Books

Olivier Lafont, the French actor who played Suhas Tandon in 3 Idiots, launched his epic fantasy novel Warrior with Penguin India in late 2014.

A 2014 conversation with Koral Dasgupta, author of Power of a Common Man — on Shah Rukh Khan’s marketing genius, her research with 2,000 fans, and writing

Koral Dasgupta's Power of a Common Man uses Shah Rukh Khan as a case study in branding and consumer behaviour — an academic, Westland-published look at

The 'Chai, Chat with Books' club reviews Gone Girl: Gillian Flynn's devilish thriller of a marriage gone bad, deceit, and two narrators you can't trust.

Part 3 of a three-part interview with Amish Tripathi: the Upanishads, his favorite books, why Shiva, and the future after the Shiva trilogy.

Our Naperville book club took on Paula McLain's 'The Paris Wife' — Hemingway's first marriage, the burden of genius, and whether Hadley's voice should have

India's women crime writers — Kalpana Swaminathan, Madhulika Liddle, Swati Kaushal — on plotting murders, female detectives, and gender myths in fiction.

A Naperville book club takes on Aravind Adiga's Booker-winning 'The White Tiger' — and splits three ways over its brutal portrait of class and caste.

Naperville's 'Chai, Chat with Books' club brings eight women together over chai and chaat to talk books. A diary note on why book clubs endure.

This book column looks at Lawrence Anthony's The Elephant Whisperer: a rogue elephant herd, a Zululand reserve, and a bond that crossed species.

Chai, Chat With Books is a small suburban book club of eight women who share a love of reading over tea, chaat, and lively conversation.

The 2012 Summer Writing Program in Naperville wraps up on July 26 — with the possibility of year-round lessons, and student work to be published.

Snigdha Nandipati's 2012 Scripps win on 'guetapens' made five straight Indian-American champions — and turned the spelling bee into a study of preparation

A proposal to barcode every human at birth resurfaced in the early 2010s. Privacy, religious, and pragmatic objections killed it — but the anxieties behind

No living writer knows censorship like Salman Rushdie. His decades-long argument: censorship protects the powerful, never the weak — and it has only

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's novels map the interior lives of Indian and immigrant women — and much of their power lies in what her characters leave unsaid.

Bill Gates rendered in panels and speech bubbles — an Indian publisher's illustrated biography made the billionaire's story accessible to young readers.

Brain scans show novels light up more than the language centers — fiction trains empathy, simulates experience, and rewires how we understand others.

An Ohio State study found preschoolers whose teachers pointed out letters and words during storybook reading read better one and two years later.

Dhiraj Kumar's 'The Asocial Networking' examines the gap between the curated selves we post and the people we are in our living rooms.

Guest review of Khushwant Singh's 1956 Partition classic: Mano Majra, the doomed love of Juggut Singh and Nooran, and why this slim novel still haunts.

In 2012 the full Hogwarts castle model — hand-sculpted, 1:24 scale, filmed in every Harry Potter movie — went public at the Warner Bros. Studio Tour.

J.K. Rowling's first adult novel, The Casual Vacancy, was announced in 2012. The trap only a billion-copy author faces: every new book is a referendum.

A reader review of Khorshed Bhavnagri The Laws of the Spirit World, the automatic-writing book born of the tragic 1980 loss of her sons Vispi and Ratoo.

Psychologist James Pennebaker's 2011 book The Secret Life of Pronouns: what twenty years of text analysis reveal about the hidden inner life of tiny words.

Reader review of Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha: an enchanting, emotional journey from 1929 Japan through the postwar years into the world of geishas.

Parental expectations are among the strongest predictors of student achievement — but pressure for perfection backfires.

A poem by Shlok Sharma, then a fifth-grader in Naperville, on the mistakes he made — from punching Justin Bieber to falling into a tributary. Childhood humor.

In 2011, Ohio mother Kelley Williams-Bolar was convicted of felonies for enrolling her daughters in a better school district — one of several such cases.

A 2011 reader's review of 'Along the Way,' a novel of Indian IT professionals' loves, careers, and compromises — from Andhra campuses to American cubicles.

A reader's review of Brian Weiss's Many Lives, Many Masters — the case of Catherine, past-life regression, and why the book eases fear of death.

From the undeciphered Indus script to Brahmi, Devanagari, Tamil, and Bengali — how India's writing systems evolved over four thousand years.

A reader's review of Jean Sasson's 'Princess' — the ghostwritten story of Princess Sultana and the appalling treatment of women in Saudi Arabia.

Arun Shourie's book on raising his son Aditya carries his wife Anita's wisdom: gratitude for an ordinary, boring, eventless day — a caregiver's creed.

A reader's review of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's Palace of Illusions: the Mahabharata retold through Draupadi's fierce, questioning voice.

K.S. Krueger’s debut children’s fantasy — a hidden world of forest Traegons, an ancient prophecy, and an environmental fable done right.

What makes a book on learning how to learn worth reading? Spaced repetition, retrieval practice, and why fluency feels like competence but isn't.

Tim Ferriss's The 4-Hour Body promised rapid fat loss through self-experiment. What the 2010 bestseller got right -- and where to be cautious.

Steve Jobs at 30, weeks after leaving Apple: a candid 1985 Newsweek interview on getting fired, staying unbitter, and why customers cannot invent the future.

Purdue researchers found students who quizzed themselves after reading retained 50 percent more a week later than those who re-read or made concept maps.

The children's books that endure — from Where the Wild Things Are to Matilda — and why the best gift is a grown-up willing to read alongside the child.

Part travelogue, part confession: Gregory David Roberts' 2003 epic follows an escaped Australian convict into the slums and underworld of Bombay.

Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers argues that success owes as much to timing, culture, and 10,000 hours as to talent. A review of the year's most enjoyable read.

NPR's Rob Sachs wrote an irreverent guide to surviving life's daily indignities — clogged toilets, dog poop, and all. A review.

Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters landed November 16, 2010, illustrated by Loren Long — and Obama gave the proceeds to military families' scholarships.

India's informal used-book economy went online in the 2010s. How platforms like Bookoholics collapsed the geography of secondhand reading.