What I have read so far in 2021 - Part 2

Compared to 2020, 2021 made for a very troubled reading experience. When Covid began early last year, the annoyance of lockdowns was mitigated to an extent by a secret compensatory pleasure of being able to order books online and immerse oneself in knowledge , while waiting for the world to open. The mood was of an upbeat confidence in one’s ability to absorb isolation due to an instinctive ability of being a curious person.

That naivete fell apart in 2021. As the lockdowns and severity of the second wave lengthened, the attention span shortened. Reading, even though I had pretended to tell myself until then, was never a totally solitary activity. One was in solitude, but while reading one was travelling, sitting in a mall, or a garden, or by the balcony – comfortable in the knowledge that one had paused on the external stimuli and could always go back to them, reflecting, discussing and comparing what one read, with the lived experience. This year, there was no pause on those stimuli, they were simply absent. In the mental palace, the learnings from each book were difficult to place – it resembled like an overcrowded room – unable to stretch and expand.

2021 wasn’t as prolific when it comes to Read Count for me. In total 9 books read as of the beginning of December and maybe a ponderous slog through another one at most.

That said, the overwhelming mood and taste this year was history. In a year where living was largely about coping, looking back in time and finding a communion with the eternal patterns of happiness and sorrow, rise and decline, cognizance and ignorance that one finds in history was an act essential to survival.

Without giving you a long preamble on why I am composing this list and what generally informs my reading choices (which you can see here), let me take you through a review of my meager pickings this year.

Fair warning – most of these books are long, running into 500+ pages. You may find this a tough list to follow if reading for you is not an activity where you set aside some time each week to immerse yourself in and if you can’t resist reading something cover to cover in one night.?

The War that Ended Peace: The Road to 1914: Margaret MacMillan

The War that Ended Peace is a prelude to the events – political, social and personal – that precipitated the First World War. Focused on Europe and rarely ever crossing over into the motivations of Americans on the other side of the Atlantic, this is a book that every Asian should read. ?

For, if you are in China today, you should read it for Bismarck’s wit – “Preventive war is like committing suicide out of fear of death”. Heeding the lessons from Kaiser’s diplomatic miscalculations would serve you well – especially if you are an economic superpower instilling fear and suspicion in your neighbors about your intentions. It usually backfires massively.

If you are in India today, you should learn the lessons from British society at the eve of the second world war, where any political or cultural dissent was silenced by fetishsising the role of the Royal Armed Forces in building the nation and by a final argument on the lines of the – “Look how the brave British soldiers are protecting our borders, have some shame”.

If you are in Pakistan and Afghanistan, you should worry about the tendencies in Orthodox Russia and the Balkans in the early 20th century, where waging a holy war and perishing in it was lionized as the greatest virtue on the planet.

Compared to the second world war, the first remains sparsely studied. Partly because during WWII, there was a clear-cut caricature of Nazis (evil guys) and the Allied powers (good guys). Not surprisingly, that simplicity has given birth to half a dozen origin stories in both Marvel and DC franchises.

Out here, in the early years of the 20th century – heroes and villains were difficult to spot. And MacMillan’s book does an excellent job of portraying that ambiguity.

Apart from what I wrote above, you should give this book a read for two rare aspects that most history books accessible to the lay reader lack. ?

First, it highlights that maintaining peace, and the economic prosperity that accompanies it, is an endless effort. The book opens with the Paris World Expo of 1900 (similar to what is underway currently in Dubai). The world of 1900s had seen robust growth and expansion of global trade and commerce in the preceding three decades. More people were crossing borders, more business interests were becoming global and thinkers like Stefan Zweig were fancying the idea of the emergence of a European and eventually a global citizen. Political and business leaders believed that with that level of intermeshing in business and social interests, globalization itself would prevent wars. In the years prior to WWI, markets and intellectual elites shrugged off military standoffs in Morocco in 1905 and 1908, Bosnia in 1908 and two Balkan wars. The fact that none of these standoffs led to a war fed into a complacency that rational sense will prevail and at the last moment, some solutions would be found. The repeated success of diplomacy in the years before the war prevented the political leaders in all countries from standing up to the extremist elements within the society which had consistently advocated for a war for one reason or the other. It just took a shot from a country-made pistol in the hands of an 18-year-old extremist in a city that was far from being the center of Europe (Sarajevo) to light the powder keg that blew up 14 million innocent lives across the world.

