Louisa Ermelino

What Books to Take to india?
March 23, 2007

I’ve got a pile of potentials. There’s Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss which has been racking up prizes and sales. I could re-read The God of Small Things which I remember loving and also I am going to Kerala for the first time so that might be relevant. I’ve read Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games and all of Vikram Seth’s books. And then there are all those books I read after my first trip to India (overland ):The Guide by R.K. Narayan in which a corrupt tour guide gets mistaken for a holy man, or Ved Mehta’s beautiful memoir All for Love about being sent, as a very young boy, to a school for the blind in Bombay. I read Portrait of India, also by Mehta, and India: A Wounded Civilization by V.S. Naipul. I’m going to find a very different India this time, very different from the India of these books I read so long ago. So back to the question…What books to take to India? I’ve decided to take the book that I carried all the way from Europe, through Turkey and Iran and Afghanistan and Pakistan, over to Thailand and Indonesia through Sri Lanka and across the Pacific. The book I carried and never even opened, never read one single word. The book I finally lost somewhere . But I just found a copy on my daughter’s bookshelf and I’m going to try again. The book? Catch 22 by Joseph Heller. I'll let you know what happens.

Posted by Louisa Ermelino on March 23, 2007 | Comments (0)