Bookwatch: Aditi Maheshwari Goyal shares her favourite reads

Aditi is the director for copyrights and translation department at Vani Prakashan. It is a New Delhi-based publication house which boasts of writers with prestigious awards such as the Sahitya Akademi Award. 

These are the five picks from her:

1. Arthashastra by Kautilya: An all-time masterpiece by Kautilya, this book offers an insight into the social construct of an economy. The epistemology used for defining certain key concepts like culture, society,  kinship, business and family are relevant even today and inform some high profile researchers.  

2. Sri Bhagwat Gita: My all-time go-to book for seeking answers and solutions to everyday life problems and larger conceptual questions. The Gita has never failed me.

3. Cobalt Blue by Sachin Kundalkar and Jerry Pinto: A story between three characters, two of whom are siblings and fall in love with the same boy, their tenant in Pune. A very modern narrative style of love and its loss. A translation masterpiece by Jerry Pinto, who makes it a beautiful book of love without any prototypes or prejudices of queer, gay or alternative sexuality literature. I have gifted about half a dozen copies of the book to my friends.

4. Hindi Mein Hum by Abhay Kumar Dubey: The book is an interesting narrative of linguistic engineering in Hindi syntax vis-a-vis the Hindi public sphere. Abhay Kumar Dubey is my favourite author for non-fiction in Hindi, and I usually keep two copies of his book on my shelf as if often gets borrowed and never returned.

5. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi: A pathbreaking graphic narrative based on the author's life from childhood in Iran to adulthood in Europe. A classic bildungsroman, this book made me realise that visual reading is the next big thing in publishing. Will be publishing its Hindi translation this year, what a high!