| | | Good morning! | | There will be no edition of my newsletter this week. However, here is a quick recap of my reading recommendations over the year so far. JULY 22 Manil Suri’s The Big Bang of Numbers: How to Build the Universe Using Only Math in which the author argues (logically) that in the beginning was not a word, but a number. Suri uses pure math to explain the world – from astronomical phenomenon to the weather to even art. He peppers this with interesting diversions, but perhaps the best way for you, Constant Reader, to understand what this book is about, without really reading it, is to look up my colleague Rachel Lopez’s Q&A with Manil Suri (on the book) in November. My favourite line from that: “It’s almost like nature is a little jealous of mathematics. She tries to put her own stamp on things, bringing in unpredictability, making a mistake on purpose to show that a separate creator was involved.” | | JULY 15 The perfect thriller for the digital era — a game of hide-and-seek that puts people against formidable surveillance and monitoring machinery, Anthony McCarten’s Going Zero. | | JULY 8 An old book that showed up on my timeline. Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyperreality. Eco was one of the world’s best-known semiologists (or semioticians), someone intelligently interpreting signs and symbols for a larger (and usually hidden) meaning. From fashion to architecture to comics to medieval history to America (many of the essays are about America), Eco casts his eye (and his mind) wide, and I couldn’t help wonder, as I have wondered every time I have picked up this book over the years, what a similar critical analysis of India (Travels in Contemporary India) would look like. | | JUNE 17 The perils of trying to read as much as one can (two to three books a week) and across genres is that sometimes, one ends up missing some really good books when they come out. This week, I finally read a book most people already have, Chris Miller’s Chip War. From the origins of the semiconductor industry — I’d also recommend Tom Wolfe’s essay, Two Young Men Who Went West for those interested in knowing about the early years of the chip industry, and the birth of Silicon Valley — through its evolution, to its current status, and the underlying economic and geopolitical implications, Miller’s book reads like a techno-thriller. The good news, and the bad, is that this is non-fiction. | | JUNE 10 I don’t like supermarkets. I view them the way JG Ballard perhaps would - a Ballard in a generous and good mood, but still Ballard. I’ve always known there are many others who feel that way. And the book I’m currently reading (a 2014 one in French, released in English for the first time a couple of months back), Look at the Lights, My Love, tells me that Annie Ernaux, who won the 2022 Nobel Prize in literature, feels the same way. At one level, it is a study of consumer behaviour – based exclusively on observations over a year from her visits to her local supermarket – but it is also an account of the dehumanising aspects of consumerism (including what your shopping reveals about you). | | JUNE 3 The most trippy book I have read in a long time, Siddhartha Deb’s The Light at the End of the World, a fantastic retelling of some moments from Indian history through four interconnected narratives. Some strands of the book are hallucinatory; others are dystopian; and still others are painfully real — but they are held together masterfully by Deb’s imagination, and language. | | MAY 27 The Hindu Right is perhaps at its peak in India – and various commentators have sought to understand its growth, and its appeal. But movements happen because of people, and it can be argued that the Hindu Right, as exemplified by the Bharatiya Janata Party, is where it is because of Atal Bihari Vajpayee. This week, I have been reading Vajpayee: The Ascent of the Hindu Right, 1924-1977 by Abhishek Choudhary, which underlines the role played by the man who would go on to become India’s first PM from the BJP in the party’s growth to the political hegemon it is today. | | MAY 20 The best horror comic ever written — the HP Lovecraft-inspired Providence (the compendium edition) by Alan Moore, which features characters and events from Lovercraft’s works, even Lovecraft himself. It helps that I’ve read almost all of HPL’s works. And it helps even more that I like to play the guess-the-allusion game that Moore likes to play with his readers. | | MAY 6 As I said in the preamble of this edition of the newsletter, Richard Fisher’s The Long View, a book that analyses our obsession with the short term (it’s only partly our fault); how the brain sees time; how to develop the habit of “expanding our perception of time” — and the benefits of doing so. I found some of the ideas in the book similar to those expressed in Jenny Odell’s Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock. That book, too, explained the futility of the way in which we