After being late the last two times, I am so happy that I am finally ahead of the curve, finishing the seventy-fifth book of the year today. I hope to keep this going and finish a few days left in 2016. It would be terrible for the pact to end up like a college assignment that is frantically finished the night before it is due. I love that the 100 Book Pact has heightened my awareness of the passing of time. Time caught me unawares only once this year, in February, when I fell very behind with the pact. It was early days still, and I learned my lesson. When you have to read hundred books in a year, every single day counts. At the end of September, it doesn’t feel like the year is over even before I took notice. And best of all, I have something concrete to show for it.
Reading in this quarter has been haphazard. I haven’t had the time to make any reading lists, forget any chance to follow them. It has been a tiring few months, and on some days the book pact weighs heavily on me and feels like another large item on my ever-growing to-do list. But then I read a book that I really enjoy and this is a fun project again. Here’s what I have read since my last update—
- Undoing Impunity: Speech after Sexual Violence by V. Geetha
- Of the Nation Born: The Bangladesh Papers edited by Hameeda Hossain and Amena Mohsin
- A Difficult Transition: The Nepal Papers edited by Mandira Sharma and Seira Tamang
- Fault Lines of History: The India Papers II edited by Uma Chakravarti
- The Search for Justice: The Sri Lanka Papers edited by Kumari Jayawardena and Kishali Pinto-Jayawardena
- Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Parts I and II by J. K. Rowling, John Tiffany and Jack Thorne
- I, the Salt Doll by Vandana Mishra, translated by Jerry Pinto
- Kaifi and I by Shaukat Kaifi, translated by Nasreen Rehman
- Doing Time with Nehru by Yin Marsh
- Bookspace: Collected essays on libraries edited by Maria Inês Cruz and Lozana Rossenova
- Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
- The Customs of the Kingdoms of India by Marco Polo
- The Newspaper: Its Place in Democracy by Duane Bradley
- Wordygurdyboom! by Sukumar Ray, translated by Sampurna Chatterji
- Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River by Alice Albinia
- The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage by Sydney Padua
- Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them by J. K. Rowling
- Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World by Kumari Jayawardena
- How to Deal with Adversity by Christopher Hamilton
- Something New: Tales from a Makeshift Bride by Lucy Knisley
- A Stamp is Born by C. R. Pakrashi
- Beastly Tales from Here and There by Vikram Seth
- Eating Women, Telling Tales by Bulbul Sharma
- Eye on Cricket: Reflections on the Great Game by Samir Chopra
- The Girl who Ate Books: Adventures in Reading by Nilanjana Roy
You can read about the first twenty-five books I read here, and the next batch here. You can also follow the last leg of my reading pact on Instagram, where I post about it under #MatraTypeReadsA100.
