How to discover great books to read?— % &My 15-year-old cousin, whom I gift books once every year, asked me the greatest question any reading or writing enthusiast could ever have asked.

"How to discover great books to read?"— % &One of the most common problems for every new reader is the absolutely useless recommendation engine of their friends—that only recommend the most popular books. Check any such avid fiction reader's library, you'll find books starting with the quintessential Amish Tripathi to Paulo Coelho to Khalid Hosseini to one by Gabriel Garcia Marquez—mostly Love in Time Of Cholera. Nobel Prize, bro. Yeah, right. In some cases, you can even find the new good shit i.e. Murakami. Don't get me wrong, the last two of these are great writers. But reading just their popular works isn't going to make you a great reader. What you would be doing is not reading, but book-hopping—rather, popular book hopping. Please don't. If you read what everyone is reading, you'll think what everyone is thinking. Your Murakami boy wrote this line in Norwegian Wood. Stay away from readers with a to-do list for books. That's not how you read. That's how you shop. Don't ever shop for a book.— % &Date a book, instead. Have a crush on a book. Wait for it. Catch its glimpse in nooks and corners, a few pages in bookshops and a few pages at airports. Open it like a loaf of bread right in the middle. Breathe. Smell. Read the first chapter during the long layovers and imagine what happens next. Notice how the author writes. Are the sentences short or long? Do they use the clunky Victorian semi-colons or do they rely on the post-modern comma? In the acknowledgement, check how profusely or subtly do they thank their husband or wife? Try forming a connection with them in values that bind you two, as readers, as writers, as humans. While you are away from or done with the book, read about its author. Her life story. The books that changed her life. The books that she's grown up reading. The books that she's reading now.— % &Here's the way to find a book you ought to read. Check the bibliography of the last book you read. I frigging found a gem called 'One. Two. Three. Infinity.' by the physicist George Gamow in the bibliography of my NCERT 12th Physics twelve years ago. It continues to be the best book on Physics that I read until Feynman's omnibus happened during college. Go find the book that the writer you like the most talks about. Read the author's interview. Paris Review, Google this website if you haven't yet. They publish the most detailed interviews delving right into the mind of the writer. Watch the BBC documentaries of writing maestros, be it Philip Roth or your Murakami boy. It's right there on YouTube. — % &Read about the spats between authors. Be obsessed with them. Don't jump on to the next book until your curiosity is quenched.

Why did Pankaj Mishra call Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet anti-literature? Why Rushdie adopted Conrad as his last name during hiding? Why did Conrad write about Africa? Why did Arundhati Roy take twenty years before writing another novel after The God of Small Things? What did David Foster Wallace think of Kafka? While you dig deeper, you will find references to new books. Great books. Not by any of your shopper-friends, but by the writers themselves. Writers that are devout readers, writers whose taste you can trust.— % &That's how you will discover a beautiful book called A Free Man by a not-so-famous journalist called Aman Sethi mentioned inside Amitava Kumar's A Matter of Rats. That's how you will be awed to hear that Jeet Thayil grew up translating Charles Baudelaire's poems from French to English, frequenting his grave in Cimetiere Montparnasse while he was in Paris. That's how you'll discover that the greatest Portuguese writer isn't Paulo Coelho, but an unknown Nobel Laureate named José Saramago. Read his book called Blindness, if you like dystopian fiction. Or you will be moved to know that Alice Munro wrote only short-stories not because she feared the form of a novel, but because she only had as much time. All her stories were written in hours stolen while her child slept or was at school.— % &All the viral listicles with 100 books that you can't live without reading are filled with bestsellers. Unfortunately the writers of those buzz-fed lists have grown up masticating the very same curd of famous recommendations with friends crooning "Yaar, Jhumpa Lahiri padho yaar. She's brilliant," and you ask, expectantly, "Did you read (her less famous but best-written) Unaccustomed Earth?" and pat comes the reply, "No, The Lowland, dude. It's just epic." Yeah, right. Booker authorities won't get it wrong, would they? They will. Most great works don't get noticed. You have to give them the notice they deserve. Else, the world will be filled with shoppers, never readers.— % &

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