HT Editors pick their best reads
FROM OMAN AND BOTSWANA to Washington, from literary fiction, sci-fi, and graphic novels to photo books, from politics and physics to foreign policy, the HT Editors’ collective list of books they enjoyed reading in 2019 encompasses diverse settings, subjects, and genres
HARINDER BAWEJA
Editor, Special Projects
We Are Displaced: My Journey and Stories From Refugee Girls Around the World
Malala Yousafzai
Malala Yousafzai, the girl from Pakistan’s Swat Valley, who was shot in the head by the Taliban when she was 15 years old, is inspirational. Her journey from near death to Nobel peace prize winner has challenge and strife written all over it.
The book, We Are Displaced is born from her own displacement and her longing for home. Yousafzai can travel the world – and she did before she wrote this book – but cannot go anywhere near her own country where she was shot for going to school. As an activist, who spread the message of the importance of education, Yousafzai met scores of young girls who were similarly displaced and cast away as refugees and migrants. The book tells the story of her and nine other young girls, all dealing with pain and loss, each one torn from home due to conflict. Told in the first person, the journeys are deeply personal and disturbing: each of the 10 characters speaks of how they escaped violence, how they tried to resettle and how difficult it was to leave everything behind, particularly your home.
Marie Claire, one of the 10 girls, speaks of how difficult it is to even find a new home. She was forced out of Congo but found herself in Zambia amid slogans of “Go back to your country.”
We Are displaced is an important work of oral history in which Yousafzai starts with her own experience but quickly moves on to tell other important stories. The experiences of the young adults are devastating but each journey also brims with hope and that’s what makes the book memorable. It was released in India in January 2019, but it is a book you could well end the year with.
LALITA PANICKER
Consulting Editor, Views
To The Land of Long Lost Friends Alexander Mccall Smith
If you love Africa as much I do, having grown up there, you will love Alexander Mccall Smith’s 20th book, To The Land of Long Lost Friends in the No 1 Ladies Detective Agency series. Set in Gaborone, Botswana, the stories are humorous, filled with traditional Botswanian wisdom and suffused with a great love for the lovely southern African country. All the books in the series feature the two lady detectives who run the agency, the traditionally-built, infinitely-kind, investigator extraordinaire Precious Ramotswe and her acerbic assistant Grace Makutsi, holder of the as-yet-unparalleled score of 97% at the Botswana Secretarial College.
In the latest book, the intrepid investigators set out to solve a number of mysteries. Cheating husbands, irrational daughters, unsuitable suitors and small village mysteries are pursued by the two and invariably solved .
The narrative shifts back and forth, the plot meanders on, the descriptions are needlessly long, some characters are thinly delineated but yet, this book, as its predecessors, lingers on in your memory long after you have read it. This is why I can hardly wait for the next in this series. There will be no surprises in this one either but the fact that so many people eagerly await it shows Alexander Mccall Smith’s extraordinary ability to keep his readers in thrall. Do start reading this series. If nothing else, you will definitely want to visit Botswana, land of its founding president, the great Sir Seretse Khama, gentle people, and mellifluous cattle bells.
MANJULA NARAYAN
National Books Editor
Celestial Bodies Jokha Alharthi
The two books I loved this year were Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi and Sita Under the Crescent Moon by Annie Ali Khan.
Winner of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize, Celestial Bodies packs the stories of sisters Mayya, Asma and Khawla, of Mayya’s husband Abdallah ibn Sulayman, motherless son of a slave-owning merchant traumatized by his father’s personality, and of their families into its 256 pages. Alharthi’s people bring alive the social transformation of Oman. For an Indian reader, these stories are at once foreign and familiar. They reminded me of conversations with older relatives that revealed forgotten family rituals, distasteful caste customs, and ill-fated pairings. A wonderful book.
I hadn’t heard of Annie Ali Khan until I began reading Sita Under the Crescent Moon. Two chapters in I Googled her hoping to make contact. Alas, she had been dead a year. I wanted to ask her if the book was a travelogue as it follows women on pilgrimages to Sufi shrines at Mango Pir, Hinglaj, Thatta, and Sehwan Sharif in Pakistan; if, with its fantastic descriptions of dhamaals, it was an examination of ecstatic religiosity; if it was a plea to nurture the syncretic traditions of the subcontinent as the pilgrims worship the memory of Sita, that doomed paragon of virtue. It is all of these and it is more. It is a cry against the limited lives of women in the cultures of the region. Sita Under the Crescent Moon is a moving, infinitely rewarding read.
