She asked me to stay and she told me to sit anywhere.

AFTERNOON RAAG
AMIT CHAUDHURI

It's a slim volume of poetry cleverly disguised as a novel. Lyrical, romantic, and subtle as a feather, it barely lasted me a stifling summer afternoon.

A simple enough love story elevated by a delicate interlacing of flashback, dislocation, and irony, it's a book so light that it practically evaporates as you read it. (Cotton candy comes to mind, but, unfortunately, that's a phrase reserved for a different kind of writing. However, I must admit that it's closest to describing the deliciously sweet floatiness of Chaudhuri's prose.)

I loved its elegance. And the sureness of its writing. (Remember the phrase 'felicity of expression'?)

Will be reading more of him, I'm sure.

Showers wash/ All my cares away/ I wake up to a/ Sunny day.

Five months of books. Of words read, savoured, and, by now, forgotten. A few linger, and those I cannot ignore.

THE ROBBER BRIDE
MARGARET ATWOOD

Zenia is every woman you know, mixed up with little bits of yourself. (Or the reverse, if you're me, but that's pretty damn unlikely, isn't it?)

It's a lovely read: light, unassuming, and sure-footed. As someone I know commented, it's the sort of book you believe no man should read, because it lays bare the inner workings of every woman's heart and mind.

HOUSE OF LEAVES
MARK Z. DANIELEWSKI

Mysterious, engaging, and quite astonishingly scary. It's an ambitious debut, that I've heard, more than once, compared with White Teeth. And it's true, they share a great deal: a perfectly self-assured voice, a refusal to be dumbed down, and a strangely endearing density.

It taught me a new word: ergodic, meaning a kind of literature that requires effort to be read.

It's a lovely book, on many levels, and I'm just surprised I haven't run into it earlier.

SACRED GAMES
VIKRAM CHANDRA

Took ages to make my way through this one, as it was simply too heavy a book to carry around with me. Was completely worth the effort, though, since it's beautifully written, and, in combination with Shantaram and Maximum City, forms a sort of 2006 Bombay trilogy for me.

If you're gonna do it/ Do it right.

THE AUTOGRAPH MAN
ZADIE SMITH

Sure-footed, and elegantly angsted-out. Intense, but also supremely controlled. Centred around one man's quest for identity, it draws a staggeringly beautiful, and carefully structured framework that questions fame, and forgetting. Faith, and ritual. The notion of permanence, and death, death, death. Friendship, and fidelity.

Alex-Li Tandem is the confused, drugged-out/ drunk on most occasions, title character, in search of the Holy Grail of Autograph Men -- a Kitty Alexander. He's conflicted in every possible way. Of course, the external quest for the rarest of autographs parallels his internal quest, for resolution of his grief at his father's death when he was a child.

It's intelligent and intense, and somehow more accessible than her other two books. Not less literary/ deep, don't get me wrong -- at least, not much. But it just feels younger, somehow. Less 70 mm and multi-generational and allusive. But stunning still.

Aside: I promise to write longer sentences. This staccato stuff sounds like me, but makes for very bumpy reading. My apologies.