My Books Page

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Prose should be a pane of clear glass through which you look -- George Orwell

Before you browse this page, here is something you should peruse if you read, write or just plain like the English language. As someone said -- "Keep it under your pillow" -- if you want to learn how to write good, clear, plain idiomatic English (Arundhati Roy, are you listening?).

Politics and the English Language .

This page will contain a list of books I have read and liked. In order  to keep it within reasonable
limits, I will include only those books I have read recently. Comments on my selection welcome,
though I will be most happy if you agree with my comments!


What this page will not contain are authors who remain my perennial favourites - those to whom
I keep returning off and on either because I have nothing new to read or because they improve with
a second or third reading. Among these are Wodehouse and Dickens amongst fiction, and Orwell's
essays amongst non-fiction.



  • Arthur and George - Julian Barnes

    The famous true-to-life story of how Sir Arthur Conan Doyle solved the case of George Edalji, a Parsi solicitor wrongly accused of maiming cattle and sentence to three years penal servitude, and proved him innocent. Barnes takes a lot of liberties in portraying the (somewhat fictionalised) personal lives of Doyle and Edalji but that too gives the book the human element.

  • The White Mughals and The Last Mughal - William Dalrymple

    These are two separate books (!) - the White Mughals is about Englishmen who took to the Indian way of life (and took a large number of Indian wives in the bargain like David Ochterlony, Resident of Delhi) before the Sepoy Mutiny which for ever created a division between the 'whites' and the 'natives'. The Last Mughal is literally a blow by blow account of the Mutiny, in Delhi during the last days of Bahadur Shah Zafar and told to some extent from the point of view of the residents of Delhi. The accounts are based on a first time translation of the 'Mutiny papers' in the National Archives in Delhi (by Dalrymple's collaborator Mahmood Farooqui) and paints a fascinating yet grim and bloody picture of the days just before and after the Mutiny. Truly, as Khushwant Singh has pointed out, it will bring tears to the eyes of any Dilliwala or anyone else who loves Delhi (the city, not the present day people, God help us!). A book that makes history interesting and readable without trivialising. Some of our professional historians could do worse than take a few tips from this kind of writing.

  • Emperors of the Peacock Throne - Abraham Eraly

    Nowhere in the category of William Dalrymple (see above) since too much of it is just a collection of quotes of earlier and contemporary historians with little or no original insights of the present writer, it's nonetheless a well written history of the 'Great Mughals' starting with Babar and ending with Aurangzeb. I would have liked a little more detail about the 'lesser' Mughals after Aurangzeb since that is something not easy to find. Eraly has a flair for writing history to make it readable to the layman though the book, even though fairly detailed about their daily lives, says little about the conditions of ordinary people and their conditions. It also ends strangely with a homily about all the ills that plague present day Indian society and why India will never again become a great civilisation! A bit misplaced (and pessimistic) in a book on history of this kind.

  • Son of the Circus - John Irving

    Not exactly a new book but one I read recently - a story of an Indian Circus in Mumbai, a Parsi family and a host of other entertaining characters, Irving gets the atmosphere and ethos of Mumbai and India almost perfectly and creates as usual, a collection of charming, erratic, eccentric but ultimately lovable characters. Remarkable considering, by his own admission, he spent just a month in Mumbai years ago, that he captures the spirit of the city and culture so well, (better than many of our Indian writers)

  • Never Let me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro

    Probably one of his most moving books yet, about a science fiction world of clones raised and reared to provide spare parts i.e organs to humans who need them. The final image of the world of clones, who are, for all practical purposes, like you and me, leaves you shattered at the end.

  • Snow - Orhan Pamuk

    I read this before he got the Nobel! A story of a poet who returns to his old haunts in Turkey juxtaposed against the burning issue of whether a secular nation (as Turkey aggressively potrays itself) should allow women to wear head-scarves - one of his best and also one of his easiest books to read.

  • Leo the African - Amin Maalouf

    Based on the true life story of Hasan al-Wazzan, the 16th century traveller and writer who was known as Leo Africanus

  • Ten Thousand Miles without a Cloud - Shuyun Sun

    A fascnating story of one Chinese Woman's journey through China, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan in the footsteps of the great Chinese monk and traveller Xuanzang (or Hsuan Tsang) who travelled over land for over 16000 miles in search of Buddhist texts and to learn from about Buddhism from the masters. Here is a brief description of the book.

  • Galileo's Daughter - Dava Sobel

    Ostensibly based on the life of Galileo Galilei's daughter, the move is really a moving picture of the life, the times and the tribulations of the father of the scientific method.

  • Alexander - A trilogy - Valerio Massimo Manfredi

    A stirring three volume work on the life, the travels and the battles of Alexander the Great written by a professor of history at the University of Milan and based on extensive research into Alexander's life.

  • The House of Blue mangoes - David Davidar

    The saga of three generations of the Dorai family set in the Southern village of Chevathar and moving on through Madras to some of the Nilgiri tea estates - beautiful descriptions of rural Tamil Nadu, social settings at the turn of the century make this a very pleasant read.

