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Walking on a trail along the fields near my home, I clicked some pictures of the reeds and wild flowers that sprout in the winter months. Nature’s variety seems boundless. Who knows how many kinds of flowers and plants there are in the world. How Nature creates such bounty, beauty and functionality while eschewing superfluousness is an absolute wonder. Of course, none of it happened all at once. It usually takes thousands of years for evolution to erode the pointless and perpetuate the essential. But then, Nature is never in a hurry. After all, it has a lot of time and space. (Yes, this is my idea of a Physics joke!) Simplicity has a ring of truth about it, an elegance and resilience that beats trends and momentary peaks and troughs. If you’ve ever seen a belt of sand dunes, you know what I mean. Functionally, it’s just piles of sand shaped into crescents by the wind and yet, one can keep looking at them, mesmerised. The same is true for sitting on a beach and watching the waves roll in and recede, and then do more of the same. Perhaps, this applies to our lives as well. Yes, we live in consumerist times and there are unending mounds of stuff everywhere we look. And yet, the call of the classic and understated is eternal and cuts through the clutter. I’m reminded of two photographs that were in the news a few years ago. One was a picture of a meeting between the Emperor of Japan and the Saudi Crown Prince in September of 2016 while the other was from the Saudi King’s visit to Japan a few months later. The coverage of the Saudi King’s visit was overrun by headlines of golden escalators, silk carpets and luxury cars. In contrast, the Japanese Emperor met with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia in a room with screen walls, two wooden chairs and a small table with a flower arrangement. Even though the visits took place months apart, my mind has collated them into a single conversation of ideals and highlighted the distinctly Japanese trait of winning an argument by speaking the softest. Wherein lies the appeal of simplicity? Is it only functionality and lack of embellishment that win us over? Or does simplicity strum a chord within us that longs to live unpretentiously with adequate belongings to make our lives easier but not smother our surroundings with everything ever invented. Clutter stresses us out, on a sub-conscious level. Which is why it feels good to live with less. Not everyone needs to or can be Marie Kondo , arguably the world’s most famous tidy-upper, but it’s helpful to recognise that acquiring possessions must have a cut-off point. After all, there are only so many mugs, rugs, clothes or vases that a person needs. This is something I like to remind myself as well. A few years ago, when I moved out of Delhi to our farm in Belgaum, I packed one large trunk of clothes I had never worn. Most still had their tags peeping out of the bags they came in. It shocked me and I was ashamed of my hoarding ways . I’m working on correcting that by cutting down my purchases and discarding before I buy. Which is why I find the story about the Zen monk who welcomed a traveller into his dwelling is so impactful. The Zen monk had only a sleeping mat and a few wooden pots in his room. His visitor asked why he didn’t have any furniture. To which the monk said, “Where is your furniture?” Taken aback, his guest responded, “I don’t have any furniture. I’m only passing through.” The monk smiled and said, “So am I.” Travel light – that’s the message. And that doesn’t mean giving up on aesthetics. Instead, one can focus more on quality if the pressure to collect quantity is deducted from the equation. The one and only Leonardo da Vinci said, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” He absolutely hit the nail on the head with that. Except that he too had trunkfuls of clothes, given his dandy ways. Aah well… so da Vinci wasn’t perfect, but at least he was working on it! So can we.

Beautiful World, where are you is not a book for everyone. If you’re the kind of person who likes fast-paced, plot-driven stories, then this is not your kind of novel. Which is not to say that there is no action whatsoever. It’s just that many of what would count as major events take place either before the novel opens or somewhere off the page, and are referred to as having happened in the final chapter which serves as an epilogue. With Beautiful World, where are you,  Sally Rooney sets out to write a story about friendship and love in the midst of economic disparity and an anxiety about human existence. The thread of existential dread or more precisely, a questioning of the true place of an individual with all the cares that occupy our minds in contrast to the larger context of recorded history, our species and the planet is fitting given that Beautiful World, where are you was published in September 2021, after the world had been through multiple lockdowns. This is Rooney’s third novel, following Conversations with Friends and Normal People . I have read neither but I do know that focussing on her protagonists’ coming of age and their relationships is a feature of her novels. And in that sense, Beautiful World, where are you is similar. It is about two best friends (who met in college), Alice and Eileen who are nearing 30. Alice is a successful and much-feted author who moves to an oceanside town in Ireland after a stint in New York where she suffered a mental breakdown. Eileen, on the other hand, works as an assistant editor at a literary magazine in Dublin, making very little money. The main mode of communication between Alice and Eileen is email, in which they discuss their romantic lives and weightier matters such as the collapse of civilization, the end of beauty, commodification of art, the conspicuous consumption of the privileged few built on the backs of the disadvantaged multitude and the strangeness of fame. Dare I say that if it wasn’t for these pithier bits and Rooney’s experiments with narrative style, Beautiful World, where are you could easily be classified as contemporary romance or contemporary women’s fiction instead of literary fiction? Though I must add that I liked Rooney’s style given as it is sparse yet beautiful in how it delves into relationships without devolving into sappiness, with sentences like, “They looked at one another for a long moment without moving, without speaking, and in the soil of that look many years were buried.” Beautiful World, where are you made me question the difference between characters who are aware of and concerned about the world and its socio-economic and political history and those who use it to sound intelligent and well-intentioned. The difference, in my opinion, lies in action. Or more precisely, the choices they make. Else, it comes across as pretentious navel-gazing with citations! The two protagonists talk a good game but we don’t see that much in terms of walking the talk. At least in the case of Alice, one makes the supposition that her novels are about characters dealing with these issues and her political and socio-economic views make their way into her work. Not so with Eileen. Her actions are restricted to reading about ancient civilizations and The Brothers Karamazov  and whining to her friends about their lack of care for her. The other two major characters in the novel are Felix and Simon. Felix is a guy Alice meets on a dating app who has a blue-collar job at a warehouse and a shiftiness that is tough to pinpoint. But Alice persists in her relationship with him even though as readers, we have no idea why. Perhaps, it is supposed to be short-hand to establish how egalitarian Alice is, despite her financial success and how untouched by intellectual snobbery. This, from a character who claims to have created a “a gulf of sophistication” between her estranged family and herself, feels a bit false. For his part, Felix is uncomfortable with the power and intimidation Alice wields as a consequence of her success and financial freedom, till, suddenly, he isn’t. Felix is the most underwritten character of the lot. Simon is the other love interest. He works as a political assistant to a Left-leaning politician. He is also the most religious character in Beautiful World, where are you which is viewed as odd behaviour by the other characters . Given that Sally Rooney is Irish and bases her novels in Ireland, I presume this is a nod to the sharply declining number of people who identify as Catholic in a country