Bookish.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery. A confection, but philosophical. A tale of a Paris concierge who reads Tolstoy, and a suicidal girl who lives in the building. Worth the read. One review here.

A Case of Exploding Mangoes, by Mohammed Hanif. Kind of like Catch-22, with Under Officer Ali Shigri as Yossarian. The hook of the story is the death of Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq in a 1988 plane crash. Very funny; highly recommended. NYT review here.

The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga. "Let animals live like animals; let humans live like humans. That's my whole philosophy in a sentence." The story of a moral entrepreneur, Balram Halwai, from a poor Indian village, who gets a start as a driver for a rich family in Delhi. Impressive; this won the Booker Prize last year. One interview here, in which the author says of poor Indians, the subjects of the novel: "But also their intelligence impressed me. What rickshaw pullers, especially, reminded me of was black Americans, in the sense that they are witty, acerbic, verbally skilled and utterly without illusions about their rulers." I leave analysis of that observation as an exercise for the reader.