Best Books of 2023

Tick tock. It's March 2024. The weeks are zooming past. 36 episodes to the end of Bleach. Won the Premier League with Nottingham Forest at World Class Level. Have a conference next week. Feel like going back home. 

2023 was a spectacular year with books. I re-read a few favourites yes but joy oh joy I found new books I loved. Seeing how badly 2024 has begun on this count, I find it therapeutic to share the best books from last year.

Yes, I did not finish this blog post. It's 11th December 2024 as I write this. Semester has ended, grading is done. Projects linger. Deadlines lurk.

It's embarrassing I didn't write up this post. 

Here's the list.

1. Severance by Ling Ma

It's a feature of growing up that you start finding authors who speak to your generation. Most of these books won't be eternal classics. But they can be fun, relatable, giving you company without commitment.

Severance has one of the best opening pages I've read in a recent novel. It grips you instantly.

The book is a satire on the centrality of work in modern capitalism. The job. The daily commute. The daily stream of emails and meetings and the self-validation that comes from doing them. And the idea of leisure and relaxation that comes about only from the absence of work.

Candace Chen, the protagonist, is the child of immigrant parents. She displays outward recklessness and a veneer of freedom but holds on to the pragmatism of first-generation immigrants; she cannot look past the importance of work and of earning money in a world where not having either means a life of curtailed freedoms. She wants to be an artist but accepts a role in a publishing company in New York, a mind-numbing job where she nevertheless grows in stature and position.

But then disaster strikes. The world is hit by a pandemic. It starts from China but slowly takes a hold over the entire world. This infection starts killing off people in the most insidious way.

Hold on, you say, and flip to the first couple of pages of the book.

When was this novel written? - 2018!

Readers of Severance would find the novel prescient in many ways of the time that was to come in our own world. But I digress. The insidious nature of the disease: it is irrevocable. The victim ultimately becomes "fevered." They become living zombies but in a macabre way. The victim only wishes to repeat their most common daily activity. On and on. Without stopping to rest. Without caring about their depleting health. If you're a taxi driver, all you do when fevered is to keep driving. If you're a salesperson, you keep folding and arranging the clothes in your boutique.

But what you do when fevered is not so simple. The mindless repetition of an activity -- and the actual death of the conscious individual -- in the diseased is an allusion to work itself. But that's not all we keep going back to. Our deepest fondest memories draw us back too. Who hasn't wished to be back in a time when they could relive their childhood, or the activities that they loved the most, once? Shen Fever -- the name of the disease -- can hijack these memories too. In the novel, Candace joins a bunch of individuals who escape being infected. Why is not clear. Yet deep nostalgia threatens them and makes them vulnerable to Shen Fever.

There is memory enforced by the rigmarole of daily work. There is memory from our deepest most cherished moments. The disease seems to hijack either pathway as it tears through humanity.

I really liked the book. I have only touched on one theme in this note but there are others: about the huge costs of leaving your community and immigrating; about office politics; about music; and many more.

2. Middlemarch by George Eliot

I wrote a long blog post on this one. Middlemarch is a great book. It's a modern novel with possibly one of the first humanist treatment of a story. I enjoyed it tremendously.

3. Science of Interstellar by Kip Thorne

This one was the surprise for me. I first saw the book in 2016 on a PhD classmate's apartment book shelf. And I had wondered ever since. How good could it be? Turns out it's fabulous. Interstellar stops being a Christopher Nolan project in this book and very much a Kip Thorne project. Thorne's original aim was to push for a movie that was as close to actual physics as a big-ticket movie project could ever be. The most engrossing chapters are where he explains why the blackhole Gargantua looks the way it does. Some chapters are genuinely heavy and demand re-reads. It's all exquisitely written. 

The funny bit? He doesn't say anything about love traveling through the brane like gravity, as in the movie. Forget a Nobel winning physicist, no science nerd would dare add "love" to all this heavy-lifting. But that's what makes Nolan a genius movie-maker -- balk at the love stuff all you want, it's what brought the movie to the masses, adding an additional level of spirituality beyond that induced by awe in how the universe works.

4. Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes

Massively underrated in my opinion. Elizabeth Finch is a professor at a continuing education college. The narrator, Neil, is a student there, a person who wants to get back to college many years into adult life. Ms Finch is impressive and mysterious. Her life reveals little until the narrator finds himself reading her most intimate work. It leads him to an obsessive study of Julian the Apostate. No really, a full third of the novel is devoted to Emperor Julian. It's a cerebral novel. I am a sucker for these kinds of books.

5. David Copperfield

This would probably not have been mentioned on this list if I had written it at the beginning of 2024. But then I read Demon Copperhead and I disliked it so much I want to emphasize how life-altering and simply many orders more extraordinary Dickens' books are. This is what I wrote after my last re-read.

I have always believed that I possess the uncanny ability to pick the book best suited for the events and ordeals I am going through in the moment. It was in October, less than three months after a heart-rending personal tragedy, that I picked David Copperfield, a favourite from my teenage years.

How can I describe the power of this greatest of novels? I took my time to read it, as one must when reading a classic. I marvelled at Dickens' powers of observations. I stopped midway a paragraph, turning my head to the sky, sighing over a particularly poignant moment; or reflecting at the depth of a line. I laughed at the grandiose confidence of Mr Micawber, a comic character beyond comparison. I felt David's earnestness and resolve to cut down his forest of hardships. And I was transported to his maudlin state of mind when he fell in love.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, what I wanted finally happened. It happened unannounced. The novel spoke to me. It spoke directly to my heart. It gave me the kind of friendship only a great book can give. I felt vindicated in my choice and in my presentiment.

I can do a deep analysis of the book. I can tell you about memory. Or about Dickens' genius in authentically conveying each phase of Copperfield's life, through his thoughts, reasoning, and actions. Or about the unforgettable cast of characters, the emotions they draw out from the reader, and their memorable lines. Or about the gentle wisdom it offers the reader, wisdom from experience (tajurba).

It is all for naught. I cannot do justice to the greatness of the novel. What I can say is that there are only a few books I will carry with me everywhere, as long as I can read. And one of them will surely be David Copperfield.

Closure. I can list the best books of 2024 now. 

Middlemarch

A book review written a year after the book was read is not a review per se. I cannot bank on a spontaneous rush of thoughts. I no longer have the ephemeral influence of the author's style on my writing. The role of memory is now paramount. I have my dog-ears and annotations of course. And copious notes. The novel in question though is Middlemarch. This is going to be a waste of time. 

Still, I am heavily jet-lagged in super hot Delhi (45C/115F). We tried to get the air conditioner in the main bedroom to work. The repair men changed a filter. Then they replaced the condenser. I am very sure I inhaled some coolant gas while they explained to me, at the close of day, that the compressor is not working either and needs to be changed. So no AC. Maybe today they'll fix it.

Like all great novels (what a cliched start; face-palm), Middlemarch is many novels in one. In recent years, it has been listed as one of the greatest novels ever written. A recent biography of Marry Ann Evans, aka George Eliot, by Claire Carlisle recounts how mid-Victorian society found her life scandalous and unacceptable. For over 25 years, Eliot lived with a married man, the journalist and scientist GH Lewes, whom she called her husband. When Lewes died, she married -- this time officially -- a man many years her junior. As Carlisle puts it, everyone obsessed about her and "The Marriage Question." 

The marriage question is certainly one of the themes in Middlemarch. Set in 1830s England, Middlemarch is a small pastoral town. Dorothea Brooke is a young idealist. She is fiercely ambitious but frustratingly constrained by the conservative era she inhabits.

Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion.

Despite the "meanness of opportunity," Dorothea wants to make a difference in her community. Marriage may be the only way out, the only way she can pursue her goals, to find someone who supports her endeavours in a patriarchal world.

She thinks that Edward Casaubon, a distressingly archetypical academic, will be the right husband. Mr. Casaubon who is a few decades older seems erudite and in control of the higher arts. Surely, Dorothea could assist Casaubon's grand pursuits. Not as an equal, that would be impossible. But she could help?

