Reading April 2024

It has been a tough month for reading. Most in the household was laid low with a nasty virus. It took us a few difficult weeks to get back to normal, so the reading was a lot slower. Even though the number seems high, the books were processed quickly.

Articles:

Having listened to him talk, Harsh Mander is a writer I look forward to read, for the kindness and empathy he brings to his topics. Here is one about his visit to Auschwitz and what it means for us now, at this point in time.

This is something I read earlier in the month about the high rates of cancer among the young. It is scary, but also watching the cement every day on my car I wonder how much of it is going into our lungs. But that’s just air. We’ve reached a stage where nothing that goes in – water, food or air is really safe.

Margarent Renkl writes about nests in her backyard as it is spring in the US. The summer is raging here and the birds are noisy around my three bird baths – bulbuls mainly along with white-eyes and the occassional tits, sunbirds, tailorbirds, magpie-robins, cuckoos and jungle mynas. It made for excellent reading around that.

Books

I started the month with Tana French’s “The Likeness”. This is a sequel to her earlier “In the woods” and they’re kinda interrelated, a lot of what is going on here makes sense from the first. French is an author I hope to read more of, and while I was hoping to read one every year, I might up it to one every 6 months. Looking forward to the next already.

Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow’s “All the little bird-hearts” is a story set around a narrator who is on the autism spectrum. She struggles socially and misses a lot of cues. As a narrator she details everything the other people in her life say, including how they say it, letting the readers form their opinions about what is being communicated and what she is missing. It was an interesting read, and the cultural context also meant that I missed a fair lot.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s “The Forest of Enchantments” is a retelling of the Ramayana from Sita’s perspective. While the telling is interesting, like most Indian authors the language is a let down. Americanisms and slang pop up out of nowhere and jarr. I wonder why so many Indian authors have this trouble with language and keeping slang out of where they don’t belong.

K.R. Meera’s “Qabar”, translated by Nisha Susan is a short novella about a land dispute and a qabar and viewing of our society through that lens, all the way till the Babri Masjid. The question she asks is about who’s history is who’s, when everything is so intertwined.

I’m currently rereading Shashi Deshpande’s “That Long Silence”. It is a short book, and I expected it to be a quick read given that it was a reread, but it is one of those books that makes you stop, slow down and proceed at its own pace, no matter how many times you read. That’s one thing I keep underestimating about Deshpande!

Reading February 2024

Articles:

This has been a month of somewhat odd reading.

Margarent Renkl writes about squirreling things away and finding them decades later. There is also the feeling of growing up and old in the same neighbourhood. While there is the joy of the memories over the decades of bringing up a family, there is also the sense of loss as neighbours die, their old houses are torn down to “make way for the new”.

Derek Thompson writes in the Atlantic about the breakdown in direct social contacts. Fewer people have close friends than before, fewer people hang out. He traces this phenomenon to two things – how our cities are growing with people living farther and farther away from their friends and extended family, and the rise of social media and online content – more time watching Netflix and Instagram reels means less time to hang out or even play.

Gana Kedlaya writes about the language that is used when reporting on man-animal conflicts and how that makes all the difference in how we drive perception. Gana has been reporting on man-elephant conflicts for many years now and is an essential voice to follow to understand the nuances of a very complex issue.

Books:

I started the month with Margarent Renkl’s excellent “The Comfort of Crows”. The book is a week-by-week chronicling of a year observed in her surroundings – her backyard and her surroundings. The chronicling is about the changes that are seen in terms of birds, insects, plants and trees. While the author cheats and some times veers to her past with a tinge of nostalgia, it is usually a welcome take. After all, even as we observe a summer now, we cannot but remember a summer past.

I had to pick up a library book after this, and it was P.D. James’ “The Lighthouse”. Loosely based on Agatha Christie’s “And then there were none”, it is a murder mystery set on an island where everyone is isolated without signal (this is a modern day mystery). Adam Dalgliesh is now a top-hat in the department and is assisted by two other detectives.

