From a newspaper article to a monthly newsletter and, now, a bimonthly magazine devoted to books and reading

Two years ago, Rohita Rambabu (Class of 2011), who was then the Books Editor of the Commits newspaper, had written an informative piece on the Just Books library chain. I had become a member of Just Books earlier that year and I was keen on encouraging young people, who formed the bulk of the readership of Your Opinion, to read books by joining the fast-expanding library. (I thought of this article as "reader service".)

Not long afterwards, the founder of Just Books, R. Sundar Rajan, read Rohita's feature and he asked her to help publish a regular newsletter (see inaugural issue pictured above) for the library. Rohita and her classmate Swaha Sircar collaborated on the project initially, but then Swaha began working full-time so Rohita handled the production tasks independently, under the supervision of Sapana Rawat of Just Books.

ROHITA RAMBABU

"I have grown so much with Just Books," Rohita wrote in an e-mail recently. "It is amazing how an article you suggested that I do turned into such a big opportunity.

"With my Just Books salary, I was able to pay off the loan I had taken from my parents for the Master's course at Commits.

"I have now been with Just Books for almost two years, and they treat me on par with a professional (though I know I am at a very junior level with lots to learn before I am good)."

NILOFER D'SOUZA

Some four months ago, another Commitscion had occasion to write about Just Books.

Nilofer D'Souza (Class of 2009), who is a Bangalore-based features writer with Forbes India, contributed a well-written and comprehensive article to the magazine on the technology used successfully by Just Books to "bring libraries back to the people".

NILOFER D'SOUZA'S ARTICLE IN FORBES INDIA.

And now, soon to hit the stands, comes a full-fledged magazine for book-lovers, backed by the company that launched Just Books, with Sapana Rawat as the editor-in-chief, and Commitscion Padmini Nandy Mazumder (Class of 2011) as the editor.

Padmini, who was a co-editor of the college newspaper (like Nilofer before her) and who gave up her job with CNN-IBN in New Delhi and came back to Bangalore when she was offered this assignment, is a voracious reader and passionate book-lover. She writes in her "letter from the editor" in the prototype issue of the magazine that reading defines who we are. She continues:

Reading can give a fresh perspective to a situation. Books transport us to another world. Books let you leave your humdrum existence behind. Stalk a devious murderer with Hercule Poirot, walk the corridors of Hogwarts, romp in the mud with Scout Finch, fall in love with Mr. Darcy, conspire with dependable Jeeves to get poor Bertie Wooster out of a sticky situation... Love, laughter, tears, horror, fantasy, mystery: you can experience it all in one afternoon with a good book.

I could not have put it better myself, Padmini!

THE COVER OF THE PROTOTYPE ISSUE OF INK.

Here Padmini explains why she loves what she does:

Imagine getting paid for doing something you love. Most are not so lucky. I happen to be one of the fortunate few.

After dabbling in a number of career choices (marketing, corporate communications, journalism) and a lot of soul-searching, the opportunity of my dreams knocked on my door right at the moment when I seemed to be losing myself all over again. An opportunity to head a literary magazine.

I love books. Let me reiterate: I LOVE BOOKS. Lock me up in a room full of books and throw away the key and I will bless you for it. So, you can imagine my glee when Sapana Rawat (my boss) called to tell me that she and R. Sundar Rajan (CEO of Strata) had chosen me as the new editor of a brand new literary magazine.  

PADMINI NANDY MAZUMDER

I would be making all major editorial decisions with Sapana and I would have a free reign on the topics we chose to cover.

I was beside myself!

It was a dream job for the likes of me. I'd be talking about books, meeting authors, attending literary fests, telling people about books, and, consequently, create more bibliophiles.

These three months at Strata have been all that I hoped for and more. I have met industry stalwarts, authors, publishers, attended a publishing conference, rubbed shoulders with the who's who of publishing, found out more about the books and authors that I love so much, and brought out a magazine which is exactly what I think is the need of the hour. In the process, I discovered that I am darn good at it too!

The opportunity to do what you love and what you are good at comes across rarely. When it does, grab it with both hands and don't let go!

