What does Calcutta like to read? We asked three bookstores — Starmark, Story and Oxford — to share with us their top sellers across a number of genres, from classics to romance, children’s lit to sports. From the data provided by the bookshops, we have compiled titles that sell the most in Calcutta across 14 categories, listed in no particular order. While this list is not exhaustive, nor is it all-encompassing, it does provide us with an insight into our reading habits. While some names were no surprise at all, we did discover new authors through this exercise. And we were shocked to see no mention of some favourite authors. Case in MIA point? To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee!

AUTOBIOGRAPHY, MEMOIR & BIOGRAPHY

♦ Wings of Fire by A.P.J. Abdul Kalam 

♦ Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

♦ The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

♦ Dongri to Dubai by S. Hussain Zaidi

♦ The Monk as Man: The Unknown Life of Swami Vivekananda by Sankar

♦ The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch, with Jeffrey Zaslow

♦ Mother Teresa: The Authorized Biography by Navin Chawla

♦ I Dare! Kiran Bedi; A Biography by Parmesh Dangwal

♦ Swami Vivekananda: The Living Vedanta by Chaturvedi Badrinath

♦ Autobiography of A Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda

♦ The Story of my Experiments with Truth: An Autobiography by M.K. Gandhi

♦ I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai, Christina Lamb

♦ A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

♦ Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

♦ To Sir, With Love by E.R. Braithwaite

♦ Barack Obama — The making of the man by David Maraniss

♦ Narendra Modi — The Man, The Times by Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay

♦ Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built by Duncan Clark

♦ The Kalam Effect by P.M. Nair

♦ Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

t2 picks

♦ To Sir, With Love: Because we could do with going back to the lessons learnt in this book in today’s day and age — turn hate into love and do it by garnering respect. The book instils old-fashioned values, fast disappearing in an increasingly violent climate. 

♦ The Diary of a Young Girl: Because it’s a haunting account of a girl’s coming of age, of friendship, love, heartbreak and discovery, all made very real by the need of a Jewish family to go into hiding in Nazi Germany. 
 

CLASSICS

♦ Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome

♦ Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

♦ A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

♦ The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupery

♦ Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

♦ Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

♦ War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

♦ Great Expectations by Charles Dickens 

♦ Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

♦ Treasure Island by R.L. Stevenson

♦ The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

♦ Animal Farm by George Orwell

♦ Dracula by Bram Stoker 

♦ Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky 

♦ The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

♦ The Outsider by Albert Camus

t2 picks 

♦ Three Men in a Boat: Because this humorous monologue by a man on vacation with his friends will have you weeping with laughter. The antics of the author with his two friends and pet dog unfold with unintentional humour, rendered more comic by the author’s pained narrative voice. 

♦ The Little Prince: Because this story of friendship and loneliness, love and loss is timeless and hides many layers. As a child it is a simple tale of talking foxes and asteroids that are houses. As a grown-up you understand the allegory and read into its critique of the modern world and its ills. 

INDIAN TRANSLATIONS

♦ The Complete Adventures of Feluda by Satyajit Ray (Gopa Majumdar)

♦ Chokher Bali by Rabindranath Tagore (Sukhendu Ray)

♦ Chowringhee by Sankar (Arunava Sinha)

♦ Mother of 1084 by Mahasweta Devi (Samik Bandyopadhyay)

♦ My Name is Radha by Saadat Hasan Manto (Muhammad Umar Memon)

♦ Gitanjali: Song Offerings by Rabindranath Tagore (W.B. Yeats)

♦ Those Days by Sunil Gangopadhyay (Aruna Chakravarti)

♦ First Light by Sunil Gangopadhyay (Aruna Chakravarti)

♦ Pather Panchali by Bhibhuti Bhushan Bandopadhyay (T.W. Clark and Tarapada Mukherji)

♦ Picture Imperfect and other Byomkesh Bakshi Mysteries by Saradindu Bandopadhyay (Sreejata Guha)

♦ Breast Stories by Mahesweta Devi (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak)    

♦ Godan by Munshi Premchand (Jai Ratan and P. Lal)    

♦ Naked Voices: Stories & Sketches by Saadat Hasan Manto (Rakhshanda Jalil)

Q: Being played by Julia Roberts [in Eat Pray Love]…   how did you cope with that?

Elizabeth Gilbert: Well, it’s not a difficult thing to cope with (laughs). It’s not a punishment, it’s a blessing. She’s extraordinary, and beautiful and magnificent and it’s a little bit overwhelming to be played by somebody like her. But she was so gracious and warm and welcoming of me… I knew that she cared deeply about the book. 

