A Chai with Priya - Making the impossible possible 

I have been set out with the impossible task of choosing my top three books ever for a new challenge set out by my book club.  

The idea is that each member presents three of their favourite books of all time and members vote to select a book from that list for that month.  

The member also hosts the book club’s discussion and puts forward questions relating to the book in question.  

When it was first suggested, I was overjoyed with this new theme. I started thinking of what to read next and began making my list.  

My first issue was that I kept thinking of books I wanted to read rather than books I have already read.  

Secondly, I started worrying about my choices. Will the book club members enjoy the books I suggest? I read many of these books many years ago, are they still relevant and will I still enjoy them myself?  Will my book choices be too strange?  

It feels too personal to put forward my top three books and there’s an element of vulnerability to it.  

Any book rejected will feel like I am being rejected and I am not ready to deal with that. 

Also, should I go with a theme, or should I just choose which books I feel are the most important or do I just play a game of Eeny Meeny Miney Moe to select which books to put forward.  

I have shortlisted 25 books, and I need to whittle it down to just three.  

My reading choices are quite varied and I would like to think I have an eclectic taste in books.  

The genres are quite varied; the shortlist includes everything from classics, to magical realism, sci-fi and contemporary literature, and features authors of all backgrounds and different countries.  

I have included the list below as it stands right now. I am sure that, until I put forward this list to my book club, it will be ever-changing. 

For now, I have some beloved classics such as Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë.  

I went through a phase of South American literature and had to include Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende and Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  

When it comes to magical realism, I would also include The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon in this and also Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier.  

I love Indian literature and books written by South Asian authors, so I had to include Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance and Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal is a contemporary novel based in London which explores the themes of liberation and empowering women of all ages.  

My list of South Asian authors had to include Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake.  

We live in very worrying times at the moment, where it feels like society has lost all empathy and compassion for its members.  

I had to include The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and The Hunger Games (all three in the original trilogy) by Suzanne Collins.  

I also had to include I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro for my sci-fi, dystopian choices. 

I love an unreliable narrator, and when a book gets dark and you hate all the characters and at some point you feel like throwing your book or Kindle at the wall, hence why I included Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn and The Secret History by Donna Tartt.  

Then there are modern-day classics that I have read and grown to love. I’m in awe of some of these authors and the genius they have poured into these books.  

These are books that I will recommend to anyone at the drop of a hat, encouraging anyone and everyone to read them whenever they can.  

These include Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, The Book Thief by Markus Suzak, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, Normal People by Sally Rooney and The Virgin Suicides by Jeffery Eugenides.  

There are also so many books I have fallen in love with that we’ve read through book club, which I would never have picked up otherwise such as The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese, The Vegetarian by Han Kang or Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbag or Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt.  

I am grateful for those few hours a month where I get to discuss, debate and sometimes even argue over books, plots and themes.  

It is pretty amazing to share this experience with some of the smartest women I now call friends.  

But, until it’s my turn to suggest my favourite books, I will continue going through my list and try to compress it to just three.