Literati Reading List

In 2016, I started a literary group focused on serious literary works. Here is the list of books for our Caravanserai Literati.

2016

• Inferno, Dante Alighieri
• Mahabharata (based on Peter Brook’s play/film), Vyasa
• Rubayaat, Omar Khayyam
• Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
• The Nature of Things, Lucretius

2017

• The Nature of Things, Francis Ponge
• Memoirs of Hadrien, Marguerite Yourcenar
• Herzog, Saul Bellow
• Tao te Ching, Lau Tzu
• Poems, Leonard Cohen
• In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust
• Aleph and Other stories, Jorge Luis Borges

2018

• Men Without Women, Haruki Murakami
• Remains of the Day and The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro
• Deep River, Shusaku Endo
• “Outsider” in Sandra Smith translation of L’Etranger, Albert Camus
• The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays in Justin O’Brien translation, Albert Camus
• Wasteland and Other Poems- Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot
• MacBeth, NTLive Play, William Shakespeare
• Julius Caesar, NTLive Play, William Shakespeare
• Overcoat and the Nose, Nikolai Gogol
• Diary of a Madman, Lu Xun
• Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
• End of the Affair, Graham Green

2019

• One hundred years of solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Anthony & Cleopatra – NTLive Play, William Shakespeare
• Short Stories, Raven and Other Poems, Edgar Allen Poe
• Metamorphosis, Ovid
• Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
• Diva (Film)
• Periodic Table, Primo Levi
• Spoils of Poynton, Henry James
• The Human Stain, Philip Roth
• The Odyssey, Homer [translated by Emily Wilson]
• Tender is the Night/Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Havana Red, first of the Havana Quartets, Leonardo Padura

2020

• The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, Yeats
• A Passage to India, E. M. Forster
• Bitter Fruit: Short Stories, Saadat Hasan Manto
• Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
• Lolita – The Film, Stanley Kubric
• Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
• Speak Memory, Vladimir Nabokov
• Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
• The Old Testament
• Selected Essays, Michel de Montaigne
• Emma, Jane Austen
• Luigi Pirandello’s short stories + Kaos (film based on four of them), Pirandello, Taviani Brothers

2021

• Petrarch’s Poetry, Petrarch
• Charulata/Nashtanir, Satyajit Ray’s Film based on Tagore’s Short Story, Nashtanir (A Lonely Wife)
• Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
• Death in Venice, Thomas Mann
• Oedipus Rex, Oedipus in Colonus, Antigone, Sophocles
• Medea, Euripedes
• Don Juan, Lord Byron
• Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
• Childhood, Leo Tolstoy
• Novellas (Death of Ivan Illich, The Kreutzer Sonata, and Hadji Murad), Leo Tolstoy
• The Golden Gate, Vikram Seth
• Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin

2022

• Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett’s play
• Casanova’s Memoirs
• Goethe’s Faust
• Wallace Stevens’ Poetry
• Sons and Lovers, D.H. Lawrence
• Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev
• Voltaire’s Candide
• Notes from the Underground, Dostoevsky
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne
• Bernard Shaw’s Plays – Candida and Man and Superman
• Oscar Wilde’s Plays – The Importance of Being Ernest and The Ideal Husband

2023

• Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Becket
• W. H. Auden’s Poetry
• Salman Rushdie’s Victory City
• Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray
• Emily Dickinson’s Poetry 
• Shakespeare’s Sonnets 
• Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• Films: Based on Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence, The Painted Veil, Of Human Bondage and Being Julia/Theater
• Films: Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew and Ten Things I Hate About You
• Films: Shakespeare’s King Lear and Kurosawa’s Ran

2024

• Film: Shakespeare’s Henry V
• Films: Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Romeo Must Die
• Covenant of Water by Abraham Varghese
• Wagnerism by Alex Ross
• Chekov’s Short Stories
• Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

2025

• Film: Laapataa Ladies (India’s entry to the 2025 Oscars)
• A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
• PG Wodehouse – a set of Jeeves radio plays
• Three Men on a Boat by Jerome K Jerome
• The World According to Garp by John Irving
• Film: Dr. Strangelove by Stanley Kubrick
• Film: Yojimbo by Akira Kurosawa
• Film: Monty Python and the Holy Grail
• Film: The Pink Panther