Worthy Of Their Blurbs

• Jinnah: India, Partition, Independence, Jaswant Singh
  To be candid, I do not get as much time to read as I would have liked. However, I did read, in parts, Jaswant Singh’s book on Jinnah.
• FDR: The First Hundred Days, Anthony J. Badger
  I am reading this right now. A remarkable account on how it was possible to harmonise a vibrant vision of reform with prevailing political realities to joggle out of systemic complacency.

I also managed to browse through:

• Strategic Asia 2009-10: Economic Meltdown and Geopolitical Stability, ed: Ashley J. Tellis, Andrew Marble, Travis Tanner
• A Blueprint For A Safer Planet: How to Manage Climate Change and Create a New Era of Progress and Prosperity, Nicholas Stern
• Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, Nicholas B. Dirks

Sonia Gandhi, 
Congress President

• Millennium Trilogy (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest), Stieg Larsson
  This has been the year of thrillers! I’ve thoroughly enjoyed Stieg Larsson’s trilogy. Lisbeth Salander, the unconventional ‘heroine’ of the trilogy, comes across as a fearless but disturbed woman, flawed by violence in her childhood, with a mind of her own who lives life uncompromisingly. Larsson’s writing is gripping, his plots complex and mesmeric. The pace, the characters, the situations—they make it difficult to put these books down. It’s tragic that the author died so young; he had so much more to give.
• The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown
  Another gripping story. There is something appealing about the feel and aroma of a well-produced book. And when it is combined with the extensive canvas of Brown’s imagination, the end-result is enticing.
• Indira Gandhi: In the Crucible of Leadership, Mary Carras
  I re-read this book which appeared 30 years ago and is now out of print. It provides a penetrating analysis of the background to the policies and actions of its subject, exploring among other things how childhood and upbringing, values and traditions may have influenced them. In many ways, it offers a completely different perspective to those of conventional biographies.
• Where Nothing Happens, Padmanabh Vijay Pillai
  This is another book I will remember this year by. It is a posthumously published exploration of the meaning of life and relationships. I have read many parts of this book more than once. Whether he is writing on loss and grief or on landscape and aesthetics; on philosophical debates or on daily domestic life, Pillai is full of distilled wisdom and profound insights. It can be sampled time and again, never fully digested and put aside.

L.K.Advani, 
Chairman, BJP parliamentary party

• Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—And How It Can Renew America, Thomas L. Friedman
  Friedman has been a favourite author and in this latest, extremely well-researched book, he gets to the root of the problem: energy, poverty and the crowded world.
• Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands, Aatish Taseer
  This is a true story of the young son of an Indian Sikh mother whose father is Pakistani Punjab’s governor. His being Indian and his father a Pakistani Muslim complicates relations between father and son just as it had earlier between his parents.
• The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma, Gurcharan Das
  The author is renowned for his writings on economics, so I was pleasantly surprised by his latest book on the Mahabharata, “about how difficult it is to be good in this world”.

Omar Abdullah, 
J&K chief minister

• Solo, Rana Dasgupta
  His second novel, about the life and dreams of its single character, a 100-year-old man, is different from his first.
• Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Paul Theroux
  In this engaging travel memoir, Theroux retraces the route he took in The Great Railway Bazaar over 30 years ago.
• Sea of Poppies, Amitav Ghosh
  I enjoyed this historical novel, the first in a trilogy, set during the Opium Wars.
• The  Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson
  I thoroughly enjoyed this unusual thriller.

Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, 
Rajiv Gandhi Foundation trustee

• Where Nothing Happens, Padmanabh Vijai Pillai
  I haven’t read much this year due to my dissertation that takes up all my reading space, but Pillai’s is the only new book on my reading list.
• No God But God, Reza Aslan
  Other than books on Buddhist philosophy, I read this book about the history of Islam and its future.
• The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa
  Besides the usual lot of poetry that lies by my bedside—bit of Neruda, some Tagore etc—is this book, a cross between a journal and a scrapbook.

Jaswant Singh, 
Politician Author

• Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman
  This is a hidden gem, centred around the battle of Stalingrad and panoramically depicts Soviet society during WWII.
• Diary of a Man in Despair, Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen
  I am re-reading this remarkable book, which has been called “one of the most important documents” of the Hitler years.
• Making Sense of Pakistan, Farzana Shaikh
  This is another gem—an outstanding work on Pakistan, brilliant in writing and in interpretation.

Wendy Doniger, Indologist

• The Palace of Illusions, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
  The story of the Mahabharata through Draupadi’s  eyes. It’s full of brilliant insights into Vyasa’s text and thoughtful speculations on submerged possibilities, such as a never-expressed longing between Draupadi and Karna. It made me see the epic in new ways.
• The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
  The complex physics of this book allows the protagonist to move back and forth in time and interact movingly not only with his dead mother, daughter, and his wife at different ages, but with himself in different periods. It reminded me of the Yoga-Vasishtha, which also violates the laws of Newtonian physics to reveal deeper truths about the nature of time.

