Description

What does it mean to read slowly in a country that has decided everything must happen at the speed of an Instagram reel? In this exquisite collection of twenty-three essays, columnist Aman Sengupta makes a quiet, sustained case for a vanishing Indian pleasure: the reading hour — that early, unspoken, unmonetised time of day when a person sits alone with a book and chooses, briefly, not to be reachable.

Drifting from his Calcutta childhood to a Bangalore terrace to a winter month spent on the Konkan coast with only six novels for company, Sengupta writes about the books that taught him how to be alone — Tagore in adolescence, Tolstoy at twenty-eight, Mahasweta Devi when his mother died. He writes about second-hand bookshops in College Street, about the lost art of marginalia, about why we apologise for liking poetry, about the dignified Indian aunties who read fat library books in second-class train compartments.

These are essays in the old, generous sense of the word — meandering, personal, learned without ever being heavy. They will remind you of a slower self you may have begun to forget you had.

*The Reading Hour* is a small, perfect book to be kept beside the bed and read one essay at a time. A modern Indian classic in the making.