Your Ultimate Holiday Reading Guide For Christmas Gifting This Year

Christmas is a fabulous time to gift a book to a loved one or to oneself. The chilly weather and short days of the end of the year are perfect for burrowing into a blanket, sipping on some hot chocolate or mulled wine, putting on a soothing playlist and picking the pages of a good book. Whether your choice of tome is a fiction, non-fiction or poetry book that spans genres from environmental writing and science fiction to bildungsroman and memoir, we have you covered.

This reading list for Christmas 2024 was chosen for its themes and elegant writing, with a focus on Indian authors. Happy reading (and gifting).

‘The Green Book: An Observer’s Notebook’ By Amitava Kumar

The third book in the series that started with “The Blue Book” (2022) and continued with “The Yellow Book” (2023), “The Green Book” gives readers a profound insight into the mind of a writer who observes the world closely and attempts to capture it in stunning artworks and images. Amitava Kumar, an English professor at Vassar College in upstate New York, deftly addresses a range of subjects such as the interconnectedness of all living things, the complexities of Indian cultural identity, the contrast between destruction and beauty, and—most importantly—the value of literary analysis of identity, nationalism and social concerns. Kumar shows his readers that great literature often begins as jottings made in writers’ notebooks. His examples extend from Virginia Woolf and John Berger to Mahatma Gandhi and Shiva Naipaul. In Kumar’s own notebooks, we find written accounts and drawings of travels across continents: among mountains and rivers, walks in parks and journeys on highways, even a visit to a prison. In each instance, we discover what comes from noticing.

‘Like Being Alive Twice’ By Dharini Bhaskar

In an unnamed nation that’s about to rupture, Priyamvada (Poppy), a Hindu, and Tariq, a Muslim, are in love. In a few hours, Tariq intends to propose; Poppy intends to say yes. Both assume that they’ll fend off political blowback. Their privilege will protect them, right? Will Poppy and Tariq sustain a love so wholesome that it remains impervious to a dystopian state? Or will the two be rent apart by chance and circumstance?

Written in alternating chapters, “Like Being Alive Twice” trails fact and possibility—the tale as-it-was and the tale as-it-could-have-been-if-only—arranging and rearranging, tweaking and nudging; hoping to find a lasting peace in one or the other story; hoping, above all else, that such peace will prevail over murderous times. Born in Mumbai, Dharini Bhaskar’s debut novel “These, Our Bodies Possessed by Light” was shortlisted for the 2020 JCB Prize for Literature, and she has spent over a decade in publishing. Politically urgent and relentlessly committed to scrutinising love, loss and the language of privilege, her new novel tells of the frantic pursuit of life piled upon life, even as a bloodied world closes in.

‘Riverside Stories: Writings From Assam’ Edited By Banamallika Chaudhry

This collection of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and visual stories by women and transpeople from Assam puts on record the experiences of the self within homes, in the environment, with politics, and with disappointments, desires, hopes and memories for a future. While Assam’s diverse culture, food and languages are celebrated by all, everyday patriarchy and the politics of boundaries have resulted in much confusion and conflict. “Riverside Stories: Writings from Assam” brings to the fore emerging voices of people who experience life differently because of their own identities and locations and proposes an inclusive space for us all. In putting together this anthology, it is the writers’ hope that they have complicated—more than it already is—the notion of whose and which stories can be told.

‘Acts Of God’ By Kanan Gill

In comedian Kanan Gill’s wildly entertaining and inventive debut novel, a celebrated scientist has been relegated to spending his days supervising a trifling project but is secretly creating and destroying universes. The bumbling private detective, P Manjunath, and his long-suffering assistant, Heng, have embarked on a trans-continental adventure to investigate a series of seemingly unrelated disasters. A Danish policeman accidentally becomes a clothing-optional leader of a worldwide group of "Science Haters," a sentient piece of wall struggles with the limits of its artistic expression and a lapel pin’s habit of always giving truthful advice results in utter chaos. A delightful alchemy of humour, imaginativeness and philosophical provocations, “Acts of God” makes for a great stocking stuffer this Christmas.

‘Late-Blooming Cherries: Haiku Poetry From India’ Edited By Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih And Rimi Nath

Delicately weaving through life’s tapestry of love and loneliness, joy and grief, the verses in this first-ever haiku anthology in English from India brilliantly showcase the exquisiteness of the haiku and senryū, allowing readers to embrace the beauty of each poetic moment. Exploring the full gamut of human experience, the book is compiled and edited by accomplished haiku writers Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih and Rimi Nath, with contributions from some of the most prominent haiku artists in India. Much like the late-blooming cherries of Shillong, this book invites readers to reflect on life, nature and human bonds—it is meant to be savoured slowly.

