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| best books |
This is a difficult question to answer for any bibliophile. Most people think that people who read have just a few favorite books that mean a lot to them. This is true, but not as true as the fact that every book we read is special in its own way; every single book has something of value to the way we look at ourselves, at other people, and the way we lead our lives.
Having made that point, I'll affirm that yes, there are a few books that stay with you. These are the stories that become part of your life, your viewpoint; they become the lens through which you see, they will be the benchmark for the books you'll read throughout your life.
So, here you go, the best books I've ever read, in no particular order, except the first and third one. Most of the descriptions I have written were in response to this question, but some are also reproduced versions of my own reviews of them on Goodreads -
1. The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
Arundhati Roy's Booker prize winning life-changer of a novel is easily the best book I've ever read. The experience of reading this story is not something I can explain. You have to experience it. It is intense, it is sad, it is also beautiful. The book left me silent and thoughtful for a fortnight, and never have I 'felt' words like that again. This is that book for me, the one you hold close to you and celebrate for a lifetime, and pass on to your children, so that they too may realize how flawed the world we live in can be, and how cruel.
Part of what endears the book so much to me is the fact that she never allowed her celebrated book to be made into a movie, for the words to be ripped and shredded and made into scenes that could not possibly hope to reproduce the emotion the words were born from.
2. The Book Thief - Markus Zusak
In Hitler's Germany during World War 2, a little girl and her adopted family hide a Jew because of the father's debt to a friend. The little girl loves books, is mesmerized by them, and at every opportunity, steals them. What follows is a story that will warm your heart as an expression of love, bravery, courage and goodwill and all that makes us human still.
Death narrates the story, and even he, in his eternal darkness, is so moved by the story of the Book Thief and how she lives through arguably the greatest evil perpetrated by humans on humans, that he carries the book she wrote with him, as he travels, forever.
It's a beautiful, beautiful book.
3. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
The second best book I've ever read. The winner of the Booker of Bookers, it is the story of my country, India, and I'll be damned if someone can tell it better than this.
Rushdie narrates the story of my nation through one man's life, and like my vast, burgeoning, multicultural, multilingual, multifaceted country, the book becomes not just one book, but many others. And that is where the book's greatness lies. The characters are drawn from my great country, and they are part of one story, singular, but at the same time, they are not representative of anything but the idea that trying to imagine India as one entity is futile.
History walks through 'Midnight's Children' with nonchalance, the people who shaped my country's destiny come and go like visitors to a house party. And I found myself stunned as I witnessed it all. Everything is there, from the mystical women in the jungles of the Sunderbans to crazed astrologers to greedy businessmen to politicians, to magicians and wrestlers, to Goddess Kali, to street urchins, to secret lovers, to childhood troubles. Everything.
I love this book like I love my country. Because it is everything my country is, too. Breathtaking, beautiful, complex, flawed, all at the same time, and filled with stories that need to be told.
4. The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai
At least two of my friends say that they don't like Kiran Desai's writing. I don't understand them. I'm a hill person, as I choose to tell everyone on my Twitter bio, and I absolutely loved this Booker winning tale. It spoke to an angst in me that I myself couldn't have given words to, and there are several passages in the book I hold very close to me.
It is a story about an old man, his granddaughter, a house on a hill and simmering political and ethnic tensions in a lost corner of India. It's a love story as well, and as a portrait of people and relationships, it is a book like no other. It is literary prose, hence difficult to read for some people, but for those who love words and their weird dances, here's writing that will make you dance.
5. Em & the Big Hoom - Jerry Pinto
Jerry Pinto's long-in-the-writing novel 'Em and the Big Hoom' is a gorgeous book. Came out last year, and won the Hindu Literary Prize early this year.
It is a part fictional, part autobiographical account of a boy growing up with a mentally ill mother in Anglo Indian Bombay.
It's a gorgeous book, in more ways than one. It just flows, the story and before you know it, you're in Bombay, on a street leading towards the sea following two people in love, watching them, feeling the angst of young love, wanting to reach out and help them.
Soon, the plot descends into madness as the novel's main character does too, and you reel in the magical rendering of something so dark in a way so beautiful.
6. The Shock Doctrine - Naomi Klein
I was in business school two years ago, when trying to get my head clear of a pretty nasty breakup, I raided the library, and found Naomi Klein's controversial economic history book. I was intrigued, and having started reading it, found myself drawn in to the dark history (and present) of global capitalism.
I was studying Keynes and Hayek then, but in this book I read about the impacts of their thinking on the world; I found a villain like no other in Milton Friedman, and debated with my professor what free market policies were doing to my country and the world. To my immense surprise, my professor who was teaching me the virtues of capitalism in class everyday, agreed with Naomi Klein's thesis.
