Editor’s note: We feature the brilliant recommendations of our partner, the Champaca Bookstore, in the Read section twice a month. FYI: Champaca is an independent women-run and founded bookstore and children's library in Bangalore.
Champaca’s Book of the Month
Love Letters: Vita and Virginia
Since June 2022, we have been reading and curating books around the theme of Loneliness and Connection in the Champaca Book Subscription. In our final month of this theme, we’re reading ‘Love Letters’—a compilation of the correspondence between Virginia Woolf and her lover Vita Sackville-West. Apart from the letters they exchanged, the book also has snippets of their diary entries and a few letters that Vita wrote to her husband Harold.
The two women first met in late 1922 when Vita was thirty and Virginia, forty. Their letters start off as polite correspondence but with a visible hint of flirtation. By the mid-1920s, they were writing to each other frequently. The relationship, as revealed in the letters and diary entries, is intriguing. The women are clearly writing to each other as lovers — their words are rife with desire, concern, and even jealousy. Vita and Virginia’s relationship is famously known to have inspired ‘Orlando’, Woolf’s most successful novel. But they are also both married women with no intention of leaving their husbands. On many occasions, Vita even discusses her feelings for Virginia with her husband.
Introduced by Alison Bechdel, this collection invites us into the passionate, complicated love story of two women who were witnesses to each other’s success, loneliness, marriages and illness. Through their letters, we allow ourselves to imagine ways of falling (and staying) in love, and seeking connections that fall outside societal norms and institutions.
Join the Champaca Book Subscription and read ‘Love Letters: Vita and Virginia’ with us in June!
A fine collection from our shelves
Are you reading with us in the Champaca Reading Challenge? We’ve put together a list of prompts designed to help us, and you read widely and more diversely. This month, we’re reading books about food! Books about food combine two of our favourite activities at Champaca, trying and tasting sumptuous food and of course reading, and sometimes doing both at the same time! Read on for our recommendations.
Travels Through South Indian Kitchens: This is Japanese designer and architect Nao Saito's personal journey. He explored many South Indian kitchens and looks at them beyond domestic spaces where food is made and more as a distinct way of living and relating to the world. Filled with recipes, illustrations and personal insights, ‘Travels Through South Indian Kitchens’ is a visual delight.
Mother Tongue: Flavours of a Second Generation: This delicious, culinary self-expression is an ode to Gurdeep Loyal’s dual British-Indian identity—an amalgamation of authentic Punjabi home recipes and global cuisine. Packed with more than 100 recipes, ‘Mother Tongue’ is an inspiration to all second-generation home cooks.
Coconut: How The Shy Fruit Shaped The World: Did you know that coconuts have been around as long as Homo Sapiens? They have been part of rituals, art, first World War gas masks, aided bombmakers, silversmiths, smugglers and even saved the life of the 35th President of the United States. Going beyond the oils, nourishment and symbols of prosperity, Robin Lawrence’s ‘Coconut: How the Shy Fruit Shaped The World’ takes a deep dive into this multi-faced nut and the surprising, unexpected ways in which it has helped civilization.
Life at Champaca
The summer has been scorching, but Champaca has been a sanctuary, literally and figuratively for all of us. We got the opportunity to do various things—delved into India’s Partition last month with a curated collection, storytelling and film screening, and conducted a nature walk for children at Cubbon Park. If you’re in Bangalore, we invite you to come to our lush, leafy store, attend events and browse through our shelves with cold tender coconut water.
And as always, you can find us, our book recommendations, and keep up with our upcoming events, on our website, Instagram, and Twitter!
