Routinely dismissed as a ‘waste of time’, Facebook can often be surprisingly educative. Amid the incessant stream of selfies, Instagrammed dinners and ‘last night’s party pix,’ every once in a while there’s a project that makes you think. A few months ago, it was the art challenge, where users tagged friends asking them to post their favourite paintings. It was followed by a similar poetry challenge. Now, as all you Facebookers have probably realised, it’s all about books.
So far, all the usual suspects have featured, from the Bronte sisters, to J.R.R. Tolkien and Paulo Coelho. Bringing up the Indian side, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth seem the most popular. J.K. Rowling, now surprisingly, is on many people’s lists. As are a handful of children’s classics: Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, Anne of the Green Gables series by L.M. Montgomery and The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe series by C.S. Lewis.
Arundhathi Subramaniam
I Am That by Nisargadatta Maharaj for its piercing and unfaltering clarity, its uncluttered wisdom, because it opens up new possibilities with each reading.
Mystic’s Musings by Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev for the voice of a contemporary sage, not a mere scholar; for its ability to address every conceivable question burning up a seeker’s innards.
The Tibetan Book Of The Living And Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche for the quiet, unsentimental insight it brings to the subject of death — an approach that is searingly contemporary and timelessly Buddhist all at once.
Women Who Run With The Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes for combining the voice of a storyteller and shaman; she reminds you of the alchemic possibilities embedded in archetypal tales across cultures. An incredibly rich experience.
The Power Of Now by Eckhart Tolle. There’s nothing fluffy and ‘new agey’ about this book at all. Remarkably lucid, there is a meditative clarity about each line — a sense of poise without tension.
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing because it is quite genuinely a modern classic — it covers such diverse facets of experience, from female friendship and political commitment to psychological breakdown and spiritual restoration.
The Complete Works Of Jane Austen (Jane Austen): because she still reminds you — and with a capacity to slow time down to a series of exquisitely crafted frames — that much of the world can be contained in a Regency drawing room.
Hymns For The Drowning by Nammalvar; translated by A.K. Ramanujan. For reminding us lyrically and unforgettably that bhakti is not genteel fervour but a wild, passionate sometimes even cannibalistic experience.
The Poetry Of Pablo Neruda (Pablo Neruda): for its ability to combine imagistic precision with sensuous vitality, for its matchless ability to fuse idea and mood.
The Light Trap by John Burnside. I discovered this book by a wonderful Scottish poet in 2002, and return to it time and again. Here’s craft that is never mannered, epiphany that is never trite, humanity that is never sentimental, and above all, this is poetry as reverie, ‘as total and incomplete/ as a blackbird’s singing’.
Lives Of The Poets by Michael Schmidt. Because it’s a rich, juicy, opinionated account of 250 poets down the ages. Here’s an author who isn’t an academic, but a rigorous, informed, passionate, unlicensed reader. May his tribe increase.
( Arundhathi Subramaniam is the author of poetry collections Where I Live , and On Cleaning Bookshleves , as well as Sadhguru: More Than A Life , and The Book of Buddha .)
Manu Joseph
Cosmos by Carl Sagan. My Life And The Beautiful Game by Pele. Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The Wasteland and Other Poems by T.S. Eliot, chiefly for the poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ after reading which I felt maybe I do not have the right to write poetry.
The first half of A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. I did not understand the second half, must try again now.
The first page of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. All through my adolescence I would begin my short stories with ‘To begin my life with the beginning of my life….’
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. I was 16 or 17 and every time I would put the book down I would want to start writing my own novel. I took nearly two months to finish the book though.
I feel a bit differently about it now but it somehow, in ways I do not understand, made me want to write the way ‘normal people’ do not write. I have long recovered, I think.
Best American Screenplays 2 compiled by Sam Thomas and The Godfather by Mario Puzo.
(Manu Joseph is the author of Serious Men and The Illicit Happiness of Other People .)
Amandeep Sandhu
I would think that any writer would start from what they read in their formative years. In my own case it was the comics and fairy tales I grew up reading — Chacha Chaudhary , Tinkle , the Panchatantra and Jataka Tales , Hans Christian Anderson , Champak and Chandamama .
The thing is one doesn’t cease to learn from other writers, so 10 is too small a list, really.
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, To Sir, With Love by E. R. Braithwaite, Train to Pakistan by Kushwant Singh, Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, Animal Farm by George Orwell , Imperium by Ryszard Kapuscinski, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, Andha Yug by Dharamvir Bharati and A River Called Titas by Advaita Malla Burman.
(Amandeep Sandhu is the author of Roll of Honour and Sepia Leaves .)
Anees Salim
In A Free State and The Mimic Men by V.S. Naipaul, The Power and The Glory by Graham Greene, Chronicle Of A Death Foretold and One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle, The Sound And The Fury and As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner and Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell. I liked them all for one common reason — they made me want to write. I found these books so powerful that they almost wrecked my self-confidence.
(Anees Salim is the author of The Vicks Mango Tree , Tales From A Vending Machine , Vanity Bagh and The Blind Lady’s Descendents .)
Meena Kandasamy
Annihilation of Caste by Babasaheb Ambedkar. Dr. Ambedkar’s uncompromising indictment of the caste system, the sustenance it derives from religion, the enumeration of the horrors of untouchability and the revolutionary call for the annihilation of caste made me alternate between weeping, feeling shattered and howling with rage and guilt and anger and sadness. I was 16 or something, and this book changed my life.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley. This is another ‘angry young man’ book. The hustler life, the way reading in prison that changes him, the police and state machinery that sustain racism, the “whitewashing” of history, the structural injustices, his conversion — Malcolm X was an icon and an iconoclast at once, and this book is destined to alter one’s outlook and peel away layers of ignorance.
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Not only did this book change the course of the history of the world, but this brilliant political tract is also a great and engrossing read. I’ve returned to the manifesto repeatedly, my copy is filled with highlights and underlining, and of course, it’s the book that converts you into a Communist.
Each these books here is a reason I became a writer: The Story of Thousands Nights and One Nights , translated by Richard Burton let me wander off to strange lands in my head. Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. I carried a smuggled copy around the school and realised for the first time what a statement a contraband book could make.
In fairness, I loved the book’s expansiveness, its gigantic distractions, the madness and unreliability of its narrator.
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, Tar Baby by Toni Morrison and Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. Not only are the three of them here great story-tellers but they are also the best prose-stylists. When entire sentences and paragraphs of a book are imprinted in your memory, and it is not even poetry, you know just how good these writers are.
Poems of Love and War , translation of Sangam Poetry by A.K. Ramanujan. I owe enormously to him. For elevating translation from what would be seen as a mechanical process into an artistic activity. Above all else, for putting me in touch with my own language.
I cannot restrict myself to any one volume of poetry. I’ve been influenced by the poems of Allen Ginsberg, Gwendolyn Brooks, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Kamala Das and many, many, many others.
(Meena Kandasamy is the author of two collections of poetry, Touch and Ms. Militancy , and a novel The Gypsy Goddess .)
