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)

India: A Wounded Civilization by V. S. Naipaul (07/09)

Dated, dated. Beautifully written, but dated. India’s problems are a product of primordial, stagnant ‘Hinduism’, which accommodates a millennium of invaders with quietism, passivity, and religious resignation. ‘Hindu culture’ is held to be a thing, a step or two above the African night, but well short of Western can-doism, the flux of modernity, of civilization, that Europe defines. I’m reading this beside Said’s Orientalism: how far we have come in only 30 years, perhaps because of Said’s seminal essay? See how scholarship matters.

But I picked up some history along the margins: the Emergency, of course, and the India-Pakistan and India-China wars, too.

This country is weirder than I could have expected. Where else do people threaten to immolate themselves in protest of the Miss World beauty pageant being held in Bangalore?

The Human Stain by Philip Roth (07/09)

My last Roth for a while. Time to move on to non-fiction. Remedy some of my ghastly ignorance.

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (07/09)

So that's why Faulkner's famous.