Globe Corner Blogs

Globe Corner Bookstore’s Shortlist of Indian Literature

Over the last few decades, literature from India has emerged as one of the most acclaimed and interesting genres. Below are a few of the titles that we consider essential reading for those contemplating a trip to the subcontinent or who are simply fascinated with Indian culture.

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The God of Small Things
by Arundhati Roy
A bestselling and Booker Prize-winning novel. A richly textured first book about the tragic decline of one family whose members suffer the terrible consequences of forbidden love.

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City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi
by William Dalrymple
Sparkling with irrepressible wit, City of Djinns peels back the layers of Delhi’s centuries-old history, revealing an extraordinary array of characters along the way-from eunuchs to descendants of great Moguls.

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The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857
by William Dalrymple
The award-winning historian presents a brilliantly researched, evocatively written study of the fall of the Raj and the beginning of the British occupation of India.

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Midnight’s Children
by Salman Rushdie
Born at the very moment of India’s independence, Saleem Sinai’s every act is mirrored by events that sway the course of the nation’s history, and telepathic powers link him with the other children born in that initial hour and endowed with magical gifts. Winner of the 1980 Booker Prize.

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Customs of the Kingdoms of India (from the Great Journeys series)
by Marco Polo
Gleaned during his voyage along the coasts of India, Marco Polo’s mystified reports include the story of a giant bird that eats elephants, along with many other tales both reliable and fantastical.

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Kim
by Rudyard Kipling
Reared in the teeming streets of India at the turn of the century, the orphan Kim is an imp with an endless interest in the extraordinary characters he meets. One of them, an old Tibetan lama, sets him on the path that will lead him to travel the Great Trunk Road and become a spy for the British.

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Unaccustomed Earth
by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake delivers eight dazzling stories that take readers from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand as they explore the secrets at the heart of family life.

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India in Mind
Edited by Pankaj Mishra
Anyone who is enthralled by India–or who loves fine writing–will delight in this compendium of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry written by 25 of the country’s most astute observers.

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Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
by Suketu Mehta
Bombay native Mehta fills his kaleidoscopic portrait of “the biggest, fastest, richest city in India” with captivating moments of danger and dismay.

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Holy Cow: An Indian Adventure
by Sarah MacDonald
When the love of MacDonald’s life is posted to India, she quits her dream job to move to the most polluted city on earth, New Delhi. From spiritual retreats and crumbling nirvanas to war zones and New Delhi nightclubs, this is a journey that only a woman on a mission to save her soul, her love life, and her sanity can survive.

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Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India
by Jaffrey Madhur
Today’s most highly regarded writer on Indian food gives us an enchanting memoir of her childhood in Delhi in an age and a society that has since disappeared.

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In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India
by Edward Luce
An enlightening study of the forces shaping India as it tries to balance the stubborn traditions of the past with an unevenly modernizing present.

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A Passage to India
by E.M. Forster
The classic account of the clash of cultures in British India after the turn of the century. With careful crafting, exquisite prose, and a well developed sense of irony, Forster reveals the menace lurking just beneath the surface of ordinary life, as a common misunderstanding erupts into a devastating affair.

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Martha and Cheetahs

Okay, so I’ll confess: before I interviewed for my job at the Harvard AIDS Initiative, I looked on a map to make sure that Botswana was where I thought it was. (And it was, right there north of South Africa.) I got the job and, four months later, landed in Africa for the first time.

If you mention Botswana to a lot of Americans, they’ll ask, “Have you read The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency?” If you haven’t; do so. I read this first book in Alexander McCall Smith’s mystery series to get a sense of the country. It’s an enjoyable read, chronicling the adventures of Precious Ramotswe, Botswana’s leading and only female private detective. McCall Smith was born in what is now Zimbabwe and educated in Scotland. After working for years as a Professor of Law in Scotland, he returned to Africa to work in Botswana. His books, worldwide bestsellers, portray the people and changing culture of Botswana. If you’re a mystery junkie, there are eight more books in the series.

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Moon's Patagonia Handbook --by Wayne Bernhardson

A great event is coming soon…REALLY soon. Say, tomorrow, October 16th (Thursday) at 6pm. Wayne Bernhardson, author of the Moon Guides to Argentina and Chile and the Moon’s Buenos Aires Handbook and Patagonia Handbook, is coming to speak for us at the First Parish Church in Harvard Square. (And rumor has it there’s a drawing for a prize!)

Bernhardson is definitely the man to listen to and shoot questions at if you are at all interested in the Southern Cone area of South America. On top of writing all these guide books, he also maintains a highly informative blog (Southern Cone Travel) about the area.

The talk will focus on the current conditions in Patagonia and about travel in it. But as the author spends half his year traveling in southern South America, he will be able to field questions during the Q&A from the whole region. …But the drawing?!

Okay, so then there is this drawing. Every person who comes to one of Bernhardson’s talks can be entered into a drawing for a free plane ticket to Santiago or Buenos Aires. The free drawing tickets from Bernhardson’s talks around the North America are put all together and chosen from in early November – Really? A free plane ticket? I’d put my name in that hat!