‘The Many Lives Of Syeda X: The Story Of An Unknown Indian’ By Neha Dixit

What does the life of an ordinary working-class Indian look and feel like? Award-winning journalist Neha Dixit traces the story of one such faceless Indian woman from the early 1990s to the present day. What emerges is a picture of a life lived under constant corrosive tension. Syeda X left Varanasi for Delhi with her young family in the aftermath of riots triggered by the demolition of the Babri Masjid. In Delhi, she settled into the life of a poor migrant, juggling multiple jobs a day—from trimming the loose threads of jeans, cooking namkeen and shelling almonds to making tea strainers. Syeda has done over fifty different types of work, earning paltry sums in the process. And if she ever took a day off, her job would be lost to another faceless migrant.

Researched for close to a decade, in this book we meet an unforgettable cast of a rickshaw driver in Chandni Chowk who ends up tragically dead in a terrorist blast, a doctor who gets arrested for pre-natal sex determination, a gau rakshak whose sister elopes with Syeda’s son, and policemen who delight in beating young Muslim men. In the end, things come full circle for Syeda. Her life is upturned for the umpteenth time during the Delhi riots of 2020. But displacement, tragedy and hardships are the things she is used to—being poor, Muslim and a woman. Written with empathy and deep insight, this book is a portal to a harsh world hidden away from elite Indians. It is the story of untold millions and a searing account of urban life in New India.

‘Snakes, Drugs And Rock 'n' Roll: My Early Years’ By Romulus Whitaker And Janaki Lenin

A legend in the arena of wildlife conservation and affectionately hailed as the “Snakeman of India,” Romulus Whitaker has had a lifelong love affair with these reptilian creatures that share our planet. The first volume of his fascinating memoir brings the India of the 1950s and the US of the 1960s to life. When his mother married and moved to Mumbai, Whitaker was transplanted from a conventional childhood in the US to what was, for him, the exciting world of India. At boarding school in Kodaikanal, he kept a pet python under his bed and realised that all he really wanted to do was work with snakes. Sent to the US for college, Whitaker preferred snakes to lecture halls and left to work on a snake farm. The adventures that ensue in his book are hair-raising and often hilarious, and they tell the story of a boy who would become one of the greatest conservationists of his generation.

‘The New Tourist: Waking Up To The Power And Perils Of Travel’ By Paige McClanahan

Paige McClanahan is an American journalist based in France. A regular contributor to "The New York Times," she has reported from more than a dozen countries, covering multilateral trade negotiations, humanitarian crises, economic development and, for the past five years, the tourism industry. Through deep and insightful dispatches from tourist spots around the globe—from Hawaiʻi to Saudi Arabia, Amsterdam to Angkor Wat—this book shines a light on an industry that accounts for one in 10 jobs worldwide and generates nearly 10 per cent of global GDP. How did a once-niche activity become the world’s most important means of contact across cultures? When does tourism destroy the soul of a city, and when does it offer a place a new lease on life? Is “last chance tourism” prompting a powerful change in perspective—or driving places we love further into the ground? This book is for everyone who loves to travel, and who witnessed the growing backlash to overtourism this summer.

‘Maria, Just Maria’ By Sandhya Mary

Sandhya Mary’s novel—masterfully translated by the award-winning Jayasree Kalathil—is an insightful and humorous take on ideas like normal-abnormal, natural-human, love-hate, etc., that define contemporary society, and the exuberant and moving story of a woman trying to find her place in this world. It follows the journey of Maria, who, after her grandfather’s death, has stopped speaking—not because she can’t, but because she doesn’t want to.

Now in a psychiatric hospital as she begins the process of reconnecting with reality, Maria recalls her journey of being “just Maria”—a girl born into a Syrian Christian family in Kerala, whose companions were a grandfather who took her along to wander around the village and its toddy shops, a great-aunt with dementia who challenged Maria’s position as the youngest in the family, a dog with a penchant for philosophy, and various long-dead family members, including a great-grandmother with a knack for prophecies and a patron saint who insisted on interfering in people’s affairs.

‘Lorenzo Searches For The Meaning Of Life’ By Upamanyu Chatterjee

One summer morning in 1977, nineteen-year-old Lorenzo Senesi of Aquilina, Italy, drives his Vespa motor-scooter into a speeding Fiat and breaks his forearm. It keeps him in bed for a month, and his boggled mind thinks of unfamiliar things: Where has he come from? Where is he going? And how to find out more about where he ought to go? When he recovers, he enrols in a physiotherapy course, joins a prayer group and visits Praglia Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in the foothills outside Padua.

The monastery will become his home for 10 years, its isolation and discipline the anchors of his life, following which he will be sent to a Benedictine ashram in faraway Bangladesh—a village in Khulna district, where monsoon clouds as black as night descend right down to river and earth. He will spend many years here, praying seven times a day, learning to speak Bengali, washing his clothes in the river, painting a small chapel, starting a physiotherapy clinic to ease bodies out of pain, and falling, unexpectedly, in love. And he will find that a life of service to God is enough, but that it is also not enough.

A study of the extraordinary experiences of an ordinary man, of both the majesty and the banality of the spiritual path, Upamanyu Chatterjee’s latest novel is a quiet triumph. “Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life” won its author the 2024 JCB Prize for Literature.