The magazine should be available to the general public soon. Having had a chance to go through the prototype, I can tell you that Ink is going to be the answer to many a book-lover's prayers. (Ace Commits photographer Pratidhani Tamang from the Class of 2012 has contributed many pictures, including the cover image above.)

Incidentally, another Commitscion, also a co-editor of the college newspaper, Varun Chhabria (Class of 2012), will be helping to produce the Just Books newsletter from January. All the best, Varun!

• UPDATE (June 19, 2012): Books&More, which is the current avatar of Ink, is now on the web, thanks to the efforts of Varun Chhabria, the associate editor of the magazine. Check out the latest issue here.  

COVER OF THE APRIL-MAY 2012 ISSUE OF BOOKS&MORE.

What is the point of a "book review" section?

SAM TANENHAUS

If you have ever asked yourself this question, or if you have ever tried to articulate an answer to this question, you will appreciate what The New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus has to say on the subject:

Our mission is very simple: to publish lively, informed, provocative criticism on the widest-possible range of books and also to provide a kind of snapshot of the literary culture as it exists in our particular moment through profiles, essays and reported articles.

There are many, many books published each year — hundreds stream into my office in the course of a week. Our job is to tell you which ones we think matter most, and why, and to direct your attention to authors and critics who have interesting things to say, particularly if they have original ways of saying them.

At a time when the printed word is being stampeded by the rush of competing "media," we're here to remind you that books matter too — that reading, as John Updike's invented novelist Henry Bech says, can be the best part of a person's life.

Tanenhaus, in a Q&A with readers on the NYT website, also enlightens us on the nature of his job, on the "absorbing and stimulating" tasks of a section editor at one of the world's greatest newspapers:

I oversee what goes into our pages and also manage a highly talented staff of editors and collaborate with our brilliant art directors ... in putting together each issue. These are absorbing and stimulating tasks. Which review should we put on the cover the week after next? How can we strike a good balance of fiction and nonfiction, high culture and pop culture, politics and science, etc.? ... Should we emphasize illustrations in a given week or photography?

Tanenhaus then gives us a peek at specific responsibilities:

Of course I read a lot each day, but in the office my fare is reviews, reviews, reviews in their various stages, from "raw copy" through final edits. This is also the case for my colleagues. Their days are spent assigning and editing and, the bane of our collective existence, fact-checking. I can't emphasize just how much of it goes on and how many different dimensions it takes.

The most demanding fact-checking is required, oddly enough, by fiction. Does the reviewer have the character's age right, the color of her eyes, the sequence of events in her past or her parents'? Does she drive a minivan or an SUV, and does she park outside a mall or on a side street? ... Fact-checking is drudgery, but it has to be done. We all "do windows" at the Book Review.

But it's not all drudgery, he writes:

[There] are fun jobs too, like reading the letters we get each week (including the many that come in via email). Our letters editor ... combs through all the correspondence and selects the most promising (the best argued, best written, most provocative). Then she brings them into my office and several of us go over them together. We're all proud of our lively letters page.

Book-reading, the great reward of the job, becomes at times a guilty pleasure, reserved for evenings and weekends. Since my own taste is for fiction, it's exciting to get early copies of the new Bolano, Pynchon, Sebald, Lethem, Eggers, or Mailer, or to see maturing novelists like Jennifer Egan or Claire Messud develop their talents in a surprising new way.

There are many interesting topics covered in this Q&A, including the selection of the "Ten Best Books of the Year" and the issue of bias in book reviews. Read the column in its entirety here.

What is it like to be a writer?

In preparation for the long Independence Day weekend, I ordered three books from Flipkart last Sunday, three books that I think I'm going to absolutely love reading: Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology Of Humor Writing From The New Yorker, by David Remnick and Henry Finder; Hitch-22: A Memoir, by Christopher Hitchens; and The Big Bookshelf: Sunil Sethi In Conversation With 30 Famous Authors by Sunil Sethi.

The Big Bookshelf and Hitch-22 arrived by courier three days ago. The first book I opened was The Big Bookshelf and Sethi's introduction itself — alone worth the price of the book — offered these fascinating insights into the world of some of the world's best-known writers:

The Bengali writer and social activist Mahasweta Devi felt the urgency to explore the oral legends surrounding the life of the Rani of Jhansi for her first book, a biography of the warrior-queen, with such intensity that "I borrowed money from relatives, got into a train, left behind a small baby with his father and went to Jhansi".

