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BOOK BASKET

The year 2010 defeated all predictions of doom where the printed word is concerned. Technology with its blogs, e-versions of books and e-reprints refused to erase the written word, with people still picking up novels to kill time and edify themselves. But the plot, it seems, only thickens.

The thinner plots, however, in the form of novellas and quick reads like Metro Reads of Penguin, are still to prove themselves. In short, shorties will be judged conclusively only in the long run. Lad-lit too continues to churn itself out but also, hopefully, will burn itself out and grow up a bit. Most writers still sound like Chetan Bhagat on a bad day and could be compiled into a book called ‘Chetan and the Wannabe Factory’.

Many new and memorable fictional characters were added to the world of make-believe, even as hitherto unfamiliar and unexplored-in-fiction scenery popped up as background; a Coorg trip anyone?

New storytellers on the block like Manu Joseph with his Serious Men (HarperCollins) and Sarita Mandanna with her Tiger Hills (Penguin) justified their print run while the usual suspects did business as usual.

First-time novelists like Sajita Nair (She’s a Jolly Good Fellow – Hachette), Soumya Bhattacharya (If I Could Tell You – Tranquebar), Tishani Doshi (The Pleasure Seekers – Bloomsbury), Kanishka Gupta (The History of Hate – Rupa) and Namita Devidayal (Aftertaste – Random House) did brisk business. While Nair totes up the travails and triumphs of the first female officers recruited in the Indian Army, Bhattacharya takes his time to tell his epistolary tale, as this letter from a father to his daughter flows in flawless prose.

Established authors like Usha K R (Monkey-man – Penguin), Anita Nair (Lessons in Forgetting – HarperCollins), Shreekumar Varma (Maria’s Room – HarperCollins) and Anjum Hasan (Neti, Neti – Roli) explored new vistas in sensitivity, solitude and cityscapes. While Monkey-man dissects the birth pangs and growing pains of a place on the make, Nair lays bare the anatomy of an aftermath, a very female aftermath.

Varma’s book, which was long-listed for the Man Asia Literary Prize, details descriptions of a scenic Goa, while Hasan tracks down Sophie Das from Shillong to Bengaluru.

Notable among novellas is Deliverance by Gauri Deshpande, translated from the Marathi, Nirgathi by Shashi Deshpande and published by Women Unlimited India. Jaishree Misra and Kavery Nambisan, meanwhile, personally brought their new novels Secrets and Sins (HarperCollins) and  The Story that Must Not be Told (Penguin), respectively, to the city.

Xcess Baggage by Varsha Dixit (Rupa) is a vampire thriller that tickles even as it spooks, while Bottom of the Heap by Reeti Gadekar (HarperCollins) is a delightful romp through Delhi’s seedy belly via a very originally created detective who never asks ‘whodunit?’ The Mysterious E-mail by Anirban Basu (Rupa) is another sleuth saga.

Khushwant Singh’s Sunset Club (Penguin), Kishwar Desai’s Witness the Night, long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize (HarperCollins), Siddharth Chowdhury’s Day Scholar, a Man Asian-shortlisted novel (Picador), Upamanyu Chatterjee’s Way to Go (Penguin), Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s One Amazing Thing (Penguin) and Maha Khan Phillips’ Beautiful From This Angle (Penguin) were all duly booked by the readers.

Along came historical fiction Shadow Princess by Indu Sundaresan (Atria), a slightly Mills and Boonic Battle for Bittora by Anuja Chauhan (HarperCollins) and Jaya – an illustrated retelling of the Mahabharata by Devdutt Pattanaik (Penguin).

Closer to the yearend came Susmita Bagchi’s Children of a Better God (translated from Oriya by Bikram Das, Penguin), Sonia Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars (Random House), and C P Surendran’s Lost and Found (HarperCollins).

It Rained All Night by Buddhadeva Bose, a translation of a once-upon-a-time-banned Bengali novel on extra-marital affairs, was brought out by Penguin earlier in the year. A path-breaking book of its times, it still manages to enthrall readers with its bold soliloquies. Somehow, adultery is made more interesting in the hands of male writers, like There was no one at the Bus Stop by Sirshendu Mukhopadyay, another translation from Bengali by Penguin.

Roswitha Joshi’s Once More (UBS) and Tuhin Sinha’s Love and Politics (Hachette) take a scalpel to matters of the heart. While Joshi revisits her earlier protagonist, a German woman who finds love and laughter in India, Sinha takes a Utopian look at a unique threesome – two men and a woman from three different political parties.

Richard Crasta’s bestseller of the 90’s, The Revised Kamasutra, was re-launched by HarperCollins and is now hailed as a classic. Ripples, a collection of short stories by 26 women authors, came to the city, courtesy Prashant Karhade (APK Publishers). Vanilla Desires and Other Stories, brought out by Unison, is edited by Annie Chandy Mathew and Vidhu Paincker.

In the kiddie section, even as city-based Roopa Pai’s Taranauts (Hachette) got short-listed at the Vodafone-Crossword award this year, Shoba Naidu’s On the Yeti's Trail (Rupa) and Monideepa Sahu’s Riddle of the Seventh Stone (Young Zubaan) were launched in Bangalore. While Naidu’s book explores new terra firma in adventure, Sahu looks at contemporary issues through fantasy glasses.

The year then has been definitely one of surprises, more pleasant than not. As far as 2011 is concerned, it will be just like this year or any other year: Good books are good books, and you can take that as read.