Book 30 - "Snakes and Ladders" by Gita Mehta

[tala-tale.livejournal.com]

I read this review of Gita Mehta's Snakes and Ladders by fiction_theory and decided to read the book -- I'm sooo glad I did.

I most heartily concur with the review fiction_theory wrote, so I'll let interested folks read that instead of repeating it all here, but in terms of my personal experience with the book... well, most fundamentally, I didn't realize how colossally ignorant I was about India's history until I started reading. Not only are Mehta's essays delightfully engaging, blending the humorous, the serious, the political, the historical, the personal, and the lyrical into a deeply seductive mix, but they left me hungering to know more, which is, to me, one of the hallmarks of good non-fiction.

I'm going to be keeping an eye out for good books on the history of India (both about the periods up to the publication of Mehta's book in 1997 and about what's happened since then) -- if anyone has any recommendations, I'd love to hear them!

(Tags: a: mehta gita, nonfiction, short essays, history, indian)