Six months of reading
Travelling for six months meant that I was also able to indulge one of my other great passions in life — reading, particularly when I became almost immobile for ten days in the middle of Maharastra with an infected foot.
In all I read 35 books while I was away and I’ve listed them all below, for the record, including the guide books I had with me.
I read a number of books about India, both fiction and non-fiction, including the amazing though seriously flawed Maximum City by Suketu Mehta and surely the most harrowing and utterly upsetting novel of all time: A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry.
But there are also a few unexpected titles on this list, part of the inevitable and occasionally exciting unpredictability of what books you might find in locations such as a guesthouse in rural Karnataka (Chandler: The Lady in the Lake) or a bookshop at a small seaside town in Sri Lanka (Porridge: The Inside Story!)
I could, I guess, have bought an e-book reader and downloaded a list of titles before I left the UK but then I never would have read many of my favourite books from this list; books that I had never heard of before, like The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch; and books that I ordinarily would have had very little inclination to read such as The Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna, which describes a fascinating episode of European history that my meagre school education had not even touched upon.
Here’s the list in full:
1. White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
2. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
3. Into Thin Air by John Krakauer
4. Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga
5. Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut
6. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
7. Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
8. The Moor’s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie
9. The Last Trip by Alex R. Stuart
10. Porridge: The Inside Story by Paul Ableman
11. Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta
12. The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch
13. The Age of Kali by William Dalrymple
14. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
15. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
16. The Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler
17. Small Island by Andrea Levy
18. The Rough Guide to India (various authors)
19. The Rough Guide to Sri Lanka by Gavin Thomas
20. Trekking in Ladakh by Charlie Loram
21. Life Class by Pat Barker
22. The Elephant by Richard Rayner
23. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
24. The Girl with the flame in her hair by Stieg Larsson
25. Tintin and the Red Sea Sharks by Herge
26. The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon
27. The Last Jews of Kerala by Edna Fernandes
28. Blink by Malcolm Gladwell (Introduction only)
29. A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
30. South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami
31. The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
32. Havoc in its Third Year by Ronan Bennett
33. The Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
34. The Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna by Adam Zamoyski
35. The Other Hand by Chris Cleave