So come join the GCB and Wayne Bernhardson tomorrow, October 16th at 6pm in the First Parish Church (3 Church Street) in Harvard Square. Refreshments will follow the talk at The Globe Corner Bookstore.

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star --by Paul Theroux

Everyone who was working last night was very excited when Paul Theroux stopped by the store to autograph copies of his latest book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star. I rarely get star struck, but this is the man that started my obsession with travel writing, beginning when I read The Great Railway Bazaar.

I am not sure if it was nerves or sleep deprivation, but I do remember babbling to him about taking The Pillars of Hercules to Croatia with me. He must have thought I was a bit crazy as I could only muster fragments of sentences, but later we kind of chatted pleasantly about traveling. I can’t believe that I was comparing flight prices with Paul Theroux.

We now have lots of signed copies of the author’s books, including The Great Railway Bazaar (Asia), Riding the Iron Rooster (China), The Pillars of Hercules (The Mediterranean), The Mosquito Coast (Honduras), The Happy Isles of Oceania (Pacific Islands), The Elephanta Suite (India), Dark Star Safari (Africa) and The Kingdom by the Sea (Great Britain) and the newest edition to my reading list…Ghost Train to the Eastern Star.

Hearting Chuck Thompson--photo by Llalan

Any human alive — or any alien familiar with the John Cusack oeuvre — knows the pain of crushes: the sleepless nights, the appetite loss, the general degeneration into a love-lorn automaton capable of nothing more than boring the bejesus out of all his friends with painfully detailed rehashings of eye contact near-misses. What is worst of all (if you are the crushed, not their friends) is the fact that most crushes remain, for all eternity, unrequited.

And this is why we love Mr. Thompson.

We can’t say that our adoration of the man behind Smile When You’re Lying is returned with the same intensity and fervor, or that he speaks of us with the same breathless exuberance that causes us to trip over words and fall in paroxysms of laughter that end in unfortunate snorts.

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While perusing the World Travel section of our store, as I so often do in the last, quiet moments of any given work day, I was pleasantly surprised when my eyes settled upon Alain de Botton’s most recent nonfiction book, The Architecture of Happiness. I was instantly brought back to the Christmas morning two years ago when I received this book from my mother. I remember reading this thoughtful and well-illustrated book for the remainder of that break, stacking it on my bookshelf, and unhappily returning to the drudgery of mandatory college reading lists. Lucky for me, the revamped, paperback edition caught my eye and I had the enjoyable experience of rereading my favorite excerpts in recent days. In one such part, de Botton directly correlates the style of architecture one favors to the lifestyle one wishes to achieve and the morals one holds. If you are suspicious of this claim, read chapter three.

At times reading like a philosophy text, at others like an art history coursebook, and still at others reading like an intimate travel diary, de Botton works through his own musings on the importance of architecture while forcing readers to reflect on the role of architecture, both good and bad, on their daily lives. Thanks to de Botton’s accessible yet intellectual narrative style, this book can serve as an introduction to architectural theory for those unfamiliar with the subject, or as a means of reinvestingating and reimagining the eternal question, as stated by de Botton himself: what makes a great building?

Travels With Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski

The store just got in a new paperback that I’m very excited about: Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski.   A brilliant and richly detailed chronicle of Kapuscinki’s half century as a foreign correspondent and author, this memoir shows his journey as a young man just out of university in post-war Poland across the ensuing decades and all of the inhabited continents.  As one of Poland’s state newspaper’s first post-war foreign correspondents, Kapuscinski expects to perhaps be sent across the border to Czechoslovakia, and instead gets India–the start of a career that will make him witness to wars fought over soccer games, the liberation of nations from colonial bondage, coronations and overthrows of kings, and get him sentenced to death in absentia by a number of different regimes for simply reporting what he saw as he saw it.  He has in other words one of the all-time most kick-ass c.v.’s of any author since Sir Richard Burton or T. E. Lawrence.

It is really hot in Boston. It is even hotter in my apartment. One sure way to beat the heat is to go to an air-conditioned cinema, so off to see the new Indiana Jones movie I went. I can’t commit to whether I liked the movie or not. I thought that it was “ok.” But it did make me want to reread my most favorite book ever:The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey!

Candice Millard writes about the true story of Roosevelt’s expedition to descend an unmapped tributary of the Amazon. It reads like an action adventure movie and seems almost too perfectly scripted. They encounter deadly rapids, murder, Indian attacks, and just about everything else you could imagine. But it is a true story! It would make a great movie, but I don’t know who they should cast as Teddy. Any ideas?

Like involuntary cocaine-fueled drinking binges with heavily armed Mexican cops?  Mountain gorges deeper and longer than the Grand Canyon that you’ve never even heard of just a hop, skip, and a jump from the US? Psychopathic hillbillies out to restore their clan honor by killing anyone remotely related to/in the drug business with their family enemies?  Hospitable people willing to share what little they have in an unearthly natural setting?   Indigenous tribal rituals crossed with Roman Catholicism that lead to extremely drunken men in devil masks beating equally drunk passersby with giant penises during Holy Week? Continue Reading »

The first time I went to Sarajevo, I met a group of guys in a bar. After a few beers, one of them told me the following joke.

Two guys were running across Sniper’s Alley… Continue Reading »