Books Read in 2020: 51 reviews in the year of COVID-19

1 ) The Heart of Darkness- Joseph Conrad. This is one of my favourite books of all time. Very few books or works of art are able to create a physical reaction. Every time I read this book, I feel my mind and body start to feel heavy, to sink, almost as though I am journeying up the Congo with Marlow, and as I go deeper into the book, the jungle thickens around me, oppressive in its darkness and humidity, until the gap between story and reality, description and sensation starts to blur. This book draws you in physically like no other and for that alone, it is one of the greatest books ever written. As an aside, I must say that I hate the modern habit of criticising works from the past without taking time and context into account. These modern critiques of the structural imperialism of the book as manifested even in the character of Marlow are absurd. When the book came out it was one of the first pieces to shed a light on the brutality of imperialism. This woke need to pass judgement from the privilege of 150 years of progress reveals little other than the fundamental hypocrisy, that is ingrained in most virtue signalling, the need to “other” rather than understand, to divide rather than bridge. 

2 ) The Piano Teacher: A Novel - Elfriede Jelinek. I really didn’t like this book from the Nobel Prize winning Austrian writer. But I do think it is brilliant. It made me uncomfortable like few books can. It was raw, brutal, unflinching. It sickened me. It’s ability to capture need, dependency, failure, suffocation, dysfunction, control, subjugation, degradation, repression, the need to escape, the chains that we are addicted to.. all through three characters is stunning. They say art should disturb the comfortable. By that definition, this is art of the highest order. 

3 ) The Crow - J O’Barr. The artwork is what really elevates what is a simple revenge melodrama and give it such poignancy and depth. 

4 ) Less - Andrew Sean Greer. More whimsical and poignant than I expected. I know it’s a very simple, almost predictable book but it’s earnestness makes it heartwarming like the best romantic comedies. 

5 ) In The Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz - Michela Wrong. Excellent, barely believable true story of one of the world’s most famous dictators, Mobutu. It’s deeply saddening how one man squandered the wealth of a nation that could have been the richest in Africa, a potential beacon of light transformed into a cautionary tale.  It also reminded me how fortunate India was to have Nehru as our first Prime Minister. 

6 ) Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar - Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein. Really fun, breezy introduction to some of the big ideas and concepts in Philosophy. Deceptively simple, it actually teaches a lot and should be read for more than the jokes. 

7 ) Nothing Is True And Everything Is Possible : Adventures in Modern Russia - Peter Pomerantsev. A reminder that however bad things seem in India, it could always get a lot worse and a lot scarier. Russia seems terrifying in this book, but countries can become frighteningly totalitarian faster then we realise, when kleptocracy meets authoritarianism, while the masses drink from the well of some ancient past glory and look for communities to blame for its passing. 

8 ) Holler If You Hear Me : Searching for Tupac Shakur - Michael Eric Dyson. This was very interesting because I expected a biography of Tupac but the book focused on placing his life and work in the context of Black American culture and society. Whether it was his Black Panther familial roots or his personal experience of revolution and poverty, it looks at how the world around him informed his art and how his art influenced his life. I found this in many ways even more illuminating than Between The World and Me to help me try and understand the Black experience in America. The strength of their women and the misogyny they encounter, the nature of the family, the crack cocaine epidemic, the scourge of the prison system... it is an eye opening and in some ways very sad read. It also makes me realise that I can never fully understand what that community goes through, and neither can the largely white liberal media that claims to speak on their behalf. 

9 ) The Radetzky March - Joseph Roth. It didn’t affect me enough for me to feel it is one of the great novels of the twentieth century as is often said. However it was still a beautiful, sad book, with big themes a wonderful rhythm, of the twin marches of death and time, the death of a way of life, an  a family, of a monarchy, of an empire. Of men who play act and hold on to notions of honour and glory but somewhere the ground has shifted, and the earth is hollow, and the pointlessness and inevitability of death and change seep through and soak every page. 

10 ) It Must’ve Been Something I Ate - Jeffrey Steingarten. Masterful collection of pieces by the mad, obsessive, legendary former food writer of Vogue. Thank you to my friend Fredrik Samtana for introducing me to him. From the best way to cook country chicken to understanding the difference between different kinds of salt to the best way to make blood sausage, I feel illuminated as well as entertained. 