Daniyal Mueenuddin, 
Writer

• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond
  We in Pakistan are living in dark times, as everyone knows. Collapse describes the ways societies fall apart—and in a year in which Pakistan seemed to slide ever closer to shut-down, it offers an explanation for our perilous state that exonerates us—and
  therefore might almost be a cheery read.
• “Chips”: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon, Chips Channon
  Mr Channon, a much-too-rich American, packed off to England in the 1930s, married an earl’s daughter, won a seat in Parliament, and wined and dined his way into the hearts of the English upper classes. He is funny and a bit sad—he really cares about these people, though he skewers them rather close to the liver and heart. And he had the good or bad fortune to live through “interesting times”—the Blitz etc—and witnessed Churchill delivering his great speeches.

William Dalrymple, Writer

• Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity, Sam Miller
  Teems with strange stories and bizarre quiddities, rich discoveries and unexpected diversions that will delight Delhi lovers and those who have so far remained obivious to its erratic charms.
• The Hindus: An Alternative History, Wendy Doniger
  Is no less eccentric. I loved its brave and even reckless quirkiness (why all that focus on animals—but then why not?) and thought it an earthy, revelatory and brilliant book by one of the world’s greatest Sanskritists.
• In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Daniyal Mueenuddin
  An astonishing collection of short stories by the new star of Pakistani fiction. Mueenuddin’s humane and humorous appreciation of rural life, seen from the point of view of the landlord, depicts a world comparable to Sketches from a Huntsman’s Album, but with the action transposed to Pakistani Punjab. Like Turgenev, Mueenuddin creates a world peopled by rural folk,  sketched with a wonderful freshness and lightness.
• Curfewed Night, Basharat Peer
  Moving and beautifully written, a worthy winner of the Crossword prize. I also enjoyed: The Difficulty of Being Good Gurcharan Das and Baulsphere by Mimlu Sen.
• Like A Diamond in the Sky, Shazia Omar
  I predict she will be one of the stars of the next Jaipur Literary Festival.
• Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West, Cormac McCarthy
  Having never read him before, I devoured this during the summer holidays, and have been working through his back catalogue. To my mind, he’s one of the few great novelists writing in English today.

Pankaj Mishra, Writer

• Asian Voices in a Postcolonial Age, Susan Bayly
  This is an unusually rewarding comparative study of the lives of postcolonial intellectuals in India and Vietnam, bringing to light a phase of our history that is either forgotten or derided—the early socialist modernity of Asia.
• No Enchanted Place: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations, Mark Mazower
  He is one of the best historians in the English-speaking world, and this new, short account of big-power motivations and needs that established the UN is full of startling information and persuasive analysis.
• The Third Reich at War, Richard J. Evans
  The third volume of Evan’s mammoth history of the Third Reich, it’s harder going than the previous two, especially the accounts of killings in Nazi-occupied Soviet Union, where many  more Jews were murdered than in the gas chambers. But no other history I have read has managed to convey the full, monstrous scale of the Nazi project—and its failure.
• The Invention of the Jewish People, Shlomo Sand
  Few myths of modern nationalism have been as persistent as those of Zionism, and Sand’s book intrepidly dismantles the nineteenth century notions that claim, predictably, sanction from a long, unbroken past of ‘Jewishness.’
• Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America 1877-1920, Jackson Lears
  No book has taught me more about this crucial period in American history than this latest volume by America’s leading cultural historian. This simultaneous account of the rise of industrial power, nationalist self-consciousness and cultural confidence contains many intriguing recognitions for Indian readers.

Prasoon Joshi, 
Poet & Film Lyricist

• T’ta Professor, Manohar Shyam Joshi (Tr by Ira Pande)
  A delightful book. It’s tragicomic and smoked with memories of Kumaon. ‘Dubbul M.A.’ Khashtivallabh Pant, or T’ta Professor as he came to be known for his penchant for English, is such a vibrant character that he stayed with me for days. And so did a line from the preface: “Poets must die when they are young; writers are born only when they are old.”

Somdev Devvarman, 
Tennis Champion

• Open: An Autobiography, Andre Agassi
  I really enjoyed it. Over the past year, I have read quite a few biographies and autobiographies, including Lance Armstrong’s, Albert Einstein’s and Eric Clapton’s. I like this genre because I find it interesting to know how successful people from various fields approach their work. They all have very different styles and yet find a way to be as successful as they are. It just goes to show that there’s no right way to do something and I really like how they fight tough times and find what works best for them. I think pretty much everyone can relate to them from at least some part of their life which makes it more personal for the reader. 
• Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling
  I thoroughly enjoyed all the Harry Potters and still re-read them on occasion.

Aamir Khan, 
Actor/Director

• The Millennium Trilogy, Stieg Larsson
  Very exciting, very thrilling, the three books in this series pull you in. The author did not live to see his trilogy published. I found them very enjoyable. The characters are etched very well, particularly the protagonist, Lisbeth Salander.
• Twilight, Stephenie Meyer
  This was recommended by my daughter Aira, who is 11. It’s a romance of the Mills & Boon kind—there’s this girl who falls in love with a man who turns out to be a vampire—and is a huge hit with young people.
• Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, William Dalrymple
  I’m still reading this.