which, for centuries, has been recognised as fervently Catholic. In the last census taken in 2022, the percentage of Irish residents who described themselves as Catholics fell to 69% from 84% in 2011. The numbers are starker still in cities like Dublin. But, I digress. Simon Costigan is, we are told repeatedly by every major character, very good-looking and never short of the attention of women. Yet he remains devoted to Eileen who is said to have 'great potential' even though we never see any evidence of the same. She is also a character almost entirely lacking in agency. The little smidgens of agency she displays are only to reject the good things that happen to her, in order to test the depth of interest of the other party. This cloying neediness gets quite trying after a point. Eileen is that person who waits fervently for other people to cajole her to do things she wants to do and sulks in a corner when they fail to coddle her enough. And yet, we are told that Eileen is worthy of great things. Told, but never shown. Even when we are allowed a momentary flashback into Simon’s memory of his relationship with Eileen, whom he has known and adored since they were children, we are none the wiser as to why he loves her so much. I wonder if this makes Simon fall into the category of male characters referred to, on social media, as “men written by women”? His emotional issues are referred to but never explored. We are presented only the symptoms which dovetail neatly into what the female character, Eileen requires for her happy ending. In terms of style and format, Beautiful World, where are you  is partly an epistolary novel where Alice and Eileen send each other lengthy emails. Written in first person, these emails give the reader a peep into Alice’s and Eileen’s beliefs, psyches and emotional worlds. In a sharp contrast to the intimacy of these parts of the novel, there are chapters written in a distant third-person. A perspective so distant that you may feel like the narrator’s level of knowledge about the characters is the same as you, the reader. It reminded me of times when I have sat in a café and watched people seated at the table next to mine. Sample this. “On the platform of a train station, late morning, early June: two women embracing after a separation of several months. Behind them, a tall fair-haired man alighting from the train carrying two suitcases. The two women unspeaking, their eyes closed tight, their arms wrapped around one another, for a second, two seconds, three.” The two women mentioned in the excerpt are the protagonists and the fair-haired man is Simon but the third-person narrator gives us no hint of their inner emotions or thoughts. Rooney carries this off with a great deal of skill though I’m not sure what it establishes for the story itself apart from the author’s skill. To me personally, the bits that sparkled were where the characters speak of relatable things in ways that are poetic, emotional and sadly beautiful like, “We are standing in the last lighted room before the darkness.” That’s the stuff that conjures up a concrete image, stirs up unnamed emotions and points to an idea too ephemeral to be cloistered into words. How friendship changes yet remains the same as our lives progress is a major theme in Beautiful World, where are you. It makes you wonder if one’s friends view us as we were when they first met us and whether one of friendship's virtues is to see potential in our friends that others miss. Beautiful World, where are you also explores the juxtaposition of the personal versus the universal (as in matters that are considered of greater importance such civilization, art or economic models). Is one more important than the other? The weakest link of Beautiful World, where are you  is the ending. It feels like Rooney wanted to wrap it up in a pretty little bow without showing us the character growth that would be required to arrive at such a point. As a result, the ending feels forced and frankly, trite. Before I wrap up, let me make the case for the inclusion of quotation marks. Can we please have them back? Life is confusing enough, what with civilization collapsing around our ears (if you believe the novel’s protagonists)! Characters speaking without quotation marks to signify direct speech just makes the world even more confusing. With due apologies to Friedrich Schiller (whose poem The Gods of Greece is the inspiration for this novel's title), this is my note to the author, editor and publishers of this novel: “Beautiful World, where are the quotation marks?”

The barista called out the name scrawled on the venti cup, “Cappuccino for Aditya.” I smiled, a gentle wave of satisfaction washing over me. That was close enough, I thought to myself. My guess had been Abhishek, Abhimanyu or some other common male name starting with the letter A. Sorry for the abrupt   opening. Let me start at the beginning. I was nursing a frappe at the Starbucks outlet at the Mumbai airport, killing time before checking in for a flight to Delhi. I was travelling alone and, as always, carrying a book. I settled into a cushioned cane chair, placed the book next to my drink but chose to watch people instead. While I wouldn’t describe myself as a Peeping Tom or an eavesdropper, I admit that I enjoy trying to guess the details of strangers’ lives from what I can observe. I’m no Sherlock Holmes but it is fun to try. Starbucks is especially helpful with regard to an added element of my pastime - guessing the names of strangers. Unlike most other coffee chains in India, Starbucks doesn’t bring their customers’ orders to their tables. Instead, they prefer to call out the customer’s name along with their drink order. Which works out perfectly fine for me, the name-guessing people-watcher! My little game rests on the theory that certain people suit their names to a T and studying their appearance and body language can sometimes help one intuit this stuff. At other times, it’s just fun to watch people in public spaces and imagine what they’re like. So, this Aditya from paragraph one was tall, fair, with a lankiness to his frame, and a certain affability to his body language. There was a casualness about him that made me think of parents who want their child to have a roll number in class that comes somewhere near the top. I’ve known parents who believe that a single-digit roll number will somehow turn their lackadaisical offspring into a competitive merit-lister. Anyway, a name beginning with an A usually lands a spot in the top ten. At least, alphabetically! If you’ve persisted with this post till this point, I commend your patience. Or perhaps, you too are a people-watcher. If yes, do leave a comment on what you consider the best places to watch people. I'm partial to coffee shops. I like my creature comforts, you see. Comfortable couches, the fragrance of coffee brewing, the trickle and spurts of moody coffee machines spewing hot and bitter liquids, the hissing of the milk steamer, punctuated by the bings of the cash register and the hum of conversation. This is my preferred setting with its soothing symphony of sounds. There’s something about the informality of a cafe that allows for people’s personalities to step out. Also, there is an element of waiting or solitude involved. Unlike restaurants, where people usually arrive together for a meal, a coffee shop is a place with many purposes. One could walk in there to work, to catch up with friends, for first meetings – whether dates or interviews, to savour a beverage while reading a book or to buy a drink on the go. To watch a person while they wait is a whole different ball game. Touching up their make-up or glancing at the door every few minutes, clicking a selfie (at times, a whole portfolio), making phone calls, texting or scrolling through social media or glancing through the week-old newspapers lying around. And then, there are also those who come prepared with a book. Like yours truly! Airports and railway stations are considered by many to be great places for people-watching. I differ on that front. The anxiety and rushing about of travel can cause most people to depart from their true nature. Almost nobody rushes to a café in a state of urgency. Apart from me, that is! And that’s what makes watching folks, as they settle in with a drink or a muffin, so entertaining. That is, until you catch someone’s eye who is doing exactly what you are. In a moment of shared confidences, you smile sheepishly, look down and open that book lying next to your coffee.