Arundhati Roy’s “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness” is her second novel after “The God of Small Things”. While expectations were high when the former was announced, it was mostly led down by comparisons to the latter. The book isn’t as great as her first one, but it wasn’t as bad as it is made out to be. There is more tell than show, which can grate at times, but it is still a necessary novel. In fact, there are two different threads in the book, each of which can make a novel by itself.

Sujatha Gidla made the news a decade back when her book “Ants among Elephants” was published. She was invited to a literary festival where she called out a lot of practices for being too religious and having no place there. Needless to say, it generated a lot of controversy. The book itself is a memoir of her family, her mother and uncle and their struggles. Her uncle was one of the founders of the People’s War Group which became the Maoist/naxal movement in India. These are necessary stories that need to be told, and its good that she chronicled it.

Books List from 2023

I finished the year with 42 books, of which 2 were barely 50-60 pages. But then some of them were absolute tomes, so I can’t nitpick. A book is a book is a book.

Anyway, moving on to the list in usual grouping.

Kannada Books

1. ತೇಜೋ ತುಂಗಭದ್ರಾ (Tejo Tungabhadra) – Vasudhendra. A Magnum Opus set in 16th century Lisbon, Vijayanagara and Goa, it tells the story of normal people who are caught in the throes of the politics of the day.
2. ಮುನಿಸಾಮಿ ಮತ್ತು ಮಾಗಡಿ ಚಿರತೆ (Munisamy Mathu Magadi Chirate)- Poornachandra Tejaswi. A lovely set of shorts which is a translation from English of Kenneth Anderson’s tales set around Bangalore of yore.

2023- A Year in Books

When I look back at the year and what I read, it feels like a blur, similar to how 2022 felt. Books that I read earlier in the year feel like they were read last year, and am surprised to find that a book I read last year feels like I read recently. But that has been the nature of the years, events getting mixed up, some recent memories vague, and those from the last year more vivid.

But I remember starting the year with Vasudhendra’s “ತೇಜೋ-ತುಂಗಭದ್ರಾ”, an opus stretching across two continents and decades. It is a historical novel set in Lisbon and a small town on the banks of the Tungabhadra near Hampi. About the persecution of Jews in Catholic Portugal and Spain and the events taking place in Southern India at the very start of colonisation. Given the turn things have taken the past few months, it is an important book about how ordinary people are affected by the whims and shenanigans of those in power.

The Life and Times of Thomas Cromwell

He sands his paper. Puts down his pen. I believe, but I do not believe enough. I said to Lambert, my prayers are with you, but in the end I only prayed for myself, that I might not suffer the same death.

Thomas Cromwell lives his whole life looking to get ahead. Every day he is alive is a day to look for opportunities to rise up the ladder. And rise up, he does, being second only to the King in terms of power.

He is made Earl in May 1540. In a month, he is in prison, knowing that he will be executed, only the manner of his execution in question. The king shows him mercy, allowing him to die by the axe, than burn.

Through all this there is the question of his faith. What does he believe in? He keeps his beliefs close to his chest, where he also keeps a knife; I believe what the king believes. Mantel keeps those cards close to her chest too, showing you only glimpses into that part of his life, and that part of his mind. He doesn’t claim to be Lutheran, which is heretic enough to get him his death; he clearly isn’t Catholic, wanting to align with the Pope. He treads a thin line, getting the bible printed in English, but not going out of his way to rescue William Tyndale who does the translation and is served death in continental Europe for the crime. In his own words, he believes, but not enough to go the whole way to rid his religion of its shackles, preferring to rid his churches of its papal influence – that’s where the money is, and that’s what keeps him close to the king.

Those are heady times, made all the more heady by the presence of Thomas Cromwell. How much of an influence was he to where we are now? What role did his time play in British Imperialism? Maybe not much. To the shape of religion as it exists, today? Probably a lot! And that might be his biggest legacy, at least by how much I know.

