The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)
In the Words of Others
Writers recall the most memorable books of 2016, by fellow citizens of the republic of letters
designed book by a limnologist looks at water from 12 different angles, from life and motion and vibration to beauty and prayer. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate — Discoveries From a Secret World by Peter Wohlleben. And to go with it, Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants ,by Richard Mabey. They’re better for you than you think, they hold the waste spaces of the world in place, and you can eat some of them. And, in honour of Ariel, air spirit of The Tempest: Birds and People by Mark Cocker. Time to pay attention to the nonhuman life around us, without which human life would fail.
Junot Díaz
Two excellent books accompanied me through the darkness of these last months. The first was Wesley Lowery’s They Can’t Kill Us All,a devastating front-line account of the police killingsandtheyoungactivismthatsparkedone of the most significant racial justice movements since the 1960s: Black Lives Matter.
Then there is Julian Voloj and Claudia Ahlering’ssuperbgraphichistory Ghetto Brother, which on the surface is a biography of Benjy Melendez, the Boricua brother who in the late ’60s founded one of the Bronx’s most notorious gangs:theghettobrothers.starklydrawn,boldly told, Ghetto Brother is a gem.
Salman Rushdie
Porcelain, by Moby; Sudden Death, by Álvaro a year of rereading: I’ve revisited Edna O’brien’s novel from 1970, A Pagan Place. Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, the Sea, her Booker Prize-winning novel of 1978, swept me in as it did the first time around, but I now see that it is also very funny — the richest, I think, of all her novels. In new fiction, I was harrowed and impressed by Ian Mcguire’s robust The North Water and touched by the delicacy of Elizabeth Strout’s My Name Is Lucybarton.bestofall,irereadelizabethbowen’s 1938 novel The Death of the Heart.
Philip Pullman
A lot of essays — to begin with. Ferdinand Mount’s new book, English Voices is how an intelligent conservative sees the nature of Englishness, which is a slippery and contradictory thing, much needing elucidation after our recent disastrous vote for isolation and closed frontiers. Teju Cole’s Known and Strange Things is the work of someone who can both see and write with vigour and clarity. I escaped from the present day in the company of Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele, those 300-yearold guides to the London of their day in the original Spectator.
I can never resist a literary biography. I enjoyed Jonathan Bate’s Ted Hughes, a controversial attempt on the north face of that craggy genius. Frances Wilson’s Guilty Thing is a vivid life of Thomas De Quincey, the English Opium Eater, with all his irresistible zest and obsession with murder and darkness. Astrid Lindgren’s A World