Read Of The Week (Dec 12 to Dec 18)

In his early twenties, the novelist Chandrahas Choudhury found himself in the position of most young people who want to write: impractical, hard-up, ill-at-ease in the world. Like most people who love to read, his most radiant hours were inside the pages of a book.

Seeking to combine his love of writing with his love of reading, he became an adept of a trade that is mainly transacted lying down — that is, he became a book reviewer.

My Country Is Literature brings together the best of his literary criticism: a long train of perceptive essays on writers as diverse as V S Naipaul and Orhan Pamuk, Gandhi and Nehru, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay and Jhumpa Lahiri. The book also contains an introductory essay describing Choudhury’s book-saturated years as a young writer in Mumbai, the joys and sorrows and stratagems of the book reviewer’s trade, and the ways in which literature is made as much by readers as by writers.

Delightfully punctuated with 15 portraits of writers by the artist Golak Khandual, this is essential reading for everyone who believes that books are the most beautiful things in life.