Reading 2019

It has become an  end of the year ritual to recall the year’s experience of reading. Although I have stopped setting reading targets or challenges, I do very little else, beyond reading. So depending on travel plans (my other interest), I usually average 60 books in a year.  And keep a meticulous l It ist, for I can no longer retain all the names in my head.

How do I select what I read?  In earlier years it was fairly random, and included browsing in book stores (and we had large, well stocked ones!),  the long list of the Booker Prize and other prizes, book reviews in The Hindu and other publications. More recently, I keep  track of new publications by following the reviews of new releases in  ‘The Guardian’, ‘New Yorker’ (available free online)  and listening to the the wonderful book podcasts from ‘The Guardian’ ‘The New Yorker’ “New York Times’.  I read ‘Times Literary Supplement’ ‘London Review of books’ and ‘Biblio’ regularly. The selected finalists for the ever increasing number of Indian book prizes give you a glimpse into Indian writing. And of course, when a favorite author’s book is released it quickly goes onto my TBR! It is heartening, how quickly the books reach us, a far cry from earlier times!

So from the list of 64 (plus a couple since I scanned these pages) books I have read this year, here are my inputs. Fiction is predominant, as in spite of my desire and frequent resolutions to read more non-fiction, i do end up reading more fiction!

Colson Whithead’s Nickel boys is a beautiful, well written and heart wrenching story of the life of boys in a reform school.  The author won the the Pulitzer prize in 2017 and National Book Award in 2016 for his earlier book ‘The underground railroad’.  The reform school in the book,  is a fictionalized version of the Dozier school for boys which opened in 1900 and closed in 2011. The state of Florida ran Dozier as a reform school and  allegations against the school for allowing the beatings, rapes, torture, and even murder of students by guards and employees came out. Investigations into the allegations  revealed substantial proof  and some 55 graves were discovered on school grounds. Colson traces with empathy and suppressed anger, the trajectory of two of the boys, one who is aspirational and smart but end up where he does, by pure accident. Makes you think of the many turns in your life which are accidental!

Ray Bradbury’s Faranheit 451, an iconic book published in 1953,  makes it to most of the top 100 books of the 20th century American fiction. I was re-reading it after many years, and while it was dystopian in its time, it is so close to our present times that it was disconcerting. The literal burning of books (451F being the temperature at which books burn, or so Bradbury was told), is totally unnecessary in the world of today, a switch of the button to disconnect the internet can do even more! As for physical libraries, they too seem to be often under threat as recent events have shown.

Margaret Atwood is among my all time favorite writers, for her style, lucidity and moral compass.  Her ‘The Testament’ was so avidly awaited by readers,  and the expectations from her so high, that it was on the Booker long list before it was published. The story was the continuation of her imagined world of Gilead, created in Handmaid’s Tale, a world that had permeated in population through a successful television series of the same name.  I bought ‘The testament’ and then decided to pull out the older book and re-read it. It did not disappoint, but made me tardy about reading new book, in case it did!! Of course, I will get around to it in the New Year.

Books by the the Irish writers Sebastian Barry and Colm Toibin were among the best I read this year. Barry’s books, On Canaan’s side and Temporary gentlemen, in different ways address the issues of the Irish freedom struggle in the early decades of the 20th century and the impact of the First War on the life of the Irish people. They convey the tensions between the two communities (Catholic and Protestant) in poetic and lyrical prose. While I was vaguely familiar with the broad outlines of Irish history, the similarities of  the Irish independence struggle with our own, maybe why they struck a special cord. Colm Toibin’s The testament of Mary is a short wonderful book about the last days of Christ. The Mary in the title is the mother of Jesus, and this is one of the most poignant books I have read about maternal love.

