Broke Bibliophiles Bangalore Bulletin #17

Silent book reading session #1 Notes!

This happened at Bangalore International Center yesterday, the 6th of Jul 2024

A very good friend of mine, Vinayak has been running a couple of silent book reading sessions at Bangalore International Center - the last two have been about Graphic Novels and Travel reading. After the last one, he put me in touch with the folks at BIC and because I already run BBB, he asked me if I would be interested to run a silent book reading session at BIC as well. I thought about what topic I would be most inclined to run a meetup about and while High Fantasy was almost picked, I edged towards Crime Fiction and that’s how today’s session happened!

I went through my entire crime fiction collection (playing fast and loose with the term “collection” here since it’s 85% just Agatha Christies) and picked up around 30-35 books that I would take to BIC for attendees to pick up and read at the event. Then I filled up two bags and lugged it to the venue where Nazneen and Sunaina from BIC had already organized the room for folks to come. We arranged the books I’d brought in, the books that BIC had picked out from their library, chatted for about an hour and picked up our respective books to read and slowly the attendees started trickling in.

At its peak, I think we had around 28 people show up, which is a decent number for a Saturday morning event :)

After 1.5 hours of reading (I was reading a book called Dakaro - not really crime fiction but a crime is committed somewhere in the story) , we all gathered around and spoke about the books we had picked up.

The brief discussion done, we dispersed for the day :) I’d like to again thank Bangalore International Center, Advaita for setting it up and Nazneen and Sunaina for being on the scene for the day :)

I was very happy with how the event turned out, the discussions we had after and how everyone wanted to know more about book clubs in the city! I’ve created a list of those at the bottom of this edition.

Here’s the list of books we discussed along with the name of the person who mentioned it.

1. Acts of God - Kanan Gill (Discussed by Sunaina)
2. Salvation of a Saint - Archana (Discussed by Archana)
3. Appointment with Death - Vishwanath (Discussed by Vishwanath)
4. Chronicle of a Death Foretold - Gabriel García Márquez (Discussed by Vinod)
5. Hold on to Your Kids - Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté (Discussed by Vinod)
6. Evil under the Sun - Agatha Christie (Discussed by Neeraja)
7. Granta - Glasgow victim, Black Sheep (Discussed by Subhash)
8. Lady Killer - Masaki Togawa (Discussed by Anurag)
9. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky (Discussed by Janani)
10. Ruskin Bond stories (Discussed by Janani)
11. The Labours of Hercules - Agatha Christie (Discussed by Anuva)
12. The Ivy Tree - Mary Stewart (Discussed by Anjali)
13. The Secret History - Donna Tartt (Discussed by Tamara)
14. The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle - Stuart Turton (Discussed by Akanksha)
15. The Master Key - Masako Togawa (Discussed by Ritu)
16. The Mussoorie Murders - Ruskin Bond (Discussed by Sanskriti)
17. Poirot Investigates - Agatha Christie (Discussed by Vinayak)
18. The Motorcycle Diaries - Ernesto 'Che' Guevara (Discussed by Kodandaram)
19. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - Agatha Christie (Discussed by Kodandaram)
20. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky (Discussed by Kodandaram)
21. Star Trek TNG (The Mask) (Discussed by Nihaal)
22. The Shadow of the Torturer - Gene Wolfe (Discussed by Shanti)
23. Butter - Asako Yuzuki (Discussed by Bharath)
24. Darako - (Discussed by Abhiram)

Here are a few pics from the event!

To know about the date for the next meetup, tell your friends about this newsletter and if you’ve not subscribed yourself, do so now!

---

That brings us to the end of Edition#17 of the Broke Bibliophiles Bangalore Bulletin. If you have any comments, let me know here or at brokebibliophilesbangalore@gmail.com .

---

If you want to know more about the different bookclubs in Bangalore, you might want to check out this article 👇