***

Whatever the motivation or their chosen route to writing, most authors professed an abiding passion for books from childhood. Reaching across to tap my knee, the novelist Nadine Gordimer, whose early education was patchy, admonished: "Reading, my dear, is the only training for a writer from a young age. You only become a writer by being a compulsive reader."

***

Asked what his advice to a young writer would be, the American travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux offered a tip: "Go away. Yes. Leave home, leave your parents and leave all the comforting things that hold you back... because if you stay... people will ask you what you are doing — what you are writing, what you are publishing. They ask you questions that you can't answer."

***

Here is the best-selling thriller writer Jeffrey Archer's regime that he briskly rapped out: "I write up to seventeen drafts. I get away for two months and I wake up at 5.30 in the morning. I write from six to eight and take a two-hour break, I write from ten until twelve and take a two-hour break, I again write from two until four, followed by another two-hour break, then I write from six until eight, light supper, go to bed at 9.30 or 10 and begin again at 5.30 the next day. Fifty days of that in a row."

***

The novelist Upamanyu Chatterjee, who leads a double life as a senior civil servant, sets himself a certain number of words a day, or how to resolve an idea or a problem in the plot, as a daily target. He writes every morning before leaving for office.

Returning home in the evening, "I sit down and peg away. Sometimes I achieve that target just before I go to bed."

Chatterjee takes about five years to complete a novel but there are others who take longer. It took Kiran Desai nearly seven years of a sequestered life to finish The Inheritance of Loss.

A more extreme example is that of the British-Pakistani fiction writer Nadeem Aslam who took more than eleven years to complete his prize-winning novel, Maps for Lovers.

Aslam grew up in a small town in Pakistan, attending an Urdu-medium school till the age of fourteen, when his family was forced to migrate to Britain to escape political persecution. "When I arrived in England my English was, 'This is a cat,'... My life was broken in half."

Instead of going to college, for many years he eked out a meagre living, working on building sites and in bars so that he could read in libraries. He would retreat into a private world to be able to write. "There were times when I draped the windows with black cloth. There was no phone, no TV, no radio, no newspapers and I just filled up the freezer with food and didn't leave the house for two and a half months."

***

IT'S RAINING BOOKS

You know how one thing leads to another.

Here I was, having lunch at the college yesterday and checking the "Writing Tools" blog on Poynter. I saw a reference to the new New York Times beta site, where a grammar link popped up. On the grammar site I saw a reference to some grammar blogs; one, especially, stood out and I noticed a little feature on a book, The Subversive Copy Editor: Advice from Chicago (or, How to Negotiate Good Relationships with Your Writers, Your Colleagues, and Yourself).

As I have noted, one thing led to another — the book is now being shipped to me by Flipkart. Make that book No. 4 ordered on Flipkart in five days.

Want to know more about The Subversive Copy Editor? Go here.

The morality of mortality

English poet and novelist Stephen Spender was staying with fellow poet W.H. Auden when the latter received an invitation from the Times (London) asking him to write Spender's obituary. He told him as much at the breakfast table, asking roguishly, "Should you like anything said?"

Spender judged that this would not be the moment to tell Auden that he had already written his obituary for the same editor at the same paper.

— This little gem is from Hitch-22: A Memoir, by Christopher Hitchens, who writes in the book that he himself has never written an obituary of a still-living person because "I cannot, not even for ready money, write about the demise of a friend or colleague until Minerva's owl has taken wing, and I know that the darkness has actually come. I dare say that somebody, somewhere has already written my provisional death-notice".

(What a striking phrase that is about Minerva's owl taking wing, a reference to the philosopher Hegel's oft-quoted line: "Only when the dusk starts to fall does the owl of Minerva spread its wings and fly.")

• Another must-read: Oriana Fallaci and the Art of the Interview: In a eulogy written for Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens recounts "his last visit with the tempestuous Italian journalist, and her last — never published — scoop, a sit-down with the Pope".

