From Philip Pullman to Peter Rabbit + November releases from Aleph, Penguin & Westland

What you're reading is work in progress. In Dear Reader, I tell you what I’ve been reading and compile lists of new books expected/ out this month in India. I've been in touch with most of the big Indian publishers to ask for their releases, but if you have a book that you'd like me to list, please get in touch via Twitter (@dpanjana) or my website. If you've got suggestions for the newsletter, they're most welcome too.

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I’ve decided the worst part of being an (unemployed) bookworm is that pretty much every book looks like a must-have. For instance, I’m dying to sink into Han Kang’s The White Book, The Vanity Fair Diaries by Tina Brown, Janet Fitch’s The Revolution of Marina M (I’ve been lusting after this cover for months),Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple, and Bunk: The True Story of Hoaxes, Hucksters, Humbug, Plagiarists, Forgeries, and Phonies.

Instead, I’ve been (mostly) grown-up, resisting raiding the Kindle store and just stuck to feeling intense despair. Being a grown-up is highly overrated.

Which is a roundabout way of saying I haven’t done as much reading as I’d hoped to, but I did finish The Book of Dust, Philip Pullman’s new book that takes us back to the universe of His Dark Materials. This is the first of a new trilogy set in the world of the Magisterium, Dust and daemons. If you haven’t read Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass, then The Book of Dust is a neat gateway book. Begin here and you’ll be reading the series in chronological order since in this new book, Lyra (the heroine of His Dark Materials) is a baby. When she shows up as an infant in a priory near Oxford, 11-year-old Malcolm’s life is overturned. He finds himself inexplicably drawn to Lyra and appoints himself her protector, which is a good thing because there are dangerous and powerful people intent upon kidnapping her. Oh, and there’s this mad, remember-Noah-and-his-ark-esque flood that’s plunged everything and everyone into chaos. Fortunately, Malcolm has a canoe.

Much of The Book of Dust is about Pullman's favourite subjects: resisting oppressive authorities, freedom of thought, and the human instinct for violence. Gerard Bonneville makes for a magnificent villain, radiating evil and brilliance, with the most terrifying daemon ever. While Malcolm is delightful and Bonneville is a chilling predator, I do wish Pullman had given the women in The Book of Dust a little more to do. The most important of them is Alice — she’s Malcolm’s sidekick — and she’s essentially there to change nappies and be a victim of abuse (a feisty one, but still a victim). It’s not like Pullman can’t write brilliant female characters. His Dark Materials is full of them. This book, though, is all about boys and men, being boys and men.

The thing with Pullman’s writing is that he’s just so damn good, with his perfect sentences and brilliant descriptions (“…a flash of lightning dazzled him, like an inscription on the heavens of his own private aurora…” Insert swoon here) that it takes a while to realise the chinks in the book. Then again, it’s only the first of a trilogy and for all my quibbles, I cannot wait for part two.

If you’ve read more of Joan Didion than the exquisite The Year of Magical Thinking, then you’ll love Joan Didion: The Center Cannot Hold, a documentary on her made by her nephew Griffin Dunne and available on Netflix. If you haven’t, then this isn’t the best introduction to Didion. It’s quite obvious Dunne adores his aunt, but the documentary doesn’t really tell you why you should adore her too. It doesn't examine her work closely enough and neither does it dig deep enough into her personal life to show us how it impacted her. I couldn’t agree more with Alissa Wilkinson’s take on the documentary and Didion. For those who aren’t familiar with Didion, read “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”.

I wasn’t sure how easy a read How to Travel Light: My Memories of Madness and Melancholia by Shreevatsa Nevatia would be. Being abused, struggling with addiction and Indian mental health professionals who add to a patient’s woes instead of relieving them, the highs and lows of manic depressive behaviour — this is not the stuff of fluffy, light-hearted reading even if the author has survived to tell the tale. Incidentally, Shreevatsa and I worked together briefly, but haven’t been in touch. Reading How to Travel Light felt a bit like eavesdropping, and as always, I’m in awe of people who can hold up their lives to public scrutiny.

For the most part, the memoir is very well-written and frequently holds you captive in the rooms and situations that you’ll wish were fictitious. This is a difficult book to have written, and for some, I suspect this is a very difficult book to read. There’s a lot here that could act as triggers, particularly to those who have memories of sexual abuse and being institutionalised. How to Travel Light is less compelling and lacks clarity when Shreevatsa gets to the parts where he's gaining equilibrium, and the last few chapters felt the most brittle. Especially when he lists out those who have stood by him to thank them, it’s difficult to gauge just how fragile or solid he actually is, and whether there’s an undercurrent of performance to the way he’s closing his narrative. I fervently hope those concluding chapters can be taken at face value and are his reality.