 

 

 

 

CHILDREN’S CLASSICS 

♦ Famous Five, Secret Seven and Noddy series by Enid Blyton

♦ The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling

♦ Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

♦ Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne

♦ Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

♦ The Incredible Adventures of Professor Shonku by Satyajit Ray 

♦ Malgudi Days by R.K. Narayan

♦ My Boyhood Days by Rabindranath Tagore 

♦ Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne and other Stories by Upendrakishore Roychoudhury

♦ Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll 

♦ The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

♦ Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White

♦Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson

♦ Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

♦ Black Beauty by Anna Sewell

♦ Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

♦ Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

♦ The Room on the Roof by Ruskin Bond

t2 picks 

♦ Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 
Here’s what Ruskin Bond wrote in t2 when the iconic book turned 150 last year: 
“Alice in Wonderland was the first book that I read — with a little help from my father, as I was only five years old at the time.... Seventy-five years have passed since I first read Alice, and this year we celebrate 150 years of its existence as the greatest children’s book ever written. Yes, far and away the greatest....”

 

CHILDREN’S CONTEMPORARY (1980 ONWARDS)

♦ The Room of Many Colours by Ruskin Bond

♦ Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling

♦ Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling

♦ Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney

♦ The Magic of the Lost Temple  by Sudha Murty

♦ The Magic Drum and Other Favourite Stories by Sudha Murty

♦ How I Taught My Grandmother to Read and Other Stories by Sudha Murty

♦ Geronimo Stilton by Elisabetta Dami

♦ Nancy Drew Mystery Stories by Carolyn Keene 

♦ The Hardy Boys by Franklin W. Dixon

♦ The Village By The Sea by Anita Desai

♦ Wonder by R.J. Palacio 

♦ Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell 

t2 picks 

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: Because it is the first time that the magical world of Harry Potter takes on a darker and edgier tone and the darkness comes from regular people, not just the threat of a long-gone Dark Lord. It feels much more real, much more identifiable. And Harry, Ron and Hermione are no longer kids, but individuals who are taking a stand.


CONTEMPORARY INDIAN FICTION (1990 ONWARDS)

♦ The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh

♦ The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

♦ The Immortals of Meluha by Amish

♦ The Palace of Illusions by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

♦ The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri

♦ The Calcutta Chromosome by Amitav Ghosh

♦ The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

♦ The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh

♦ Chanakya’s Chant by Ashwin Sanghi

♦ Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

 

THE t2 INTERVIEW

Q: Why do you write? 

Amish: “Umm… I am not sure I can give a coherent, logical answer to this. It’s something that I just feel compelled to do. I just love doing it. It’s a bit like asking a man why he loves his wife... if he loves his wife (laughs)! I love my wife (Preeti), there’s no reason for it, I just do. It’s the same way with me and writing. I just love it,” the man behind the Shiva Trilogy told us in June 2016. 
 

Q: Why did you become an author? 

Amitav Ghosh: “I always wanted to become an author. I read a lot as a child and you know, writing comes from reading... I was a passionate reader, so I ended up as a writer! Seeing my first book was wonderful... completely magical, beyond anything I had imagined,” the Sahitya Akademi Award-winning author told us in 2011.
 

Q: Do you have any special memories of Calcutta?

Jhumpa Lahiri: “I can’t really say, you know. It’s just a part of my life in some sense, my consciousness, my upbringing. I’ve been coming here from my childhood, and the city is part of my earliest memories. It neither feels like a foreign place nor a place where I belong. It’s a strange connection I have, a particular kind of connection that, I imagine, a lot of people like me who were raised outside of India but have come here all their lives probably feel. It’s been a constant in my mind, an ongoing presence, it’s a place that I have come to now so many times and in so many ages, it’s, you know, a marker of my life, in some ways,” the Pulitzer Prize-winner told us in 2014.  

Q: What are you passionate about?

Ashwin Sanghi: “Currently my lifestyle has become such that reading and writing are the two big ones in my life right now. These days I am typically working on more than one project at a time, which means that I really have to plan my schedule.... My wife (Anushika) says everything in your life seems to have gone out of the window. I say, well, my life is now ruled by four Ws — wife, work, writing and whisky… no time for the fifth (laughs)!” he told us in June 2016.

