It's the time of the year..to count my blessings? Nope, to count my books 📚
Ok, blessings too. But mainly books. The books I have read, the adventures they took me on, the thoughts they left me with. Here are a few -
📙 I devised a “reading philosophy”
This year had a lot going on, work-wise, bandwidth-soaking events that often left me with little space for “high-concept” reading, so I devised a system where I interspersed the heavies with some light escapes.
I stumbled across the famous (fictional) Sicilian Inspector, Montalbano, in the form of a recommendation from a friend. Another dear friend had just moved to Sicily and it seemed like a meant-to-be situation. I had also been enjoying the Japanese detectives Kaga and Galileo, and who could say no to our favourite British octogenarians solving murders every Thursday from peaceful Kent. As a Marvel-esque galaxy of Detectives gathered in my mind, I conceived of an ambitious project – to read Detective fiction from around the world!
Well, it may not be that ambitious, but it certainly was interesting. Thrillers have a way of capturing time and space like few books do, and for the price of a crime I got to read about local cultures, politics and food. So much food 😋
So here I am and my latest pick is Inspector Chen Cao, a poetic crime-solver in a China of the 90s. A China a-straddle lingering Maoism and Deng Xiaoping’s shiny new reforms. A perfect mix of sugar and spice and everything nice.
📙 I started Audible
This year my “reading” went multi-media, physical books, kindle ones and Audible. From never wanting to read anything but physical, I now actively pick books for each medium. But I have a system, physical books are for keeps – beautifully written fiction or mind-opening non-fiction, kindle is for light-fiction and audible is for experimental non-fiction.
My first book on Audible was “Kitchen Confidential”, an autobiography by famous chef Anthony Bourdain, narrated by him too. And it was a roller-coaster of a listen, across his early childhood that resulted in a culinary career, to the underbelly of this world, the rough, tough and often-rejected-from-mainstream-society men and women who find their way into kitchens across America, serving food and experiences to oblivious patrons.
📙 “Where did you come from, where did you go” or I read across Genres
I read across history, investigative non-fiction, evolutionary science and history, science, parenting, finance and many more genres. A few notables below -
In “Smoke and Ashes” Amitav Ghosh took me on a journey of the poppy plant, the story of Opium in the 19th century, colonial forces using it to exploit a nation (India) and destroy another (China). He ended with the mind-bender: was it humans that used the Poppy plant for their ends or the other way around, the plant using our basest instincts for survival and propagation?
I read about the on-going opioid crisis in America (hello again poppy) in “Empire of Pain” and in “Cobalt Red”, about the disturbing account of miners in Congo unearthing Cobalt under atrocious conditions to power our technology addiction.
“A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution” which exactly as the title sounds, explained how we hold the power to edit our genes in our hands today, a prospect more revolutionary than AI and as simple.
In “Anxious Generation”, a MUST-read for parents with young or teenage children, I learnt how unbridled access to the internet, coupled with a childhood increasingly spent away from the real world, can lead to terrible consequences.
I learned about the 5 fundamental breakthroughs that have paved the path for human intelligence from single-cellular organisms to modern humanity in “A Brief History of Intelligence”, and in “Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From”, the fascinating 65000-year old history of the homo sapien, our migrations, genealogies, the DNA that divides us and the common origins that unite us. Across a subcontinent as diverse and rich as South Asia and in these polarising times, we would do well to remember what Tony Joseph leaves us with: We are all Indians. We are all migrants.
I read Andre Agassi’s “Open” and Salman Rushdie’s “Knife”, the former a complex testament to the sacrifices demanded by world-class competitive sports, and the latter a deeply touching narrative of the seconds, minutes, hours, days and months of one’s life right after tragedy strikes, such as it did Rushdie on that Chautauqua stage where he was stabbed 15 times.
📙 I went time-zone hopping
As I collected travel miles this year, from Singapore to Berlin to Dubai, I also did my best to pick local authors and stories. From “Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital” to “Chess Story” by Stefan Zweig, I shuttled across time-zones and timelines.
I went into the past with Ravindranath Tagore’s “Gora”, a timeless tale of nations and nationalism, religion and its rigidities, mores versus morals. As relevant today as it was in the early 1900s.
📙 I read books about work
And finally in my year-end "light fiction" mode I realized once again that there no such thing.
Much like Hermione’s bag of plenty, a book-any book is a bottomless storehouse of goodies. How much we take depends on us, our moods, which way our receptors are facing, our willingness to go deep or not.
I found myself reading stories of people burnt out, starting again, finding a renewed purpose or lack of, liberating themselves from the conditioning of a lifetime and lifetimes, in the form of these amazing books about books, namely “Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop” and “What you are looking for is in the Library”.
As somebody working to unravel the new definitions of work, I realized that these books too offered glimpses into the new ways that work was seen today.
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This is me. Has all this reading transformed me? I cannot quite say how but I know it has.
Ending with the happy sight of my beautiful-wonderful-new (now half a year old) bookcase. A life-long dream come to fruition.
Here’s to all your bookish and non-bookish dreams. May 2025 be the year they come true!