Our law of treason in capacious. It encompasses words and bad intentions. We let More bring himself down that way, we let the Boleyns do it. Is a man a victim, who walks into a knife? Are you innocent, if you set up the damage for yourself?

Eventually he falls on the same knife that he uses on others – words uttered at unguarded moments, words said in jest, letters written to parties no longer favourable, turned on him by those he trusted. “Christ entertained Judas. Not that I force the comparison” he says when he learns who betrayed him – he had known it all along, trying to use the same person to bring down his archenemy only to find it worked the other way.

Religion is a deadly weapon in the hands of those who rule. And we see this even today, how it can be weaponised to decide who is with you, and who is your enemy. Silly labels carry their own weight – a papist or a Lutheran would mean death. In the modern day, being called secular or an urban naxal comes with its weight, of being on watchlists, knowing there could be a knock on your door at the wrong time.

Power and its trappings come with their capriciousness. An uneasy king, always worried about who is plotting against him, listening to the whims of those in favour, ritual executions every few months. In the modern day, uneasy autocrats, constantly worried about electoral results, but always plotting to bring down their opponents – both within and without. Only the executions have changed.

I wonder what a modern day Cromwell would look like in the age of democracy where technically anyone can come to power from anywhere. But then, such a person wouldn’t be in the forefront, working his whims from the background. For Cromwell it was the coin that was the leverage, how to make more of it.

No ruler in the history of the world has ever been able to afford a war. They’re not affordable things. No prince ever says, ‘This is my budget, so this is the kind of war I can have.’

I wonder about the courage to work his way up to be no. 2 after the King, especially when his career looked done with the death of Wolsey. Mantel’s trilogy is about what kind of person Cromwell could have been to “arrange his face” and show up to work, to do what he can to make more money for himself, for the king and for England.

Along the way, he shows kindness, convinces the king’s daughter away from sure death, gets Anne Boleyn an expensive executor so that she won’t feel pain – after building up a case for her death, saves the king’s niece from her death for falling in love with someone – royal daughters and nieces, even sons and nephews are for leverage with other kings, not to marry whom they please. Oddly the only person who bends this is the king himself, first lusting after Boleyn, then Jane Seymour and later Katherine Howard. I wonder how lonely it would have been to be a king. It is only hinted at, but strongly.

The reason for Cromwell’s death remains vague. He only guesses, about how the ground shifted under his feet without his knowledge, but the books are all from his perspective. He is in every room the scenes unfold even though it is written in third person. He guesses the King of France wanted him as price for a deal, that Gardiner and Norfolk talked the king into it. But then, at one point he almost threatens the king who wants to end his third marriage – a child bored of his new toy. But the ground shifts suddenly, too suddenly for him to do much. You also realise he’s grown too big and as he himself says – no prince likes to have an obligation to someone.

Rafe shrugs. ‘He is frightened of you, sir. You have outgrown him. You have gone beyond what any servant or subject should be.’ It is the cardinal over again, he thinks. Wolsey was broken not for his failures, but for his successes; not for any error, but for grievances stored up, about how great he had become.

In May he’s made Earl, in June arrested and by end of July he’s dead – executed without a trial, but by an act. The exact process he instituted to execute the Boleyns, and the noble families with claim to the throne.

Things change in politics, and towards the end he ends up not being able to read the way the winds are changing. Such is the capriciousness of politics and the times he was living in that the price you pay is your life. And the process is what you set up.

Books List from 2022

Another year gone, 2022 just flashed by. I barely got much time to think or plan what to read. Most of my reading was reactive to what was already there in the bookshelf. Not saying that they were not actively chosen and purchased by me, but that they represented choices from a not too distant past and I was only responding to that.

Anyway, I still managed 42 books, and as I mentioned in an earlier post, one month went with just one book or I could have had more. But then it was also a month where my weekends were busy so can’t really complain. Anyway, the number of pages I read each year is a slightly better parameter of amount of reading than number of books itself, and I finished at a touch over 12500 pages, which is just over 1000 pages a month. If I have to look deeper, non-fiction books bloat this number as the references and notes add up a fair bit. And this year, the NF count was pretty less compared to other years. Such it goes.

