Book lovers are haunted by the fact that there are too many books and too little time to read them all. This year, for instance, there is to be a generous outpouring of books into the existing ocean of unfathomable depth from established superstars of the written word to promising newcomers in every conceivable genre and a few more.
Ottessa Moshfegh whose Eileen was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2016 is back with Homesick for Another World, a collection of stories about motley misfits told with gentle humour and grace. Our very own Aravind Adiga who won the coveted prize in 2008 is all set to rock our world with Selection Day, which follows the lives of two brothers who seek to make it big as cricketers. Readers who adored his masterpiece The White Tiger, and ardent cricket fans at home and around the world are salivating in anticipation. Fellow Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy has also announced that The Ministry of Utmost Happiness will be out this year, following a 20-year gap, creating ripples of excitement among those who have read and reread her epic, The God of Small Things, in the interim.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout wi
ll be hoping to repeat this feat with Anything is Possible. J M Coetzee’s The Schooldays of Jesus, sequel to his Nobel Prize-winning The Childhood of Jesus (2013), will see the author in fine form. Haruki Murakami’s intriguingly titled Men Without Women will tell the tales of men who find themselves in the unhappy situation of finding themselves without women. It is said of this towering talent, that it is only a matter of time before he is awarded the Nobel Prize and expectations are huge for his new book. There is more from the winners of various literary prizes but no reader will manage to wade through them all since they are almost as numerous as the authors themselves.
Paula Hawkins of The Girl on the Train fame returns with Into the Water, another taut psychological thriller featuring all manner of suspense. Roxane Gay, who has been enjoying a golden run since 2014, will seek to keep up her winning ways with Difficult Women. Robert Coover revisits Mark Twains’s classic with Huck out West. Short story master George Sanders is all set to delight fans with a full-length novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. The list is endless and can fill foreign fiction aficionados with equal parts delight and dismay at the sumptuous goodies lined for them to savour while also leaving them overwhelmed with sheer abundance.
Besides, there are all the books accumulated over the years and now downloaded by the dozens on Kindle sitting huffily and demanding they be read as soon as possible if not sooner. But even if it were possible to spend 2017, shacked up in a Swiss chalet with nothing but books and hot chocolate for company, with every waking moment devoted entirely to perusing them, all the books devoured in that period will be nothing more than little drops in the mighty ocean.
Which is why it is not a bad idea to go with the flow this year and read whatever you chance upon. This would be like dipping into Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans and tasting chocolate, vanilla, coconut, nougat with a little vomit, earwax or poop thrown in for good measure. Doesn’t that sound delightful? Happy reading everybody.
(Chandramouli is the author of Arjuna, Kamadeva, Shakti and Yama’s Lieutenant. She can be reached at anujamouli@gmail.com)