A weekly column on what well-known personalities are reading and planning to read. This week, it is historian and writer Ramachandra Guha and author Anish Sarkar.
Ramachandra Guha
I am currently reading A Life Misspent , a thinly fictionalised memoir by the great poet Suryakant Tripathi ‘Nirala’, translated by Satti Khanna. The first few pages are terrific! The last book I read was Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Cafe , a riveting history of 20th century philosophy that focuses as much on individuals as on ideas. Once I am done with Nirala, I hope to turn to Nandini Sundar’s The Burning Forest . Professor Sundar is a brilliant and brave anthropologist, and her book draws on many years of research in the beautiful and war-torn region of Bastar.
Ramachandra Guha is a historian and biographer based in Bengaluru. His latest book is ‘Democrats and Dissenters’.
Anish Sarkar
There are two books currently by my bedside. Both are thrillers, translated into English from the original. The first is A Midsummer’s Equation by the Japanese author, Keigo Higashino (whose most famous work is The Devotion of Suspect X ). The second is Operation Napoleon by Arnaldur Indridason, arguably Iceland’s most well-known crime fiction writer. Higashino’s book is a murder mystery; Indridason’s is a thriller set in World War II. In both books, the mood and pace build up gradually, but they are page-turners all the same. For a foreign reader, the imagery and cultural insights into Japan and Iceland are highly evocative and fascinating.
Anish Sarkar works for a consulting firm and is an author. He lives in Mumbai.