11 ) Revolutionary Road - Richard Yates. Predictable but powerful, like a Greek tragedy, written with unsparing clarity and observation. The conflict between the sense of exceptionalism people feel and the suffocating mundanity of everyday life, the reality of suburbia and cubicle, and the tragic inner deaths of people have rarely been captured with such sympathy and honesty. 

12 ) The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery. I had never read this much loved classic and I find that many classics underwhelm when when I get around to reading them. Not this one. I thought it was surreal, beautiful, profound and moving. Possibly even more relevant today than when it was written. The themes are universal and timeless... the purpose of life, beauty versus function, the nature of love and how love can create meaning, consumerism at the cost of depth. But told with this wistful sorrow and hope, a naive innocence and the shadow of darkness, rich in allegory, interpretable at multiple levels. This is a masterpiece. 

13 ) Milkman - Anna Burns. This is such a raw book. The form and voice are so original, and through the narrator we see sectarian violence through a completely fresh perspective. It looks at the collective and individual psychological toll of pervasive violence and sectarianism, the futility and despair. It looks at the role of women in conflict and the nature of sexual violence especially psychological violence. It looks at youth and a culture of nihilism and the glorification of death. It does all these in a way that sounds matter of fact, that is unflinching but that is filled with a dark humour at the utter absurdity of violence itself. 

14 ) American Lit 101 : A Crash Course in American Literature - Brianne Keith. Reductive and repetitive, but still a good way to remember and rediscover, or to discover and explore many American classics. 

15 ) Batman : Dark Victory - Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale. Fabulous detective story. Beautiful artwork. And the emotional payoff of seeing Robin being born. 

16 ) Pundits from Pakistan - Rahul Bhattacharya. The 2004 India cricket tour of Pakistan will always be special for me because I went to Lahore on work to watch one of the ODIs. The trip was unforgettable.  I won’t forget the warmth of the Pakistanis, the feeling of brotherhood, the food, the sense of connection, the sense of oneness, the hope, the friendship... everything. It brought home viscerally how national boundaries and religions are artificial constructs created by powerful men to perpetuate their power and to divide us, to keep us from seeking and finding our shared humanity. I haven’t watched cricket for fourteen years now but this book transported me back in time to a time when sport felt like it had the power to bring nations and religions and peoples together, that it could heal the trauma of Gujarat, that  the arc of humanity would bend inevitably towards a shared humanity. Alas.. if only...

17 ) Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout. There are stories when I felt the author struggled with trying to end the short story in a way that felt complete, so they that ended up being a little forced. But on the whole I think this is a triumph of observation and structure. To tell the story of a person not through the structure of a novel but through short stories about the town and community she lives in, stories where she sometimes barely features, allows us to form a fully formed view of a character that is almost impossible in short stories, while retaining the sweeping moments of insight and revelation, of tightness and things left unsaid that make the best short stories feel like a punch in the gut. And the observations... a titular character that is hard to like, relationships and lives that carry the loneliness of decades of things unsaid yet unforgotten, congealing layer upon layer like a blood clot. But narrated with an honesty, a almost brutal clarity that renders it empathetic, almost kind. The author shows that sometimes the greatest kindness is in accepting the flaws and neuroses that affect us all and seeking to observe and to accept and to retain empathy and seek understanding rather than judgement. 

18 ) Vietnam : An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975- Max Hastings. Monumental military history of the Vietnam War by one of the greatest chroniclers of war. Like most of Max Hastings’ books he looks at the war through a military lens, telling the story of how the military campaign unfolded, and using that as the foundation to talk about its impact on the people of Vietnam and the political forces behind the war. As a consequence it doesn’t really shed much new light on why the war evolved the way it did. What he does do is not just write a definitive military history of the war but also demonstrates that this was a war with no heroes, that while there were good and bad people, heroes and villains at an individual level, when it came to the political leadership they matched each other in repulsiveness. The corruption and cynicism of the USA has been well documented but the venal spinelessness of the South Vietnamese and the ideological fanaticism and cruelty of the North Vietnamese matched the Americans in every way leading to sacrifices made by soldiers and ordinary men. The war was fought, the North Vietnamese leadership may have won, but the only people who lost were ordinary people, across Vietnam and in America.