Dorothea's marriage is ultimately a failure. Casaubon has no time for Dorothea. He is insecure. A failed academic. He is supposedly out to finish his magnum opus but Dorothea gradually realises he will never get it done.

These minor monumental productions were always exciting to Mr Casaubon: digestion was made difficult by the interference of citations, or by the rivalry of dialectical phrases ringing against each other in his brain.

Edward Casaubon's Sisyphean pursuits contrast with those of Tertius Lydgate, a freshly minted doctor. He embodies the age of science and reason.  He has spent years in France learning the most recent advances in medicine. His commitment to the scientific method falls afoul of the medical orthodoxy in Middlemarch, who subscribe to the necessity of prescribing many pills to satiate the expectations of the patient.

One of the facts quickly rumored was that Lydgate did not dispense drugs. This was offensive both to the physicians whose exclusive distinction seemed infringed on, and to the surgeon-apothecaries with whom he ranged himself; and only a little while before, they might have counted on having the law on their side against a man who without calling himself a London-made M.D. dared to ask for pay except as a charge on drugs. But Lydgate had not been experienced enough to foresee that his new course would be even more offensive to the laity; and to Mr. Mawmsey, an important grocer in the Top Market, who, though not one of his patients, questioned him in an affable manner on the subject, he was injudicious enough to give a hasty popular explanation of his reasons, pointing out to Mr. Mawmsey that it must lower the character of practitioners, and be a constant injury to the public, if their only mode of getting paid for their work was by their making out long bills for draughts, boluses, and mixtures.

Yet Lydgate remains a defiant idealist. He is incredibly ambitious and seeks deep discoveries that will grant him eternal glory. He does not want to marry because that could be an unnecessary distraction. He is confident his self-discipline will guard him from indiscretions. Love is for weaker men.

Lydgate capitulates spectacularly. He not only falls in love with someone, the very pretty Rosamund Vincy, he deludes himself he can handle the inherent conflict between his wife's expectations for a comfortable, luxurious life, with his own ascetic desire to throw himself into his work. Another failed marriage. 

The marriage question thus comes to haunt the novel. Dorothea and Lydgate are stuck. A passage encapsulates what I think the novel tries to achieve.

We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes to fall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally parted from her. Is it due to excess of poverty or of stupidity that we are never weary of describing what King James called a woman's 'makdom and her fairness', never weary of listening to the twanging of the old Troubadour strings, and are comparatively uninterested in that other kind of 'makdom and fairness' which must be wooed with industrious thought and patient renunciation of small desires? In the story of passion, too, the development varies: sometimes it is the glorious marriage, sometimes frustration and final parting. And not seldom the catastrophe is bound up with the other passion, sung by the Troubadours. For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their  vocations in a. daily course determined for them in much the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be shaped after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardour in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardour of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly. Nothing in the world more subtle than their process of gradual change! In the beginning they inhaled it unknowingly; you and I may have sent some of our breath towards infecting them, when we uttered our conforming falsities or drew our silly conclusions; or perhaps it came from the vibrations of a woman's glance.

As a man, imagining Lydgate and what he would or wouldn't think comes fairly intuitively to me. It's with Dorothea that I remember first grappling with the idea (I think was 15) that women characters could be described very differently by women authors. Dorothea comes to terms with her situation with compromise and resilience. She is willing to change her natural instincts -- to an extent -- for Casaubon. But she is also silently resisting. There is no grand rescue mission she undertakes. There are no sudden moves. She is working at life, she can't save her marriage, she handles it with innate maturity. I can certainly imagine the trajectory Dorothea takes if I were writing (a very sub-par novel). The subtle difference lies in the punches she pulls and the way she thinks through them.

The lives of the upper class intersect in a town as small as Middlemarch. She gets to know Lydgate. Will Ladislaw, Casaubon's cousin, enters the scene too. Ladislaw is an artist with no heart in art, a wanderer who lives on Casaubon's support, and who is driven by emotions as much if not more than sense. Dorothea is exasperated by any speculation about her friendship with men.

