I read a lot this year, and it was fun—but I rated the books purely based on how they made me feel. Many of them could easily have ended up on my top list, barring a few misfires. There were also a couple of outright disappointments—Ambilimol and Vinoy Thomas’s attempts at sarcasm come to mind. […]
Although I had written this before, there was a time in my reading life when I avoided Rushdie and Naipaul after seeing them dismissed by Krishnan Nair (he was not really a critic but a literary journalist — which, to be fair, suits many so-called “critics” now as well). Later, however, I read two of
A serious reader does not choose a book in isolation; it is always the sum of the people, times, and experiences they have passed through. That is what some online readers fail to grasp. The offline lives of people we see online—their ripenings, the choices they make, the things they embrace or abandon—cannot be known