The year 2011 saw a lot on the writing front but prominent writers such as Aravind Adiga, Tabish Khair and Manu Joseph were also reading a lot.

“I've enjoyed The Essential Tagore, an anthology published by the Harvard University Press, which has selections from Tagore's essays, poems and plays. Novelist Amit Chau­dhuri has written an excellent preface to the book,” says Adiga.

The 2008 Booker prize winner says, “I've also enjoyed reading Girish Karnad's Memoirs. In a series of autobiographical essays, Karnad tells the story of how he absorbed influences from traditional Indian theatre and western literature to develop into a modern Indian playwright. The book is, at present, available only in Kannada, and I hope that the author translates it into English soon.”

Poet-novelist Tabish Khair finds it difficult to choose just three best reads from 2011. “There were excellent novels by Amitav Ghosh, Patrick DeWitt, Anuradha Roy and Rahul Bhattacharya and a brilliant collection of stories by Anita Desai. Also, there was a good translation book of fiction by MS Madhavan, Roberto Bola­no and Banaphool.”

Khair adds, “But if forced, I would pick Julian Barnes' novel, The Sense of An Ending, Terry Eagleton's necessary polemics in Why Marx Was Right, and Charles Taylor's collection of perceptive and lucid philosophical essays in Dilemmas and Connection. Journalist-writer Manu Joseph's top three reads were Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, Death in Mumbai by Meenal Baghel and Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzru while thriller fiction writer Ashwin Sanghi liked The Exclusive Biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, The Emperor Of All Maladies: A Biography Of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee and Lucknow Boy: A Memoir by Vinod Mehta the most.

London-based Indian writer Kishwar Desai, who in January won UK's prestigious Costa First Novel Award 2010 for her book Witness by Night also read a lot of books. But the top three are The Wandering Falcon (Jamil Ahmad), The Rediscovery of India (Meghnad Desai) and My Animal Life (Maggie Gee).

For German author Roswitha Joshi, Dreams from my Father (Barack Obama), Sunset Club (Khushwant Singh) and Calcutta Exile (Bunny Sur-aiya) were the best.

According to Delhi booksellers Bahri Sons, River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh, Empire of the Mughals: Ruler of the World by Alex Rutherford and The Sunset Club were the top three books in the fiction category while in the non-fiction section had Makers of Modern India (Ramachandra Guha), The Emperor of All Maladies and Tinderbox: The Past and Future of Pakistan (M J Akbar).