• UPDATE (December 16, 2011): Christopher Hitchens died yesterday in Houston, Texas. Read the New York Times obituary here: "Polemicist Who Slashed All, Freely, Dies at 62".

Like crime novels? Here's a wide-ranging list...

...compiled by Jerry Pinto for Time Out Bengaluru: "Bloody murder".

I loved the nifty descriptions for each book in the list, but none more than this one for Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest:

You read this. Or you are reading it. Which?

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest is the final book in the Millennium trilogy, which kicked off with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and continued with The Girl Who Played with Fire. All three books have been phenomenally successful and each one has also been turned into a movie (they were telecast on HBO just last month). What makes this publishing feat poignant is the knowledge that the author died shortly after submitting all three manuscripts.

It is the stupendous popularity of the Millennium trilogy, then, that led to Jerry Pinto's writing that nine-word description for the last book in the series. How ingenious!

• Want to know more about the Millennium series and Stieg Larsson? Go to "Marked for Life" and "The Man Who Never Slept".

Could a best-selling Finnish novel change your life?

Pico Iyer is one classy writer. A former Time journalist, he has numerous travel books to his name — Video Night in Kathmandu is probably the most popular in this part of the world.

Pico Iyer is also a renowned essayist. Mint Lounge last week devoted a whole page to his ruminations, reproduced from the Wall Street Journal, on a book by a Finnish author that extols the virtues of quitting the rat race and slipping away, at least for a while, from "everything that sounds so important".

Don't you love the way Iyer's opening lines seduce you into reading on?

Which of us has not entertained that deliciously seditious notion: to do a Gauguin? To slip away for a while from everything that sounds so important — a steady job, a settled home, a regular salary — and go off in search of adventure, restoration, fun? There is, after all, more and more to escape these days....

The book in question is The Year of the Hare, by Arto Paasilinna ("To me [at first] he simply looked like a name with too many vowels," writes Iyer.)

The plot of "The Year of the Hare" could not be simpler. A journalist, Vatanen, is sleepwalking through his everyday life, blind to the beauties of the wild, when a hare, "tipsy with summer," runs across the road in front of the car he is traveling in. In the wake of the resulting collision, Vatanen wanders off into the forest to care for the wounded creature. Soon he is drifting farther and farther away from what is commonly known as civilization, till finally he is living in a Nature Reserve in Lapland, north of the Arctic Circle. Free of the daily grind, he finds that his senses are newly sharp, his food has a taste it never had before and he is alive as he has never been in his regular life (besides which, his wife seems hardly to miss him).

After discussing the plot in some more detail, Iyer explains why this story resonated with him:

I, too, was working for a weekly magazine, once upon a time, sequestered in a small office in midtown Manhattan, and it was just a single autumn morning, on a layover in Tokyo, that acted on me like a fast-running hare: I was killing the hours before my flight back to New York by wandering through the little town of Narita, and something in the quiet stillness of the streets, the mildness of the late October light, told me of everything I was missing in my daily life at home. Why was I living according to someone else's idea of happiness, I thought, and not according to my own? I decided to move to Japan.

Many of us might have harboured similar thoughts — Why are we living according to someone else's idea of happiness and not according to our own? — but few of us set out to change the way we live and work. Perhaps Pico Iyer's concluding paragraph may prove to be the inspiration we need:

"The Year of the Hare" reminds us that what seems so important in our daily lives may not be all that permanent or sustaining. The best resolution to make this New Year's Day might be to open your eyes to everything around you — while also recalling that most of our lofty resolutions will ultimately come to naught.

Read the essay in full here: "The Road Into the Open".

• On the same page, Pico Iyer also provides a list of other books that can "set you free". Included among the five on the list are, unsurprisingly, Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert, and surprise, surprise, Shakespeare's As You Like It.

• Illustration courtesy: The Wall Street Journal

If you are a book lover, how can you not want to possess (and read) Pradeep Sebastian's The Groaning Shelf and Other Instances of Book Love?