The American writer Marillyne Robinson, is widely acclaimed and awarded.  I had read her 1984 novel, Housekeeping  sometime ago. It was on many of the “books of the century” lists and also on the list I was trying to plough through, of great American writers of the last century. She wrote with love and sensitivity of the vast American outback, in this case Idaho. Her book Gilead was published 2 decades later and was widely acclaimed. But I had kept away from it, because I got the impression that it was a ‘religious’ book! However, I did take the plunge and enjoyed it immensely. Its a book about a pair of friends, both preachers.  Christianity does come into it, but its far more than that. It is essentially about ‘faith’ and family ties told in a lovely, simple yet powerful style. It raises many universal questions. Its not an easy book to get through but worth the effort. So much so, that I also read her next book Home.

Sebastian Faulks, is an English writer, best known for his French triology. I had previously read the Birdsong (1993), the best known of these. This year I read the earlier book  in the triology, The Girl at the Lion d’Or (1989) as well as A fool’s alphabet (1992), On Green Dolphin Street (2001) and Human traces (2005).  Many of the stories have links to France and WWI and he tells them with wonderful empathy for the characters that he creates. There is something warm and likeable about them.

This was also the year that I finally read that iconic masterpiece of English literature, Middlemarch by George Eliot. Its a thick book, and its slow beginning, describing   middle level British aristrocatic country life, was not appealing to me on my earlier attempts. However, the book was on my TBR shelf for a while, and finally I did persist. This was probably inspired by the emerging discussions on women writers, especially in the context of the post-MeToo ecosystem. George Eliot, who lived through the middle part of the 19th century was actually Mary Ann Evans. Middlemarch reveals  much about her, as she weaves out the character of the spunky heroine Dorothea. I have just started reading her ‘Adam Bede’ and would probably venture onto others as well.

I  do plan to widen my non-fiction reading and  I have a host of them on my TBR shelf. However, among those I read, some were outstanding.  Educated by Tara Westover has been widely raved about and I got to read it when it was picked by the Book Club, which I have joined. This is an autobiography, of growing up in a Mormon family with extreme beliefs. Born sometime in September, 1986 on a remote mountain in Idaho, Westover was the seventh child of Mormon parents who subscribed to a paranoid patchwork of beliefs which went well beyond the mandates of their religion. Westover’s mother worked as a midwife and a herbal healer. Her father claimed to have prophetic powers, and owned a scrap yard where his children labored without any protective equipment. (Westover recounts accidents so hideous, and so frequent, that it’s a wonder she lived to tell her tale at all.) Mainstream medicine and schools were not trusted, and Westover’s determination to leave home and get a formal education was seen as a rebellion against her parents’ world. Westover tells her story with tremendous  perceptiveness and unsparing clarity, as well as with curiosity and love.

There were many books on the list that were ‘good but and then there were the disappointments. Pico Iyer has been a favorite for a long time, especially his travel books. But his latest release Autumn lights disappointed on many counts. He writes  on Buddhism, Dalai Lama, stillness but in this book it was stillness carried too far. I could get where he was coming from, but I felt that he failed to convey the benefits of a still and minimalistic life in words! I am sure he enjoys living it and I do envy him that. But it did not come through to me in the book.  Amitava Ghosh’s Gun Island was the other great disappointment. I have been a huge fan, have looked forward to each new book and consumed them with enthusiasm. Of course, the expectations from such prolific and competent writers are high and some of the disappointment is consequent to this. But even on its own, the story appeared contrived at many places and the characters never really came to life for me.

And as the year, and in fact the decade comes to an end, I look forward to more interesting adventures in reading in the coming years.

P.S. Links to some of my previous blogs on books

https://wordpress.com/post/sitanaiksblog.wordpress.com/114

My father’s reading list  

My reading list for 2012

There are books and books and then there is Coetzee!

On reading

My romance with historical fiction

This year in reading

 

Booker challenge – 3 #bookerlonglist2017

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These were book Nos 5, 6 and 7 of the challenge, as I continue to select the books on a lottery system. The first two books  – one by an American author (Whithead), the other by an Irish one (Barry) were both set in the Americas of the mid-nineteenth century, and both were related in part or in full, to slavery. This I thought was quiet something,  considering the possible millions of topics on which fiction is written.  I had read neither authors before, although later googling has shown that they both have been highly appreciated for their earlier works,

The Underground railroad is a slave story set in the late 1830s. While I am familiar with the broad outlines of American history, I am totally unfamiliar with the history of slavery itself. Of the many famous slavery stories, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is an all time classic, which I read so long ago, that I recall little of it. Stowe was an abolitionist and wrote the book  in the 1850s when it was the second highest sold book after the Bible. It is attributed in part to the Civil War and the abolition of slavery.  Confessions of Nat Turner (William Styron), Invisible man (Ralph Ellison)  and Beloved  (Toni Morrison), are the other classics on slavery that I have read. These show aspects of this inhuman practice from the perspective of individuals and their stories.

