readersdigest.co.in 125an abiding weight that the world we
inhabit is a thing of glittering deceits.Brokeback Mountain
BY ANNIE PROULX, Scribner, ` 410 A blue
sky, a river, gorse and adder enter sto-
ries of American life that is brutal, iso-
lated and without love—except when
you read Brokeback Mountain. Then
it’s love all the way, the kind that can
knock you down.Less Than Zero
BY BRET EASTON ELLIS,
Picador, ` 450 This mir-
rored a time when I grew
up in India, where the ar-
rival of money had left so
many people I knew—
like in this glorious de-
but—as glamorous vessels of drugs,
greed and sexual misdirection. Its bare-
ness and vacuity is as moving as a room
made empty when someone has died,
their clothes and prayer beads set aside,
the window open.English, August
BY UPAMANYU CHATTERJEE, Faber &
Faber, ` 399 This book draws from the
dark sludge of boredom that is perhaps
the essential nature of life. The protago-
nist, posted in government jobs that
might make someone suicidal from
sheer drabness, hangs on to his life with
wit, observation and nostalgia, slipping
into a masturbatory rhetoric of college
life, as though his youth might endure
if its language were repeated.The Virgin Suicides
BY JEFFREY EUGENIDES, Picador
Modern Classics, ` 750 I return to
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
to see why four beautiful sisters might
kill themselves over a year. A novel of per-
fect sentences that might have thrilled
Capote, it taught me how detail
brings fiction alive.The Collected Poems of
Frank O’Hara
BY FRANK O’HARA, University of
California Press, `1,767 Frank O’Hara’s
poetry paid homage to abstract expres-
sionism, yet they were masterful docu-
ments of how to speak directly to the
reader. Each sentence is a singular work
of art, meticulously arranged and con-
ceived, as when we read:
I wouldn’t want to be faster
or greener than now if you were
with me O you
were the best of all my days.Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales
BY HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN,
Puffin Classics, ` 299
What is truly simple
will endure, and what is
powerfully sad resonates
with us all—Andersen’s
enchanting tales. In
stories as varied as
The Little Mermaid or
The Snow Queen the grief has so much
voltage it illuminates the pages as if it
were lightning in the night sky.
—COMPILED BY SAPTAK CHOUDHURYReader’s DigestBook prices are subject to change.