I was alerted to this gem of a book by a review in The Hindu Literary Review earlier this month. Referring to it as "a stylish, cultural landmark communicating one man's passion to a larger audience", reviewer Suresh Menon wrote:

Sebastian's essays make erudition accessible, as he discusses the French philosopher Diderot, C.S. Lewis, Amar Chitra Katha, Shakespeare & Co and other bookshops, Umberto Eco, antiquarian books, the first editions of J.D. Salinger's novels, Nabokov, book thieves, collectors and much more with an easy familiarity. And all this is done without once showing off, which is an achievement in itself.

(Read the review in its entirety here: "A modest miracle".)

Well, I just had to get my hands on the book so off I "went" to Flipkart, my favourite online bookstore, to order The Groaning Shelf. Ten minutes ago, it was delivered to me at home. Which is why you are now reading this post. And which is why I am now going to log off so that I can go curl up with my latest possession.

Meanwhile, if you like, you can take a look at my Flipkart wish-list here. And you can check out my library on Google Books.

Do we like the same books?

UPDATE (November 18, 2010): It was serendipity that led me to read Suresh Menon's review of The Groaning Shelf, and I am so grateful. Pradeep Sebastian not only loves books, he also knows how to get other people to love books.

Not every essay in The Groaning Shelf will appeal to all readers, but there's so much in this book that will get you thinking about reading and writing. It is here that I first learnt about Michael Dirda, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic of the Washington Post Book World who has written many books about the joy of reading. I just had to have one of Dirda's books and I am now reading — and enjoying — Classics for Pleasure, first published in 2008. And Classics for Pleasure has introduced me to another wonderful book, The Lifetime Reading Plan, by Clifton Fadiman, which I have ordered on Flipkart. (Clifton is the father of Anne Fadiman, the author of At Large and At Small and Ex Libris; book-lovers will find both to be delightful reads.)

So thank you, Pradeep Sebastian, for introducing me to new ways of thinking about books and, especially, for reinforcing my belief that we are what we read.

UPDATE (June 4, 2012): Here's another terrific book, which I have just finished reading: Would You Like Some Bread With That Book? And Other Instances of Literary Love, by Veena Venugopal.

The editor of Mint is a fan of Modesty Blaise

And so am I. (And so is my wife.) Like R. Sukumar, who devoted his Cult Fiction column in Mint Lounge (May 15) to the character created by Peter O'Donnell, I have all 13 Modesty books (pictured).

Sukumar is a cerebral senior journalist who, in addition to editing Mint, also writes a serious column in the paper. And look at his qualifications: he has an MBA from Bharatidasan Institute of Management, Trichy, and an MSc in Mathematics and a BE in Chemical Engineering from BITS, Pilani.

When someone like Sukumar showers praise on the Modesty Blaise series, it really means something to fans.

Here's an excerpt from the column:

I like the Modesty books and comics for several reasons: They are very well written (better than some of Fleming’s weaker Bond books, although all the books have more action and humour than the latter; this may be one reason why the screenplays for the Bond movies had to be very different from the books); the characterisation, of Blaise and Garvin but also of the bad guys (and gals), is vivid and piquant; and the illustrations (in the case of the comics) are masterful.

Read the full article here.

How to write your first book

Sidin Vadukut is the managing editor of livemint.com, Mint's website (one of the best I have seen). He is also a technologist (National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli) with an MBA degree from IIM-A. Now he also has a novel to his credit, Dork! The Incredible Adventures Of Robin Einstein Verghese. He was in Bangalore recently to launch the book (you can read about First Year student Dipshikha Kaur Chowdhury's interaction with him in The Commits Chronicle).

Back in January, when Dork! had not yet been released, Vadukut wrote an eloquent and instructive article in Mint describing how he wrote his first book. Reading it will also give you an insight into the publishing world in India.

In the concluding paragraphs he offers a bonus to everyone intested in knowing more about writing and writers:

As for your first book, a good place to start is perhaps with a few audio interviews with the best authors. These interviews will tell you not only how these writers find inspiration, but also how, where and, most importantly, why they write. Get them here:

• BBC World Book Club

• CBC Writers and Company

• New York Times Books

Afterwards, read this excerpt from Dork! and check out Vadukut's blog, Domain Maximus.

• A copy of Dork!, autographed by the author, has been placed in the Commits library. Thanks, Dipshikha!