What I read in 2020 - Part 1
It is that time of the year I suspect. People are looking back at the year that goes by, perhaps with a lot of hope that nothing like this year ever comes back in their life again. It is also the time of the year when you compile lists – of the best movies you have watched, podcasts you’ve listened to and for those who wish to curate/style an image on the social media as a thought leader, the books that they have read which changed their lives each year. For the first time, I am tempted to jump on this bandwagon as well, listing all the books I read this year and my impressions of them. Before I dive further into that list and offer you some recommendations on what to read from the limited universe that I have surveyed, a few points are in order:
Why now?
I think having lived through the longest period of sensory deprivation in my life, locked down in a flat in Gurgaon for 9 months, I feel this is a time when everything from this period – sparse in sensory stimuli as it was- is worthy of enumeration. It is not that reading has been a new discovery as a hobby during lockdown. It is just that it had been the only/primary source of entertainment as every other indulgence was taken away. Earlier, reading was incidental – waiting for someone in a coffee shop, distracting oneself while travelling, an aide to sleep. This year it became central. And for that reason, it deserves a special respect and a separate section.
There is another answer to that Why as well. If there is one skill where I became prolific and proficient at during the Covid exile was writing (I became prolific at cooking, but not even distantly proficient). This is the year when I put down 50K plus words, none of them as a part of my job. Writing was a labour of love, supported and encouraged by a community of readers like you. In that sense, putting down this list is a homage from a new skill to an old indulgence.
What is in this list?
Given that most of what I write about in public sphere concerns Finance and Economics, it may come as a surprise to you that, except for one, all the books I read this year had nothing to do with this subject. One of the things I have been extremely fortunate to have engaged early in my life is quizzing as a sport – which encourages a lot of interstitial and lateral thinking. Quizzing is all about arcane connects between literature and science, music and finance. It is that essence I try to bring to my reading list. This eclecticism also helps me cultivate a respect for other disciplines and how lessons learnt therein can contribute to my daily job, helping me become a more broad-minded, cross-functional person. Indeed, I found Charlotte Bronte’s prose in Villette a better descriptor of the plight of women entrepreneurs than any seminars, business books and HBR articles on this topic that I have gone through.
Second, not everything that I read this year was to my liking. I found some underappreciated novels revelatory; some storied Nobel Prize winning authors trite. I will lay them all out before you. Perhaps I am immature to perceive the wisdom and pathos in some of these books. Or maybe I haven’t touched the context from which the writer’s ideas originate or their essence. But that is a risk one has to be bear when one is reading diversely, sampling at random anything, from any topic (reading a book about the history and politics of waxing).
Third, there are no large lessons here. Nothing that I read here will change my life tomorrow, or yours if you do read them. It will one day. But there are no quotations I can throw before you, no 5-step process plans of becoming a better person. There are, of course, a few reflections, and some indications of why I liked the book. That is all. Perhaps you will like it for entirely different reasons. The point of reading is to immerse oneself in an experience, and to read mindfully. Even for the thickest tomes, what I did this year, or what I have always done is not to binge read. Rather going through it 20-30 pages a day, in a sort of meditative reading session. The flipside is that I do not have 100 books a year statistic to brag about. However, each book that I have read in this fashion has left a deeper impression on me, reminding me of the time(s) in my life that I read them, places that I read them in and how being immersed in that story for that period felt like. It is a feeling difficult to describe – it seems like a conversation with an author who you regularly meet for a period in your life and you bring to each reading the impressions of what is happening around you.
The list
Now, without wasting much of your time and in a chronological sequence for the year, here are brief my brief impressions (reviews) of the books I read this year (200 words or less).
1. Drop City: T Coraghessan Boyle:
A highly recommended read from an author who isn’t so well known outside of the US, Boyle’s Drop City is a dark satire on the 1970s counter culture and hippie movement. It doesn’t strain itself to make you howl with laughter, but you won't be able to suppress a chuckle at the antics of the protagonists through its journey. More importantly, it takes the politics and social beliefs associated with the radical leftism in that period and places them in two different settings. One part of the novel sets the protagonists – a commune of free lovers – in Sunny California and the other in a difficult to survive, hardy Alaska. Nothing especially dramatic happens in the novel – except that you see how circumstances, and the abundance or lack of resources changes a friendly, peace-loving, open-minded community into something as bigoted and deceptive as the society it despises and seeks to renounce. By taking the familiar political themes of welfare, subsidies, equality of opportunity and right to work out of the context, Boyle’s novel still makes a political statement by exposing the flipside of a liberal, socialist utopia.
