The book in my hand - July 31, 2016

A weekly column on what well-known personalities are reading and planning to read. This week, it is Lawrence Liang and Anjan Sundaram.

A weekly column on what well-known personalities are reading and planning to read.

This week, it is Lawrence Liang and Anjan Sundaram. Mr. Liang is the co-founder of Alternative Law Forum . Mr. Sundaram is a journalist and author.

Lawrence Liang

I’m reading Karthika Nair’s

Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata , a poetic retelling of the Mahabharata from the perspective of many of its minor characters. I last read Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. Not since Langston Hughes’s “Harlem”, when he famously asked whether a “dream deferred... explodes”, have I encountered lyrical anger as I did with Citizen . Next I’d like to read Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels because I am a sucker for intelligent hype and because every smart person rolls their eyes when I say I haven’t read Ferrante. Bad enough that I missed the Murakami fad bus, but to be left stranded on the Ferrante junction all alone... oh, the horror!

Lawrence Liang is a co-founder of Alternative Law Forum and is an independent legal scholar and writer based in Bengaluru.

Anjan Sundaram

I’m currently reading an unpublished memoir of America and East Africa by a journalist colleague and friend. I last read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It is a sobering portrayal of life in a Soviet labour camp. I admire Solzhenitsyn’s use of farce to take us through a day of near-death encounters in the life of Ivan, who had seemingly become numb to the dehumanisation. Next I plan to read The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard.

Anjan Sundaram is a journalist and author of Stringer: A Reporter’s Journey in the Congo, and Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship.