FICTION
The wondrous world of words
Rupa Bajwa
Working on a new novel has taken me down unfamiliar, new paths this year and I didn’t get to read as much in 2008 as I would have liked to. While I am wary of indulging in any critical analysis right now, here are reminisces of some of the reading I did this year, and my personal response to it.

NON-FICTION
India comes to the fore
M. Rajivlochan
O
F all the books released in 2008, the singular best-seller in 2009 would be Nandan Nilekani’s Imagining India: Ideas for a New Century (Allen Lane) on what India should do in order to move forward in the present century. Now, that he has made Infosys so dramatically successful, everyone would like to know his recipe for making India great.

Eye-catchers
Boyd Tonkin and Katy Guest select some of the outstanding titles of 2008
Fiction
Something to Tell You by Hanif Kureishi (Faber, £7.99)
AFTER a quarter-century of nimble and witty provocations, Hanif Kureishi has kept his entire mischievous gift for insight and outrage. Uniting public affairs with affairs of the heart, this novel of London life and lust takes its psychoanalyst narrator on a journey into his, and his culture’s, tangled past.

Netting numbers
Roopinder Singh
B
OOKS by young non-professional writers are selling in numbers too big to ignore. They might have a tough time with critics, and established authors may have issues in making space for these writers among their ranks. However, there is no doubt that their books sell, and they have a special place among readers who respond to them through the Internet via websites, and blogs.

Take a chill pill with chick lit
Aruti Nayar
I
T’S crazy, it’s zany, and, of course, it’s chic...what is more, it’s spinning an entire generation of yuppies into a tizzy. Chick lit is here to stay. Bindis, saris and bangles happily infuse the book covers that were distinctively pink and illustrated with lipsticks, martini glasses and stilletoes.

Real lives on bookshelves
Harbans Singh
A
S the year comes to an end and one recalls the biographical books that made an impact, one cannot miss the contrast between L. K. Advani’s My Country, My Life (Rupa & Co) and Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope (Canongate).

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