10 most favorite books…(in no particular order)

1. Eat.Pray.Love – Wonderful book whose title actually abbreviates the best philosophy of Life! Not only did I love her account of traveling voraciously through Italy for the best food in town, but also loved her very accurate account of the transition into deep spirituality in a very hilarious way.
   PS: Elizabeth Gilbert’s humor and warmth in this book totally rub onto you like a pair of purring kittens!
2. Under The Tuscan Sun – Life in bella Tuscany with a lot of Italian culture, language and of course, food thrown in. Best of all, it is my most secretive dream to have a house in a place as voluptuous as Italy and this book is how the author, Frances Mayes, goes about fulfilling it.
   PS: If you have seen the movie, it is nothing like the book – the book even has some delicious recipes which makes me clutch it to my heart! 🙂
3. The Little Prince – All time favorite this one! All love and longing in which Antoine conveys more emotion through the spaces in his words than the words themselves! It’s truly a masterpiece! Later I learnt that this was actually a love letter to his wife due to their separation since he was a World War pilot. She (Consuelo de St.Exupèry) wrote a memoir in reply that was discovered much after her death called “The Tale of the Rose”.
4. The Old Man and the Sea – Never judge a book by its size is what I learnt with this one! Ernest is so earnestly deep with this account of an aging fisherman’s ambitious quest at the sea, that it flashes in front of me every time I look at the sea.
5. Illusions – Richard Bach can write the way God writes…this one just resonates in my very soul like a wind chime put up in my heart.
6. The Zahir – I never knew what true love was until I read this book. Although the book drones somewhere in the middle, towards the end it gets so beautiful and the last paragraph is a defining moment of the story.
7. An Equal Music – If there is any author I would love to be, it would be Vikram Seth!He has put a musician’s love for music in words which I still find unbelievable! It’s like a pilot putting into words his love for flying!
8. Love in the time of Cholera – Although I disliked his first book (to the point that I wanted to return it to the bookstore and get my money back), thanks to my indignant friend who kept insisting that I like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I loved the writing in this one! It has a feverishness about love in its very language…couldn’t help getting entangled in his mood which extorted a poem out of me.
9. Life of Pi – Although the ending just “dropped off” in my mind like a sudden road that drops off into the sea (which I recently experienced in Goa), I found the entire account moving and yet something deeply funny that there is a whole “genre” of imagination I can identify with this book.
10. 2 States – Chetan Bhagat is really a writer for modern India although I know many would argue that! But he is to India what pop music is to music. This is a story of a young couple ‘s misadventures in getting married after graduating from an IIM thanks to the complicated and sometimes senseless yoke and mantle of tradition and religion which most people identify India with. After this I wanted to kiss him and say “Thanks for writing something about the India of my generation!” even if it seems like a Tweet of literature!

Since this is a list of some of my current favorites, I have kept it restricted to ones I have recently enjoyed. But you know how most people have a favorite classic that they keep reading again and again? Well, I don’t read any book again and again since I grow “over” a book pretty soon, but my most favorite classic I have read several times is Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women”, preferably unabridged. Her writing is so very transparent in terms of her own feelings as Josephine, the rebelliousness of a determined young girl and shame of poverty so timeless that it feels like it was written by someone who is still with me now.