Shashi Tharoor began reading books-Enid Blyton’s Noddy series-when he was three. By the time he was ten, he had published his first work of fiction, Operation Bellows, a credulity-stretching saga of an Anglo-Indian fighter pilot. In between were years when he read a book a day. And in the years since, he has published eight books an written for many Indian and foreign publications. Bookless in Baghdad brings together pieces written over the past decade by this compulsive reader and prolific writer on the subject closest to his heaert: reading. In these essays on book, authors, reviews, critics, literary festivals, literary aspirants, empire, and India, Tharoor takes us on a delightful journey of discovery. He wanders the ‘book souk’ in a Baghdad under sanctions where the middle-class are selling their volumes so that they can afford to live; analyses the Indianness of Salman Rushdie; discusses P.G. Wodehouse’s enduring popularity in India; and drives around Huesca looking to pay an idiosyneratic tribute to george Orwell. There are excursions into the pitfalls of reviewing, explorations of the ‘anxiety’ of audience’ of Indian English Writers, and a wicked account of how Norman Mailer dealt with a negative review. Informed, honest and tongue-in-cheek, these essays will provoke, educate, amuse and divert the reader. Once again, Shashi Tharoor lives up to the credo he attributes to Moliere: if you wish to edify, you must entertain. He does both with the panache that readers of The Great Indian Novel and India: From Midnight to the Millennium have come to expect-and to enjoy.
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