I started this year with a target of a minimum of 20 books to be read and reviewed, but I was way below my expectations and by the end of the year, the to-read list is ever increasing. This year is my most productive year in terms of the number of books I read but still it leaves me with that guilt of not having read more especially when I know that I have neither been very busy with work nor doing anything productive otherwise. The count comes to a paltry 15 out of which I have reviewed 8 of them in detail in my posts, so there isn’t much to write about either. This post is just a note of what I was able to read this year.


1. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie: I have ordered this book after coming to the US for onsite since it was not available anywhere in India. I read Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and left it unfinished since I was not able to follow the thoughts and even the language was higher than my level of understanding. It became very difficult for me to read this book on merely its face value after all the controversies it has created and the notoriety it has gathered since the day it was published. I thought I made a decent job of it but still I found the book provocative. I was not able to relate the alleged blasphemies to the actual story, but I’m sure there must be something I was missing. I read a bit about Islam and Mohammed Prophet while reading this book and may be what I read was only one side of it and the author definitely knows better. I think banning or allowing this book would have been equally catastrophic, so at the end the choice rests on individual perceptions which ironically do not count much in view of the chaotic mob.


2. The Virgin Fish of Babughat by Lokenath Bhattacharya, translated by Meenakshi Mukherjee: I came across this book through one of the external bloggers I follow and I have completed this book in a couple of sittings. It was an interesting satire on government and it was vague, powerful and does not follow any pattern that was recognized earlier. It was completely random with no definite beginning or ending narrated by a convict who happens to be an author and who is allowed to write about the jail in which a group of people were imprisoned. No one knows what their crime was and how long they will be in that prison and how much time elapsed. The prisoners include men and women stripped off everything they had and are tortured with painful procedures during the day and are left with each other to fulfill their carnal desires in the nights without any guilt of relationships. The ending if one could call it that is as abrupt as the beginning again if one could call it that.


3. The Alchemy of Desire by Tarun Tejpal: This is the first book by Tarun, the editor of the sensational Tehelka Magazine. As it happens with first time authors this book narrates the story of the author in a first person narrative. Another interesting thing that I noticed is that in every author’s debut they tend to write about themselves mostly as the artistes they were debuting in. Tarun does a fine job in his debut, but had it been three quarters in length of what it is now it would have been excellent. Also, the novel has most number of detailed descriptions about sex than in any other book I have ever read. If not for the poetic flow of the narrative, and interesting characters found all over the book, this book would have been a serious contender for soft porn.


4. Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry: Rohinton Mistry is the really the master of tragedies. The way he narrates painful Indian middle class conflicts, never ceases to amaze me and wonder how he gets the inspiration to delve to such depths to understand the pain which is quite commonplace. The way in which the family in this story tries to be united without really meaning to be is ironic but it is quite realistic as I can vouch for it from a few experiences of my own. The central theme of this story might be that the relationships are tested only by the adversities and going by the way how the people in this book react to those, he does not seem to be too optimistic.


5. Chanakya’s Chant by Ashwin Sanghi: I’m totally disappointed with this book and it is an exciting opportunity criminally wasted by the author.


6. The fountainhead by Ayn Rand : This was a re-read as I was feeling a bit low with some of my disappointments of the year. It needed a book of this stature to bring me back and it is worth to be preserved for life. There is nothing that can be said about this book by mere mortals like me.


7. The Circle of Reason by Amitav Ghosh : The debut novel by Amitav Ghosh is not as exciting as his later works, but it provides a glimpse of what to expect from the author who has developed his narratives and literary style immensely over the course of his career.


Other books read 
8. One Amazing Thing by Chitra Divakaruni
9. Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga
10. The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
11. Way To Go by Upamanyu Chatterjee
12. Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh
13. River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh
14. The Great Indian Novel by Shashi Taroor
15. Such a Long Journey by Rohinton Mistry