Since I spend some of my time reading all kinds of stuff, I thought I should have a page devoted to books. But there's a problem: a problem of plenty. There was a time when I used to read almost any kind of book, but of late I have become more discriminating. Eclectic or elitist, my preferences are wide-ranging: poetry, science fiction, history, fiction, philosophy, science, and that quintessential literary form, the Novel. The best I can do when asked what I normally read is to give out the names of who I like to read and the books I particularly like. So here goes my very own list of all-time greats!

Vikram Seth: Easily the best writer in English alive, IMO at least. As a critic pointed out rightly, he's less of an author and more of a magician who weaves magic with his words. Click here for more about the genius and his masterpieces.

William Shakespeare: Enough (rather, more than enough) has been said about the Bard of Avon over the ages, yet I can't but sing his praises. I'm not a big fan of his tragedies as most people seem to be, but his comedies and sonnets are just wonderful. Soon I'll get a page about him working...

Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Dostoyevsky the man is at least as interesting a character as any in his novels. In many ways the father of the psychological novel, he churned out novels with a keen insight into the hearts and minds of people and the workings of the world. The Karamazov Brothers, Crime and Punishment and The Idiot are all great masterpieces. His short-stories are equally well-written.

Douglas Adams: I got introduced to this guy's stuff recently, and he's too good. An unimaginably good imagination combined with an impossibly good mastery over words makes him a delight to read, and re-read over and over again.

J. R. R. Tolkien: In many ways, The Lord of the Rings is probably the best book in a long, long time. Rich in imagination, the trilogy takes you into a world that's very different from -- yet oddly similar -- to our own.

Now that I've put up a few names, the hopelessness of it all strikes me -- there are too many names and too much to be said about them. So I'll just take a few names as they come to mind: O. Henry (The Gifts of the Magi), Anton Chekov (The Cherry Orchard), Richard Bach (The Bridge Across Forever), Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged), Mark Twain (The Prince and the Pauper), Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland), Frederick Forsyth (The Day of the Jackal), Richard Feynman (Lectures in Physics), H. G. Wells (The War of the Worlds), Arthur Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey), Somerset Maugham (The Razor's Edge), Arthur Doyle (The Hound of Baskerville), Stephen Hawking (A Brief History of Time), R. K. Narayan (A Horse and Two Goats), Jerome Jerome (Three Men in a Boat)...

The list, it seems is practically endless. So I'll end it abruptly here.

I have a collection of e-texts on my machine (courtesy Chandrasekhar Varma), which you can access through the Network Neighbourhood (browse to aardvark and go on to ETexts). Or else click here.