Under 100 Words

City of Djinns by William Dalrymple
Completed 14 November 2012

I want to see Dalrymple’s Delhi: the century-old mithai stall at the corner of Chandni Chowk, the old havelis, Nizamuddin’s whirling dervishes. I want to hear the Urdu of Ghalib and see not alleys and roads but Shahjahanabad, the greatest and most beautiful city the Mughal empire has known. In the City of Djinns, Dalrymple walks the fine line between travel memoir and two thousand years of history, and deftly balances both with expert skill. He summons catacombs, hidden tunnels and the ghosts of eras past, superimposing them on modern Delhi. The result is something absolutely magical.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo 
Completed 8 November 2012

Frightening and hard-hitting, this book on life in a Mumbai slum is a rare example of how truth surpasses fiction.

Annawadi is a slum near Mumbai’s international airport and nestled within the shadow of luxury hotels. As India becomes one of the world’s fastest growing economies, Annawadians, convinced of the new India’s many miracles, begin to nurture dreams. An old man dreams of a new heart valve; another dreams of becoming the slum’s first female college graduate.

However, for a book that claims to be reporting the truth, there is little depth in the representation of non-Annawadi characters. 

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer 
Completed 5 October 2012

A jaded journalist heads to Venice to attend Belini-fueled parties, snort cocaine, fall in love and write about the Biennale. The whole scene is something out of a dream; a wild, hedonistic celebration of the body. Then the scene changes to Varanasi, that holiest of holy places where people go to die. Here comes the search for something deeper, more transcendental and also more insane. Look out for the knee-slapping gripes about the peculiar behaviour of locals.

For the record, Geoff Dyer knows how to write a sentence. 

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Completed 24 October 2012

I red this book and it made me angrey how pepul made Charlie tink they was his best frend but when he got smarter after the doktors did a oprashun, he fund out they was all laffing at him cos he was retarded and wernt his frends at all. Charlie was been made use of so pepul culd feel beter aboot themselfs. No one loved him, not Fay who used him cos she was bored or Alice who felt risponsble for his fate. It showd me a mean, cinical reflecshon of society as a bunch of morons who are entirly self intrested and are kind only when they stand to gaine somfink. But I liked the storey espesully wen Charlie descovers himself and his family. It made me tink and feel. Tinkin is alrite but its hard to find storeys that make you feel.

Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India by William Dalrymple
Completed 14 October 2012

Nine Lives is a remarkable piece of travel writing on India’s carnivalesque culture and society, seen through the lens of its backwater religions, self-contained cults and their outcast followers.

The book contains nine stories, each of which is a detailed biographical sketch. What does it means to be a temple prostitute, a warring monk or a man who becomes a god for 3 months? Perhaps most astonishing of all is the tale about an illiterate goat herder from Rajasthan who keeps alive in his memory an ancient 4000-stanza sacred epic.

Reading this book was so rewarding that I’ve ordered three others also by Dalrymple. You can most definitely call me a fan.

The Pleasure Seekers by Tishani Doshi 
Completed ? August 2012

Tender, luminous, lively and poetic, this is a novel I wish I’d written. Four generations of the Patel family are documented, and while the questions Doshi asks are not new (Where is home? What is my identity?), her writing sparkles. The story flows seamlessly from episode to chapter to continent. Each character is richly realized, no small feat considering this is a slender novel traversing almost 80 years. You meet characters as they fall in love, and follow them through their life, meet their parents and grandparents and children, and children’s children and lovers and… it’s just beautiful. Read it.

Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shariar Mandanipour
Completed ? August 2012

A novel by an Iranian writer about an Iranian writer who wants to write a love story and see it published in Iran. But he finds himself in a metaphorical burqa. Almost everything he writes is in danger of being censored, or political, or blasphemous, or offensive to some unknown party. Circumstances threaten to kill characters; other characters go out of control and rebel against the story and narrator.

Read this novel if you want to know how Shariar Mandanipour manages to treat censorship like a new literary form, much like a sonnet or a graphic novel. So. Fucking. Smart.

I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett
Completed 18 August 2012

With Terry Pratchett, so much happens and happens so delightfully that a summary takes away the fun of reading. So, all I can say is: almost-16-year-old witch, Tiffany Aching, the hag o’ the hills, is accompanied by tiny, invisible, high strung, ale-guzzling, chaos-causing, half-men half-dwarves, as she takes on a witch hunter from the 16th century, and discovers love along the way. Crivens!

Wicked by Gregory Maguire
Completed 10 August 2012

The nature of evil is at the center of Maguire’s Wicked. On this side of the tale, our famed Wicked Witch of the West starts out as a rather green, precocious child, and later becomes an intelligent young woman who only wants to see justice done. We get a real sense of Oz beyond the yellow brick road, its people and the wizard himself; Dorothy enters only at the end. Anyway, Baum’s Dorothy was a nauseating girl, so I was happy to read that Maguire’s Dorothy was portrayed accurately - with little character and almost no mind of her own.