Gasp.
As I write the title of this blog post, I have to take a deep breath. The word "Best" doesn't sit well with the fiend 2020.
Friends and distant acquaintances alike used last year to read tons of books. I couldn't manage any such feat. 2020 was, reading-wise, a typical PhD year -- some meaningful books interspersed with long gaps in reading.
1. The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen's debut novel, starts in the twilight of the Vietnamese conflict. Our narrator -- and protagonist -- is nameless. As Viet Cong forces descend on Saigon, he describes the state of his lot, the losers, with crackling satire and Catch-22 verve. But the book is so much more. Through the frenetic retreat and exile of a chastened group, almost imperceptibly, the tale becomes a poignant story of a person who is destined to fall between the cracks. Even while seeing the hypocrisies on his side and the other, he cannot escape. He is a deviant and he will be punished.
Nguyen's voice is that of the Vietnamese; it is powerful and unsparing. The hollowness of dominant narratives are shown for what they are. Nguyen makes no concessions and pulls no punches in an entertaining story with a darkly melancholic undertone. Brilliant book.
2. The Anarchy by William Dalrymple
Dalrymple's latest was the best work of history I read all year. I wrote a longish review on Goodreads and the only person to have read it -- liked it at any rate -- happened to be William Dalrymple himself. C'est la vie.
In a world full of people holding steadfast to their extreme convictions and in a time when myth has replaced history as the source of our understanding of the past, William Dalrymple does great service by writing a magisterial and richly informative account of roughly the 100 years of the 18th century in India, a period he calls -- and I concur after reading his book -- the Anarchy.
The East India Company has been widely documented to be the progenitor of the modern joint stock corporation along with its Dutch sibling. In this book, Dalrymple dramatically shows how the EIC is also the ancestor of most corporate wrong-doings and malpractices. In fact, he persuasively argues that the EIC outdid its modern counterparts in a way which seems unlikely to be replicated in its audacity and rapacity. Excessive risk-taking to the point of being systemically too-big-to-fail ultimately leading to a massive bailout of the company. Toxic lobbying. Extracting profit at any cost of dignity and lives. (Leading to events such as the Bengal famine of 1770 killing at least 1.2 million people.) The EIC was there first.
Apart from the commercial history aspect what makes the book remarkable is how Dalrymple ties it up with India's political history. This is not a coincidence and forms the core of the book. Starting from tepid, meek origins when Sir Thomas Roe was at the mercy of the attention and benevolence of Jahangir, through the chaotic disintegration of the Mughal Empire after Aurangzeb's death (and his successor's colourful life), through the intrigue behind the battles of Plassey and Buxar, and then through bruising wars with Mysore and the Marathas, the account of the British slowly but surely tightening their grip over India makes for gripping and disturbing reading.
Dalrymple covers many fascinating characters which are far too many to recount here. His roll list covers the ruthless Robert Clive, the relatively gentler and later beleaguered Warren Hastings, many military commanders, and succeeding Governor Generals. He brings alive the court of the enfeebled Mughals. He induces cringe at the despotic regimes of the usurpers and rulers of local provinces. One laments at the inevitability of fate -- none of the many actors -- the Maratha confederacy, Tipu Sultan, Mirza Najaf Khan -- are able to prevail. What started off as a mercantile organization taking convenient advantage in a pocket of Bengal (because of internal bickering by the powers of the time) culminated in outright military and financial superiority at the close of the eighteenth century. The stage was set for the British Raj.
There is a lot to learn and understand. There is much that evokes despair and horror. Most importantly, any person who has been fed a smooth narrative of any of these actors must reconcile themselves with the nuances of history. One ends up sobered and, hopefully, wiser.
I recommend this book. It's not a book that can be rushed through in a couple of days. But it's well worth reading.
