Books that worked magic
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While 2006 ended on a high note with yet another Indian author winning the Man Booker Prize, what was the rest of it like? What were the books, for whatever special reason, that struck a chord? We asked a few personalities to name their choices for the best of 2006.
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"I HUGELY enjoyed Kiran Desai's endlessly witty and marvellous well-observed The Inheritance of Loss, and Edward Luce's In Spite of the Gods, a marvellously clear, affectionate and balanced analysis of India's rise to economic power.
William Dalrymple
I also greatly admired Maya Jasanoff's Edge of Empire — one of the best-written history books with an Indian focus I have ever read: her writing on Tipu Sultan is especially well done and insightful. Another piece of essential reading is Rory Stewart's remarkable Occupational Hazards: My Time Governing Iraq, the best account yet written of the complete chaos created by the U.S. on the ground in Iraq, and the complete failure's of the American-backed administration.
Manjula Padmanabhan
"ORHAN PAMUK'S Snow — but I'm still reading it! I enjoyed Stephen D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner's Freakonomics. It's a quick, light read, dealing with such questions as: `How much do parents really matter?' and `Why do drug dealers live with their mums?' The answers might come as a surprise! It's not a literary work but the ideas presented in the book continued to twinkle in memory long after I closed the book."
Jairam Ramesh
"UNDOUBTEDLY, William Dalrymple's The Last Mughal was the best book of 2006 I read in 2006 — and not just because it was virtually the last and therefore its impact is most recent. This is history at its archival, yet lucid best. Dalrymple combines meticulous research with a wonderful writing style. He captures the zeitgeist of both pre- and post-1857 brilliantly. More than anything else, he has produced a book that is not just about the past but that has contemporary significance as well. If only other Indian academics — both at home and abroad — emulated him, history will be both educative and evocative, both enlightening and entertaining."
Taslima Nasrin
"I READ a lot of books, mostly non-fiction as well as a lot of feminist literature. I don't recollect all that I have read in the course of the year (and that includes a lot of old books) but would mention two books I liked: Backlash by Susan Faludi and Women and the Koran: The Status of Women in Islam by Anwar Hekmat."
Jeet Thayil
"A NEW Thomas Pynchon book is an extra-literary publishing event, and Against the Day is no exception. At 1085 pages, this one is also a master class in fiction, especially boy's adventure and spy novels, and dime-store westerns and pulp. Somewhere in there you will also find an epic family feud probably borrowed from the Mahabharata. Also (since you can't write about a Pynchon novel without resorting to a list at some point, here it is): references to high and low art, sometimes in the same paragraph, the history of anarchism and travel in air balloons, the inner workings of modern mathematics and science, shamanism and drug-taking, and characters who `stop what they're doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs'. This is a big, important book and I don't want to finish reading it."
Maria couto
"THE intensity of Orhan Pamuk's introspection and his mesmeric narrative power overwhelmed me in Istanbul and Snow. Istanbul and the history of Turkey are the stage for a clear-eyed exploration of issues and experience which engage us in India and much of the world today : tradition and modernity, complex, multilayered identity, secular ideals which disregard the spiritual base of ancient civilisations, old empires and neo-colonialism, the mundane and the sublime in cityscape, nature and man."
Rituparno Ghosh
"I CANNOT recollect all the books that I have been reading over 2006 but two books that I read over the past month and liked include In the Name of Honor: A Memoir by Mukhtar Mai and a book in Bengali called Lal Bati Nil Porira (Red Light Blue Fairies) by Krishna Dutta which is about women in the red light areas and which I found extremely interesting and liked a lot."
Amit Chaudhuri
"THE book I was most impressed by of late is a book of poems called Entr'acte, written by Deepankar Khiwani. It is his first collection and indeed very good. I am also reading Edward Said's On Late Style, an anthology called Poetry in Theory edited by Jon Cook, which consists of critical and theoretical essays by poets and critics, and also rereading and investigating into James Merill, the American poet. I am a slow reader, have a lot of writing to do and so take a long time to finish books. I am naturally drawn to poetry, philosophy and literary criticism. Among journals, I regularly read the London Review of Books."
Shashi Deshpande
"THREE thrillers, John Le Carré's The Constant Gardener, Henry Porter's Brandenburg Gate and Scott Turow's Ordinary Heroes, gave me the happy surprise a reader enjoys. These writers, one a veteran, one unknown, and the third a popular writer, give us stories of ordinary people in extraordinary situations and times. If Le Carré has moved on from spies and the Cold War, Porter's book, about the end of East Germany, carries shades of Le Carré's early novels."
Goutam Ghosh
"THOUGH not written in 2006, I was impressed by two books by Arundhati Roy — the first is An Ordinary Person's Guide to the Empire and the second is The Algebra of Infinite Justice. I found in these works a voice of dissent in a society that is fast turning repressive and violent, not just in India but throughout the world. I also liked Kumar Prasad Mukherjee's The Lost World of Hindustani Music that depicts how the various gharanas gradually died and how alive and passionate it all was. Also relevant was Amartya Sen's The Argumentative Indian which, through its overview of Indian culture, showed that our traditional culture was secular and ancient Hindu philosophy accommodated diverse trends like monotheism, atheism and scepticism."
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