Top authors' top reads in 2014

As Nobel Prize-winning US novelist William C Faulkner once famously said, 'Read, read, read... Then write', top authors this year spent a lot of time reading apart from their writing pursuits.
Among the exclusively non-fiction works which celebrated author Dan Brown, who came to India in November, read was theoretical physicist and renowned futurist Michio Kaku's latest book "The Future of the Mind".
The top three picks of Pakistani writer Bilal Tanweer, whose debut novel "The Scatter Here is Too Great" published earlier this year by Random House were Rebecca Solnit's "Wanderlust: A History of Walking"; "Mumbai Fables" by Gyan Prakash and Laurent Gayer's "Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City".

Tanweer, who has just finished translation of Muhammad Khalid Akhtar's "Chakiwara Chronicles", won the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize 2014 and is also shortlisted for the 2015 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.
Noted writer William Dalrymple read widely for his new book "The Anarchy" on the rise of the East India Company, and was fascinated by the work of his predecessors in the field especially that of John Keay, Nick Robins, Thirtankar Roy, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Philip Lawson, Percival Spear, Christopher Bayly and K N Chaudhuri.
"Two of my favourite books this year outside that field were set close to home, both of them stylishly written, powerfully moving books set against the bleak beauty and baroque decay of 21st century Delhi. Deepti Kapoor's 'A Bad Character' is in many ways the fictional counterpart of Rana Dasgupta's brilliant non-fiction portrait of 'Delhi, Capital'.

Both books darkly distil the essence of a corrupt, violent and traumatised city which growing so fast it is almost unrecognisable to its own inhabitants," Dalrymple told PTI.

But the book which, he says, "swept him away" was something well off his usual territory, a history of the ancient Mediterranean - "The Making of the Middle Sea" by Cyprian Broodbank.
"It's a wonderfully sweeping and oddly unputdownable history of the region from the ice age to the Parthenon and full of the oddest facts imaginable," he says.
Novelist Amit Chaudhuri, who is also an acclaimed musician and a professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia, named four books as his top reads in 2014.

"Prawin Adhikari's 'The Vanishing Act' is a book of stories by a young Nepalese writer who was a discovery to me. His language is compelling in the way it captures small dissonances in emotion and the immediacy of sensory experience. 'The Scatter Here is Too Great' is a terrific, deeply impressive book of linked stories about Karachi, full of contained volatility, savage humour, and love," he says.