American Gods by Neil Gaiman (11/09)

This wasn't any good.

On reconsideration, it was alrite.

Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth (11/09)

Bought this old copy in a Pokhara bookshop for 105 Nepali rupees. Read it back in Delhi, falling asleep, on the metro, in rickshaws. 

Who's ready to grow up. Neil is. I'm worthless.

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (11/09)

City of Joy by Dominique Lapierre (10/2009)

Stupid Christian preening, with a lot of general research. Delhi, Varanasi, and the Annapurna Circuit. Abandoned in a Danaque guest house.

City of Djinns by William Dalrymple (10/2009)

On the Annapurna Circuit.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (09/09)

Women are nursemaids to arid, egotistical men. Spare our egos, oh ambiguous mothers with your mercurial, unnamable emotions, your weird, fluid perceptions of homey objects and their significances of feminine loss and ambivalence.

Any dinner table is a battleground of submerged moods. I ask for such pittances—be my ally in mollifying Mr Tansley’s wounded preening—and am frustrated. I want only to examine the lovely, symbolically fraught topography of the fruit bowl, but my spitting demon of a little girl snatches a pear and ruins the ensemble!

What do you feel I feel about my husband’s tyrannical feelings? Answer in wet metaphor.

Heavy sea musk stains the draperies in the shifting flow of seasons. See me write about absence.

He wanders the beaches seeking philosophic consolation in tidepools and the dumb white fringed humps of waves, while Mrs Van Beek's stout, aged ass rests itself on a barstool after a day's knocking about in cupboards dusting his collected editions of this or that.

The Age of Kali by William Dalrymple (08/09)