We’re well into the second month of the year and if you’re like me, you have a reading target for the year. And if you’re really like me, you’re lagging behind so miserably that the whole idea is beginning to look impossible. But I’m an optimist. I usually wake up looking to turn into a new leaf almost every other day. Some people call that delusional. I call it Tuesday! My usual reading target is 24 books in a year. I have achieved that target only once in the last five or six years which is when I began keeping a count of the books I read. Mostly, I end up reading 17-18 books in a year. Therefore, with a renewed spurt of afore-mentioned optimism with real-life data shaking its head in disbelief, my target for this calendar year is 36 books. For the mathematically-oriented, this translates to 3 books a month. It's the 9th of February and I’ve read one book. So clearly, something’s got to change. I need to get out of my reading slump. And from my extensive experience of such slumps, I know that one of the important elements of achieving the requisite momentum to get out of a reading slump is to pick the right book . Something that is fast-paced or soothing (depending on what you need) but mostly, something that reads like a letter from an old friend… easy-going, fun and with bits that make you chuckle or sit up in surprise. I hope to stumble upon such a book recommendation but for you, dear reader, I bring a list of books I’ve read in the recent past that should help jumpstart your reading battery. THE ART OF RACING IN THE RAIN by GARTH STEIN The Art of Racing in the Rain  is the story of the Swift family narrated by the half Labrador and half either Shepherd, Poodle or Terrier protagonist, Enzo. At the centre of Enzo’s life and the story, is Denny Swift, an aspiring professional race car driver dealing with family and financial issues. Enzo’s perspective as narrator is what makes this novel shine. If you’re looking for a heart-warming book about family, loss, resilience and hope, this may be just what you’re looking for. THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY by MATT HAIG Have you ever wondered how your life would’ve turned out if you’d done a few things differently? The Midnight Library  by Matt Haig is a novel about the decisions we make and how every choice we are offered is both a fruit of previous choices but also a seed for future possibilities. The Midnight Library is a charming little book to curl up with. It reminds us to value our small victories and joys in a world that glorifies the flashy. THE READING LIST by SARA NISHA ADAMS Between the pages of a library book lies the List – a handwritten catalogue of eight novels with no obvious similarities- written out for no one in particular just in case they need it. For reasons of their own, the protagonists, Aleisha, a teenage librarian and Mukesh, an elderly widower who has until now kept his distance from books, start reading the novels on the list, forming an unexpected bond with books and each other. A MAN CALLED OVE by FREDRIK BACKMAN The protagonist of A Man called Ove  is a grumpy and rigid old man. He decides to end his life, seeing no point in carrying on. Ove has a plan and the tools to achieve it. That’s when a couple moving into the neighbourhood ruin his design. This book will warm the cockles of your heart while reaffirming the inescapable truth that few things are more essential than the belief that one is loved and needed. MORE BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS AHEAD If mysteries and thrillers are more your speed, here are a few more recommendations that will keep you engaged without getting too complicated. Remember, easy-peasy is the vibe we’re going for. THE PLOT by JEAN HANFF KORELITZ The Plot  is a novel about Jacob Finch Bonner, a struggling writer who steals a riveting plot narrated to him by a student who dies before completing his novel based on the same plot. Jacob’s book ends up becoming a blockbuster and he, a celebrated author. There is, however, one tiny fly in the ointment - someone knows his secret and is threatening to reveal it to the world.  The writing is engaging and the narrator’s turn of phrase and ironic tone elevates the story, injecting it with humour and insight while keeping you turning pages to discover the identity of the murderer in Jacob’s novel and the blackmailer in his own life. A DEATH IN THE HIMALAYAS by UDAYAN MUKHERJEE Set in the hilly environs of an idyllic little village in the Himalayas, this novel sets the stage early when an English activist found murdered in the nearby forest. Clare Watson is a victim with many supporters, quite a few enemies and a secret or two. Neville Wadia, a suave, former policeman is the primary but unofficial investigator of the case. He carries the baggage of his past as do most of the suspects. THE TRUTH ABOUT THE HARRY QUEBERT AFFAIR by JOEL DICKER The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair  is a cold case whodunnit delivered with a literary flair. It’s a novel about two authors – Harry Quebert, a celebrated senior writer who is arrested for murder, 33 years after a fifteen-year-old girl that he loved goes missing; and Marcus Goldman his protégé who, struggling with writer’s block after his successful first novel, resolves to clear his mentor’s name. With a host of suspects, fading memories and looming deadlines, Marcus is up against many challenges in this twisty page-turner. Joel Dicker’s style and narrative technique make it even better by imbuing a thriller plot with literary allusions, three-dimensional characters and social commentary without letting up on the pace. Happy reading, folks!

Every now and then, burrowed into the prosaic paths of the commonplace is nestled something whimsical. Amazing and amusing in its quaintness and imagination, it makes us smile and adds a sparkle to the humdrumness of everyday life. I’m very easily charmed by whimsy – a quaint café, an interesting bookmark or a delightful hobby or trait is all it takes. A few months ago, a friend, Shruti sent me a link to something called a literature clock . It’s a website that operates as a clock, telling you the time. It updates every minute without the user refreshing the page. Before you judge me as particularly simple-minded with a roll of your eyes, let me clarify that while I am easily amused, it is not quite that  easy. This online clock’s beauty lies in its revealing the time as part of a quote from a piece of literature.   Which means that someone searched for quotes from thousands of works of literature that would represent every minute of a day. To me, watching it change from one timely quote to another is gratifying. Is it strictly necessary? Of course not. But then, neither is dancing. To the best of my knowledge, nobody dances to cover the distance from point A to point B! Speaking of going from A to B reminds me of a company that goes from A to Z, Amazon (check out the logo and you’ll see that the arrow travels from A to Z). It’s a multi-billion-dollar corporation with a dismal reputation for profit-gouging and fostering a toxic work environment for a majority of its employees. I’m certainly not a fan. Even so, I came across a page on its site quite by accident which managed to humanise this global profit-squeezing, mega-corporation. The humanising effect didn’t last long but given my opinion of Amazon, even that ounce of goodwill generated was no small achievement. The page in question is an Error 404 page which basically pops up only when Amazon can’t find whatever you’re searching for. Except that this page has a picture of an employee’s dog and a little write-up about it. Apparently, Amazon has a Dogs at Work program allowing employees to bring their dogs to work. The whimsical charm of this webpage was enough to make me forget for a while what I was searching for in the first place. That is the power of whimsy. It fires up our imagination, emotions and turns the run-of-the-mill into something memorable. And sometimes, it can also turn into a lifestyle and a business. Like it did for Zack MacLeod Pinsent , a 29-year-old British man who, at the ripe old age of 14 ditched his denims for bespoke 18-Century clothing. He chooses to dress like a Regency gentleman every day, regardless of quizzical looks from strangers and the effort required to tailor his own clothes in a fashion that has been out of fashion for a couple of centuries. But it’s obvious that it makes him happy. And frankly, he cuts quite a figure. More power to him. We can all sprinkle some whimsy into our lives in whatever manner we like. Most of us already do, I’m sure. It could be a playful pair of spectacles, reading Wuthering Heights or Harry Potter every winter or gifting hand-made dreamcatchers to friends and family. It’s quirks like these that spark joy even if nobody else understands the point of them. Carry on regardless. As did Edwin Hubble, the brilliant American astronomer who is often credited with having revolutionized mankind’s understanding of the Universe. He has the rare distinction of having an asteroid, a crater on the Moon and a space telescope named in his honour. Here on Earth, the planet of his birth, a planetarium, a stretch of highway and a school were named after him. His was an exceptional mind. However, by most accounts, he was also quite eccentric. After a stint at Oxford University in England, he adopted a fake British accent and began to go about dressed in a cape and carrying a cane. I suppose you could call it an affectation but I find it both droll and delightful! To me, whimsy is like stardust. Even a dash of it catches the light, making everything shimmer.

