Is your TBR pile multiplying overnight? Are you faced with dusty, reproachful spines? Do you wonder when you’re ever going to catch up with the most prolific bookstagrammers and shoot pretty pictures of a cover, some flowers and a hardwood table? Or perhaps you’re overwhelmed by how many new books there are and how you’ll never have time to read them all. Help is at hand. Welcome to Tsundoku, a monthly books recommendation column, where I break down books into the three parts that really matter: what everyone’s talking about, what’s happening in the world, and what old book you should read (or re-read) next. (Tsundoku, a word borrowed from Japan, means basically buying new books only to leave them in a pile next to the last pile you bought and haven’t gotten around to reading.)

Water cooler

Anuja Chauhan’s books are always fun, because she takes commercial fiction and wraps it up in a big Bollywood-style extravaganza. Each of her books is pacey, full of action and the kind of dialogues you might use among yourselves — liberal lashings of Hinglish and long odes to men’s bottoms. Her latest, Baaz, just came out to the delighted squeals of women aged anywhere from 19 to 40. Each of Chauhan’s books has a central theme: her first, The Zoya Factor was about cricket, followed by books about politics, Delhi in the ’70s and Doordarshan, and family disputes over property. Baaz is the Air Force book, peppered with fauji (army) language and, in an interesting departure for Chauhan, deals more with the Indo-Pak war in the ’70s than romance. Which is not to say the romance isn’t heady and exciting, but Baaz marks Chauhan as a skilled writer of action as well as relationships. This is also the first time she creates a male protagonist, the dashing Ishaan Faujdaar, nicknamed Baaz. Faujdaar is a small-town-boy-turned-sophisticated-army-officer, with “kota grey” eyes and a sense of chivalry that bowls over photographer Tehmina Dadyseth, herself an army daughter, who has many reasons to hate all that life represents. Read for the touching bromances, loving descriptions of life in the Indian armed forces, but perhaps ignore the superhero ending. (Baaz by Anuja Chauhan, Harper Collins, ₹399)

Watchlist

The first Iran elections since the nuclear agreement of 2015 happened this week. A great way to understand Tehran and the people who live there is by reading Ramita Navai’s award-winning book of essays City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death and the Search for Truth in Tehran. All the eight essays are about controversial people in the current regime — a sex worker, a trans woman, a thug, just to give a few examples, and are spun out of several interviews Navai did while she was living in Tehran as a journalist. Written almost as short stories, Navai goes deep into the psyche of each subject — what their family life was like, what they ate or drank? what they wore — and leaves you feeling as though you’ve travelled to the city yourself and spoken to the people. My particular favourite was the essay about Someyeh, a traditional, religious girl who marries her dashing first cousin, only to realise that marriage is not all it’s cracked up to be. Bonus: you’ll be reminded very much of India as you read, especially the descriptions of the traffic and the heavy pollution. (City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death and the Search for Truth in Tehran by Ramita Navai, Hachette, ₹399)

Way back

If you’re looking for something light after all that heavy fare, consider the cupcake of a book that is Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster. An epistolary novel, with little illustrations, it’s sweet, funny and (deservedly) a classic. The 1912 book takes the form of letters from orphan Jerusha “Judy” Abbott to a mysterious benefactor she calls Daddy-Long-Legs, as part of a deal he strikes with her — he’ll send her to college if she writes him a weekly letter telling him how she’s faring.

Along the way, Abbott transforms from a little orphan girl to a popular college student and makes many friends, but also the mysterious “Daddy” changes from a detached anonymous trust fund, to someone who begins to support her through her four years in college. Premise sound familiar? The book was the inspiration for the 1984 Malayalam movie Kanamarayathu, and a Hindi remake called Anokha Rishta. (Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster, free online on Project Gutenberg, Scholastic (paperback) ₹105)

Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan is the author of five books with a sixth, The One Who Swam With The Fishes; out soon @reddymadhavan

(This new monthly column is a primer for the books you need to know about, as well as the ones you want to)

comment COMMENT NOW