19 ) The Perks of Being a Wallflower- Stephen Chobsky. Extraordinary. Even before I got to the end, it moved me even more than Catcher In The Rye did when I reread it a year or so ago. It was achingly beautiful, painfully moving and hopeful and sad, with so so many moments of stunning insight and depth, told so matter of factly. It is good as any story of adolescence and coming of age I’ve ever read. And that’s even before I got to the end, when it became intensely real and personal to me, so that when I ended it, I just had to lock myself in a room and cry and just try and breathe. Life is hard. We can’t choose the things that affect us and shape us. All we can hope for is that someday we have the opportunity and ability to choose how we deal with it. It took me a long long time, but I’m grateful I had the opportunity.

20 ) Il Postino (The Postman) [originally Ardiente Paciencia (Burning Patience)] - Antonio Skarmeta. Such a beautiful, magical, joyous, sad book. A book ostensibly about the power of words and metaphor, but actually an allegory about the death of idealism and hope, and the death of poetry and dreams and laughter and joy and love and family and music and sex. The cruelty of Pinochet and the tragedy of Allende are commemorated in a way that is subtle and poignant and quite unforgettable. 

21 ) The Guide - R K Narayan. This is deceptively simple writing, a simple story but a complex tale. I can’t imagine how brave and progressive it would have been to write a story like this in India in the 50’s, especially for someone seen as a literary and cultural icon (and yes I know that there have been stories like The Quilt in Urdu that may have been more bold but they didn’t have the wide reach and acceptance of The  Guide). This is a book rooted in India and its  culture but seeking to define a new idea of India and understand what the values of society are in a newer, modernising world. And at the same time, it is a deeply human story, filled with empathy and understanding and sadness, and brimming with hope and life. 

22 ) Ali : A Life - Jonathan Eig.  This is the definitive Muhammad Ali biography, the man as much as the boxer, with his warmth and kindness, his cruelty and greed, his flaws and his redemptive qualities. I was struck by how success in any field but especially in fields in the public eye, and to whatever relative degree of success, often leads to a sense of entitlement and a sense of pushing the rules and boundaries, dissolving of lines and values, bringing out the worst in people, as they are surrounded by parasitic leeches who enrich themselves and enable or turn a blind eye to the person’s failings, instead of trying to help  the person survive, to find and nourish and sustain their better selves. Which is why I was so moved to read how Ali, for all the parasites, for all the flaws and contradictions, for all his stumbles found a way to not just survive but to find peace, find grace, find humility, find kindness. To find his best self. To spread joy. 

23 ) Naked Lunch - William S Burroughs. Every year or two I read a classic that I just don’t get. It’s not that I can’t read difficult books (considering I did finish Infinite Jest). But sometimes, rarely, a book becomes such an ordeal that I can’t finish it. Naked Lunch joins Walden in my pantheon of unreadable American classics. 

I can see why it’s important. I can see why it’s thematically and stylistically pathbreaking. I can see why it WAS shocking. But those are attributes that mattered at the moment when it was printed, not today. 

The hallucinatory nightmares of the junkie life have been portrayed better. The staring into the abyss of hell as personal experience has been done better. The graphic sex (and not just the gay sex), the assholes full of shit being rimmed and penetrated, the festering sores and turning tricks for a hit, the ejaculation of a corpse‘s penis at the moment of death, the necrophilia and cannibalism...all of it have lost the power to shock since 1959. 

I don’t see the humour and the social commentary people say the book has. 

Instead I see the absence of plot and narrative structure. I get the idea that in certain books, you don’t need structure or plot, that you can dive into a liquid pool of pure words, images and ideas. But does that really work when what you dive into is just more of the same turgid crap (pardon the pun) again and again? Shorn of the power to shock with the passing of time, it becomes repetitive, puerile and pointless. 

When it was printed, Naked Lunch was like nothing ever written before. It broke every rule and every taboo. It shocked and gave voice to a generation that was lost and didn’t seek to be found. It took a chainsaw to society and convention and morality. I was raw. It was visceral. It was revolutionary. 

60 years later, it is a victim not just of its own success, but the success of the literary revolution it launched. 

60 years later, Naked Lunch is boring. Boring as shit. 