Let’s say you’re looking for book recommendations and head to Goodreads.com to see what’s good (even though you could as easily go to my site!). Sidestepping the ones with the one-star ratings and bad reviews, you find a few books by new authors that have good reviews. You order them on Amazon, Kindle or Audible. Well done! You’re just the kind of reader Amazon’s looking for. After all, they own each of these platforms (from Goodreads which deal in reviews, to Amazon, Kindle and Audible which deliver books to you in your preferred form. What’s more, they own the means of production as well - Kindle Direct Publishing and Amazon Publishing). So, you’ve paid for a book and provided them with vital market research data on what sells, so that they can tailor their future publications to those parameters. Is that necessarily a bad thing? Let’s put a pin in that and return to it later. THE BEGINNING OF AMAZON Amazon started selling books online in 1994. Jeff Bezos picked books as his product of choice because in comparison to all the things one could sell online, books offer a unique advantage. In an interview recorded in June 1997, Bezos said,   “There are more items in the book category than there are items in any other category, by far.” Think about it. Nobody who buys books (except those who buy three aesthetically pleasing ones to place on their coffee table) ever thinks that since they have 20 books, they don’t need any more. Setting aside consumables, only a miniscule number of products possess this quality. Bezos went on to name the other product that shared this quality, “Music is No. 2 — there are about 200,000 active music CDs at any given time. But in the book space, there are over 3 million different books worldwide active in print at any given time across all languages, [and] more than 1.5 million in English alone.” As with anything, where there is a positive, there is a downside too. The book business is a business with a long tail . Which is another way of saying that there are significant profits to be made by selling books that are relatively hard to find because they aren’t bestsellers. Most brick-and-mortar bookstores don’t find it feasible to stock them since they don’t sell as much as the latest thriller and as such, are a waste of precious space. THE LONG TAIL OF THE BOOK BUSINESS The term long tail was coined by Chris Anderson. He argued that products in less demand and with low sales volume, provided they were numerous enough (as is the case with books and music), can collectively make up a market share which rivals or exceeds the individual sales of a relatively small number of bestsellers. The fly in this particular ointment is that an inventory of millions of titles requires lots of storage space. And real estate costs money. That’s where the internet comes in as the ideal distribution channel. It allows a seller to have a gigantic warehouse on the outskirts of a small town, instead of a tiny bookstore in a high-traffic area in the city, with a monthly rent that has them considering selling their organs on the black market. It’s the perfect mix - a vast inventory with a storefront convenient for customers. After all, it's right there on your phone. That’s why Amazon is online. A BUYER’S MARKET The focus of this post is not Amazon’s online presence. Instead, it seeks to figure out what it means to any sector of business when one company takes over almost all aspects of the industry and uses that omnipresence to becomes a monopsony. The word monopsony is a recent addition to my vocabulary. It is a mirror image of the word monopoly with one key difference. While in a monopoly, there is only one seller who can charge as they see fit, a monopsony is a market with only one buyer, who can purchase at whatever price they like. Which is why the dwindling numbers of publishers is a concern for writers and eventually, readers. THE DIMINISHING RETURNS OF THE SELF-PUBLISHING BOOM You could say the decline of traditional publishers isn’t really a problem since so many authors are choosing to self-publish. You’re partially correct. Let's see how this plays out. At the moment, most authors who choose to self-publish are getting a bigger slice of the revenue pie than they would if they went with a traditional publisher (with the exception of some bestselling authors). However, that may not always be the case. Especially when all other publishers are pushed out of the game. In fact, you don’t have to wait that long to see the direction in which things are headed. As of July 2022, the Kindle Direct Publishing payout per page read in the United States was $0.0043. In July 2015, the payout per page was $0.0058. That’s a 25% drop over a 7-year period.   WILL BOOKS BECOME JUST ANOTHER PRODUCT? What creative freedom and quality of writing can we expect when editors are replaced by managers who are guided solely by spreadsheets and the prospect of profit? I am not imagining this authorial dystopia. Authors commissioned by Amazon’s imprints like Thomas and Mercer and Kindle Press who choose to put their books on Kindle Unlimited are compensated per page read. That, per se, is not the problem. However, since these e-readers collect every possible data point, it is safe to conclude that there is an end use in mind for all that data. It doesn’t take much imagination to think that authors and editors may tailor their works to get more page views instead of honing the story, theme or characterisation. I am reminded of a scene from the Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks film, You’ve Got Mail  where Tom Hanks' character sarcastically compares books to a “ten-gallon vat of olive oil”. Let’s hope it won’t come to that. You could argue that market demand has always played a role in which genre or writer is promoted over another. You’re right. The difference now is the amount of pinpointed data that is available to publishers. It is, quite frankly, unprecedented. When in history have the publishers of any book known at which page did a reader close the book never to open it again? CONCLUSION There have always been folks who write solely for money and some who write as an expression of their creativity, and good writing is not the sole domain of either. It is one thing for the earnings of a Wuthering Heights to be eclipsed by the royalties of a Fifty Shades of Grey . That’s fine and has probably already happened. However, what a loss it would be for us all if the next Animal Farm or  Fahrenheit 451  are not published because they’re deemed ‘unviable’ by a manager or worse, a software looking solely for the next blockbuster mediocrity. Good luck finding something good to read then. Especially on Goodreads.