  • Ponniyan Selvan - Kalki

    The classic six volume fictional work by Kalki on the Cholas, and in particular that of Sundara Chola and his two ons - Aditha Karikalan and Arulmozhi Varman (later to be known as Raja Raja Chola). Kalki beautifully conveys the settings, the land and the intrigues in the land of the Cholas (in and near Thanjavur) around the closing years of the first millennium.

  • The Death of Vishnu - Manil Suri

    Manil Suri debut fiction about Vishnu - a watchman and odd-job man living on the stairs of an apartment block in Mumbai woven around the lives of the various occupants of the building.


  • Sick Puppy - Carl Hiaasen

    In fact , all his books! Adventure comedy set in Florida, uniformly about corrupt politicians (what else), real estate developers and newspaper editors along with a medley of a hilariou bunch of crooks, thugs, wheeler-dealers that are out to exploit the Florida open spaces by subverting every single rule in the book. Great page turner - but beware - not for the squeamish!

  • My name is Red - Orhan Pamuk

    A murder mystery set in Istanbul at the time of the Ottoman Empire, among the illuminators of manuscripts. Slightly> tough going but worth it. >

  • The books of the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz - particularly the Cairo Trilogy.

    By the time of the third book of the trilogy, its gets to be a bit heavy going, there is nothing comparable to portray Cairo in the early 19th century through the lives of all the people who pass through the books.

  • The da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

    A great page turner - a thriller and murder mystery set in and around Paris and weaving large parts of Biblical historiography and ethnography, the search for the Holy Grail and much more. The eclecsiastical background and the story of various biblical cults is all real and very informative.

A brief collection of non- fiction writing.

  • The books of Oliver Sacks - The man who mistook his wife for a hat, An anthropologist from Mars, and his all time classic Awakenings

  • Phantoms of the Brain - V. S. Ramachandran

  • Matt Ridley - Genome and Nature versus Nurture

  • K. T. Achaya - Indian Food

    The ultimate source book on Indian food - what did people eat during vedic times, what did Akbar eat, what were the original Indian fruits and vegetables before recent 'imports' like potatoes and tomatoes.

    • What's missing


    The vast collection of writings by Indian expatriates - of these, the truly outstanding ones (do I need to spell it out?) are the books of Sal the Rush (sorry , I mean the incomparable Salman Rushdie) who with his last book, 'Shalimar' has partly redeemed himself for the utterly disastrous 'Fury' , Amitav Ghosh (his next to last book , Glass Palace, is also perhaps one of his best, though his last 'Hungry Tide' is nowhere in the same category), the one book wonder Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth (An Equal Music) and a slew of others, many of them eminently avoidable. Much has been made of Monica Ali's "Brick Lane" but I find it tough going. Jhumpa Lahiri's "The Namesake' is much better than that and also better than her earlier "Interpreter of Maladies". But there are just too many of these "diasporic experiences" and after all, it gets tiresome to have to read books about how someone made rasagullas, or samosas in the US. After all many of us have done the same in India and in the US without a whole book being written about it!


    Of course my old favourites continue to cast their benign gaze on my literary (or lack of it) tastes (if anyone has seen the earlier version of these pages) - Wodehouse for humour and George Orwell (no, not for Animal Farm and 1984) but for his essays, journalism, letters - unsurpassed in their clarity of thought and felicity in the use of the English language. Present-day pretentious bombastic long winded journalists and essay writers could pick a few tips from him - if not his philosophy, at least his style. They were responsible for inculcating in me from an early age, a strong distaste for pretentious, puffed up and ponderous unreadable tomes - all those must-read books for the wannabe "intellectual".


    I want to end this book section with the last two paras from Timothy Garton Ash's review of a recent book on Orwell (you can read the full review on my 'Articles' page). It sums up what I imagine Orwell would have been like, if he had lived to this day...

    Orwell sought desperately to fight his last enemy, death; yet it was his early death that secured his immortality. Tempting as it is to speculate, in the light of the list, about which way he would have gone if he had livedan iconoclastic left-wing voice on the New Statesman? a curmudgeonly old cold warrior on Encounter? this is strictly illegitimate. We will never know. One thing, however, is clear: he would have taken definite, strong political stands, and therefore alienated people on the left or the right, and probably both. Only his early death allowed everyone to beatify him in their own way. And he would have written more books possibly, as his previous novels and last draft story might suggest, less good ones than Animal Farm and 1984. Untimely death made him the James Dean of the cold war, the John F. Kennedy of English letters.

    How we would all have loved to read his views on the building of the Berlin Wall, on the Vietnam War, and on the 1968 student protests. How I would have enjoyed meeting him in Central Europe in 1989, aged eighty-six, as the Soviet communist Big Brother finally collapsed. How wonderful it would be to hear his voice today -- a voice that we imagine all the more vividly because no recording of it survives -- commenting on the propaganda language of the Iraq war, or the continuing miseries of Burma, or the dilemmas of Tony Blair. But the hundred-year-old Orwell growls through the asterisks and crossouts of his notebook, "Don't be silly. Work it out for yourself."

    If you feel I haven't read any good books lately, please do let me know at this email - rahul AT imsc.res.in

    Updated 9 June 2007

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