'I am not aware of it. And to me it is one of the most odious things in a girl's life, that there must always be some supposition of falling in love coming between her and any man who is kind to her, and to whom she is grateful. I should have thought that I, at least, might have been safe from all that. I have no ground for the nonsensical vanity of fancying everybody who comes near me is in love with me.'

How Dorothea uses her agency is what defines the story. I would think that Dorothea's decisions wouldn't be wholly satisfactory from a feminist perspective. Given Eliot's own life, and the bold decisions she took through it, and the force of her erudition and humanism, it is interesting to ask why. I think part of the reason is that the novel is a work of some pessimism, a portrayal of how things tend to come to be rather than an active normative account.

Middlemarch is a complex novel about idealism, marriage, and class divides. It has romance and tragedy. Scandals too. Like all eternally great works of literature, it deserves multiple re-reads. 

'That depends. To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion --- a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.'

Quote of the Week XX

 "We work in the dark -- we do what we can -- we give what we have."

~ Henry James,  The Middle Years

Quote of the Week XIX

It is necessary to handle yourself better when you have to cut down on food so you will not get too much hunger-thinking. Hunger is good discipline and you learn from it. And as long as they do not understand it you are ahead of them. Oh sure, I thought, I'm so far ahead of them now that I can't afford to eat regularly. It would not be bad if they caught up a little.

I knew I must write a novel. But it seemed an impossible thing to do when I had been trying with great difficulty to write paragraphs that would be the distillation of what made a novel. It was necessary to write longer stories now as you would train for a longer race. When I had written a novel before, the one that had been lost in the bag stolen at the Gare de Lyon, I still had the lyric facility of boyhood that was as perishable and deceptive as youth was. I knew it was probably a good thing that it was lost, but I knew too that I must write a novel. I would put it off though until I could not help doing it. I was damned if I would write one because it was what I should do if we were to eat regularly. When I had to write it, then it would be the only thing to do and there would be no choice. Let the pressure build. In the meantime I would write a long story about whatever I knew best.

~ Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

Quote of the Week XVIII

"True to oneself! Which Self? Which of my -- well, really that's what it looks like coming to -- hundreds of selves? For what with complexes and reactions and vibrations and reflections, there are moments when I feel I am nothing but the small clerk of some hotel without a proprietor, who has all his work cut out to enter the names and hand the keys to the wilful guests..."

~ Katherine Mansfield

Best Books of 2022

I know you've been waiting in desperate agony for this list to come out. You stopped buying books since December, awaiting guidance.

I thought a lot about this list. Unlike previous years, I did not read a book in 2022 that transformed my life. In past years, there had been a book -- that book -- that drove me to write this blog post. This year's post seemed to be under threat but for the wonderful gift of procrastination I have in no small measure.

So let's get on with it. The best books I read last year, along with some thoughts on discovering new authors, thanks to the generous recommendations of my friends.

1. The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee

This is the second SM book to find a place on my annual lists, and it's really not hard to see why. I wrote a long blog post on the book almost exactly a year ago. While The Emperor of Maladies was a one of a kind book oozing with style and substance but also a striking sense of humanity, The Gene is one of many excellent books -- this space is relatively crowded -- talking about how the gene encodes the stuff of life and its infinite expressions, and the fascinating cast of contributors who got us here. It's essential reading especially in a post-covid world where the use of technologies like PCR tests and m-RNA vaccines is ubiquitous, the latter if you are privileged to be in a developed country. Mukherjee's latest book, The Song of the Cell is out and sounds like a sequel but I don't think I'll be reading it for another couple of years at least.

2. Lost History by Michael Hamilton Morgan

The trope narrative goes like this -- there were the brilliant Greeks followed by the pugnacious and practical Romans. And then, darkness. The world went through The Dark Ages when there was no science, no progress, and no development. After this long period of nothingness came the Renaissance. One thing led to the next -- we had the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and so on to the magnificent days of multiple OTTs.