MODERN INDIAN ROMANCE  

♦ Five Point Someone by Chetan Bhagat

♦ I too had a Love Story by Ravinder Singh

♦ Half Girlfriend by Chetan Bhagat

♦ One Indian Girl by Chetan Bhagat

♦ Our Impossible Love by Durjoy Datta

♦ This Love that feels Right… by Ravinder Singh

♦ She Swiped Right into My Heart by Sudeep Nagarkar

♦ Like a Love Song by Nikita Singh

♦ A Thing Beyond Forever by Novoneel Chakraborty

♦ Of Course I Love You — Till I Find Someone Better... by Durjoy Datta and Maanvi Ahuja

♦ When Only Love Remains by Durjoy Datta 

♦ Right Here Right Now by Nikita Singh 

♦ The One You Cannot Have by Preeti Shenoy

 

THE t2 INTERVIEW

Q: Do you think Ryan (of Five Point Someone) is more believable than Rancho (of 3 Idiots)?

Chetan Bhagat: “Yeah, of course. Because, you know, when you turn Bollywood, you have to tweak a lot. Ryan is more believable because he is really a five-point someone. He doesn’t have it all. Whereas in the movie, Rancho [Aamir Khan] comes first in class and he has a girlfriend also…. Movies tend to over-simplify, but a book allows you to put layers, put various aspects to people’s characters,” he told us during his first interview with t2 in March 2011. 
 

Q: The Girl of my Dreams is about how dangerously little one knows of love. How much do you know of love?

Durjoy Datta: “It’s not as if I’ve been through something that Daman (the male protagonist) has been through, but then I’ve had exes who were crazy as well, and done stuff. I’ve thought of doing stuff that’s extremely crazy but I’ve not done it. So, it was about reaching that dark place inside you and thinking that if you could get away with anything, what would you do to your ex,” the dimpled Bengali boy told us last month. 
 

THE t2 CHAT

Ravinder Singh: “When I was writing I too had a Love Story, I never knew this was going to happen. I had a very selfish purpose. I felt I would burst like a pressure cooker, I was like I can’t deal with this pain, I want to share it with as many people as possible,” the Delhi boy told us when he visited the t2 office  in September 2016. 

SPORTS

♦ Playing It My Way by Sachin Tendulkar

♦ Open by Andre Agassi 

♦ AB: The Autobiography by AB de Villiers

♦ Six Machine: I Don’t Like Cricket... I Love It by Chris Gayle

♦ Ace Against Odds by Sania Mirza 

♦ Driven: The Virat Kohli Story by Vijay Lokapally

♦ Sunny Days by Sunil Gavaskar

♦ Messi by Guillem Balague

♦ Ronaldo: The Obsession for Perfection by Luca Caoli

♦ It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life by Lance Armstrong, with Sally Jenkins

♦ Serve to Win: The 14-Day Gluten-Free Plan for Physical and Mental Excellence by Novak Djokovic

♦ Unstoppable — The Incredible Power of Faith in Action by Nick Vujicic

t2 picks

Open: Because our hearts went out to Agassi when he called tennis a prison he spent 30 years trying to escape from. Because our jaw dropped when he admitted to smoking crystal meth. Because we went awww over his love for ‘Stefanie’ Graf.

Sunny Days: Because our love affair with reading about sporting heroes started with this. And like Sunny’s batting, it was solid in defence and stylish in attack. 

HISTORICAL & NARRATIVE NON-FICTION  

♦ The Discovery of India by Jawaharlal Nehru

♦ Makers of Modern India by Ramachandra Guha

♦ The Last Mughal by William Dalrymple

♦ What Happened to Netaji? by Anuj Dhar

♦ History of the Bengali Speaking People by Nitish Sengupta

♦ Plain Tales from the Raj by Charles Allen

♦ Land of The Seven Rivers: A Brief History of India’s Geography by Sanjeev Sanyal

♦ Land of Two Rivers: A History of Bengal from the Mahabharata to Mujib by Nitish Sengupta

♦ India: A History by John Keay

♦ The Second World War by Antony Beevor

♦ A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor

♦ The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan

♦ Princess: A True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia by Jean Sasson

♦ The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity by Amartya Sen

♦ White Mughals by William Dalrymple

♦ The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone

♦ The Arthashastra by Kautilya (L.N. Rangarajan)

♦ Bravo Two Zero by Andy McNab

THE t2 INTERVIEW

Q: Have you thought of writing a current political narrative? Bengal politics alone would give you enough food for thought...

William Dalrymple: “It certainly would! No, in the last 10 years there’s been growth of a very strong team of long-form journalism, from non-fiction writers — Suketu Mehta, Sonia Faleiro right up to political works, like Ram Guha or Basharat Peer. So that space is quite crowded. Historical narratives is a territory I feel happy to be occupying,” the Scottish historian told us in 2013.

