New Delhi, April 11 -- When I read a book, I all but end up living inside it. The immersion is so thorough that my writing even takes on a little of that book's style. I completely feel the characters I identify with and find I want to know much more than has been written in the book. This isn't true of crime fiction or thrillers, fortunately, but if the book is full of substance, I switch off the world around me and dive in.

So when I recently started to read The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish Nobel laureate, I found myself wanting to stop and find out more about the author, the city of Istanbul, the Bosphorus, and many other things. I started asking Gemini, which soon became my reading companion for this interesting bo...