POONAM SAXENA
National Weekend Editor
Sufi – The Invisible Man of the Underworld
Aabid Surti
An extremely enjoyable novel I read this year was Sufi – The Invisible Man of the Underworld. The author, 84-year-old Aabid Surti, is not just a writer; he’s also the legendary creator of (among others) the popular comic book character, Bahadur, and a dedicated water conservationist. At the Mumbai launch of the book, filmmaker Sriram Raghavan (of Johnny Gaddar and Andhadhun fame) said that Sufi, for him, was “Shantaram meets Charles Dickens meets Once Upon A Time in Mumbai.” The novel is a thrilling tale of two friends, Iqbal aka Sufi and Aabid, who grow up, desperately poor, in the dingy lanes of Dongri, go their separate ways and then meet 30 years later. Every Thursday, Aabid drops in at Sufi’s flat, they sit on easy chairs, and talk about their lives. Aabid became an artist, cartoonist and writer, but the cerebral, soft-spoken Sufi ended up as one of the city’s biggest smugglers. His story unfolds against the Mumbai of the 1960s and 1970s, when smuggling was at its peak. Surti gives a detailed, dramatic account of this world, from the modus operandi of smugglers (yes, contraband goods were unloaded from one ship to another in mid-sea at night) to its convoluted power hierarchies (Sufi’s ultimate boss turns out to be a nondescript Gujarati seth in a kurta pyjama). Real characters like Haji Mastan, Karim Lala, Vardha bhai flit in and out of the narrative, as do Mumbai landmarks such as Ghadiyal Godi, Sion-koliwada and Do Tanki.
I hope Sriram Raghavan is already planning a film on the book.
PAROMA MUKHERJEE
Head – National Photography Desk
Dalit: A Quest for Dignity Nepal Picture Library
Iran into Nayantara Gurung Kakshapati, founder of the Nepal Picture Library at the India Art Fair at the beginning of this year. She was carrying copies of their new publication Dalit: A Quest for Dignity —a book I promptly bought. My case for the book is its fair critique of photography as a medium enabling biased representation and documentation, and yet its undeniable power to make visible the Dalits in Nepal. The book addresses the upper caste saviour complex precisely, as it urges readers to look beyond the obvious frame to find caste violence, and step away from the need to save those already wronged. From a page of seemingly innocuous selfies of a young man before he was found dead after eloping with his Brahmin girlfriend to a grid of repetitive tree images, where a young Dalit girl was kidnapped and raped, the book isn’t for the faint hearted for it is in the everyday that we hide the most violent of our crimes. There’s much to learn and unlearn in this volume. To put it simply, this book is a way of seeing beyond our considered choices to merely watch.
ROSHAN KISHORE
Data and Political Economy Editor
The Most Dangerous Place: A History of the United States in South Asia
Srinath Raghvan
Srinath Raghvan’s The Most Dangerous Place: A History of the United States in South Asia deals with not just India but also Pakistan and Afghanistan.
A little engagement with the text brings to the fore how successive Indian leaders, from Jawaharlal Nehru onwards, shaped their policy towards the US based on three shifting goalposts: larger geopolitics, the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and India’s own strategic and material interests.
Among the most fascinating parts of the book is how Us-china relations have evolved, and what it has meant for Indo-us relations. The book focuses on the importance of looking at current problems with a historic perspective. For example, it gives details about how the Us-pakistan sponsored ‘struggle’ against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan was crucial in the proliferation of Islamic terrorism, including in India. We need more books like these, which can narrate complex stories in simple terms.
RUDRANEIL SENGUPTA
National Sports Editor
Exhalations Ted Chiang
Ted Chiang’s latest collection of short stories, Exhalations, navigates through familiar territory for science fiction readers: Can machines develop a conscience? What dilemmas will be raised by time travel? Working within these common frameworks, Chiang crafts deeply-felt meditations on what it means to be human.
Exhalations begins with The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate, a time travel story set in ancient Baghdad. Another story, The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling is set in a world where human beings can record every moment of their lives. Our protagonist is a man born before everything was recorded, but his daughter is a woman of the times. The father must grapple with this question: Is the precision of a recorded life better than living with the vagaries of memory? Read Chiang’s stories for echoes of Phillip K Dick and Brian Aldiss, even Kazuo Ishiguro; and for his ability to work with cerebral questions with a light touch.
SANCHITA SHARMA
Health and Science Editor
Six Impossible Things: The Mystery of the Quantum World
John Gribbin
For those who are still puzzling over how Schrödinger’s Cat can be both dead and alive, and how a particle can be in two places at the same time, British astrophysicist and bestselling science writer John Gribbin has put together six of the world’s foremost hypotheses about the quantum world.
