The last month has been a lot. Work has been busy and I haven't had much mental energy outside of it. After finishing
Loving Day, I started a long book I'd been intending to read for quite a while, but reading it was rarely what I wanted to do at the end of the day or in the morning. Instead, I watched Sanditon and Bridgerton and played Spelling Bee on my phone. And then I had some weekends away, so I did less reading then than I might have. Last Wednesday, after finishing a full rewatch of both seasons of Bridgerton, I decided maybe I should just start a new book. I mention Bridgerton only because I think it influenced my selection – I wanted to read something romantic. I didn't know much about
Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows but the title at least suggested it might fit the bill. I picked it up a few years ago thinking it might represent Singapore in my world books project, because the author lives there, however the book is entirely about the Sikh community in London so I'm not sure that's fair. (Then again,
my New Zealand book was entirely about a winemaker in nineteenth century France, so maybe it's ok? Or maybe I have to read a new book from New Zealand too.) In any case, I started
Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows on Wednesday and finished it on a plane on Friday.
At the center of the book is Nikki, a second generation Punjabi Londoner in her early 20s who signs up to teach what she believes will be a creative writing class for Sikh women. It turns out what was expected was a literacy class, but what the class in fact turns into is an erotic story-telling class filled with mostly older, widowed women, who most of society treats as invisible. Expected antics ensue, the women gain mutual respect, an unsolved murder is solved, and of course there is a love story for Nikki. This was a fun read that turned out to be just what I was looking for at the moment.