Anyway, here is Anush’s list. My list follows.

2022 – A year in books.

Like past years, I managed to get past the 40 mark again, but closed the year with 42 books. With 10 days left in the year, I started off on the book that will close only in early/mid Jan of 2023. Like the past few years, I managed to keep at least 50% of the books read as those by women – this year 22 of the 42 were by women.

2022 has been one of the quickest years in memory, and the books read seem both farther in time when I try to remember them and closer once I remember them. It feels like a lot has happened between the time a book was read and now, and at the same time the book springs out afresh as if it was read very recently. It also reminds me of the events in my life around that time frame, and the same feeling of fast-flowing time manifests there also. It is not a pleasant feeling, to be honest.

Given how quickly the year passed, I did not have much time to take stock and figure out my reading ahead of time. The to-be-read pile was big, and kept growing with time even though I did not visit any bookstores to buy books to read. A few accounts in Instagram, some gifts, some procured last year and, crucially, visits to the library kept me going through the year. I just realized that 9 of the 42 books this year were from the library. This is a good rate to have and I intend to continue this.

One more year of reading

As the year draws to a close it is again time to cud-chew on the year gone by in terms of books. The year started badly, laid low with back issues, health issues for the parent, and the passing of a dear uncle. There were days when I tried to eat breakfast and found it difficult to process any taste and only the lime pickle sent out its pulippu. But the books were there. I remember working through Merlin Sheldrake’s “Enchanted Life” about fungi and their beautiful world and not being able to make sense of it. The words were words, but they refused to coalesce into meaningful sentences. The worst days were spent reading Anuradha Roy’s “An atlas of impossible longings”. It took a long time to finish, and the book is now permanently associated with some of the hardest days I’ve endured in years.

As things slowly picked up, with lots of gratitude to friends and family, the reading picked up, but it stayed difficult. The days plodded along with work as a source of distraction. They were days lived one weekend at a time, slowly pulling my horizons closer again.

During this time Shubhangi Swarup’s “Latitudes of Longing” was a welcome reread. Higashino and McCall-Smith were the go-to authors to get through the days. It was only in April I ventured back to serious reading with M Rajshekar’s “Despite the State” which looks at the dysfunction across the country in the way administrations are run.

Neha Sinha’s “Wild and Wilful” followed despite my worries about another depressing read. I was surprised to find it very matter-of-fact about 12 different species, how they are faring and what can be done. If anything, it was a call for empathy, rather than trying to pull out the tears.

The year picked up slowly at the personal level, but April and May were also the worst months in terms of the pandemic second wave, and it brought along a lot of fear of how things were going. The only hope was that I had gotten both the parents vaccinated.

I was good enough to revisit Jerry Pinto’s “Em and the Big Hoom”, and Marie Elisabeth Herberstein’s “Spider Behavior” was an interesting intro to how spiders work. It was fascinating to go into detail about creatures that I’ve only been looking at from the taxonomic perspective – see spider, take pics, find out name, that was it.

I had put off reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “Braiding Sweetgrass” and finally got around it. The only thing I regretted was finishing it. It was a beautiful look into living a slow life, co-existing with plants and trees, and foraging. A life lived in gratitude with nature knowing what all it provides.

For the next re-read I picked up Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude”. I read this at a particularly stressful time at work and it helped a lot.

As I quit my job, I picked up Barry Lopez’s “Horizons”, a book with a large sweep, looking at his travels and his experiences from different parts of the world. Reading Barry is about slowing down, trying to process every sentence and letting it sink in. He doesn’t make it easy, raising important questions about life, how to live, what is important, where we are, and where do we go from here. The biggest challenge of our lives would be to find meaning, when it is easier and enticing to consume and fill our lives with stuff instead. I hope to read more of him, but given the small number of books he’s written, I might have to keep revisiting him often.