This book changed my life; I would never trust capitalism again, and after this as I read more and more on this - Raghuram Rajan's Fault Lines, Nourial Roubini's Crisis Economics, a book by Jeffrey Sachs whose name I forget, I was exposed to the dark realities of the system with which we choose to govern our world.
7. How Green was my Valley - Richard Llewellyn
I read this book on a cold weekend in a house built on a rock on the heights of Meghamalai, a mountain in the range we call the Western Ghats in southern India. And the whole time I was in another world. A world of simple people, simpler lives, great food, family, values and a connection to nature that has since then been completely lost.
I know Richard Llewellyn wasn't Welsh, but that doesn't take anything away from the story. It echoes with meaning, with poetry and the smell of the mountain air. It reminds us of the life we are capable of living and contrasts it with the life we choose to live. It is less a story, more a portrait of a way of life.
I was struck most by the emotion which binds the book, start to finish. There is no point, not one, when the author's words do not feel charged and laden with meaning. There are electrifying passages, scintillating sentences, and all this time, there is a certain music in the background, a slow buzzing that means something. Reading the book was an experience.
8. On the Road - Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac's iconic road novel is next on the list. The characters in Kerouac's book are crazy, as he also is, and it is an infectious craziness; a get-out-of-your-chair-and
And Neal Cassady, what a character he must have been! The book is more or less a meditation on a single person's soul, a mad, interested-in-everything soul with the charm and mystery to carry a generation along!
The romance and mystery of the open road is the consistent backdrop of the book, and which I think is the book's most powerful voice. But what it also is, is a remnant of a time when people actually loved to 'live', just for the joy of 'living', the loss of a way of life I find cause to lament.
Again, On the Road will work for some people, not so much for some. You've got to be a bit crazy to love this book. And I love it a bit too much.
9. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
I don't think I can ever describe how the book made me feel, but I'll try.
The imagery is stunning, the description of the landscape riveting and the characters so well drawn out, its surreal. The strength of the book, though are the situations that we are drawn into along with the family. I felt their pain, their mental and physical tiredness and found myself praying that no harm came to them.
Steinbeck succeeds in making us identify ourselves with them - they become our people, our family. They want nothing more than some land and respect. Why are the other people not giving it to them? What wrong did they do?
You find yourselves questioning capitalism, which is in fact so relevant a question at this time that I'm surprised the Occupy movement did not adopt this as their bible. The passages on land and the rich claiming ownership to so much & leaving the poor with nothing sometimes comes through as plain propaganda/ but at the same time, it somehow manages to be honest about it.
Seen through another lens, it is also a window into another world, a pre-war America, before the middle class took over and it became the powerhouse we all know it as.
This is a powerful book, an important book, extremely relevant in this time and age. There are passages when tears will peek through your eyes, especially the climactic end, which stunned me into silence for hours. Steinbeck had said that with this book, he wanted to tear the reader's nerves to shreds.
So many years later, he still succeeds.
He makes us think about the system we have created and perpetuated upon ourselves. A rich book about poor people.
10. The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes
It's really a tiny book, a small unpretentious thing is the 2011 Booker winner, but I dare you to read it and not feel like the world just fell in around your ears. Julian Barnes is one of the last of the great English writers, and this book shall reeaffirm your faith in literature, if it does nothing else.
It's a story about four friends growing up together, growing old together and something that happens between two of them that changes everything. In these 150 or so pages is a love story so hidden, so meaningful that I've never been able to get it out of my head.
Of all the books on this list, I shall reccommend this one to you, reader, the most. Literature never had a more poignant advertisement.
11. Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
The book that got me into reading as a kid. This rollicking tale of gnarled, swashbuckling pirates on the open sea hunting for treasure, left me as a child hungry for books, an initiation that has shaped me as a person, gave me an identity and a career, and forever changed me.
I still believe that Long John Silver is the greatest literary character ever, and I shall argue that until the end of time.
12. Island of a Thousand Mirrors - Nayomi Munaweera
This is a dazzling book, full of imagery that will make your eyes yearn for them. The name of the book comes from the image of a shoal of silverfish suddenly breaking formation and spreading out into the waters of Sri Lanka, like a thousand mirrors shattering. She had me by the throat there, and I knew then that this would be a special book.
I'm Tamil, and this story is my own. And I could not help but read it with emotions sometimes spilling over into tears.
The rape passage is one of the most harrowing, emotional and raw pieces of contemporary writing that I've been exposed to. It left me sad, hurt, haunted. Writing this powerful is seldom a fluke. Munaweera is gifted.
I loved this book because it helped me understand the land to my country's south, a people who speak my language and a people who persecute them. It helped me cry over the blood of my people spilt just because they speak a 2000 year old language. My language.
I shall read many more books as I grow older, of course, and my lists will change. But that's not how books are.
They never change, the stories they tell will never change. Therein rests my belief in the written word.