Except that is not true and conveniently omits at least 5 to 6 centuries of advancements in science, engineering, medicine, philosophy, literature in the lands from Spain and northwestern Africa all the way to Central Asia, from Seville to Samarkand. Lost History is a fantastic book that offers an engrossing introduction to the intellectual richness of this world. I wrote a review of the book here.

3. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

This is the best JRRT book, no question about it. An eternal classic and a constant source of joy and amusement. I doubt I'll be re-reading LOTR or The Silmarillion any time soon, if ever, but I can't help myself whenever my eyes catch the brilliant opening to the book,

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”

4. When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut

A strange book. Labatut writes without sentiment and emotion. His meditations involve real individuals from science and mathematics and then he weaves in threads of fiction over a back bone of actual facts. The result is an austere and disturbing incursion into the madness of great scientific discovery. Friends and family are routinely thrown by the curb-side and people's lives are threatened and taken in this pursuit. The end aim isn't as clear as fame or fortune. Many times it's neither. The closest analogue I can think of is the eponymous Hill House in Shirley Jackson's famous novel -- the house chooses who it wants to absorb. Once it does, there is no reason. The allure is irresistible. Resistance is futile.

5. A Burning by Megha Majumdar

Megha Majumdar's debut novel is fast-paced and packed with wry commentary on India. Naturally then, many Indians do not like the novel. I call it The White Tiger problem. If you exoticise India that's cool. We love orientalism. What we cannot stand is incisive dark comedy that pushes us out from our comfort zones. Jivan, a young woman, is but another victim of a larger change in Indian society that seeks aggression and vengeance. Displaced from her village, growing up in a slum, she is liked as long as she conforms. Till she conforms, she is an example of all that is right in the country. But she becomes a deviant -- out of sheer bad luck -- and then...well, then she has to face the consequences. The book isn't a classic but it's a pretty good read.

So these were the best books I read last year. I also got introduced to some new names, partly out of my desire to read more books by U.S. authors. The books have a different cadence and many of them are at least partly based in New York so it's nice to see familiar and not so familiar reflections on the great city. I read Lore Segal's Her First American which tackles the Jewish immigrant's experience in the 1950s and her romance with a Black journalist of some renown. It was a good book. Lore Segal lives in Upper West Side and I am pretty sure I have seen her a couple of times in parties, a smiling diminutive figure, with a walker (she's over 90), that somehow helps me imagine Ilka Weissnix, the protagonist in the novel. I also read The Topeka School by Ben Lerner and I have no idea why he's rated so highly. I haven't read his poetry -- he's a well-regarded poet -- but on the basis of this novel, I was not impressed.

Finally, a shout-out to Anirudh Kanisetti's absorbing history, Lords of the Deccan, that was a vivid account of the great Chalukyas, Rashtrakutas, and the Cholas; and Rukmini S.'s Whole Numbers and Half-Truths, a recommended read if you need good data to talk about India's problems, both real and under-discussed, and false and over-blown.

Quote of the Week XVII

'MY DEAR YOUNG FRIEND,

    'The die is cast -- all is over. Hiding the ravages of care with a sickly mask of mirth, I have not informed you, this evening, that there is no hope of the remittance! Under these circumstances, alike humiliating to endure, humiliating to contemplate, and humiliating to relate, I have discharged the pecuniary liability contracted at this establishment, by giving a note of hand, made payable fourteen days after date, at my residence, Pentonville, London. When it becomes due, it will not be taken up. The result is destruction. The bolt is impending, and the tree must fall.

    'Let the wretched man who now addresses you, my dear Copperfield, be a beacon to you through life. He writes with that intention, and in that hope. If he could think himself of so much use, one gleam of day might, by possibility, penetrate into the cheerless dungeon of his remaining existence -- though his longevity is, at present (to say the least of it), extremely problematical.

    'This is the last communication, my dear Copperfield, you will ever receive

               'From

                    'The

                        'Beggared Outcast,

                            'WILKINS MICAWBER.'

~ David Copperfield, Charles Dickens