. Meanwhile, I hope that the rest of the week will be a good one for everyone. I also hope that the pandemic, with all its variants, will soon come to an end.

Kickstarting the blogging week is a fresh Goodreads Monday update. In the past few weeks, I have been featuring works by female writers as I really didn’t have an idea of what my April reading month is going to look like; I usually align my Goodreads Monday update with my reading month theme. April is effectively an extension of my March Women’s History Month reading month. Reading-wise, I have been alternating writers who are new to me and writers who are not-so-new to me. My current read is Hanya Yanagihara’s latest novel, To Paradise. This is my second novel by Yanagihara but my first since 2017. For this week’s Goodreads Monday update, I am featuring a book I recently added to my want-to-read list, Vauhini Vara’s The Immortal King Rao.

I think I encountered Vauhini Vara’s The Immortal King Rao earlier this year while I was researching for books to include in my 2022 Books I Look Forward To List. As there was already a growing list of 2022 books I was looking forward to, I dismissed The Immortal King Rao; the book’s title was not right up my alley as well. I would encounter the book again while building my most anticipated releases in 2Q 2022. To be more specific, it was Goodreads that suggested the book. I was again reluctant to mark the book as “want to read” but in the end, I relented. My curiosity was once again a major driver in this shift of opinion.

The novel’s premise also drew me in. From the synopsis, I get that the novel grapples with seminal and timely subjects. It underlines the relationship between big corporations and climate change. Recently, scientists protesting about climate change have swept social media. They are calling for governments, and consequentially, big corporations and individuals, to take climate change seriously in order to reverse, if not slow down the impacts of this growing global concern. Everyone has come up with different solutions and suggestions, different means where everyone can make small contributions. Ironically and surprisingly, perhaps unsurprisingly, the discourse didn’t last beyond the week. As the book suggests, at least in the synopsis, combatting climate change requires radical steps.

To be released in May, I hope to acquire a copy of the book so that I can delve into it immediately. How about you fellow reader? What book written by a female author are you looking forward to? I hope you could share it in the comment box. For now, happy Monday, and as always, happy reading!

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