Unlike my friends I haven’t selected my 10 favorite books, and find the task extremely difficult. I prefer reading fiction – though, many books of non-fiction too have left an impact on my life – and biographies.
My current favorites include Michael Connelly, the creator of the Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller series, Jeffrey Archer, Mario Puzo, and Frederick Forsyth; and the authors I repeat include Harold Robbins (specially his earlier books), Irving Wallace and Arthur Hailey.
Parallel to these books is the fiction of Ernest Hemingway, Guy de Maupassant, O Henry, W. Somerset Maugham and DH Lawrence.
I may still have one of the earliest editions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I read this as a curiosity, and then read ‘Sons and Lovers’. Sons and Lovers remind me of Joseph Conrad’s ‘Lord Jim’. I found a lot of similarity between Lord Jim and the character Amitabh Bachchan played in Yash Chopra‘s ‘Kala Pathar’. Of course, there is no comparison, but then there can be no comparison between The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Paa.
Love for reading began with Phantom, Diana and Dave Palmer, Mandrake, Narda & Lothar, Jiggs Maggi and Bimmy, Archie’s, Blondy and other comics when I was in my teens. Having shelves full of books, brought from Karachi by my mother, along with the belonging Sindhi refugees brought during partition were my introduction to serious literature from different languages and countries. These books along with a lot of reading of Indian mythology shaped an attitude. Read Sufi writings in Sindhi, novels of Rabindranath Tagore, Sarat Chandra Chatterjee, Khandekar, Bhagwati Charan Sharma and pulp of Ibne Safi BA, Om Prakash Sharma along with stories, books, poetry and plays of Agyaya, Dharam Veer Bharati, Mohan Rakesh, Khwaja Ahmed Abbas, Krishan Chandra, Yashpal, Gulshan Nanda and many others
And then there are books on Feng Shui and Vastu.
My reading and writing began very early with books from Hindi, Urdu, Sindhi, Punjabi, Bengali and Marathi.
To select 10 books is doing an injustice to all of them. A hundred is more like that.
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