When reading a book, I often pause to reread a line or phrase to admire the artistry of its construction or the beauty of the thought expressed. I feel excited about returning to the book while I go about my other activities because I can't wait to find out what happens next. And yet, something strange happens as the book approaches completion. I try to slow down because I don't want to let go of the characters yet and I don't want the story to end. But end it does. Over the years, my favourite books have always left me with ideas, fragments of dialogue or expressions that made them unique. In no particular order, these are five of my favourites from the best books I read this year.  EVERYTHING I NEVER TOLD YOU by CELESTE NG Celeste Ng’s debut revolves around the lives of a mixed-race family of five, the Lees. The novel opens on the day of their older daughter, Lydia’s disappearance and death. This isn’t a whodunnit. Instead, it explores each character’s heart-breaking secrets which they kept to themselves in the hope of holding on to each other and the price they end up paying for their silence. Ng paints a moving portrait of the immigrant experience as well as what it feels like to be considered different in a college town in Middle America. Read it for its emotion, style and pace. I was left with a pit in my stomach wishing things had turned out differently for the Lees. ORIENTING: AN INDIAN IN JAPAN by PALLAVI AIYAR Orienting: An Indian in Japan  is divided into ten chapters, each dealing with an element of the Japanese experience. For the average Nipponophile like myself, anecdotes about lost umbrellas and tiffin-boxes that are almost always located and returned, the intoxicating fervour of the sakura-viewing season and technological marvels fit right into my idea of what Japan, with its sushi-dispensing vending machines and kintsugi  philosophy, is all about. That's not all though. Chapters dealing with the foibles of Japanese culture, including their oppressive working hours, political apathy and xenophobia provide a balanced view of what living in Japan is like. Pallavi Aiyar writes with the clarity and specificity of a journalist and the whimsy and humour of a novelist, making this part memoir, part travel literature and partly, a collection of essays immensely readable. SHE WHO BECAME THE SUN by SHELLEY PARKER-CHAN She Who Became the Sun  is a reimagining of the rise to power of the Hongwu emperor, better known as the founding ruler of the famed Ming dynasty. The twist in this reimagined tale is that this is the story of a girl who is foretold a life that will amount to nothing while a glorious future is predicted for her brother. A historical fantasy novel, She Who Became the Sun is about desire, destiny and the desire to alter one’s destiny. Shelley Parker-Chan’s style is lyrical yet pacy with characters drawn from real life with weaknesses, conflicting desires and ill-judgement, making them come alive. The characters of this novel have stayed with me long after I turned the last page. Their joy, ambition, pain and desire leaves its mark thanks to Parker-Chan’s splendid writing. I look forward to reading the next book in the series.  TALKING TO MY DAUGHTER ABOUT THE ECONOMY by YANIS VAROUFAKIS I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Yanis Varoufakis makes the story of the rise of capitalism such an entertaining story with lots of references to iconic movies, Greek mythology and classic literature that you may be forgiven for thinking of economics as interesting! Get your hands on a copy if you would like to read about industrialisation, colonialism and the rise of debt as the backbone of our economy without falling asleep. I was delighted by his perspective and his lack of jargon. Does it explain everything? No. But does it make you want to read on and learn a bit more than you know? Yes, and it’s a fun read. What’s not to like? THE TRUTH ABOUT THE HARRY QUEBERT AFFAIR by JOEL DICKER The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair  is a cold case whodunnit delivered with a literary flair. It’s a novel about two authors – Harry Quebert, a celebrated senior writer who is arrested for murder, 33 years after a fifteen-year-old girl goes missing; and Marcus Goldman his protégé who, struggling with writer’s block after his successful first novel, resolves to clear his mentor’s name. With a host of suspects, fading recollections and looming deadlines, Marcus is up against plenty of challenges. This is an absolute page-turner with lots of plot twists. Joel Dicker’s style and narrative technique make it even better by imbuing an investigative thriller plot with literary allusions, three-dimensional characters and social commentary without letting up on the pace. Read it if you’re looking for an riveting book to curl up with this weekend.

The image of a single person following their dream with no help from anyone has a fantastic quality to it. It’s the kind of stuff that drums up the iconic Eye of the Tiger soundtrack from Rocky in our imagination. The solitary nature of the pursuit makes the accomplishment seem all the more creditable. But is that how great things come to be? Take Apple. Most people think of Apple as being the brainchild of one man, Steve Jobs. That’s branding for you. Even in that now-legendary garage in Los Altos, California which was the birthplace of Apple Inc, there was a team of two, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Decades later, there was a team of designers and engineers who worked on the Macintosh computers, iPods, iPads and iPhone models that rocked the world. The same holds true for almost every organisation and invention. Even some works of art. Artists are often portrayed as solitary beings in a whirlwind of dreamy ideas, toiling away in solitude to create works of art that astound and enthral the masses. But that’s not usually the case. Many artists benefit from exchanging ideas with other artists and even people from fields far removed from their own. Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man Take for instance, Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. I propose Vitruvian Man as an example because it appears simple enough to be a one-person job, but that’s far from the truth. Leonardo learnt about geometry from Andrea del Verrocchio, with whom he apprenticed as a young man. Cosimo de’ Medici’s tomb (which was completed in 1467, a year after Leonardo became Verrocchio’s apprentice) was adorned with geometrical patterns dominated by a circle inside a square instead of the usual religious imagery. This pattern of a circle inside a square would be used by Leonardo for the Vitruvian Man decades later. Vinci collaborated with Francesco di Giorgio, an architect in conceiving the Vitruvian Man . The drawing itself was Leonardo’s homage to the concepts of Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, who lived and died almost a millennium and a half before Leonardo was born. Pollio served in the Roman Army and specialized in the design and construction of artillery machines. His most important work was De Architectura, known today as The Ten Books on Architecture. In this work, he described the proportions of the human body. Though Leonardo, ever the perfectionist, relied on his own meticulous measurements for the drawing. At the heart of the Vitruvian Man is an analogy that goes all the way back to Plato and the thinkers of the ancient world – man as a microcosm of the universe which is the macrocosm. The Vitruvian Man embodies a moment when art and science combined to allow mortal minds to ask eternal questions about who we are and how we fit into the grand order of the universe. It also symbolises an ideal of humanism that celebrates the dignity and value of humans as individuals. Great ideas are often sparked by individual brilliance. Sometimes they require a singular vision. But executing that vision often calls for working with others. Innovation is a team sport. Just like creativity can be a collaborative endeavour. While we are welcome to get our ideas from books or the works of those who preceded us, it is worthwhile to meet our collaborators in person when we can. Having studied the lives and processes of some of the brightest minds, the best-selling biographer, Walter Isaacson writes, “Ideas are often generated in physical gathering places where people with diverse interests encounter one another serendipitously. That is why Steve Jobs liked his buildings to have a central atrium and why the young Benjamin Franklin founded a club where the most interesting people of Philadelphia would gather every Friday. At the court of Ludovico Sforza, Leonardo found friends who could spark new ideas by rubbing together their diverse passions.” We can all benefit from collaboration whether it is at our workplaces or for our personal projects because, regardless of how bright we believe ourselves to be, we are seldom smarter than five or six brains put together. And most importantly, the varied interests, knowledge bases and unique perspectives of our collaborators can spout answers we may never imagine and pose questions that lead us down new paths of discovery. Like it did for Spencer Silver, the scientist partially-credited for the creation of the Post-It. This is how it came to be. Silver was trying to develop a very strong adhesive. He failed. What he ended up making was an extremely weak adhesive. Though this new glue didn’t serve his purpose, Silver shared his unintentional invention with his colleagues at 3M. A few years later, Art Fry, another scientist at 3M, was at his church choir practice, becoming increasingly frustrated. His bookmark kept falling off the page, off the music stand and onto the floor. That’s when he remembered Silver’s weak adhesive and figured he could use it to make the ideal bookmark. Thus, was born one of the most recognizable brands today – the Post-It. That’s the power of collaboration. Some of us scoff at the idea of meeting our colleagues or hashing out ideas in conferences considering them a waste of time but these meet-ups do have some merit. The benefit of these exchanges lies not in formal settings, long presentations or meetings that should have been emails but in quick chats, focussed discussions and the tossing together of ideas. That’s the reason why communities of like-minded individuals flourish even online. Speaking of online forums, I was on Reddit just the other day. Someone had posted a question requesting suggestions for a character nickname/name. I responded to it in the hope that my response might, in some way, be helpful to this anonymous person. Call me a romantic but there is something so intensely human about reaching out to others for help or suggestions and to want to contribute toward someone else’s project with no thought to reward or credit. Therein lies the seed of collaboration.