24 ) In Patagonia - Bruce Chatwin. I had never read the book that “reinvented travel writing”. Having completed it I can completely see how it has influenced every travel writer I have ever read from Pico Iyer to Rory Stewart. I use the words travel writing loosely, to describe any literary non fiction work that sees a geographical place through the eyes of a writer, even if it captures its most ephemeral essence. But even with such a loose definition it is hard to classify In Patagonia as a travel book and it’s easy to see why Chatwin resisted the label. This is a masterpiece of technique and form as much as content, a kaleidoscopic collection of vignettes, of fact and fiction, of mythology and myth creation, of personal and family and cultural and evolutionary history, and the rewriting and reshaping of it to create something that captures the essence of history more than the facts. It is travel writing only if you were to take a place as a starting point to seek not information but truth, while knowing full well there is no truth. Just a feeling. A lie. A chimera that you create for those to come, a chimera created with such exquisite beauty that it becomes reality. 

25 ) The Iliad - Homer. You need to step back from the battles and speeches and endless names and gods and goddesses and look at the structure, the way themes develop, the rhythm of the story and the way the mood shifts to really appreciate the story. I started out getting lost in the weeds with the joy of an occasional line of poetry. But gradually you get caught in the human drama, you see how the language changes, how the violence becomes dehumanised, how the objects become more mechanical and that’s when the sheer genius of this work hits you. It may not be the Mahabharata which I truly believe is the greatest story ever written, but it amazes me that something with such complexity of theme, emotion, language, structure and visual imagination could have been created as part of an oral storytelling tradition and carried down through history. 

26 ) War Games - Linda Polman. Like all polemics this book doesn’t seek balance. Despite that inherent flaw, this is a very important book, a book that while controversial asks essential questions about the global aid industry and forces you to question your assumptions and beliefs as well as shines a huge spotlights on the corruption, politics and ethical flaws in the aid world. Does aid sometimes help promote conflict? Can it a tool for political oppression or imperialism? Is it more often than not a means to enrich the corrupt, not just in the country that receives it, but also in the countries that give aid? Is it just a global, money-making industry that has minimal impact, that causes great harm, that is rife with ethically dubious choices and conflicts of interest? Does it enable war? Does it reward the perpetrators of war and sometimes even genocide? Most of all, should we sometimes just say no to aid even if it means people die? These are difficult, uncomfortable questions and there are no easy answers, not even in this book. But this book is important for raising them. It is a tour de force and it has to be read by anyone who seeks to opine on the issues of humanitarian aid, leave alone work in the industry.

27 ) The Second Jungle Book - Rudyard Kipling. I know Kipling is deeply unfashionable, seen as prejudiced, colonialist and racist by people who judge the past by the values of the present. And I know that people think of the Jungle Book as a children’s tale. But when you read the book, you are reminded why Kipling was the youngest winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. The writing is pure poetry, and emotion is deep and poignant, and for a westerner he has a surprising amount of empathy, curiosity and indeed love for India. The gold though, is the non Mowgli stories, and none more so than The Miracle of Purun Bhagat, a story filled with kindness and wisdom and compassion. 

28 ) The Corner : A Year in the Life of an Inner City Neighbourhood  - David Simon and Edward Burns. I have often felt that it is impossible for anyone to write about and to explain the Black American experience, nor is it possible to truly understand the Black American experience unless the writer or reader is actually black. I’ve tried reading widely, from Toni Morrison to Ta-Nehisi Coates but I was always left feeling that as a brown person in country of brown people in another continent, I couldn’t truly comprehend the horror of what it was and is like to grow up Black and poor in America. Not even the deep rooted racism in India (and when it comes to colour I truly believe we are among the most racist countries in the world) gave me a sense of it, unless I viewed it through the prism of parallels like Dalit oppression. 

Strangely, the book that affected me the most, that left me truly shaken and saddened, that gave me the rawest comprehension of that experience was written by two white men. 