“Charlotte’s Web” by EB White was a favourite this year. So much of our reading as kids, at least us kids of the 80s, we owe to Enid Blyton and Amar Chitra Katha that I do envy the kids growing up later, who had more access to authors like White, Seuss or Dahl. It is such a travesty that many grow up with Chota Bheem instead.

I renewed my acquaintance with the IIWC(Indian Institute of Wold Culture) library now that I have more time in my hands. Probably the biggest draw would be the Dosés, vadés and kharabhaths of Basavanagudi. I started the library borrowings with K.R. Meera’s Hangwoman, one of the best books of the year. A woman in charge of hanging and the world going crazy about it around her. And then there’s the history of executioners, a family stretching back to the 3rd century BC as they claim. An execution is supposed to be about the executed and the one who orders it. Meera turns the eye towards the hangman/hangwoman and tells their story, and that of the world from their perspective.

Speaking of perspective, David Graeber and David Waingrow’s “The dawn of everything” turned out to be an excellent book on human history. It is largely a critique on existing study of pre-history, and takes a lot of fun lampooning the Hararis, the Diamonds and the Pinkers (I loved that part). Most of the history we study as students is a chronological parade of kings and their dynasties. We barely look below them to see the people who lived under their rules and how they lived, how they chose. Graeber/Waingrow turn our eyes towards the common folks and show how they had a conscious choice in who ruled them, and what kind of rule they wanted to live under. A lot of this freedom was to do with being able to turn their backs and move away if they didn’t like a particular rule/way of life. That freedom has been lost to us. Hate Modi? Where can you go unless you are privileged enough to get a one-way visa to, say, New Zealand?

John Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charley” is an excellent travelogue of Steinbeck doing a trip around the US with his dog. It was interesting to read about a country on the verge of polarisation with the stage set for the most acrimonious election of that time – Kennedy vs Nixon. So much of what we see now around the world can be traced back to those years.

As the year draws to a close, I hope to finish with Hilary Mantel’s “Bring up the bodies”. “Wolf Hall” left the Tudors and Cromwell at an interesting juncture. Can’t wait to plow ahead.

And that’s it. Another year gone, another set of books done. Unlike a binge-watch on Netflix, which leaves you with a void wondering what next, with books there is always an assembly line and more authors waiting to be read. Sachin has put Wendell Berry on my radar, and sounds like this might be my next big author discovery. A short story collection by Ambai has made me want to check out more of her work. Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste” is sitting on my bookshelf staring down at me.

A new year, and a new set of books beckons!

Books list from 2020

As I mentioned earlier, this was a year of tomes. Even though I finished with fewer books than in 2019, I ended up spending time on more pages than every before. The average book length was close to 350 pages as against 300 the previous year.

This was also where I picked books a lot more consciously and ensured at least 50% were written by women. Without much ado, the books list:

The year of elephants

I remember the evening when I dropped into Goobe’s on Church Street. I don’t really remember what took me into the store, but I was there. I was probably looking for a specific book. Which one, I don’t remember. Maybe Schaller’s ‘Deer and the Tiger’. A cursory glance on the first shelf picked out a book for me “Elephant Days and Nights”, by Raman Sukumar. Now, Sukumar is one of the foremost authorities on Asian elephants, having spent a lifetime studying them. This would be good to read.

What followed was an immersive experience into the regions of Punjanur, Hasanur, Sathyamangalam, and most interestingly for me, Kyatadevaragudi (K-Gudi). 10 years of studying the elephants there, understanding their clans, their movements, the males, depredations on crops, poaching, and towards the very end, Veerappan. It was magic, and it was also tragic. This led me to Cynthia Moss’ study of African Elephants over 10 years, following the families of Teresia, Slit Ear, Torn Ear, etc over 10 years across the dusty plains of Amboseli. A study of how elephant populations grow, decline with the seasons, the pressures in the form of poaching. Again, magical.

