Staff Picks: The Best of Film, Books & TV

‘I am reading Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines these days and am loving it. Chatwin is an excellent writer—grafts theme to sentence so well. The subject of the book is the varied musical “routes” called songlines that criss-cross Australia and Chatwin’s learning about these routes. Each songline was sung by an Aboriginal elder and represent a particular landscape, its constituents and features—animals, rocks, hills, the weather, etc. The songline is at once a map, a trade route, a historical record, a collection of myths and several other things. Chatwin’s book is about a people who sang their world into existence, whose language had musical notes for everything they saw and felt.’ — Joseph Antony, Editorial Assistant

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‘I recently picked up Fire in Babylon by Simon Lister after watching the Steven Riley film with the same title. Perhaps the greatest story of turnaround in sporting history, this is the journey of a talented bunch of cricketers, looked down upon as “calypso cricketers”, on how they transformed themselves and went on to rule the cricketing world for nearly two decades. Guess who would I recommend it to? All business leaders who are busy rescuing ailing companies!’ — Sachin Sharma, Senior Commissioning Editor

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‘I recently watched a series called Riverdale on Netflix, based on the Archies comics. It takes the main characters from the comics and transports them to a murder-mystery, dysfunctional-family, intense-drama setting. Sounds weird, but works well as a teenage drama series. The characters have been given interesting back stories and the murder angle is intriguing.’ — Amrita Mukerji, Deputy Managing Editor

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‘Matthew Reilly is an Australia-based fiction writer who has about fifteen books & novellas to his name. His writing is fast paced featuring brilliant action sequences and death-defying stunts. Reading Matthew’s works is like watching a hardcore action movie, only better.’ — Shobhit Saxena, Marketing Executive

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‘If you’ve been as impressed as I have by Damien Chazelle’s versatility as a filmmaker (La La Land, Whiplash), I urge you to check out 10 Cloverfield Lane, a science fiction/captive drama which released last year. Chazelle is a co-writer for the film’s screenplay. In a welcome departure from the now-overdone found-footage format of its predecessor (Cloverfield), this film is the story of a young woman who meets with a car accident and regains consciousness only to discover that she’s captive inside an underground bunker with two men, one of whom (John Goodman, superb casting) claims that he saved her life and she’s completely safe with him, because the outside world is under a widespread chemical attack. There’s mystery, intrigue and nail-biting suspense. I’m quite sure 10 Cloverfield Lane will surprise you!’— Arcopol Chaudhuri, Associate Editor & Rights Manager