The Corner, written by a former policeman and a journalist who went on to create The Wire, chronicles the lives of people living in a corner in a small neighbourhood in Baltimore. A neighbourhood that is poor, a neighbourhood of ordinary people, predominantly Black and African American, that serves as an open air drug market for heroin and crack cocaine. As you follow these lives, these families, you are forced to question everything you assume or think you know about violence, drugs, education, policing, policy and the lives of the urban poor. We realise that when we say there are no easy answers, we are wrong, because there are no answers at all, at least not yet. Every answer, every solution, every proposal, every idea fails to comprehend the complete absence of hope, of possibility, of options that exist for a child in such a neighbourhood from the moment they are born. That to survive, to get a steady job, to not be a teenage parent, to get an education, to not be a criminal, to not be an addict, to be none of these isn’t the result of will or strength of character. To realise that these outcomes follow the inevitable arc of destiny, just as certainly as a private school child goes to an Ivy League college and gets a trust fund. The circumstances that exist in these communities, where survival and dignity are a miracle to be hoped for and dreamt of, rather than a goal to be achieved, shocked me, a person who drove past Dharavi and Tulsi Pipe Road and lived in Garhi village. 

The fact that citizens can live like this put to lie the myth of America being a land of wealth and opportunity, of equality, of milk and honey. 

29 ) Cat on a Hot Tin Roof - Tennessee Williams. When it was first written and performed, the play derived its power in most critics eyes from how it shattered social convention, exploring taboo themes like homosexuality and repressed sexuality even within a marriage. However its timelessness stems from its unwavering, clear eyed honesty, it’s ability to look at a family with its greed and politics and jealousies and tensions and resentments without sentimentality. In terms of characterisation I do feel the alcoholic younger son is written too much like the noble savage, his alcoholism a way of coping (or not coping) with the mendacity of the world around him. Similarly, his brother and sister in law are unidimensional in their scheming avariciousness. To me the play would have been even stronger and more honest if it depicted the three-dimensionality of all the characters. As it stands the play has a mix of both wholly formed characters and caricatures, which stops it from being the perfect masterpiece it could have been. 

30 ) The Last of the Mohicans - James Fenimore Cooper. The plot moves quickly, and the writing and situations are dramatic. It’s easy to see why this book was such a huge success in the early days of the novel, with a sense of adventure and exoticism and excitement that was missing in American fiction, as well as being truly American in setting, an American novel in the real sense when most literature in English represented the English worldview through British eyes. I also found interesting the allusions towards interracial love and the dignity and strength of the titular character, even compared to the Caucasians in the novel. While there are many examples of what we can only describe as racist stereotypes today, I still feel this must have been a brave and bold, and in many ways progressive attitude in the time and milieu when it was written. That being said, my god this is really melodramatic, over the top, pulpy writing... the sort I would run a hundred miles from if written today. 

31 ) Radiohead : Hysterical and Useless - Martin Clarke. I would have been better off reading Wikipedia. Atrociously written. Like a 10th grader was submitting a research project. 

31 ) The Missionary Position : Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice - Christopher  Hitchens. Scathing essays by one of the great modern writers exposing the double standards behind Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity. Like he said, he chose to judge her reputation by her words and actions, rather than to judge her words and actions by her reputation, and the results are eye opening. I do wish, someone would write a properly researched book on this because polemical treatises lack depth and balance and this suffers from the same failing.

 

32 ) Seven Brief Lessons on Physics - Carlo Rovelli. Brilliant, illuminating and poetic. If there ever was a book to make you fall in love with science and with physics specifically this is it. I desperately need to find a physicist to help me understand and dive into things more deeply, because to understand physics is to have a clearer and truer understanding of the universe. Of the particles that constitute the universe, and the infinity that each individual particle helps create. This books makes you look at the essence of reality differently. From time and space, to heat and human interaction. And written with a sense of poetry and magic and wonder over seven simple lessons and seventy nine pages. It’s truly a book everyone must read. What I truly want to read now is a book of philosophy based on the principles of physics, a book that uses physics to answer the big questions about life and death and time and impermanence and significance and creation and more.. because the answers are there in physics and not just in abstraction. 

33 ) The Mirror and the Light - Hillary Mantel. It seems stupid to quibble with a book that is so masterfully written. And I must say I really did like the book, and that it takes a special kind of genius to generate so much tension, drama and emotion in a story where you already know the ending. But that being said, I did feel that Hillary Mantel’s staggering reputation is what stops this book from being all it could be. This book would have benefited from a more rigorous editor, someone who cut the tedious, repetitive middle section by a hundred pages or more, an editor less in awe of the writer and her immense reputation. It is still a very good book, a fitting end to the trilogy that redefined the historical novel. But it isn’t as flawless, as breathtaking, as gripping as the first two books of the trilogy. 

