Road to Mussoorie

I was listening to a podcast recently–Art Of Reading, and at one point, when the host said that reading should give you joy, this is the book I thought of instantly.

Ruskin Bond lives a life a lot of people dream about or at least romanticize. He has a cozy cottage in the hills, is somewhat of a loner, finds joy in small and mundane things, and writes lovely short novels and memoirs. And so this one is no different, a collection of droll recollections over the course of his life, written in a humorous manner. Every other chapter had me pulling out my phone and searching for the modern-day remains of a school he mentioned, a movie theater he used to frequent in Delhi, his house on Janpath, etc. There’s something I find oddly charming when a writer talks about a place where you live or have visited. Some of the anecdotes were downright scary, but how he puts a humorous twist on even the most haunted stories is nothing short of magic. I was often laughing loudly at the end of a chapter that began rather glum. Beautiful, short little read.