Anjum Hassan's 10 Favourite Books of All Time

Now we are Six by A. A. Milne, Egmont Books Ltd.  

This was gifted to me when I was six and was my first experience of poetry. The little everyday stories about Christopher Robin impressed on me that children can have personalities too.

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov, Penguin Modern Classics 

A delicate and comedic account of the visceral experience of cultural dislocation, and yet Pnin is so dignified in his dealings with a glib and unsympathetic world.

The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh, Penguin India 

This is the most exemplary and moving Indian novel about the connections and chasms between private and public memory.

My Michael by Amos Oz, Vintage Classics

A wonderfully sad love story set in a bleak Israel, which I identified with very closely as a teenager growing up in Shillong.

Clearing A Space by Amit Chaudhuri, Penguin India 

Best book of criticism that I know and one from which I have learnt a tremendous amount on the most creative ways of thinking about literature—Indian and Western.

Kala Ghoda Poems by Arun Kolatkar, Pras Prakashan 

This is a marvellously joyous book of poems about Bombay’s street life. It reminds us how to notice what we usually try to avoid—the unremarkable, often decrepit, reality right under our noses.

Open City by Teju Cole, Faber

This is a novel about a young man walking around and musing in a post-9/11 New York. The best book I’ve read about this new world, mostly because, as he says at one point, it deals with sorrow rather than anger, and that is a harder emotion to bear.

Butter Chicken in Ludhiana by Pankaj Mishra, Penguin

It revealed to me a way of writing about Indian small-town life in the tone of an autodidact who is looking for, but usually not finding in his reality, some glimmers of a life of the mind.

Swami and Friends by R. K. Narayan, Indian Thought Publications

Read this as a child and continue to be enchanted by Swami, who is both strong-willed and vulnerable. It’s a novel very well served by Narayan’s bittersweet, acerbic style.

English, August by Upamanyu Chatterjee, Faber and Faber

Impossible to imagine the blossoming of Indian English fiction in the 1990s without this late ’80s novel written in a voice never heard before: the westernized young Indian responding to the seediness of the provincial hinterland with a comically exaggerated horror and yet not without a certain askance empathy.

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