Leaders Eat Last begins with a foreword by George J. Flynn, a Retired Lieutenant General of the U.S. Marine Corps. The General gets straight to the point in his opening sentences, “I know of no case study in history that describes an organization that has been managed out of a crisis. Every single one of them was led.” That’s what Leaders Eat Last is about – the difference between managers and leaders, what makes a leader and how all of this impacts everyone with a job, regardless of their place in the totem pole called workplace hierarchy. Feeling valued, safe and brave enough to take risks for the greater good is on everyone’s wishlist, even if it isn’t verbalised. Simon Sinek shows us how the answers to most of our modern-day troubles lie in our prehistoric biology simply because our species hasn’t changed that much. Everything we do and are is rooted in our biology. And there’s no fooling Mother Nature. I particularly enjoyed the chapters about how the happiness chemicals – endorphins, dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin are responsible for so much that we do; from squeezing in a morning run before work, helping with the dishes after dinner, chasing quarterly sales targets at work or catching up with friends over a drink. We many think it’s about discipline, motivation or affection. Simon Sinek demonstrates that it is about all of the above but that wasn’t Mother Nature’s original intention. As is usually the case with most things that Nature engineered, it was about survival. As is cortisol – the stress hormone . Sinek does a great job of explaining in conversational language how these hormones work and why our world today is causing them to malfunction a wee bit. He uses the metaphor of a snowmobile in the desert. Nothing wrong with the snowmobile or the desert. They’re just not an optimal match. Leaders Eat Last is not one of those books that elaborate only on the problem. Sinek explains why the problem is the problem. He illustrates why large organizations often have trouble holding on to a culture of teamwork and instead break up into silos with paranoia and distrust flowing through the corridors. And it’s not just about Dunbar’s number (which states that we can maintain only around 150 stable connections) but more fundamentally, it is a result of what these organizations stand for and reward. For instance, if meeting the quarterly sales target is the sole aim and only the people who achieve it are rewarded, while the rest are at risk of losing their jobs, then innovation requiring a long-term approach is not likely. Neither is team work. Sinek ties each of these to the hormone they generate, making logical connections to the consequences of each type of behaviour. Before he became a TED talk sensation (Sinek’s 2010 TED talk “How Great Leaders inspire Action” which grew out of his 2009 book, Start with Why is amongst the most viewed TED talks ever), Simon Sinek began his career in advertising, so he certainly knows how to brand and sell an idea. One of these ideas is Circle of Safety. I assume he came up with it since I haven’t heard it being used in a similar context earlier. Sinek uses the analogy of a herd to demonstrate why being liked and protected releases serotonin, while being sidelined leads to feelings of stress and anxiety caused by cortisol pulsing through our systems. Destructive Abundance is another such term. It signifies the imbalance between selfish and selfless pursuits and the results of a mismatch. Sinek stresses the importance of the social contract of leadership. Leaders Eat Last also lays out the roles played by various generations over the last 100 years, and how each of them partly rebelled against and partly perpetuated the ethos they grew up with, and where all of it has brought us. Of course, no one book can summarise the events of a century and their consequences, but Sinek lays down the threads of his thought process. And the rest is for us to think through. The role of abstraction in today’s behemoth corporations is explored and why it leads to a lack of leadership and accountability. What Sinek refers to as abstraction is how people- whether employees or customers – become a statistic, an abstract number. Joseph Stalin expressed this succinctly and Sinek quotes him in his chapter, Managing the Abstraction, “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a million is a statistic.” Abstraction robs not only employees or customers of their humanity but also, the leaders of the corporations of theirs, because they no longer see their actions impacting people. They view their actions as only affecting digits on a spreadsheet. Sinek conveys this disconnect when he writes, “Numbers of people aren’t people, they’re numbers.” Speaking of numbers of people, Leaders Eat Last discusses how teams or organisations can cultivate cultures that reward positive behaviour which will, in turn, reap them long-term benefits. Sinek isn’t talking about some high-flying philanthropic approach. It’s practical and far-sighted. There’s an anecdote or two about Goldman Sachs when it was considered a 'gentleman’s' organisation and what makes 3M, the company that makes Post-It Notes, so successful at innovation . It's the kind of stuff that is instantly relatable. The edition I read also had an extended chapter about leading Millennials, who were probably employers’ least favourite employees till Gen Z arrived on the scene! It’s a fairly practical guide for both employers and Millennial employees to make their work lives more fulfilling and productive. Read Leaders Eat Last if you want to understand why certain workplaces and leaders make everything seem better and easier while the others do the opposite. It might also help you formulate a checklist of what to look out for before joining a new workplace. And most importantly, to think about what kind of leader you aspire to be.