Second, considering that so much of historical writing has focused on macro-factors that lead to big events, MacMillan provides a counterpoint to it by focusing on the eccentricities of key decision makers. This book, by peeking into private lives of such leaders, raises a lot of What ifs. Pre-World War 1 Germany did resemble a military state, but what if Kaiser Wilhelm II had been more of a liberal like his father and less of a bully? Would Germany have not provided an unconditional support to Austro-Hungarian Empire, localizing the conflict?

What if Russia had someone else as a Czar in place of Nicholas II, someone who was only occasionally interested in ruling and whose first instinct was to avoid problems and go into a domestic utopian shell? And funnily enough, what if Count Hotzendorf, the Austrian General in charge of the Austro-Hungarian Imperial Army, wasn’t so painfully spurned in love that he wouldn’t have been tempted to jump recklessly into a war to convince the object of his affections of his abilities? Despite the inexorable forces leading the world in the direction of a conflict, these decision makers had a choice to prevent it. It is illuminating to learn of their personal quirks that pushed them to do otherwise.

This book, though running into 790 pages, is a worthy read. Chew it maybe 50 pages a week, for its plots and subplots are perhaps more interesting and nuanced than the simple good-vs-evil story of the WWII.?

The New Wild: Why Invasive Species will be Nature’s Salvation: Fred Pearce

The title of this book sounds like a clickbait. There is a reason why it is so. Beginning with the first page, journalist Fred Pearce makes it his job to be provocative and question all the established notions about human-led (anthropogenic) engineering of biodiverse ecosystems.

From uprooting plants considered as weeds, to trying to control the populations of rats and pigeons that seem to follow humans wherever we settle down – this book chronicles the modern environmental movement’s attempts to label certain species as rogue and then try to “restore” the ecosystem by “undoing” their impact. If misguided nostalgia of European settlers brought rabbits in Australia in the 19th century, driving the native species to extinction through competition, could attempts to kill them bring back the nature to its original state? Over multiple chapters, Pearce shows how invasive species today are the primary agents of dispersal and pollination in the ecosystems in which they have been introduced. He explores places where native species have been equally smart in adapting themselves to newer species, bringing the nature back to balance.

Pearce’s argument is – by their nature as a species spanning across six continents, human beings have aided the spread and growth of species around them as they have migrated, farmed, and urbanized. To say that all such efforts have led to a destruction of the nature in its most pristine form is to give the earth a lot less credit for its resilience. Expressing a minority opinion in a growing consensus around the adverse impact of human habitation on the nature and biodiversity, he questions the studies that attribute a cost to the environment from invasive species.

That said, the book in its bid to stand out and make a provocative point loses its nuance. It is a book worth reading in the sense that it educated me about how our ideas of nature being virgin before human contact, the concept of native and non-native species – come from our ideological foundations in religion and anti-immigration rhetoric. However, it ignores the fact that over the past century, human impact on nature and biodiversity has been exponentially higher than it has ever been. By swinging the pendulum too far in the other direction – overemphasizing the nature’s ability to evolve, adapt and regenerate- this book seems to be giving an intellectual carte blanche to wantonly destroying the environment without thinking of its consequences.?

Castle Rackrent: Maria Edgeworth

This novella isn’t something you’d enjoy if you are not into exploring the English language and the evolution of its multiple literary genres. The story here is simple – the decline of a prominent Irish family into penury, as seen through the eyes of its servant.

But for those interested in such things as origins of genres, this is a remarkable book. Maria Edgeworth is an author that deserves more fame than she gets today – someone who in her day was cited by Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott as an influence. Written in 1800, this is one of the first attempts at a period novel and the first English book to have the concept of an unreliable narrator. The stamp of Edgeworth’s style can be seen in Austen’s witty observations about pre-Victorian English society. Sir Walter Scott copies her attempts at authenticity by giving characters from different social classes in his novels a distinct dialect and vocabulary. This early peek into how some perennial tropes in English literature, especially historical satire, evolved – is what makes this book unique.

Barring the originality in style though, there isn’t much that has been said in this novel – in terms of either dialogues or the plot – that you wouldn’t have read before. You have seen this script play out in real life, in novels by Sarat Chandra Chatterjee, in TV series.

It is not an eternal classic like Edgeworth’s later admirers like Austen or Charlotte Bronte would go on to create. Read it on a day when you have nothing to do and have a hidden passion for language inside you. You may find yourself entertained.?