As the mercury rises and the sky gets whiter and flatter and ever so malleable, those of us who live to read find a strange lassitude descend on the soul. On long, hot afternoons, when the walls of neighbouring houses are wrapped in an intense gold glow, with lizards hunting for shade in odd crannies and pigeons sitting dully under eaves, too exhausted to mate, I pad around the house and consider our various piles of books, detachedly, as though they are somebody else’s.

Each rack of every bookshelf feels bloated and excessive. Not one book seems right for the moment. Every title is too loud or too heavy, every sentence too weathered, and every page generates a peculiar heat from the characters moving around or chattering or simply reacting to the setting the writers have willfully abandoned them in. It all leaves you exhausted.

Yet, not reading is not an option.

So, finally, I devised a deeply scientific method involving thermometers, old cotton pyjamas, glasses of rooh afza and masses of meteorological data, and have gathered a list of six books that will be perfect for perusal on summer days in the sub-continent. The first lines from each of these books will display the combination of quirk factor and unhurried pace, two of the chief qualities that endeared these to us in the first place.

6. Travel/Life/Cities/Memory

Watermark: An Essay on Venice, Joseph Brodsky

“Many moons ago the dollar was 870 lire and I was thirty two. The globe, too, was lighter by two billion souls, and the bar at the stazione where I’d arrived on that cold December night was empty. I was standing there waiting for the only person I knew in that city to meet me. She was quite late.”

5. Cosy Sloooooow Mystery/Cats/Smalltowns

The Cat Who Wasn’t There, Lilian Jackson Braun

(While we have specifically picked out this one title, what we really mean by this submission is that any of the thirty odd books in this delightful detective series starring the two Siamese cats, Koko and Yum Yum, and the man they own, former journalist and heir of a generous fortune, Jim Qwilleran, will do.)

“In late August, sixteen residents of Moose County, a remote part of the United States 400 miles north of everywhere, travelled to Scotland for a tour of the Western Isles and Highlands, lochs and moors, castles and crofts, firths and straths, burns and braes, fens and bens and glens. Only fifteen of them returned alive, and the survivors straggled home in various states of shock or confusion.”

4. History/Exile/Powerhouse Prose/Literary fiction

The Emigrants, WG Sebald

“At the end of September 1970, shortly before I took up my position in Norwich, I drove out to Hingham with Clara in search of somewhere to live. For some 25 kilometres the road runs amidst fields and hedgerows, beneath spreading oak trees, past a few scattered hamlets, till at length Hingham appears, its assymetrical gables, church tower and treetops barely rising above the flatland.”

3. Novel-in-Verse/California/the Onegin Stanza/Sahitya Akademi Award

The Golden Gate, Vikram Seth

"1.1
To make a start more swift than weighty,
Hail Muse. Dear Reader, once upon
A time, say, circa 1980,
There lived a man. His name was John.
Successful in his field though only
Twenty-six, respected, lonely,
One evening as he walked across
Golden Gate Park, the ill-judged toss
Of a red frisbee almost brained him.
He thought, 'If I died, who'd be sad?
Who'd weep? Who'd gloat? Who would be glad?
Would anybody?' As it pained him,
He turned from this dispiriting theme
To ruminations less extreme."

2. Humour/Self-Help/Embedded with Chapters With Such Amazing Titles, ‘How to Melt’, ‘How to Clap’, ‘How to be Self-Deprecating’, ‘How to Love’ and ‘How To Be Incompetent’

How to Be Normal – A Guide for the Perplexed, Guy Browning

"Normal people are extremely unusual. Think of all the people you know and ask yourself how many are normal. None of them. In fact, you’re probably the most normal of the lot. Of course, normality is clearly a relative thing. If you have relatives, they are unlikely to be normal.

Normal people wear things that aren’t trendy but neither are they uncool. Only when flared trousers hit the high street will normal people be wearing them. Abnormal people will have worn them willy nilly for the last twenty years.

Normal people don’t have their own taste in anything. They like whatever is good at the moment. Not really good but averagely good. The fashion industry is dedicated to changing what is normal. That is why models and what they wear never look normal."

1. Novel/Love/Rage/Lists/Tenderness/Satire

Varying Degrees of Hopelessness, Lucy Ellman

"The Catafalque
It was not the best place in the world to study Art History. It was not the worst. It did not warrant the superlative degree of comparison. Within its high-ceilinged halls, lurking behind the plaster pillars painted to look like marble, slumped against the shelves of its reportedly estimable library, going up and down in the ancient two-person lift were the usual degrees of wisdom and foolishness, belief and incredulity, light and darkness, hope and despair. It was Dickensian, in short, and just as one tolerates a lot of nonsense in Dickens, a lot of it was tolerated here."

Devapriya Roy is the author of two novels and the co-author, with Saurav Jha, of a book called The Heat and Dust Project: the Broke Couple’s Guide to Bharat.