India has probably the cheapest mobile data in the world. Practically everyone with a smartphone has 1 GB of data available to them every day. Some of us also have a broadband connection at home and at our workplaces. All this inexpensive data allows us to scroll for hours through free social media apps – consuming several hours of mostly inane content, keep up with friends, family and sadly, even work emails. Except that it’s not as inexpensive as we think it is. It costs us our ability to concentrate on tasks and perhaps most importantly, our time. Time is irreplaceable even if you were willing to pay for it. Think about it. Something you think is practically free i.e. internet access, robs you of a thing so valuable that, once lost, even the richest person on the planet can’t buy it back - Time. Add to that, another precious commodity, Focus. And yet, you think it costs you nothing. This is perhaps the greatest mind trick of our times – a kind of mass hypnosis. And I’m not even going into the costs of data mining and the ways in which the companies that own our data manipulate us, mostly because I don’t know all the ways. But what I know is scary enough. Some of you may think I’m being alarmist. Read on and then you can decide. Here’s what I’ve observed in my own life. I’ve been a reader for almost as long as I can remember. However, I believe that I used to read faster when I was younger than I do now, mostly because I keep getting interrupted by a bing or a ping. And when that doesn’t happen, I reach for my phone to check if I missed a beep. Confession: I’m guilty of unlocking and scrolling through some or the other app even when I can see that I have no notifications whatsoever. Not even the non-urgent kind. This is pathetic behaviour but I know I’m not alone in this dome of dopamine-addiction. THE MYTH OF MULTI-TASKING Even though I stand under this dome, I’m at least part of the group of people that admit their addiction instead of pretending to be a multi-tasker. The myth of multi-tasking is a seductive one. It paints the incessant phone-checking, email-responding, text-sending while we work, converse or read, as the pinnacle of productivity. It soothes us into propagating the idea that somehow, we've evolved into beings that are able juggle all these balls effortlessly. But truth be told, that’s the kind of stuff that only shows stupendous results in a movie montage set to uplifting music. FOCUS IS INDIVISIBLE In real life, multi-tasking splits your focus and concentration leading to slower progress in whatever you’re doing. Let’s assume I’m writing a report while simultaneously, responding to emails and text messages. While I may want to believe that 80% of my focus is devoted to writing the report and only 20% is spent on responding to a colleague with a brief mail or a quick exchange over text with a friend. Sadly, that’s not how it works. Every time I shift from one task to another, 100% of my focus moves to it. Focus is a currency of sorts. We can choose where we invest it but it differs from money in one very significant way. Unlike money, your focus cannot be invested in two or more areas at the same time. As a result, while I’m sending a meme to a friend, I’m no longer working on my report and my focus is wholly concentrated on the text message. Ten seconds later, I might turn it back to the report but the shift in gears isn’t quite as smooth as we like to believe. I will need to collect my thoughts all over again and read the last few lines I wrote to get back into the flow of things. And just as I do, my phone will buzz with a response to the meme I sent. And the whole cycle begins again. Don’t take my word for it. Basing its conclusions on research findings , the American Psychological Association states that, “shifting between tasks can cost as much as 40% of someone’s productive time”. Which means that if I could’ve written this post in an hour of uninterrupted time, it’ll probably take me at least an hour and 40 minutes to complete if I continue texting, emailing and checking my stock portfolio while I write this. So much for productive multi-tasking! THE AGE OF DISTRACTION I know generational stereotyping is annoying but unfortunately, I meet a lot of people who believe that they are somehow better-equipped to multi-task simply because they grew up in an age where cell phones and the internet are as ubiquitous as pen and paper. Perhaps, even more so (Try borrowing a pen from someone and you’ll see what I mean). And yet, unless Millennials and Gen Z have managed to re-engineer their own pre-frontal and parietal cortices in all the free-time they gained due to multi-tasking, all this talk about being 'natural multi-taskers' is just wishful thinking that doesn’t have any facts supporting it. But again, this fig leaf isn’t used only by Millennials and Gen Z. Anyone who doesn’t want to be parted from their devices usually uses some or the other form of this argument. But the facts remain the same, regardless of your age or argument. We know that it takes longer to complete a task if one is distracted. I know this without any help from the American Psychological Association because I’ve been writing this blog post for more than two hours and I’m still not done! MULTI-TASKING DIMINISHES QUALITY The other aspect of productivity is the quality of the work done. Is quality impacted by multi-tasking? A study conducted at Stanford University on their students, found that self-proclaimed chronic multi-taskers made more mistakes and remembered less than those who multi-tasked less often. Another Stanford study found evidence to support the conclusion that chronic multi-taskers are worse at analytical reasoning as well. David Jones, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology observed similar patterns amongst his students who, he believed weren’t doing as well as they should be. Jones explained, “It’s not that the students are dumb. It’s not that they aren’t trying. I think they’re trying in a way that’s not as effective as it could be because they’re distracted by everything else.” It goes without saying that students who have made it to a premier institution like MIT aren’t ‘dumb’, which means that perhaps the lack of focus caused by distractions in the guise of multi-tasking is the problem. TRY IT YOURSELF Ultimately, we all need to take a minute and ask ourselves if our minds are more or less focussed when we are being interrupted by our devices. If you can’t answer that, try an experiment. Like I did. It took me about three hours to write this post. I also responded to several messages, monitored the share prices of four to five stocks and bought shares in two, ate lunch and checked my LinkedIn account. Without all these secondary tasks, I could most likely have written this post in little more than an hour. Next time, I’ll keep my phone aside and write on days when I don’t want to buy any shares. Let’s see how that goes. I’ll be sure to report back. And I’d love to hear about your conclusions if you do conduct a similar experiment.