34 ) Anatomy of Terror : From the Death of Bin Laden to the Rise of the Islamic State - Ali Soufan. Excellent and insightful book by former FBI Agent Ali Soufan tracing the emergence and rise of the Islamic State starting with its roots in Al Queda. I had read his previous book on Bin Laden and Al Qaeda and was stunned by his knowledge and understanding of Salafi- jihadism. This book is equally masterful, not just documenting the what and the how but the why. 

He goes beyond the monolithic and misleading label of Islamic Terrorism to explain the sectarian, tribal, theological, philosophical and economic roots of extremism in the Muslim world as well as how they play out across different narratives and movements, from the Muslim Brotherhood to ISIS. 

He forces the reader to examine issues more deeply, providing the context necessary to understand extremism as different manifestations of multiple realities and consequently offers a path forward that is more nuanced than a rudimentary good guys/bad guys approach. 

35 ) The Underground Railroad - Colson Whitehead. I have to react to this book acknowledging my ignorance of what it could mean to anyone who has descended from the people kidnapped from Africa as slaves. The horrors described in the book affected me and made me realise again the barbarism of the white rulers in every place they came into contact with people of colour. The story is gripping, the plot quick, the writing often beautiful. But all of that being said, I find it hard to see the book as the masterpiece it is often acclaimed as. The characters seem over familiar, some plot points are overly convenient, and many of the characters (with the notable exception of the lead character Cora) are one dimensional. It is a book that reinforces the horrors of slavery without bringing any fresh insight to our understanding of it. 

36 ) An Ordinary Man’s Guide To Radicalism : Growing Up Muslim in India - Neyaz Farooquee. Despite issues with structure, pacing and repetitiveness, this is a really important, powerful book chronicling the Indian Muslim experience through the eyes of the author, a boy from Bihar who goes on to become a journalist in the Hindustan Times. Set against the backdrop of the infamous Batla House encounter which took place when the author, then a student at Jamia, lived barely a hundred metres away, this is a very affecting and difficult read for anyone who has ever believed in the idea of a tolerant, inclusive India. I feel ashamed at what Muslims at India face everyday, the daily indignities and the structural exclusion. I can’t imagine what it’s like to live with constant fear, fear of your fellow citizens and fear of the institutions that are supposed to protect you. 

And most of all, I anger at the people around me that don’t just accept but try and justify a system that creates second class citizens of an entire community, that looks away and often supports the destruction of the ideals our founding fathers built our nation on. A hundred million people can’t be wrong or paranoid and anyone who claims that the ill treatment of Muslims in India is a myth is either blind or bigoted. 

37 ) Gilead - Marilynne Robinson. To call this a work of fiction would be to do it disservice. It is a book of theological exploration, a philosophical treatise and a novel all rolled into one. It is a book of deep conviction and feeling, of faith and grace, of kindness and understanding. Even as an atheist, I was moved deeply by it, not just by the writing but by the intensity and beauty of religious feeling. It’s the sort of book that makes you realise why, for all its flaws and all the bloodshed it has caused, religion has provided succour, hope and comfort to so many hundreds of millions of people over the centuries, through collective horrors and personal despair. It reminds you that the religion we see corrupted and used by power hungry politicians and priests in every single faith was not the religion that was first created, that religious leaders betray its very purpose, to shine a light and bring some love to the darkest corners of our world and ourselves. 

38 ) MBS : The Rise to Power of Mohammad Bin Salman - Ben Hubbard. Gripping and eye opening account of the rise of the man who would be King if Saudi Arabia. 

This is a difficult book to put my head around. Mohammad Bin Salman is despotic, cruel and dangerous. He is responsible for the murder of innocents, from journalists slaughtered in cold blood to children dying of war crimes. He doesn’t just silence dissent, he punishes disagreement with cruelty and brutality. He is corrupt and he is turning the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia into a brutal, dangerous dictatorship. 

But at the same time he has done more for the social freedoms of women than anyone in Saudi Arabia since its creation. He is the first person to challenge the power of the clerics and move towards a state that isn’t defined by religious intolerance. He is the first Saudi leader to envision and work towards a future that isn’t an oil oligarchy, waiting for the day when the oil runs out. The first to give the kingdom’s young people a path forward that isn’t based on servicing royalty or religion. The first leader who seems ready and willing to move towards ending the ceaseless conflict with Israel. 