Roth is best known for his novel “The Plot Against America” to most of us readers. But Nemesis, his last novel is a more timely read in the times of a pandemic. Set in Newark of 1944, it tells the story of a small community where causes of polio are still unknown and there is no vaccine on the horizon (I guess he takes some liberties with the timeline of the development of the polio vaccine here). When I picked up this novel in January this year, I never imagined it would foreshadow the news developments over the coming months. As with the Coronavirus epidemic, the lack of knowledge about Polio in the community, which sees its worst outbreak and the death of several children in a school, causes its notable citizens to fall back on their age-old racial and religious prejudices. New immigrants in the community – Italians – suddenly become associated with lack of hygiene and spreading of the disease in the neighborhood. People with mental illness and learning disabilities are targeted as carriers of the disease by more scientifically inclined people. Social ties begin to disintegrate as people lock themselves down as the epidemic spirals out of control (pre-internet era). As children perish, people recoil away from gestures of intimacy such as hugging or cuddling them. All the while, the local government authorities play down the severity of the epidemic. If this sounds familiar to you wherever you are in the world, you ought to pick this up. Given the year we have been through, I am sure there is a line, a word or an image that will conjure into your mind, for a long time to come, the terrors of an epidemic we have lived through
3. Strait is the Gate: Andre Gide:
A re-read after five years, this novel continues to disappoint and definitely has not aged well. Perhaps it is my own lack of emotional depth, but Andre Gide as an author has been over rated in my opinion, notwithstanding his Nobel Prize win in 1947. In a romantic narrative that competes with Hindi soap operas for melodrama, the broader message of the novel, whatever it is, is lost. If it is French literature, given me Albert Camus and Daphne du Maurier and Guy de Maupassant any day. Gide lags far behind, as a dim nebula in that constellation.
This book is a part memoir by Joan Didion, more famous as a long-form journalist. I picked this up out of curiosity, albeit dark, about its subject matter – the part where she talks about the years immediately after the loss of her adopted daughter to a brain ailment. It is a great book to learn about the complexities of being a parent who adopts a child and must one day reveal to them the truth about their biological parent. For me the other great insight was the anxieties about abandonment a lot of grown-ups who have been adopted face, and the way they respond by actively or passively seeking validation for it. That said, this memoir feels incomplete – perhaps because where it shines it fuels our appetite to know more about the protagonists – Ms. Didion and her deceased daughter. Pick it up for a one-time read, but I have a feeling that you might end up feeling slightly disappointed in the narrative, because at the end of the day an honest transcription of those feelings of loss of a child is too private and requires a bravery that none of us, including Ms. Didion, possess.
5. Maltese Falcon: Dashiell Hammett:
Maltese Falcon will forever be imprinted in my mind as the book that I carried with me in my bag, during my travels through South Africa and Congo. It is a rare conjunction – I was reading a thriller while also embarking on a business trip-cum-adventure in a place where I had never travelled before. The best way to describe Maltese Falcon is to compare it to the Guru Dutt's famous classic Pyaasa. It is perhaps the first prominent work of art in its genre – Hard boiled detective fiction for Maltese Falcon. But though we may have seen hundreds of other inspired works in this genre over the almost 100 years since its publication, the original novel still has a core which none of the other detective novels have managed to faithfully imitate. Doesn’t matter if you have watched the classic black-and-white movie adaptation starring Humphrey Bogart. It is still worth a watch and a fascinating read if you are traveling/stranded on an airport.
6. The Girls of Slender Means: Muriel Spark:
A novel that I picked up on Johannesburg airport to read during a 14-hour layover, The Girls of Slender Means is a light-hearted take on the lives of working women in the post-war Britain which playfully hits chauvinism hard in its shins. A mere 176 page novella published in mid-1950s, it hilariously describes “mansplaining”, “glass ceiling”, “body shaming” – stripping these terms of their terminology and spin. In a short novel, Spark conjures a London hostel for working ladies where some plot points border on magic realism – with women applying Vaseline to their waists to squeeze through a narrow window to the “world outside”, an unlikely bomb detonating and ending the life of a pious inmate who shunned the pleasures of life to be closer to God. I will leave you with this witty remark from the novel to whet your curiosity – “it never really occurred to her that literary men, if they liked women at all, do not want literary women, but girls”
To be continued