Ten books for a long train journey
Bengaluru to Delhi is thirty-four hours. Here is what we would pack, in the order we would read it.
A long train is the last place left where nobody expects you to answer an email. We asked the counter what they would pack for the Karnataka Express, and argued about it for a week.
Start light
Platform Number Four by Rehan Qureshi is the obvious opener: short poems about stations, read one per stop.
Settle into something big
By Nagpur you want a novel you can disappear into. The House of Many Doors is six hundred pages of one family and one house, and it is never slow.
Something to argue about
Small Things We Kept, Kabir Sethi's essays about the objects families refuse to throw away, will start a conversation with whoever is on the berth opposite.
The classic
Great Expectations. Dickens wrote for people with time, and on a train you finally have it.
The rest of the list is on the shelf by the door, with a card that says Karnataka Express.