The six impossible-sounding hypotheses discussed are the Copenhagen Interpretation, Pilot-wave Interpretation, Many Worlds Interpretation, the Decoherence Interpretation, Ensemble Non-interpretation or the Statistical Interpretation; and the Timeless Transactional Interpretation. Gribbin brings non-specialists up to speed with the complex ideas about what makes up the subatomic quantum world. Designed to be as accessible as a textbook, this slim book was among the six shortlisted for UK’S 2019 Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize. It’s a must read for science enthusiasts and sci-fi fans, as well as newbies who want a working understanding of the quantum world.
SOUMYA BHATTACHARYA
Managing Editor
Ties
Domenico Starnone
The finest novel I read this year was Ties by Domenico Starnone, who is widely regarded as Italy’s greatest living novelist. Short and intricately structured, it is a searing story of love, loss, ageing and the complexity of family dynamics. Jhumpa Lahiri has translated this novel from Italian to English. It made me dive straight into his backlist.
It has been a year of extensive rereading for me. John Updike may not much be in favour nowadays, but his Rabbit quartet is still a work that refuses to lose any of its magic. JM Coetzee’s Youth, one of his two volumes of fictionalised memoir, and William Styron’s Darkness Visible, his terrifying account of spiralling into depression, seemed to me gems that are not talked about as much as they should be. I was happy to have reaffirmed to myself that Jhumpa Lahiri’s collection of stories, Unaccustomed Earth, is her finest work. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein celebrated 200 years of its publication in 2018. I reread it this year and realised again why it is such a seminal work; and why everything that has been written about artificial intelligence owes Frankenstein and Shelley a debt.
SUNETRA CHOUDHURY
National Political Editor
This Town Mark Leibovich
It’s been a year of discovery and learning and in 2019 I discovered the joys of the 2013 American bestseller This Town by Mark Leibovich. The author, who is a White House correspondent, gives a rare insight into how aides of politicians manipulate the media, how top news anchors have close proximity with those that they are supposed to cover, and how it results in some unseemly activities in Capitol Hill. Reading the book was an eye-opener because it made me think about the need for reading something like this on the Indian scenario.
My second recommendation is Akhil Sharma. I discovered him a few years ago when I read his award-winning novel Family Life. It was the most beautiful and haunting story I have ever read. I can say the same for everything else that Sharma has written. I was thrilled to find a collection of his short stories called A Life of Adventure and Delight. His writing is melancholic but there’s a beauty to that sadness. If you’ve not discovered him yet, I hope you do in the New Year and you can thank me later.
R SUKUMAR
Editor-in-chief
American Gods : My Ainsel
Neil Gaiman, P Craig Russel, Scott Hampton
Neil Gaiman’s American Gods came out in 2001. The Starz TV series of the same name, which introduced the book (one of the classics of the modern fantasy genre) to new readers came out in 2017. In 2018, Dark Horse Comics started publishing a comic book version, adapted by the redoubtable P Craig Russell and Scott Hampton. Gaiman’s book is about a clash of old and new gods. The old gods include those from various myths (Odin, from Norse; Anansi, from Ghanian; Kali, from Indian; and other such). The new ones are gods that symbolize the internet, the media, the market, and others. Written well into the onset of the internet era, but much before the emergence of much of new media (and new social media), Gaiman’s work is prescient. After all, who worships the old gods anymore? And isn’t it natural for such gods, once venerated, to do everything in their powers to stay relevant?
The comic book adaptation of the book is even better. A collection of nine issues of American Gods Vol 1: Shadows, was released in 2018; the second, that of nine issues of My Ainsel came out in 2019. Russell’s adaptation makes Gaiman’s smooth prose, smoother. Illustrated mainly by Scott Hampton, the result is a comic book that is as enjoyable, but different from the original (to which it is still true). The comics of the third volume, The Moment of the Storm have started being released and a trade-paperback compiling all nine issues of the final chapter of the comic version should be out in
2020. That’s something to look forward to.
ZIA HAQ
Associate Editor
E=mc2 A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation
David Bodanis
Everyone has heard of E=mc² but hardly anyone, save for physics graduates, knows what it means. Science writer David Bodanis tells its story in a brilliant little book. This is a biography of Einstein’s most famous discovery, the theory of relativity, and the world’s best-known equation. E=mc² is behind everything: From the mushroom clouds over Nagasaki and Hiroshima to electricity and PET scans. Bodanis plots the evolution of E=mc² at the hands of its ancestors, such as Michael Faraday. He breaks down each variable, namely e (energy), = (is equal to), m (mass) and c (celeritas, or the speed of light) as well as the exponent 2, offering glimpses of the social history of England that shaped it. It all came together in 1905, in one of the five papers published by Einstein. Einstein’s insights into light led him to understand that mass can be destroyed if it is converted into energy and vice versa. That’s what E=mc² means. The book brought to light the theory of relativity for a physics dunce like me in a chatty, entertaining way.