The concurrent list

By Usha Raman

This is not a review but a statement of purpose. I’m sure most of you will know the feeling….

I am reading four different books. One is on the table next to my bed. This is News of a kidnapping by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I’m about 10 pages into the book. A different sort of Marquez, but I’m still to make up my mind about it. The next is in the car (and I have the good fortune to be able to read as I am driven to work, a good 1 hour commute each way). This is the second book in Alexander McCall Smith’s Corduroy Mansions series, The dog who came in from the cold. The third is in my bag at the moment, to be dipped into when I find myself waiting for something or someone–Chimamanda Adichie’s That thing around my neck. The fourth is something I think I “ought” to read, The wave rider, by Ajit Balakrishnan, an account of rediff.com, an Indian start-up that rode the early web start up wave to success.

I find that increasingly, I need to have a variety of books “going” at any given time. Within a day, shifts in mood and focus require different kinds of feeding. It is also the only way I can satisfy what I can only characterise as a “greed” for books. Unfortunately, reading is a linear activity, and we can only follow words one at a time, and trace the journey of text line by line. So my compromise is to have a bunch of books available within reach, and it makes me feel like I am reading all of them together.

So, the first one I finish, or the most interesting one, will get on to this space. Soon.

Usha