The UC Berkeley Summer Reading List is an annual compilation of recommended (though not required) readings suggested by Cal faculty, staff, and students as a welcome to incoming freshmen and transfer students.
This week we take a closer look at Love and Longing in Bombay by Vikram Chandra Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1997.
“I love this book as a reader and as a teacher. A series of four thematically linked short stories, the book provides a glimpse into bits of life in India that most of us are not familiar with. But more important, really, than the ‘new worlds’ nature of the book, the themes of how we love or what we want out of love are wonderfully expressed. The writing is often very beautiful and the characters breathe life: a Sikh detective trying to solve a murder; a software engineer trying to fix a bug; and the Bombay ladies-who-lunch and plot against each other, to name a few.
This is my go-to book when I teach the second half of the Reading and Composition Requirement. Vikram Chandra is a professor in our English Department.”
—STEVE TOLLEFSON, Lecturer, College Writing Programs
This post was contributed by Michael Larkin Lecturer, College Writing Programs
Tim Dilworth First Year Coordinator, Library
Jonathan Garrett Site designer, Doe & Moffitt Libraries