MC Travel Special | Holiday reading list - Part 1

Whether you like to read on the plane or at the beach or in a tent up in the mountains, there's no time like the holidays to catch up on books for leisure. (Representational image: Jeroen Den Otter via Unsplash)

Nonfiction

1. The Blue Book: A Writer’s Journal by Amitava Kumar

We often think about the power/powerlessness of words during a catastrophe. Perhaps Kumar thought about this, too. Living in a world of fake news, and inspired by Hemingway’s maxim (“Write the truest sentence you know”), he began documenting a “revealing lie” during the lockdown months. He picked his son’s watercolours and newspaper, and began colouring, too. The Blue Book is not only a collection of those journals and paintings, it’s also a deeply sensitive, aware, and significant portrayal of an artistic and writerly life.

2. Limitless: The Power of Unlocking Your True Potential by Radhika Gupta

CEO of Edelweiss Asset Management Limited, Radhika Gupta’s powerful memoir-cum-self-help book promises to help you be your limitless self. By sharing personal stories—and those that her mentors, partners, and supporters shared—and key takeaways from all of them, Gupta convinces us how one can be ambitious yet coy and self-doubting, but in the end, it’s what you do despite all odds that truly counts!

3. To Hell and Back: Humans of COVID by Barkha Dutt

When most journalists adopted the ‘new normal’, Dutt went out on the streets and reported from the ground. She, along with her small team, travelled thousands of kilometres across the length and breadth of the country to bring us stories that were waiting to be told—of people who became mere statistics—and in telling them, Dutt soon found herself becoming the story that she was covering.

4. She’s Unlikeable: And Other Lies That Bring Women Down by Aparna Shewakramani

It appears we all know already who Aparna is, right? If you read her book, then you’ll know how wrongly you’ve perceived Aparna. A participant of the super-bingeable and cringeworthy Netflix original Indian Matchmaking, Aparna was considered rude and ‘hard to please’, but that’s what you saw. Even though the book appears to be an exercise in image management, you’ll find that there’s much more to this forthright and confident person, who continues to inspire young women to speak their minds.

5. Azad Nagar: The Story of a 21st-Century Slave Revolt by Laura T. Murphy

Slavery never ended. It kept on changing forms as the rulers continued to replace the old methods with the new. In telling the story of a “sanitised account” of the Azad Nagar revolt in the Sonbarsa village in Uttar Pradesh, professor of Human Rights and Contemporary Slavery, Murphy uniquely captures the reality and cruelty of the caste system in India, and its human cost that the country continues to overlook.

Fiction

6. Tell Me How to Be by Neel Patel

A family looks perfect only on the outside, but its internal turmoils are obvious if one pays attention. This texture of imperfectness comes alive in Neel Patel’s first novel. The story of a queer songwriter who has a drinking problem and a mother looking for her long-lost love after her husband’s death, Tell Me How to Be is a breath-taking work of fiction.

7. Half-Blood by Pronoti Datta

While an internal churning forms the core of Tell Me How to Be, the cityscape and its historicity help to understand the lives of a Parsi family in journalist Pronoti Datta’s debut novel. Through Maya, a journalist, and an adopted child of a unique Bengali couple, we learn how reconciliation with the past haunts us our whole life. In this typical Mumbai novel, Datta uses her experiences as a journalist to weave a narrative that’s thoroughly entertaining, yet philosophical in its rendering.

8. City of Incident: A Novel in Twelve Parts by Annie Zaidi

Annie Zaidi creates a mesmerising universe in her latest book. City of Incident appears like an interconnected series of short stories, but it’s an expertly crafted novel that takes place in the liminal and oft-ignored everyday incidents that we sometimes pay heed to or are too absorbed in our own lives to pay attention to.

9. Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree; translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell

This book is special for more than one reason. It’s the first-ever book from South Asia to win an International Booker Prize. But that shouldn’t be the only reason to pick this book up. Here’s an array of them if you like: it’s a story of an 80-year-old woman, who has ‘risen’ anew; it’s about the mother-daughter relationship; it’s about borders, about freedom, about India-Pakistan, about Hindi writers, about artists, about everybody, in fact, but most importantly it is about language!

10. Slices of the Moon Swept by the Wind: A Novella by Surendranath S.; translated from the Kannada by Pratibha Nandakumar

A short and immersive read for time-strapped readers, Slices of the Moon… is loosely based on Kannada theatre artist Surendranath S.’s aunt’s life. In this book, which is expertly translated by Pratibha Nandakumar, a family is shaken up by a series of events that form a middle-class existence. The story is told by an intelligent, perceptive but homebound “misshapen boy”.

11. Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor

Booker Prize-nominated author Brandon Taylor, who recently won the prestigious Story Prize for Filthy Animals, leaves you flabbergasted with his sharp observations and exciting commentary on the lives of his troubled, resilient, broken characters. One of the marvellous things about his work is that, unlike others, no character—especially queer—in his stories is begging for your pity.

12. Midnight Doorways: Stories by Usman T. Malik

While Taylor delves into the realistic, Usman T. Malik champions the fantastical in his debut short-story collection. In this part-tender, part-horrific, and part-unimaginably real book, whose rich text and characters pioneer humanity, Malik takes you through the seen-unseen, speakable-unspeakable that punctuate everyday Pakistan by celebrating its magnificent fables.

Poetry

13. Why Do You Fear My Way So Much? Poems and Letters from Prison by G. N. Saibaba

An anda (egg) cell is a specially designed prison cell with high surveillance for “high-risk prisoners”. G.N. Saibaba, a man with 90 percent disability and former professor of English at Delhi University’s Ram Lal Anand College, is one such prisoner in that cell. Yet he continues to write gut-wrenching letters and poems of hope, and life itself.

14. Woman by the Door by Kashiana Singh

In Singh’s verses, you’ll find shadows of the long-lost past lingering. Not only are the poems in this collection rich in their delivery, but they’re also packed in an everyday language that’s so unique to South Asians—to the immigrants, to the mango and grandmothers’ pickle lovers, and most importantly to those who kept their memories of the land too close to them no matter where they went.

Graphic Books

15. Inquilab Zindabad: A Graphic Biography of Bhagat Singh by Ikroop Sandhu

At a time when several camps and sects have begun claiming Bhagat Singh, Sandhu, through her graphic book and supple text, reminds us of who he really was—a shape-shifter in Indian politics and freedom struggle, someone whose resistance was tied to revolutionary ideas.

Children’s Books

16. The Kailash Temple at Ellora by Tilottama Shome and illustrated by Kavita Singh Kale

As a child, I was taught history in the most boring of ways. I wish I had a book like The Kailash Temple at Ellora. Wouldn’t it be fun to see not only the maps but fun exercises while discussing historical eras, temples, monuments, and dynasties with your kids?

17 - 20 The Ghost by Keki N. Daruwalla and Granny’s Tree-Climbing by Ruskin Bond—both illustrated by Ekta Bharti

Sweet yet interesting, richly illustrated, and vividly imaginative, these narratives could serve as an introduction to the world of storytelling for children aged 3 and above.

While the above titles help teach history or mesmerise young readers with storytelling, books like Ritu Weds Chandni by Ameya Narvankar and Inni & Bobo Find Each Other by actors Soha Ali Khan and Kunal Kemmu and illustrated by Rituparna Sarkar create space for inclusive conversations. The former being a story of a same-sex wedding and the latter of a dog’s adoption, both help sensitise children in one way or the other.