There’s Always Something to Love and Read
Rina Ramdev
WHY DON’T YOU WRITE SOMETHING I MIGHT READ? READING, WRITING & ARRHYTHMIA by Suresh Menon Context-Westland Books, 2021, 275 pp., 699.00
December 2022, volume 46, No 12

Suresh Menon’s collection of essays, Why don’t You Write Something I Might Read? is that rare book that leaps up at first glance with multiple hooks. To begin, is the poignant pull of Westland’s Context logo—from what used to be India’s oldest independent book house, felled for closure earlier this year, after its buyout by Amazon. Westland loyalists and book lovers have since sought out its titles, and Why don’t You Write would now be part of its last lot. The book’s cover strikingly frames Dimpy Menon’s beautiful sculpture, ‘In Thought’—not quite the Rodinesque ‘Thinker’, but feminized, and more enigmatic, poised between the ecstatic and reflective, also totemic and yet different in idiom from her acrobatic, floating, lithe figures. The sub-title, Reading, Writing & Arrhythmia, with its tongue-in-cheek play on that old fashioned parental instruction, also irreverently beckons readers.

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