I learnt more about elephants this year than any. But then, when I look back at the books read this year, it has been a lot more wildlife than other years. When my cousin brought books that I had ordered from the US, my nephew took a look at each book and had only this to say “All animals!” Of the 24 non-fiction books this year, 13 were on wildlife, and most of the rest having to do with nature in one way or the other. And I am not complaining. In fact, there’s more on the bookshelf waiting to be read.

When it comes to talking about nature itself, one book that I find difficult to slot is Timothy Wise’s “Eating Tomorrow: Agribusiness, family farmers, and the battle for the future of food”. The topic itself is pretty dry. Wise travels to different parts of the world, from Malawi to Ohio, Mexico and to India, looking at food, how it is grown in the modern age, and how it is affecting those who are growing it. Has the embracing of modern practices like fertilizers and pesticides worked out for the best for the farmers? Has it ensured more food on the poors’ plates? The jury has been in for a while, and farmers are increasingly turning towards organic farming, even if the yields tend to be lower. If anything, it offers them food that they can eat, and it doesn’t push them into debt traps with high input costs that they seldom recover no matter what the yields.

On the topic of organic farming was also Meera Subramaniam’s “Elemental India: The natural world in crisis”, which looks at the five elements – earth (soil and farming in India), air (vultures and their precipitous decline), water (water conservation in Rajasthan), fire (the future of cooking), and ether (where she looks at what it means to be a woman in India). It was a surprisingly positive book given how bad things are getting to be.  On goodreads, there are only 3 reviews of the book, one by me, and the other by T.R. Shankar Raman whose “The Wild Heart of India” was a favourite read this year. The book is a collection of essays written by him from and about different parts of the country, with a lot of them from where he lives, in the Anamalai hills of Valparai. A love of books, nature, and life comes through when reading the book. Definitely something to revisit over the years.

Speaking of revisiting, I reread Elizabeth Kolbert’s “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History”. It was as haunting as it was when I first read it, talking of the chytrid fungus wiping out frogs by the species in the Central Americas, and the white-nose syndrome doing in bat species across North America.

This was also the year of re-reading. I made it a point to re-read one book every quarter and the books that made the cut this year were : Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Namesake”, Amitav Ghosh’s “The Shadow Lines” and Michael Ondaatje’s “The English Patient” along with the one mentioned above. It definitely is a practice that I want to continue. I read so much into the English Patient when rereading than when reading it the first time.

Among fiction authors, I discovered a new author to look forward to in Thrity Umrigar. Shashi Deshpande’s “The Long Silence” left me shaken with the quiet violence of the every day, and so did Perumal Murugan’s “Seasons of the Palm” where the violence of caste hides openly amidst the idyll.

For a change I did not get too many current books, sticking to old ones, and mostly used copies of those. I started being price conscious, tending not to spend 500 bucks on any book on a whim. The only books I spent much money on were those that I really wanted, like “The Wild Heart of India”. I got Sally Rooney’s “Normal People” at a good discount, and also Perumal Murugan’s One Part Woman trilogy which was selling for a song at Blossom’s.

Shopping occasionally from Amazon did happen. Thing is, every time I feel like buying something after getting a bonus or some unexpected money, I tend to buy a book. This is a decoy buying strategy meant to avoid spending money on something that I don’t need, like upgrading my camera or phone unnecessarily. Most times you want to buy only to get the feeling of getting something new. So, instead of spending some 30-50K on a big gadget, I end up spending Rs. 500-1000 on a couple of books and the urge to spend goes away.  I hope to take this further and not buy any new physical books from Amazon next year. For older titles there is always Blossom’s or Goobe’s where I can get used copies, and for newer ones I’d rather wait it out for a few years. Most of the time there is a huge promotion machinery at action, especially on Instagram where I follow a lot of publisher accounts. Non-fiction tends to be expensive, but Kindle versions work out better for that.

Either way, I don’t think I’ll be beating the number of books I read this year, which I’ll put up when I put up the final list next month. This is just cud-chewing on the year. I expect to get to 40 and be +/- 4 in 2020. Let’s see…