measure time, and suggested ways to do it better. As someone reshaping his relationship with time, I found both books fascinating, and more importantly, useful. | | APRIL 29 There’s something about the way Sri Lanka plays cricket that evokes the West Indies at their prime - and it isn’t just the papare beat at grounds, reminiscent of the calypso. Yet, not much is known about the country’s cricketing history, or its stars (many from the golden generation haven’t bothered to write their biographies, while lesser cricketers from other countries have written and updated theirs). Nicholas Brookes’s An Island’s Eleven seeks to fill the gap – and does so masterfully. Brookes writes about the lives of past greats (such as Mahadevan Sathasivam, considered by many to be the best batsman in the world in his time), the big leap that Sri Lankan cricket made under arguably its greatest captain ever (Arjuna Ranatunga), and the years after – and he does so with passion, a keen sense of nuance for the local culture, and with the obvious energy of a cricket fan. | | APRIL 22 With the Karnataka elections campaign in full swing, I am reading Furrows in a Field: The Unexplored Life of HD Deve Gowda. The former PM’s life is a classic rags-to-riches story, and Sugata Srinivasaraju’s biography is rich in detail and also context. Given its span (Gowda is now 89, and was 87 when the book was released), it is also a cross-sectional view of national as well as regional politics over at least seven decades (Gowda’s political life started in the early 1950s). | | APRIL 15 A book on two of my interests — mathematics and literature. Many years ago, when I still did these things, I was at a small sit-down dinner for writers where I proceeded to get drunk with India’s best poet and discuss mathematics and poetry (we also made fun of the youngest person in the group, a very successful writer who characterised his work as “popular fiction aimed at people in B and C towns” without knowing what he was getting into). The link, not just between math and poetry, but also math and literature, is strong, argues Sarah Hart in Once Upon a Prime: The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature (and it is a clever title). Critics who want to quibble may insist that much of the book is about arithmetic and numbers and not really pure mathematics, but there’s enough mention of calculus and fractals and cryptography and geometry in it to keep everyone happy. | | APRIL 8 Covid-19 made me rethink time (just like it has made me rethink a lot of other things). I’m not talking about the three-odd weeks spread across 13 months that I worked from home after being infected (the HT newsroom remained open throughout), but the two-years-and-a-bit after February 2020 that it took for life and work to return to some sort of normal. That time deserves rethinking is the central premise of Jenny Odell’s new book Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, and she then goes on to do just that by drawing from a variety of disciplines (management theory to philosophy to biology) to show why the way we measure time is fundamentally flawed. I’m intrigued enough to go out and buy Odell’s previous book now. It’s titled How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. | | APRIL 1 This week, I finished reading Humanly Possible, an intelligent, reasonably deep, and engaging account of humanism and humanists by Sarah Bakewell. It is an apt time to read this book, not just in India but anywhere in the world. Humanism, many would have us believe, is outdated — and what little of it remains, technologists insist, will have to deal with a post-human future. But Bakewell thinks otherwise and argues that humanism is a work-in-progress (like it has always been), suggesting that there is hope. | | MARCH 25 I finished reading Haruki Murakami’s Novelist as a Vocation earlier this week. The book is a collection of essays on writing — and covers a range of topics from ideation to style — but I thought it should have been titled Novelist as my Vocation. This is, at one level, an intensely personal book that tells us more about Murakami’s writing process (and evolution) than it is, even tangentially, a how-to for aspiring writers. Then, that is understandable — writing itself is an intensely personal process. | | MARCH 18 For the longest time, I used to write a column on graphic novels for Mint (it was called Cult Fiction). I do not follow graphic novels as closely as I did then, but I still keep an eye open for something that is either graphic or novel (or both). This week I am reading Nicholas Mahler’s graphic novel retelling of James Joyce’s Ulysses (which itself was a retelling of Homer’s Odyssey). Mahler’s minimalist art, sometimes delightful, at other times provocative, and at still other times, puzzling, makes this release from Seagull Books as interesting to read as the original. | | MARCH 11 Babel, by RF Kuang. Set in an alternative 19th century where skilled