CRIME THRILLERS 

♦ Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

♦ The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

♦ The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino

♦ The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

♦ The Monogram Murders by Sophie Hannah

♦ Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith

♦ The Incredible Banker by Ravi Subramanian

♦ The Mahabharata Secret by Christopher C. Doyle

♦ The Rozabal Line by Ashwin Sanghi

♦ The Godfather by Mario Puzo

♦ The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle

♦ Aarushi by Avirook Sen

♦ Mumbaistan by Piyush Jha 

♦ A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie by Kathryn Harkup 

♦ The Terrorist by Juggi Bhasin

t2 pick

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: Because it gave us Lisbeth Salander, the most kick-ass and flawed shero of modern literature. Add to that the gripping plot and a maverick protagonist called Mikael Blomkvist and our love for the Millennium Trilogy is sealed. 

Psst: The Christie fans in Team t2 feel Murder on the Orient Express is overrated. We prefer The A.B.C. Murders and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. 
 

YOUNG ADULT 

♦ The Fault In Our Stars by John Green

♦ The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

♦ Magnus Chase: The Sword of Summer by Rick Riordan

♦ Dork Diaries by Rachel Renee Russell

♦ Happily Ever After by Kiera Cass

♦ The Puffin History of India Vols 1 & 2 by Roshen Dalal

♦ Letters from a Father to his Daughter by Jawaharlal Nehru

♦ The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

♦ The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

♦ Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan

♦ Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling 

t2 picks

The Fault In Our Stars: Because Hazel and Gus made us fall in love with love again. And cry our eyes out in the end. It also introduced many of us to the genius that is John Green. #Nerdfighters

The Hunger Games: Because it has a badass heroine in a dystopian world who is not just talk. This was the YA book we were waiting for. An ace archer and a smart strategist Katniss Everdeen can feel compassion without being soppy. And love is not her life’s goal. Survival is. Also, Katniss is the one who saves Peeta Mallark’s ass! 

POLITICS 

♦ India Since Independence by Bipan Chandra

♦ Half Lion: How P.V. Narasimha Rao Transformed India by Vinay Sitapati

♦ India Unbound by Gurcharan Das

♦ India vs Pakistan: Why Can’t We Just Be Friends? by Husain Haqqani

♦ The Accidental Prime Minister by Sanjaya Baru

♦ 2014: The Election That Changed India by Rajdeep Sardesai

♦ 24 Akbar Road by Rasheed Kidwai

♦ ISIS: The State of Terror by Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger

♦ The Bolivian Diary of Ernesto Che Guevara edited by Mary-Alice Waters

♦ The Age of Empire: 1875-1914 by Eric Hobsbawm

♦ India 2020 by A.P.J. Abdul Kalam and Y.S. Rajan  
 
♦ Indian Summer by Alex von Tunzelmann

♦ Curfewed Night by Basharat Peer

Q: Why did you decide to write a book?

Rajdeep Sardesai: “I always wanted to write a book. I have been a print journalist, then TV. Always believed in the power of the written word and in the power of books. I believe that 10 years from now people won’t remember a TV programme... I think books endure. And I thought 2014 was truly a historic election,” he told us in December 2014. 

CONTEMPORARY WORLD FICTION IN ENGLISH (1980 ONWARDS)

♦ The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

♦ My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk

♦ Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

♦ All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

♦ Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

♦ The Color Purple by Alice Walker    

♦ The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

♦ Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James 

♦ Life of Pi by Yann Martel

t2 pick

The Kite Runner: Because it’s a tale of friendship and loyalty that stands out against the violent political backdrop, leaving us breathless at the turmoil of emotions that it arouses. And it gave us a first-hand peek into Afghanistan, with all its beauty and strife. 

HUMOUR 

♦ Mrs Funnybones by Twinkle Khanna

♦ My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell

♦ Carry On, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

♦ The Very Best of the Common Man by R.K. Laxman

♦ The Select Nonsense of Sukumar Ray, translated by Sukanta Chaudhuri

♦ Khushwant Singh’s Joke Book series 

♦ World of Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

♦ Book of Humour by Ruskin Bond    

♦ Murphy’s Law by Arthur Bloch    

♦ Wilt by Tom Sharpe

THE t2 INTERVIEW

Q: Did you know that you would one day become a bestselling writer?
 

Twinkle Khanna: No, I didn’t. But strangely enough, there’s an old interview of mine — in this odd-looking bouffant and proper weird lipstick — and I am saying things like, ‘I don’t know if funny things happen to me or whether I look at them in a funny way but I have always found things to laugh at.’ So, you know, how you have the origin of the Wolverine, that was probably my ‘origin’ (laughs out loud). I think I’ve always been like that but I never thought I would do this,” the former Bolly girl told t2 when we visited her Juhu office late last month. 

MIA

Add to the list of missing titles at t2@abp.in