In The Underground railroad, Whithead gives a more sweeping overview of slavery. Center to the story is the life and escapades of Cora, a young slave who escapes from a particularly cruel plantation, and then manages to escape again and again …….. Through her experiences we learn of the extreme forms that  human cruelty can take, the laws that were passed by the Southern States, to preserve their leadership in tobacco commerce and the humanity of people who were willing to take unbelievable risks on behalf of the enslaved. The ‘underground railroad’ was a term coined for the route through which escaped slaves were helped to reach relatively safer places like Boston, Canada.. In the book, this has been given a physical form in the shape if an actual underground tunnel…and the book ends on an optimistic note with Cora escaping through the underground tunnel. It is disturbing in many parts, as it reveals what man is capable of doing to his own. One of the things that struck me was the strong Christian faith of the pro- and anti-slavery groups, who could find support in the scriptures for their diametrically opposing stands. It is not unlike some of what we see today, where religion can be used to support opposite sides of the story with equal faith!! All in all an interesting book, which won the Pulitzer and the National award in 2016.

Days without end, looks at another set of human cruelties – here the protagonist, Thomas McNulty,  is a young Irishman or rather boy, as he is only 17 at the start of the book.  He escapes the potato famine which kills his family, and takes a boat to America. The story is told by Tom, and describes the transformation from a raw youth (‘nothing people’ as he describes himself) to the hardened middle aged person who has seen it all – the wars with the tribes (with as much cruelty and inhumanness as the slavers), the civil war with all its contradictions, etc but it is  his friendship with John, a young American he meets during his early days in America, which flows through the story.   They join one of the private armies that help to preserve White domination  over the American tribes, and travel as far west as California. Tom and John also fight on the side of the Union forces against the confederates, are taken prisoners, rescued, go back to their old fighting unit, fight the Indians again…..It is a wide panorama of a story with two parallel but intertwined themes – the  growing love between Tom and John (a true same sex love story with John dressing as a woman), and their love for a rescued Indian girl and the transformation of their commanding office (the Major) for whom Tom feels respect and loyalty,  from a humane soldier, who is driven by his personal tragedies, to a monster like so many others Tom sees around him. The story stretches over two decades, and although the time periods do not overlap, I could almost imagine Cora hiding behind a bush on her northward escape, watching Tom and John being marched South by the Confed soldiers!!

Solar Bones is a contemporary novel, also by an Irish writer. Its greatest challenge is its style – Its 266 pages are just one long sentence – maybe not even that as it does not start with a capital or end with a full stop. After the first few pages, I was wondering how long I could go on – the whole book is a recap of his life by a civil engineer living in a small  Irish town. All the people in his life, and there are not too many of them, and all the major events are recalled in no specific sequence – but as you get to know him, he grows on you and the ordinariness of his life has something to say to you. His relationship with his father as a child, as a young man and his with his son; his courtship and the every day-ness of their marriage, the oh-so different daughter …… it dragged here and there, but the end is a climax.

I started reading Lincoln in the Bardo (George Saunders) as book 3 and am still struggling through it while  the 9th book  I started on 12th was 4321 by Paul Aster. Yesterday the short list was announced – lo and behold none of the 7 books I have finished are on the list. It has the two I am reading and the 4 I have not read – History of wolves (emily Fridlund), Exit West (Mohsin Khan), Elmet (Fiona Mozley) and Autumn (Ali Smith).  I thought that was quite something since I have been selecting on a blinded lottery system!! So I have 4 weeks to complete the list – the winner is to be announced on 18th October.