It’s easy to see why people support MBS. Why people are willing to strike the Faustian bargain. 

He is the only hope for an alternate path for Saudi Arabia and the Sunni countries that seek to navigate a path to the modern world. 

But at what cost?

I reflexively recoil and say that MBS is evil and must be stopped. But must he? I really don’t know. 

39 ) The Sympathiser : A Novel - Viet Thanh Nguyen. It’s so so good to read a book that looks at a community, and a diaspora, that is extremely underrepresented in global literature and culture. To see the American war in Vietnam (and not the Vietnam) war from the perspective of a Vietnamese immigrant was a new experience for me. There are no good guys or bad people in this book, just deeply flawed and imperfect people on all sides, capable of terrible things. The only moral position this book takes is that concepts like freedom and independence are hollow, that when it comes to war, it is always about power and greed and never about altruism. Despite the cynicism, you can’t but help but feel the love that the narrator feels for Vietnam, his attempt to distill its essence while also feeling a sense of disconnect and unbelonging because of his mixed race heritage, trapped between two worlds but drawn towards one identify, much like the author himself. 

Most of all though, this book is memorable for the sheer beauty of the writing. I don’t like it when authors use words that are unnecessarily difficult and almost never heard in conversation. Despite that, this book sweeps you away with the stunning visual imagery of its writing, almost poetry like in its depth of feeling and fluidity, filled with a burning anger and an aching love.

40 ) Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell.  The casual anti-Semitism and racism may jar after 90 years but Orwell’s first published book showcases the sharp social commentary and powers of observation that make him one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. An eye opening account of his experiences of poverty in Paris and London, he makes you aware of the dignity and humanity of the poor, as well as the Dickensian horror or their lives.

41 ) Boats on Land - Janice Pariat. I have to wonder if someone who hasn’t grown up in Shillong can be as deeply affected by this book as someone who has. I found it deeply, deeply moving, and felt almost a physical pain reading it. This was my life. My home. My childhood. With all its brutality and toxic masculinity and violence. These were the myths and legends that I grew up with. This was the schizophrenia of my split identity. All told with writing of such extraordinary beauty, that some passages could be read as pure poetry. 

I wish a man would write about Shillong like this, to hold a mirror to this world we grew up in. Or are we so scarred by the violence, the need to project strength and invulnerability that are incapable of doing so? I had a chat on my school group recently about some of our classmates and friends. Not just the ones who died (how casually we talk about the death of a child). But the ones who were beaten. Again and again and again. Day after day. Because they were sarong. Because they were sissies. Because they were Dkhar. 

What amazed me was how many of my classmates said it was part of growing up and that rite of passage toughened us up and made us the men we are today. 

Yes it did make us the men we are today. It made me a messed up man, who could only feel safe when he felt strong or powerful. Who was unable to acknowledge his imperfections and vulnerabilities, let alone share it even with the ones who loved me most. A man who lived in constant paranoia looking for violence to explode at any moment and always thinking about how to protect myself and my family from it. A man with such a confused sense of identity, so fearful of not fitting in and craving it, yet always believing he would always be an outsider and rejecting acceptance. 

A man running from the chasm that lay behind me to a future utopia that never seemed to arrive, and so exhausted and burnt out by a life of running, that I spent every single day feeling numb and drained as I sought out ever more self destructive ways to feel something, to cry for help. 

A man hurtling inevitably towards an inexorable violence, violence against the world, violence against those who loved me, and most of all violence towards myself. 

Yes I was saved. 

I was saved from Shillong. 

And yet I still love Shillong as much as I hate it. 

We love the things that cause us the greatest pain. And for me that thing was growing up in Shillong. 

And even today, in memories and stories, in legends and myths, in the food I eat and the smells that transport me, in the way I feel complete when a cold breeze brushes against the goosebumps on my skin... in a million ways large and small, I carry Shillong  in me. 

