An Anthology of Indian Crime Fiction - and 3 Books on Ecology - by Harini Nagendra

It's the time of the year when gift-giving is being considered. Book suggestions please! 

Harini, writing on a Sunday instead of my usual Friday blog - talking about my book suggestions for the holidays. My fellow Minds have given us some great lists of books to look at, and I'm looking forward to dipping into some of these over the holidays. The posts have also been bitter-sweet to read - sweet because this month marks the end of my first year with the Minds, which I have enjoyed tremendously - and sad, because we also say farewell this month to Josh Stallings and Susan Shea!

I'll keep my end-of-year post short, because this has been a roller coaster of a year on the work and home front, leaving very little time for reading - sadly! But I have read four wonderful books, which are probably not on any of the other Minds' lists, since they are all from, and on India - so let's dive in, shall we?

The first book on my list, which is also the only mystery and crime fiction I've been able to read with some attention this year, is the wonderful two-volume Hachette Book of Indian Detective Fiction, edited by Tarun Saint. With stories from the past and future, amateur sleuths and professional detectives, supernatural crime and comedic mysteries, and translations of classics from other languages, this is a treat of a two-volume set. I haven't read all the stories in here, but have dipped into quite a few, and am looking forward to reading the others.

After this, three wonderful Indian books on ecology which I have loved greatly.

First, Arati Kumar-Rao's wonderful marginlands: Indian landscapes on the brink. Arati, a dear friend, is a wonderful author, photographer and keen observer of landscapes who has traveled across the length and breadth of India. In marginlands, she describes the incredible beauty, and fragility, of these landscapes, from the deserts of Thar to the high mountains of the Himalayas, and from the dolphins of the majestic Brahmaputra to the tiger-rich wetlands of the Sunderbans - and to India's fragile and choking cities. Here is a review I wrote of the book - which, happily, is now going to be published in the USA by Milkweeds, and can be pre-ordered here

Second, A Walk up The Hill: Living with People and Nature, an autobiography of one of India's finest ecologists (also my PhD supervisor) Madhav Gadgil - who recently received United Nations Environmental Programme's Champions of the Earth award (considered the UN's highest environmental honor). Now in his eighties, Gadgil has spent a lifetime wandering India's forests and hills, and this book is - as he terms it - a love letter to his first and foremost love, the majestic Western Ghats hill chain of India. It's a rare insider's glimpse into India's changing ecology over the past several decades, told from up close - and he doesn't mince words! More about the book in my review in The India Forum here

I'll conclude with a third favourite, Iconic Trees of India by S. Natesh - which describes 75 individual trees, each remarkable in their own right, with love and painstaking detail. From India's loneliest tree - a giant sequioa languishing in Kashmir sans sibling or potential romance partners - to a peepal tree whose branches bear testament to the dark history of the Indian freedom struggle - there is so much in these pages to be savoured. If this piques your interest, here's a more detailed review which I wrote for The Hindu   

Happy holidays and holiday reading, everyone!