What Champaca Reads
Now that we have been in your inbox for the last three months, we would like to introduce ourselves to you with some of our favourite books. At Champaca, we’re a community of readers, and have found that we experience the world differently thanks to the stories we've read and shared. Our small team of curators reads widely—everything from geology to politics to science fiction. Get to know us here through the books we love. Maybe you’ll find something you love too!
‘H is for Hawk’ by Helen Macdonald is part-nature writing, part-memoir, and part-biography. Apart from being a story about how one woman copes with the grief of her father's death by training her own goshawk, it is also a poetic tribute to falconry, and a biography of T.H White, a closeted gay autor in the 1930s, for whom falconry was a lifeline. This book, recommended by Radhika, Champaca’s founder, is a poetic rumination on love, loss, memory, death, and regeneration.
‘Several People are Typing’ by Calvin Kasulke is a satirical WFH comedy about Gerald, an employee at a New York PR firm, who finds his consciousness trapped in his company's Slack channel. Hilarious and painfully relatable in these trying times when we’re all working from home, Nirica, our resident bookseller, writes, “Several People Are Typing might genuinely be my favourite piece of writing about the internet.” Read her review here!
‘A Matter of Rats’ by Amitava Kumar is a short, entertaining exploration of one of India's oldest cities, Patna. Kumar takes us on a fascinating journey through his hometown, examining not only the storied past of the city, but also the harsh reality of living in the capital of one of the country's poorest states. It’s one of our curator Kavya’s favourite books.
Meet the rest of our team here, and find some of the many, many books we love here!