42 ) The Untold History of the United States - Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick. Yes it’s a liberal left perspective with all its biases but it’s still stunning how much violence and murder the United State and its leaders have inflicted upon the world over the last century and more. I don’t think any nation in the world has been responsible for more deaths in more parts of the world than America throughout history. This book chronicles the USA’s bloody legacy from the Philippines to Korea to Vietnam to Latin America and exposes the horrors and dangers of its military industrial complex and how it gave rise to the Cold War and the Atomic Age.

That being said, think about the extraordinary nature of a country that allows these stories to be told and shared, to be published, to be debated. Without fear or consequence. And we are reminded that American exceptionalism has another face, that at its best, it truly is the land of the free. 

43 ) Pet Sematary - Stephen King. I don’t like horror but for some reason I didn’t think this was scary at all. There is one creepy section but otherwise it was a fairly predictable but fun page turner. 

44 ) Childhood’s End - Arthur C Clarke. Do not be fooled by the functional writing style.  This is a profound novel, perfectly imagined and thought provoking. Great science fiction seeks to explore the greatest philosophical questions of all, the existential questions not about us as a species but the planet itself and it’s place in time and the universe. This book does so with a beauty and imagination and depth that leaves you gasping for breath. 

45 ) Vanni : A Family’s Struggle Through the Sri Lankan Conflict - Benjamin Dix and Lindsay Pollock. A harrowing, deeply moving and affecting graphic novel that looks at the Sinhalese Tamil conflict through the eyes of ordinary people and specifically one ordinary family. The simple black and white art work, the panels with no dialogue, the restraint, the empty spaces, the missing words.. in many ways they communicate the horror of war and its impact on ordinary people far more strongly than words ever could. It also forced me to look at my visit to Sri Lanka last year, this idyllic paradise we visited, and wonder if we have in some way been complicit in the erasing of horrific crimes, in letting the perpetrators of war crimes move forward with a whitewashing exercise. The world is far more complex and horrifying than we realise...

46 ) The Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller. Like the Greek Epic version of The Palace of Illusions, an interesting take on Achilles from the perspective of his companion Patroclus that focus not just on the Trojan War or the part of it covered in the Iliad but how the boy came to become the greatest warrior in the western world. 

47 ) I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou. In addition to being an important book, this is also an exquisitely written book. An autobiography where the writing feels like poetry. Maya Angelou’s perceptiveness and insight into her childhood self and those around her, the unflinching honesty, the empathy and innocence elevate this into a work that deserves to be read as long as we read to understand ourselves, others and our world better. 

48 ) Everybody Loves a Good Drought : Stories From India’s Poorest Districts - P Sainath. Maybe the most powerful and important book of journalism in Independent India. It shows how good journalism can help impact change and transform lives. It also makes me wish that contemporary journalists and publications had the courage, integrity and moral purpose of P Sainath.

49 ) A Beginner’s Guide to Japan : Observations and Provocations - Pico Iyer. A special special book. It isn’t travel writing. It is actually observations and provocations about and inspired by Pico Iyer’s experiences living in Japan for thirty years. His powers of observation and insight shine more brightly than ever while the prose is as spare and beautiful and perfect. But more than any book he has ever written, the ideas and thoughts in this book make you stop and just think of what you’ve just read, meditate on it, absorb it. It’s almost like a book of philosophical observations and ideas rather than a book of sociological observations. 

50 ) Great Expectations - Charles Dickens. I had never actually read the book and loved how it still feels so timeless and beautiful, Yes you need some suspension of disbelief for the coincidences but the ability to understand and demonstrate the complexity of human emotion with such perceptiveness was staggering. And the writing itself was beautiful and poetic. 

51 ) Ducks, Newburyport - Lucy Ellman. This is a difficult sentence to read. Any sentence that lasts for a thousand pages with no breaks and no paragraphs, just an endless recitation of thoughts and lists is a struggle. But after a few hundred pages, you find that the words have their own rhythm, that the repetitions have a purpose and the absence of a plot doesn’t mean the absence of a narrative. This is a work of staggering ambition and masterful ability, seamlessly blending the personal, the political and the social. As the narrator obsesses about the senseless violence in America, I was reminded of Bolano’s shocking recital of the murders in 2666. But at the end, I was left with a sense of hope, a belief in the power of love and family, and a recognition that every life, however ordinary to the world, has its struggle, and every life is both worthy of a deeper examination, and deserving of love and hope.