Sri Lanka Reading List - part 1 (I hope)

I've been back in the U.S. for a few weeks and it's been great to reconnect with classmates and other friends, and I've been busily twisting arms and encouraging nascent plans to visit Sri Lanka sooner rather than later. Though I love painting word-pictures and treating myself as well as my friends to stories from home, I thought it would be a good idea to start a little list of recommended reading - books that I enjoyed and which have enough connection to Sri Lanka to give people a taste of what's to come. Remembering the books' highlights makes me want to bring forward my return date!

Life having been so busy for the last few years, I haven't been getting through many books, so I recruited my uncle Suren, who also studied in the U.S. (in the 80's) and as a pilot, gets a lot of downtime where he devours books (and yeah, he's the one Malcolm Gladwell mentions in Outliers). Other respected elders, you may be next for a list of books (I'm talking to you, Shaku Akki)

Diya Rakusa's contributions:

• Handbook for the Ceylon Traveller, a Studio Times publication (unfortunately not available in the U.S. last time I checked)
• Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje
• Flower Boy by Karen Roberts
• An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon in the East Indies Together with an Account of the Detaining in Captivity the Author and Divers other Englishmen ... There, and of the Author's Miraculous Escape by Robert Knox (give the guy a break, this was the 18th century)

Suren Ratwatte's contributions

(notes from Suren to Diya Rakusa: "Haven't read the last one yet" and "Not necessarily positive. Don't censor the reading lists!"):

• Reef by Romesh Gunasekera **
• The sweet and simple kind by Yasmine Gooneratne
• The Hamilton Case by Michelle De Kretser *
• A Disobedient Girl by Ru(wani) Freeman

[unpublished from 3.5 months ago] A future more like a past I barely knew

[I was looking another draft when I realized I hadn't published this, started June 19th 2009. Will not edit it further. General idea I had at the time: returning home after some tumultuous times, hoping things can return to something close to what they were]

One week more before we get on a plane back home - back to Sri Lanka. Finally some downtime after the treadmill of Business School; the fire hose is finally down to a trickle.

Hanging out at my aunt's place in Los Altos Hills, lucky to have my parents around too as well as my wife. Finally back to being able to read for pleasure alone. Of course it's a chance to devour some of the modern Sri Lankan literature lying around here, that four years of undergrad, five years of work and two years of business school made it too easy for me to never get around to.

Shyam Selvadurai's editor (Cinnamon Gardens) needs to be fired of course - how could he have let Galle Face Green - and Colombo, by extension - be moved lock stock and barrel to the East Coast, for Annalukshmi to watch the sun rise over the sea?!

I'd started Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family on a rare break at a friend's place in LA (for those who know him, never expected Sajith W. to have literature on his shelves - other than maybe the variety with yellow pages!!) and immediately felt a strange nostalgia for a time before my own, for an ideal, not even a country, that represented some of the best of our enchanted isle.