Other notable mentions in the history genre: Pankaj Mishra's From the Ruins of Empire, an immersive history of a motley crew of 19th & 20th century Asian thinkers who were tied together by the mission of rediscovering a place for their battered homelands in a rapidly changing world, and Tony Joseph's Early Indians, a delightful and accessible account of the genetics based history of the people who today inhabit South Asia. The conclusion? Beautifully complicated.
3. Educated by Tara Westover
A reading year is incomplete without reading a good memoir. Educated is the story of a young girl who clawed her way out an abyss of terrifying depth. Born into a family that eschewed all contact with the outside world, surrounded by a paranoid father susceptible to bouts of mania and a mother showing shining resolve but troubling pliancy, scarred by a brother whose violence threatened to destroy her, Tara Westover found a way. Her story only speaks of formal education in the last fourth of the novel when she escapes to college and graduate studies but her true Education is in gaining something more profound: a fierce independence of thought unencumbered by the dictates of familial bonds, or traditional fealties, or the fear of estrangement. Remarkable story.
4. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
I wrote an entire post on Mrs. Dalloway last year. Let me add here this nice piece in a recent issue of The New Yorker. Statutory warning: Woolf's novels are not for the faint of heart or fragile of mind. But they read best when you are either or both of the above.
5. (BONUS) Collective Choice and Social Welfare by Amartya Sen
The big achievement of 2020 turned out to be a glorious book by Amartya Sen originally written in his prime in the 70s. This is an expanded edition of Sen's celebrated monograph supplementing the original with more than 300 pages of wisdom garnered in ensuing years. I wrote a review of it in greater detail, reproduced below:
I am going to make an exception with my rating rule. I typically only give five stars to a book I think everyone should read. I cannot truly say this book is for everyone: it is brilliant and it is incredibly profound but it is also technical and dense. But to give the book any less than 5 stars would be heresy.
Collective Choice and Social Welfare was originally published in 1970 and synthesized Amartya Sen's work in the field of social choice theory, taking its point of departure Kenneth Arrow's famous Impossibility Theorem, but moving well beyond. The original book had a beautiful stylistic experiment: each topic is covered in two chapters. There is an exposition chapter that assimilates the essence of the argument and presents an intuitive narrative to the reader. Followed by its corresponding mathematical counterpart.
Somewhat Technical
Social choice theory is considered a heavily technical field: it is often presented as a part of "mathematical economics." And so, each technical chapter in the book presents results that, among other things, (1) investigate the nature of the axioms behind Arrow's famous result, pointing out their non-basic nature, also understanding the boundaries and contours of the result; (2) compare the requirements of Pareto optimality with classical Liberty; (3) argue for the the possibility and appeal of partial comparability between individual values; (4) investigate theories of justice; (5) look at theories of voting.
All of the above was already present in the 1970 edition. Indeed, the book sparked off entire bodies of research in various domains and laid the foundations for welfare economics. It is also an important reason why Sen won the Nobel Prize in Economics.
It took me a lot of time to complete the original edition. The proofs were often involved and there were a plethora of concepts squeezed into every chapter. But I would hasten to add and, perhaps, hazard to claim, that it was all well worth the effort.
The original book would have been, by itself, a crowning achievement for any formidable intellect. Sen has written another 300 pages in this 2017 edition. The canvas has subtly changed. He assimilates progress in social choice theory for the reader in the 40+ years between the two editions. He provides a scathing critique of rational choice theory and its need for internal consistency of choice. He spends a fair bit of time evaluating various theories of justice. What's remarkable is that his theory flows from his formal mathematical work in social choice and also incorporates the thoughts of an incredible array of philosophers and thinkers even while adding his own originality, for example, in terms of the need for a focus on capabilities, on reasoned discussion, and on the willingness to accept improvements rather than an endless -- possibly impossible -- search for perfection.
There is far too much for me to write about and, to be perfectly honest, I will probably take a long time to absorb the arguments Sen has made in this wonderful book. It represents a large part of his life's work and there is much to learn. And so much more to admire.
Onwards we go. Here's hoping 2021 grants us some much needed relief and joy.
