Lounge Loves: ‘The Mountain in the Sea’, Letters Live and more

A Little Bit of Luxury

After a friend mentioned booking a rental cab for a day to take an ailing family member to multiple medical appointments, I realised the value of this approach and have borrowed their hack for the days I have multiple back-to-back meetings. Long waits and endless traffic make it almost certain that a day with four meetings will require a rain check on at least one. It is costlier, of course: each rental ride feels like paying for an extra trip. But I now view that as the price of avoiding the stress of hunting for a cab, worrying about cancellations, and inevitably showing up late at meetings. That frazzled cascade of delays causes exhaustion that often spills into the next day, derailing more schedules. I now treat cab rentals as a small luxury I gift myself, a way to ensure fewer logistical hassles amid the usual chaos of life in a metro.

—Shephali Bhatt

A Noble Journey

At the age of 10, Omar M. Yaghi went into a library, discovered a book with ball-and-stick illustrations of molecules, and was immediately captivated. Born into a Palestinian family in Jordan, at the time, he was growing up in Amman, sharing a room with a dozen family members, as well as the cattle his barely literate father and illiterate mother reared. Half a century later, his obsession with molecules has won him a Nobel Prize for Chemistry 2025, along with Susuma Kitagawa and Richard Robson. “I set out to build beautiful things and solve intellectual problems,” Yaghi said in an interview. But, along the way, his research became key to solving problems like access to clean drinking water. With tens of thousands of children currently living in refugee camps in Gaza, Yaghi’s story inspires a flicker of hope in these bleak times.

—Somak Ghoshal

What the Future Holds

Human genius lies in our ability to tell stories, and when faced with such a critical time—climate change, AI, unchecked corporate power—it is stories that show the way to possible futures. Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea—set in the near future where pretty much each of the things I mentioned above have come to pass—is one of first contact. How will we react when we finally meet aliens? And what if they’re not from another planet, but one of our neighbours from the animal kingdom, developing consciousness and starting to tell stories of their own? The Mountain in the Sea is a thriller as well as a profound meditation on the nature of consciousness. This is a novel that you just can’t miss.

—Bibek Bhattacharya

Loud Letters

We text so often that we romanticise letters —the materiality, the slowness, the effort—forgetting that paper and ink once spelt communication. Letters Live (Youtube: @letterslive) brings all this to life, with famous people reading letters out to a live audience. It’s not the celebrities who make it special, it’s the words. There’s a guest’s apology for letting a flock of seagulls into his hotel room (Benedict Cumberbatch); an anxious Franz Kafka wondering why Felice Bauer hasn’t replied to his letters (Richard Ayaode); a woman’s response to an unsolicited d*** pic (Olivia Coleman), anger at a speeding ticket (Jude Law), and more letter-videos that express a myriad of human emotions.

— Shalini Umachandran