My past week has been lit up by Ana Martins Marques’s poetry. You can read “Clocks” and two more poems by her that are quite beautiful. The one that's haunted me is this one, titled "Penelope" and translated by Julia Sanches. Maybe it's the link to mythology, or maybe it's just the shimmering beauty of her language. (Desperately wish Sanches had translated parts v and vi as well. Sigh.)

Penelope (i-iv)

What day knits
night forgets.

What day traces
night erases.

By day, threads,
by night, tracks.

By day, silk,
by night, loss.

By day, cloth,
by night, fault.

(ii)

Day’s plot
in night’s yarn
or night’s plot
in day’s yarn
as I spin:
fidelity by a thread.

(iii)

By day thimbles.
At night no one.

(iv)

And she did not say
I am no longer yours
I gave my heart to quiet a long time ago
while your heart swayed in travel
as I waned
amongst the night’s drapes
you traversed unsuspected distances
the charmed bodies of women whose strange language
I could use to spin a shroud
of our common tongue.
And she did not say
in the beginning I thought of you
first as one who burns before
a dying campfire
later as one who, remembering, visits childhood shores
and then as one who recalls a long summer
and later as one who forgets.
And she also did not say
loneliness can come in many forms,
as many as there are foreign lands,
and it is always welcoming.


And because life could do with a little more fluff and Domhnall Gleeson, here's a new trailer for Peter Rabbit. This is not how I remember the books at all, but well... .

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NOVEMBER RELEASES

Aleph – Fiction & Non-Fiction

The Book of Chocolate Saints by Jeet Thayil
Literary fiction
A novel that sounds like an homage to a past generation of Bombay poets, journalists, thugs and artists. Thayil’s hero, Newton Francis Xavier — “blocked poet, serial seducer of young women, reformed alcoholic (but only just), philosopher, recluse, all-round wild man and India’s greatest living painter” — sounds like he’s an intimate of FN Souza.

The Bengalis: A Potrait of a Community by Sudeep Chakravarti
Non-Fiction
I worry about any book that declares in its blurb that Bengalis “are among the most civilized and intellectually refined people on earth” (even if the next fragment acknowledges that they’ve also “been responsible for genocide and racism of the worst kind”). But maybe this is indeed “a definitive portrait of one of the world’s most vibrant and distinctive communities”.

Penguin – Fiction

Buffering Love: Stories from The App Store by Isaac John
Romance
Each of the stories is named after an app, or a specific technology, that has a role to play in impacting the lives of the protagonists.

The Boy With A Broken Heart by Durjoy Datta
Romance
Contains precisely what the title says along with a heroine who is determined to “love him back to life”. Why, you ask? Because “the antidote to heartache is love.” ‘Nuff said.

Undying Affinity by Sara Naveed
Romance
Zarish and Haroon are childhood sweethearts, but will the hot new professor drive a wedge in their relationship? Try not to think of LoSHA (List of Sexual Harassment in Academia, not the Pakistani lingerie brand) while reading this.

Padmini, The Spirited Queen of Chittor by Mridula Behari
Historical fiction
The novel is written from the legendary Padmini’s perspective as she attempts to figure out what it means to be a woman in a man’s world.

Prithviraj Chauhan: The Emperor of Hearts by Anuja Chandramouli
Historical fiction
Here’s the blurb: “Princess Samyukta loved him from afar, and when Prithviraj Chauhan claimed her for his own, defying the wrath of an implacable foe, their happiness was complete. Victorious in love and war, Prithviraj Chauhan was soon to discover that success came with a terrible price - trials, treachery and tragedy.”

Westland – Fiction

A House for Mr. Misra by Jaishree Misra
Fiction
I’m sure the echoes of A House for Mr. Biswas are intended, though probably with irony since this one stars the author and her husband, the phlegmatic Mr. M, and includes neighbours waving cutlasses, venomous snakes, union men and that complicated piece of legislation known as the Coastal Regulation Zone.

The Dirty Dozen: Hitmen of Mumbai Mafia by Gabriel Khan
Crime fiction
Mining his experience as a crime reporter, the writer looks at the lives of twelve Mumbai hitmen. I must admit, I’m equally if not more fascinated by fictitious persona Gabriel Khan and his relationship with the real reporter behind the pseudonym.

A Hundred Little Flames by Preeti Shenoy
Fiction
When Ayan is sent to live with his grumpy old grandfather in a tiny village in Kerala, he has no idea that these few months in the sleepy, idyllic village will change everything.

Readers’ tip

Twice Blessed by Rani Ramakrishnan
Fiction
A racy urban contemporary suspense fiction novel featuring a strong amateur female protagonist.

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Dear Reader will be back next week, with more new books and more nattering. Thanks for reading.