The Bookworm

I’d promised to myself that I’d read 50 books in 2009. I didn’t keep count though I read quite a handful of books. Just that I hardly read any non-fiction. What a shame!

2010. I already have a selection of books at hand. And what more, a large number of them are non-fiction (of course one would point out that most of them relate to the economy). And, I have some books by Indian authors too (I’d read reviews eons ago and I picked them up at a sale). Here’s the list.

Fiction (9 books)

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

The Girl Who Played With Fire

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest

The above three books form the Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson, a Swedish journalist (and rights activist) who died before the books were published. I’ve heard that these books have become a rage the world over (and I’d not heard of it at all). The books have been translated from Swedish to English. I am keeping my fingers crossed.

The Black Book. By Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish author who won the Nobel in 2006. I’ve been immensely impressed by his works that I’ve read so far (My Name is Red and Snow.

The Romantics by Rajkamal Jha

The Blue Bedspread by Pankaj Mishra

The Collected Novels of Khushwant Singh

The Time Traveler’s Wife

The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux

I have never read so many Indian authors in a year. It’d be fun reading Khushwanthough!

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. The only reason for picking this up is that it won the Booker. I wasn’t mightily impressed by the last couple of years’ Man Booker awards (Arvind Adiga and Kiran Desai). I hope I’d not be disappointed once again.

Non-Fiction (11 books)

Infectious Greed (Frank Partnoy)

A Search in Secret India (Paul Brunton)

The Crunch (Alex Brummer)

Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)

What On Earth Happened? (Christopher Lloyd)

Panic! (Michael Lewis)

Undercover Economist (Tim Harford)

Storms in the Seawind Ambani Vs Ambani (Alam Srinivas)

Traders, Guns and Money (Satyajit Das)

Beyond the Last Blue Mountain (RM Lala)

Veerappan’s Prize Catch: Rajkumar (C Dinakar)

It doesn’t matter if I end up reading 25, 50 or 100 books this year. I’d love to end up having gone through some quality stuff. Happy reading!

Blues

Hammurabi was never right

But none would want to admit it

Lest one loses out one's pound of flesh!