I know what you read this summer

Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight saga, Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games series, the Percy Jackson books by Rick Riordan: the names trip easily off their tongues. But ask them about Young Adult (YA) books written by Indian authors that rolled off the presses this past summer and you hear a studied silence.

“I generally don’t read books by Indian authors,” says Kinnisha Michellin Andrew, a third-year student of Mount Carmel college.

Andrew, a voracious reader, gets most of her recommendations for books from her college peer group or from social networks for bookworms (Shelfari, Goodreads). She is currently reading the latest in the Hunger Games series (Mockingjay) and Name of the Wind, the first book in yet another fantasy series The Kingkiller Chronicle by Patrick Rothfuss.

The hyper-success of Twilight was supposed to draw all these young readers into bookstores and into exploring the burgeoning YA literature from India. This past summer, a large number of young Indian writers have published their books; among them are Samit Basu with his Terror on the Titanic: A Morningstar Agency Adventure, star blogger Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan with The Confessions of a Listmaniac, Vodafone-Crossword book award winner Siddhartha Sarma with The Grasshopper’s Run (all three published by Scholastic India), Giti Chandra with The Fang of Summoning (Hachette India) and Tushar Raheja with Run Romi Run (Roli).

Full report here DNA