My Bookshelf - Reader’s Digest

The Dopamine Cookie Tin:

Before I get into the main content of this newsletter (brief blurbs on 10 of my favorite books), I want to document a personal failure. This is a newsletter primarily about exercising discernment in our information-saturated age. I must admit that I failed at proactively managing my information diet in the lead-up to the election. I was unhealthily addicted to reading the polls like tea leaves. I found myself greedily reaching into the dopamine cookie tin — the Internet — to “stay informed” but pretty soon, I was back to watching mind-numbing Youtube videos of deranged street interviews while queuing up true crime podcasts while playing chess. I exaggerate of course but the point is stimulation seeking leads to more stimulation seeking. Now, I’m trying to put the dopamine cookie tin on a higher shelf. I know what I need to do in my communities, in my personal and professional life. Very little has changed in that regard. First, I must slow down. An excellent way to slow down is in the company of a good book.

Reader’s Digest - Me & My Shelf

I loved Reader’s Digest as a kid; I remember tattered copies were frequently passed around in the dorms in Rishi Valley and we’d lie on our beds during “rest hour” (the hour after lunch) and read aloud their clean yet quaintly funny jokes. I particularly loved their true stories submitted by readers. Reader’s Digest and the Chicken Soup series were perennial favorites amongst us. So was MAD magazine and Tinkle, to be perfectly honest. We were gluttons for anything. Now, I’m honored to be featured in the print issue of Reader’s Digest (India).

Just came out in the Nov 2024 issue of Reader’s Digest (India)

The story is ‘Me & My Shelf’ and it’s basically ten books that I can’t live without / have influenced me / that I recommend to everyone. It was a pleasure to compile this list and I’ve shared it in full below. If you’re in India, please go outside and buy a Reader’s Digest copy and support that venerable institution.

My Shelf:

The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl - Roald Dahl

There’s few things we love more than a twist and Dahl, known for his quirky, dark children’s fiction, is an exceptional crafter of a nasty twist. Spare, artfully constructed, and often cruelly funny, many of its stories are unforgettable guilty pleasures.

The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers - Sarnath Banerjee

This graphic novel occupies a shelf in my heart because, with school friends, I adapted and staged it as a play. Adapting a text allows for deeper intimacy; my copy is annotated to tatters; apocryphal moments, “the dark armpits of history” are illuminated; this Kolkata story is for all urbanites; how we drink our cities in vignettes like cups of chai.

Beloved - Toni Morrison

Growing up in India, I read mostly Indian and British authors but Toni Morrison captures the central fissure running through America, the painful, enduring, tormented legacy of the enslavement of countless people of African descent. A heartbreaking book whose lines float off the page.

The Snow Leopard - Peter Mathiessen

Journeys, like books, present an external conflict but are always about an internal conflict. Not long after losing his wife, the author embarked on a two-month journey in Tibet as part of an expedition to film the elusive snow leopard but of course, as you’ve probably guessed, it’s about more than that.

The Simoqin Prophecies by Samit Basu

The fantasy genre is replete with binaries but there’s nothing simple about this witty, gag-filled, spoofy fantasy. Twenty years after its original publication, it has lost none of its zip. In fact, its twists, values, flips and flops, are more glorious. If you haven’t, you must read about these asurs, pashans, vanars, and manticores!

A River Runs Through It - Norman Maclean

A novella, written late in life, by a longtime professor of English, is a story of two brothers who grew up fly-fishing in Montana. It’s an important reminder that, while, yes, representation certainly matters, words, artfully arranged, can bring meaning to anyone, even a young boy in India in a hot room under a non-functioning fan.

Born for Love by Dr. Bruce Perry & Maia Szalavitz

It’s not often that you can say a book changed your life; here, a renowned child psychiatrist and a journalist together examine the long-term effects of loving or withholding love from children. For me, it reframed our purpose on the planet and how best to allocate our time.

The Remembrance of Earth’s Past (Trilogy)- Cixin Liu

This series imagines Earth’s response to encountering an alien civilization with such magnificent scope that only a great mind could even attempt such a thing. The result, for me, was a story that made me feel like a kid again, reading under the sheets with a torch until the batteries ran out. Whenever an outsider approaches, more than them, it’s the people around us that we learn about!

The Legends of Khasak - O.V. Vijayan

Lyrical, suffused with syncretic magic that is wholly Indian, Khasakkinte ittihasam is dripping poetry in English, how good must it be in Malayalam? Uniquely, the book has been translated by the author himself; I’ll take this book over any of its contemporaries, the great Latin American works of magical realism.

The Karla Trilogy by John Le Carré

These three exceptional novels, published collectively as an omnibus, are the work of the master of the spy novel at the height of his powers; beyond the high-stakes games of nation states, inside each one of us, is an inner war. We fight ourselves as much as our enemies; I open it weekly and each time learn a new lesson.

Please Review and Rate MISSY:

If you have read MISSY and enjoyed it, then please leave a review and rating on Goodreads and Amazon. You may think it inconsequential; nothing could be further from the truth. Every review helps me and my agent improve our pitch to US publishers.

The best online retailers for my book are currently Waterstones and Blackwells. If you’re in Chicago, you can get a copy from me directly at a discounted rate. Here’s the India pre-order link.

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