New Delhi, Oct. 2 -- Early on in Of Ancestors and Friends: A Life with Books, writer and translator Shanta Gokhale sets the stage by welcoming the reader for a "ramble through my personal Bookland". Like Alice's chaotic adventures in Wonderland, the preamble foretells a whimsical tour of crowded bookshelves, led by Gokhale-sparkling, sagacious, and sharp, but also intensely human in her analysis of the great works of literature across times and geographies. It is a story of one true love, cultivated for its own sake ("we get nothing whatsoever except pleasure from reading," Gokhale quotes Virginia Woolf in the epigraph).

Born to a father who bought books "by the armful" from the now-defunct Strand Book Stall in Mumbai, Gokhale, 87, has a...