Celeste Ng’s much-feted debut novel, Everything I never told you was published in 2014. As is apparent from the title, the novel is about secrets. The kind of stuff we keep to ourselves, hoping to hold on to the people we love and the price we end up paying for our silence. But that’s not all it’s about. I’ll tell you the rest later. For now, let’s start at the beginning. The plot of the novel revolves around the lives of a mixed-race family of five, the Lees. They live in Middlewood, a small All-American college town. The book opens on the day of their older daughter, Lydia’s disappearance and death. Using an omniscient third person narrator, Ng unfurls the story from the alternating perspectives of all five family members allowing us to witness poignant moments in their lives, present and past, and making us privy to their emotions, secrets and motivations. The narration is also peppered with several political and socio-cultural references such as the ‘the summer of the Son of Sam’, Elvis’ death and launch of NASA’s Gemini 9, grounding the story in a real-world timeline. Everything I never told you is not a whodunnit where the police or a detective solves the case. It’s a mystery that delves not so much into Lydia’s disappearance and death but the layers of her life. And this is not easy given the double life Lydia leads. This is a character who had maintained an annual diary for 12 years and never wrote a single word in them. Not one word. The reader is led by the narrator into an almost languid study of events from the parents’ childhood and youth to the children’s early years that made Lydia, the person she was and her life, what it was. There’s no rushing about but the pace of the story doesn’t slacken. Academic excellence as a path to acceptance, racism, alienation, sexism and secrets are some of the themes in Everything I never told you. One of the ideas explored is how a parent’s dreams for their child can rob the child of the opportunity of finding their own way and end up stunting their growth. And that’s not to say that the parent’s choices for their child, per se, are necessarily wrong but just that being pushed, no matter how subtly, is what makes them problematic. This novel reminded me of a quote by the Swiss psychotherapist Carl Jung: “The greatest tragedy of the family is the unlived lives of the parents.” Ng paints a moving portrait of the inherently human longing to be seen for who one is and how precariously the pile of small sacrifices, made in service of those we love, teeters as the years go by. By the end of Everything I never told you , one is left with a pit in one’s stomach wishing it had turned out differently and goes down the rabbit holes of thinking how a few small changes or a honest chat or two could’ve made all the difference. To me, that is the power of this book - that you're left with a tinge of regret and sadness at the waste of it all. Alas, what is done, is done and nothing alters the cold fact that Lydia is no more. Speaking of Lydia brings me back to the opening lines of the novel, “Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” This opening is so good that the publishers couldn’t resist putting it in the blurb at the back of the book. One can’t fault that decision because it gives the story impetus from the word go. What makes the introductory sentences truly brilliant is that they imbue a mundane family breakfast, which is the opening scene of Everything I never told you, with gravitas because of what the reader knows but the Lees don't. For a first-time novelist, Ng is masterful with this bit of dramatic irony for without these lines, the reader would probably have skimmed over the details or worse, shut the book and picked up another. Instead, it turns us, the readers, into keen-eyed sleuths on the lookout for clues amidst soggy cornflakes and physics problems. Celeste Ng’s characterization is another positive in Everything I never told you . The characters are relatable. Their hopes, complexes, motivations and coping mechanisms feel real whether it is Lydia’s father, James’ cloying desire for his children to be popular, Marilyn’s ‘tiger mom’ tactics to make up for the missed chances in her own life or Nathan’s tangled ties of loyalty and resentment to his sister. And then there is Hannah, the baby of the family, stuck, literally and metaphorically, in the attic. She who misses nothing from her hiding places and craves the sunshine of affection from her family. There is also a passing reference to William Faulkner’s classic The Sound and the Fury, a novel about the breakdown of a Southern, formerly aristocratic family. I saw certain parallels between the characters in Faulkner’s book and Ng’s novel. Perhaps, I’m wrong. Read Everything I never told you and let me know what you think.

The Art of Racing in the Rain is the story of a family on the verge of being torn apart by the rigours of life and a confluence of cruel circumstances. Denny Swift, one of the protagonists of the novel, aspires to be a professional race car driver even as he deals with family and financial issues. He is portrayed with much care and admiration by his fellow protagonist and the narrator of this story, Enzo. Half Labrador and half either Shepherd, Poodle or Terrier, Enzo is Denny’s greatest champion and loyal friend. Cola keeping me company while I read Enzo’s role as the narrator is what sets The Art of Racing in the Rain apart from any other novel with similar good-people-in-tough-situations storylines. Enzo is old and unwell when the book opens and he narrates the story of his human family right from the day he met Denny as a puppy, through all the highs and lows faced by the Swift family up until the present day. Even for those who aren’t dog-lovers, Enzo’s love for racing, thirst for knowledge, perceptive discernment of human behaviour and his obsession with the power of opposable thumbs is charming. But that’s not it. Enzo desperately wants to be born as a human being in his next life. Though it’s ironic because he could teach the world a lesson or two in how to be human. The American journalist, Andy Rooney made a similar point when he said, “The average dog is a nicer person than the average person.” Garth Stein creates Enzo - a character who is a sponge for trivia, history, weather updates, spiritual truths and everything in between. He prefers the Godfather series to Scarface (don’t we all?), has strong opinions on dining table etiquette and is a keen observer of human nature and storytelling. Enzo knows that a hero, in order to be loved, must have at least one flaw, making him or her relatable. And yet Stein upends the idea by making Enzo as close to perfect by making him a dog. But then, that’s the nature of dogs. The title, The Art of Racing in the Rain pays homage to the legendary Formula 1 driver, Ayrton Senna’s tremendous feat of driving through the rain at the European Grand Prix in 1993. Enzo repeatedly tells us that Senna is his favourite driver. Racing in the rain also acts as a metaphor for tough times and how they can be travelled through with grace, courage and fortitude. Garth Stein uses the conversations between Denny and Enzo as channels to set up the themes of his novel. The power of manifestation is one such idea. “The car goes where the eyes go.” In other words, what we focus on is what we will find before us. In terms of characterization, this is a book with two protagonists and a handful of secondary characters. We, as readers, are rooting for both protagonists and even more so, their bond and friendship. And yet, there are some perks set aside only for four-legged narrators. And one of those benefits is the benefit of no doubt. Usually with first-person narrators, one is expecting them to gloss over their own flaws and indulge in some self-aggrandisement. These are the pitfalls of first-person narration. Not so with Enzo. Sure, he is well-spoken, wise and worldly but then you must understand that he is a documentary-watching dog with a philosophical bent of mind. For Enzo, there is no better human being than Denny and because Enzo is telling us his story, I’m more willing to believe that Denny’s character could perhaps be exaggerated by Enzo’s adoration than I’m willing to entertain the idea that Enzo could be less than truthful about himself. The Art of Racing in the Rain lets us live out the fantasy of imagining what our pets would say if they could speak and illustrates what we, as pet-lovers, sometimes forget. That while, our pets might be only one part of our days and lives, we are the entirety of their days and lives. If each of them could write a book or make a movie, we’d all have starring roles in them. Enzo spends his entire life wishing to be human and yet, it is us who would benefit from being more like him: in the way that he listens without interrupting, turns learnings into practice and loves with his whole heart. The scenes depicting his interactions with the Swifts’ little daughter, Zoë are especially touching. Some of Enzo’s weather channel watching ways seem to have rubbed off on me as well. And so, I’d like to say that in case you’re looking for a heart-warming book about family, loyalty, loss, hope and resilience as the weather gets colder (at least here in the northern hemisphere), The Art of Racing in the Rain may be just the novel you’re looking for. A breezy read, it’s the kind of book that is bound to keep you engaged till the end, at which point, I assure you, it'll leave you with a lump in your throat. Consider yourself warned.