V5R8: Rohan Joshi
Readathon 2025 Week 8, also featuring Alok V Menon, Salman Rushdie, Virginia Woolf & Vijayendra Mohanty
Dear Reader,
As February winds down, welcome to another edition of our Readathon, delivered on Thursdays, straight to your inbox.
Choose your next read from an eclectic menu of 5 handpicked pieces of writing. Happy reading :)
Read #1 - ‘What makes us laugh’
Take a trip to 2010 and look at stand-up comedy in India through Rohan Joshi’s words in Mint. Keep in mind that Instagram is yet to be born.
Also watch:
A seemingly meaningless coincidence: Rohan aka mojorojo turned 42 this week :P
Follow him for cats and giggles.
Read #2 - ‘Impossible Lives’
A reminder from Alok V Menon that you are an everyday miracle.
Also watch:
Read #3 - ‘Passing by the concert on the roof’
Head back to 1969 with
as he recalls the day he stumbled upon John, Paul, George and Ringo while walking around London.Read #4 - ‘How should one read a book’
Virginia Woolf wrote 99 years ago in The Yale Review:
At this late hour of the world’s history, books are to be found in almost every room of the house—in the nursery, in the drawing room, in the dining room, in the kitchen. But in some houses they have become such a company that they have to be accommodated with a room of their own—a reading room, a library, a study. Let us imagine that we are now in such a room; that it is a sunny room, with windows opening on a garden, so that we can hear the trees rustling, the gardener talking, the donkey braying, the old women gossiping at the pump—and all the ordinary processes of life pursuing the casual irregular way which they have pursued these many hundreds of years. As casually, as persistently, books have been coming together on the shelves. Novels, poems, histories, memoirs, dictionaries, maps, directories; black letter books and brand new books; books in French and Greek and Latin; of all shapes and sizes and values, bought for purposes of research, bought to amuse a railway journey, bought by miscellaneous beings, of one temperament and another, serious and frivolous, men of action and men of letters.
Now, one may well ask oneself, strolling into such a room as this, how am I to read these books?
Read #5 - ‘How to read a story’
A piece from the pen of Vijayendra Mohanty aka Vimoh circa the lockdown of 2020.
Follow his work here
That's all for this week. Till next Thursday, folks. If you enjoyed this edition, consider helping us spread the word :)
Cheers! - N&N
PS. ICYMI - Volume 5 of 42: The Curious Reader's Companion is now ready :D
Existing Readers of 42: We will be mailing you the link to download your digital copy soon. Keep an eye out.
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