translators can work magic which powers the British empire, Kuang’s book combines the classic script of a fantasy — a young initiate being trained in a magical institute who discovers that his work may lead to greater evil — with an unsympathetic look at British imperialism. It’s been pointed out to me that I’m reading more fiction this year than last. Maybe it’s because fiction makes more sense at this point. | | MARCH 4 For someone who listens to a lot of music (and I mean a lot), I am a relative new entrant to the world of 33 1/3 , “short books about albums” as the website says. This week, I read Kim Cooper’s book on In The Aeroplane Over the Sea, a cult album that turned 25 in February (I’m old!) and which continues to sell largely through word of mouth. Cooper’s book provides the backstory of the album (and the band), the cultural context in which it was created, a brief exploration of the songs themselves, and an explanation for band front-man Jeff Mangum’s desire to walk away from it all at what should have been the high point of his career. Some people believe this has added to the album’s charm. But as anyone who has listened to In The Aeroplane Over the Sea can vouch, the music speaks for itself. | | FEBRUARY 25 For the past two decades, I have gotten into the habit of re-reading John Kennedy Toole’s classic A Confederacy of Dunces once a year. Increasingly, I have started doing this in February. It helps me get through the month, usually the low point of my work-year. In part disturbing, largely funny, and mostly pointless, CoD gets better, and seems more relevant, with every reading. It strikes me that it’s unlikely that I have not mentioned CoD in my newsletter before, but there’s nothing lost in a re-plug, which may well encourage some of you to seek out the book. | | FEBRUARY 18 At a time when alternate histories are gaining currency, and just about everyone is being called a historian, it’s been a pleasure to dip into an authoritative history of India (and one co-written by a historian). There are three things that work for A New History of India — From its Origins to the Twenty-first Century by Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Shobita Punja and Toby Sinclair: its span, its currency, and its brevity. It’s tough to pack India’s history into one volume (of modest proportions), but Mukherjee & Co have managed to do so. | | FEBRUARY 11 Despite the size his group has grown to and its prominence in some infrastructure sectors, Gautam Adani remains a relatively low-profile businessman. And the listed companies of his group are, given their market capitalisation, not as closely tracked by analysts as other listed companies of comparable size are (perhaps a function of their low free-float). But Adani and his businesses have dominated headlines over the past few weeks. For those who want a fairly detailed, albeit sympathetic view, of the man and his businesses, I’d recommend RN Bhaskar’s Gautam Adani: Reimagining Business in India and The World. | | JANUARY 21 In late 2020, Hindustan Times featured a set of essays by writers describing their pandemic experience. One of the essays was by Janice Pariat, and she wrote about her forever work-in-progress garden and her work-in-progress book. I started reading that book, Everything the Light Touches, released last year, this week. Part of the book is set in Meghalaya, which is fast becoming my birder-son’s favourite stomping ground, and all of it (there are four separate narratives, across time and space) is about nature (specifically, plants) and our connection to them. It is clever and sophisticated storytelling, of the sort I have not encountered for a long time. | | JANUARY 14 India is Broken, by Ashoka Mody, a fascinating exposition (based on data as well as social science) of how, when presented with options at almost every stage of the country’s evolution and growth since Independence, its leaders chose to take the suboptimal one. I do not entirely agree with the author — as regular readers of this newsletter may remember, I have a different way of classifying the nation’s challenges (first, second, and third generation) and it is clear that over the past eight-and-half years, the government has addressed first-generation challenges with a great degree of success — but India is Broken is definitely a book anyone concerned about India’s challenges should read. | | JANUARY 7 Sarah Tolmie’s All The Horses of Iceland, a compact little novel about magic, geography, and belief, which is, at its spare little core, about one little country, one big man, and one magical horse. | | | | Were you forwarded this email? Did you stumble upon it online? Sign up here. | | | | | | Get the Hindustan Times app and read premium stories | | | | | | View in Browser | Privacy Policy | Contact us You received this email because you signed up for HT Newsletters or because it is included in your subscription. 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