A weekly column on what well-known personalities are reading and planning to read.
This week, it is Amitava Kumar and Jairam Ramesh. Mr. Kumar is the author of 'Lunch With a Bigot' and Mr. Ramesh is the Congress Rajya Sabha MP and former Union Minister.
Amitava Kumar
I’m currently reading Nothing Ever Dies by Viet Thanh Nguyen. It is about the way in which Vietnam is remembered. We just learned last week that it is on the non-fiction longlist for the National Book Award. I’m on my way to Boulder, Colorado, for the JLF at Boulder Literature Festival. I’ll be on a panel with Viet Nguyen. The last book I read was his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Sympathizer. I haven’t yet read The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota, a book praised by many people I like. I have it sitting on my desk at home.
Amitava Kumar is the author of ‘Lunch With a Bigot’, ‘A Matter of Rats’, and ‘Nobody Does the Right Thing’, among other books.
Jairam Ramesh
At the moment I am reading Roger Paulin’s biography of August Wilhelm called The Life of August Wilhelm Schlegel, Cosmopolitan of Art and Poetry. Schlegel is the founder of German Indology. I last read Einstein and the Quantum: the Quest of the Valiant Swabian by A. Douglas Stone. It is science writing for the layman at its best and has a wonderful chapter on Satyendra Nath Bose. Next I’d like to reread the collected works of D. D. Kosambi, the greatest polymath we have produced in the 20th century.
Jairam Ramesh is a Congress Rajya Sabha MP and the author of ‘To the Brink and Back: India’s 1991 Story’, among other books.
