What Are You Reading Today?

Randall Munroe’s ‘What If’ is a collection of answers to the interesting and/or weird questions users posted on his wildly popular Web comic, XKCD (www.xkcd.com). A physics graduate and former NASA employee, Munroe is a rock-star in the world of science, tech and all things geek. As he says in his introduction, trying to answer to a stupid question can take you to some pretty interesting places. What would happen if everyone on earth jumped at the same time? How long could a nuclear submarine last in space? From what height do you need to drop a steak so that it is cooked when it hits the ground? The answers take science, curiosity, math and humour and take you on a journey of creativity and imagination. The book is peppered with jokes, funny stick cartoons and hilarious asides, including footnotes! The answers make you think and you end up learning something new in every page. This is the kind of book that shows you how cool science is and if you didn’t already agree, it gets you interested.

A biography of Hungarian-Indian artist Amrita Sher-Gil written by Anita Vachharajani and illustrated by Kalyani Ganapathy written for children and young adults. It is written simply, but with class, keeping the target audience in mind and beautifully illustrated in colour. It also includes a large number of stunning colour prints of Amrita Sher-Gil’s work. At 181 pages, it is an eye-opening read about one of India’s pioneering artists. Because of the intended audience, the book also leaves out some of the more colourful parts of the artist’s life. Overall, great read! Buy it as a gift for children you know or for yourselves. Highly recommended!

Hats and Doctors is a collection of Hindi and Urdu short stories by Upendranath Ashk, translated by Daisy Rockwell. The stories are set in India at a time when trains had an Intermediate Class and a Third Class and when Lahore wasn’t a city across the border. Even so, the keen observations Ashk makes about the Indian middle class would hold true even today. The characters in his stories are believable and one can see their contemporary versions around us today. The stories are funny and sometimes sad. The translation is very good though sometimes I couldn’t help trying to translate a particularly funny line back to Hindi to see how it would sound. Recommended reading.

A young teacher, vacationing with his girlfriend, is asked to play a friendly tennis match with a fellow guest. From the tennis court, John le Carré’s thriller takes you through the shadowy world of espionage, the Russian mafia and the global black money network. The best spy writer of the Cold war era is just as good 20 years after the Wall fell. Le Carré’s taut writing keeps the tension throughout the book without a single car chase or shootout. I love how le Carré’s books start from the most unlikely places – a tennis resort in this book – and then build up to a crescendo. Great story-telling, flawed but likable human characters, fast paced narration that keeps the imagination working. Definitely worth reading.