Moving House
Hey everyone!
I have moved my blog to a new home in 2009 and, as a fresh start, have not migrated any of my content from this one.
Please go over to
and follow my exploits there.
I'll still be on nomadlife regularly and all that but will be updating my blog over there instead
Top 10 Books of 2008 - Second 5
Tracy Chevalier - Girl With A Pearl EarringAn excellent novel by
Tracy Chevalier, published in 2003 it became an instant bestseller and has since been remade into a movie and a play. Inspired by the Dutch Painter
Vermeer's famous
painting of the same name, Chevalier set out to fictionalise the circumstances under which the painting was created including the girl herself, the subject of the painting and protagonist of the novel.
The novel is short but moving, the prose careful and precise and the historical detail accurate, if not deep. It paints an interesting picture of late 17th century Dutch life including the cultural divisions between Catholic and Protestant, and rich and poor.
A short but excellent read.
Zadie Smith - White TeethThe Whitbread Award winning debut novel that turned Zadie Smith into a powerful force in 21st century literature and showed her to be one of the UK's, and the literary world's, brightest new talents.
Smith has a knack for being able to capture the realities of the seemingly mundane characters portrayed in her books and turning them into characters we can identify with, relate to and sympathise with. Her use of the modern vernacular and the, once again, mundane but important details of every day life in British suburbian paints a realistic and very contemporary cultural picture of British life.
Her books are also pretty funny.
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
A modern classic and an amazing book, extremely easy to read and highly recommended to those that want to "get into" classics but haven't yet plucked up the courage or struggled with Dickens/Austen in high school. The book falls under the
"gothic horror" genre and, yes, it's quite horrifying though not in the demons and ghosts way you would expect. I personally found it very unsettling, particularly the ending, and
Wilde dealt well with building a sense of dread throughout the book. I'm not sure what exactly Wilde's overall moral is, given his life (and the repeated accusations of decadence) it would hardly make sense to write a moralistic cautionary tale about overindulgence...
Nick Hornby - High FidelityIf we talk about books that have been influential on modern pop culture then surely High Fidelity must spring to mind. Published by
Nick Hornby in 1995,
the grunge revolution was waning and a new musical era was starting, the return of pop and R&B, plus the coming advent of electronic/techno music. With these cultural trends in mind, we can look at High Fidelity as a last gasp from the alternative/indie scene. We can also look at it as a book that was tremendously influential for the new wave of indie fanatics. I'm sure if followers of
PitchforkMedia had to read a book in their twenties, this would be it.
Having spawned
a film starring John Cusack and even
a Broadway adaptation, the book is now the cornerstone of Nick Hornby's fame. And it is an excellent book, entertaining, witty, hilarious, human and one we can all relate to as it dissects popular music and relationships side-by-side. Hornby has a knack for creating sarcastic loser characters that are somehow irredeemably lovable. If you're looking for a light and breezy but fantastic novel to read this summer (Aussies!) read this.
Haruki Murakami - What I Talk About When I Talk About RunningThose of you that know me well will know that I am a "Murakami nut" or at least someone who loves the author enough to devour everything he's ever written (got the biography by Jay Rubin sitting on my shelf waiting for me now too) so it should come as no great surprise that this book appears in my top 10 list. I did also read another Murakami book this year, his last novel "After Dark" which didn't impress much as it didn't compare favourably to his previous work.
The memoir, "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running" on the other hand was excellent and a welcome departure from his usual fiction/non-fiction. Unsurprisingly, Murakami writes much like his usual protagonists think which just shows that the characters of his fiction are often at least partly autobiographical in nature. His prose is always light but detailed, dismissive of some things and yet obsessive about others, this duality is what, I believe, makes Murakami a great writers. His novels are easy to read and easy to relate to yet are profoundly deep and have many layers (often revealed further upon rereading).
The memoir itself is a short meditation on Murakami's long career of writing superimposed on top of his long pursuit of long-distance running as his main hobby. As Murakami himself says “most of what I know about writing I’ve learned through running every day.” Murakami sees the two activities as inextricably linked, both are endurance activities that require a lot of commitment, mental stamina, preparation and hard work. The most interesting thing about this novel is the deep parallel Murakami draws between the two seemingly very different activities. In fact, if you really read it, the book tells you more about Murakami as a writer than it does as a runner.
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So that concludes my Top 10 for the last year, any comments or any thoughts on the books I've reviewed if you have read them or any recommendations if you have them would be very welcome.
I may post another top-something as I dont think I'm quite done with 2008 yet, the loser that I am.
Labels: literature
Top 10 Books of 2008 - First 5
As I enjoyed doing this last year I'm going to do it again. Top *whatever* lists of 2008 are like the blogging thing you do. It's a good roundup of what happened in the previous year in the blog topic of your choice and also it's guaranteed content for the end of year when nothing much happens (well nothing much apart from
Gaza, but then, what's new right?).
Firstly two disclaimers.
Disclaimer 1, I will not even attempt to put these in any sort of order. I have no idea which one was the best or my favourite or whatever, I enjoyed them all which is why I'm posting about them.
Disclaimer 2,
The Holy Qur'an, though it was something I read over the last year, is not in contention. I don't consider holy books to be on the same level or in the same category as mere fiction/non-fiction. Reading
The Qur'an was an amazing experience and for sure I learned a lot but I would not disrespect it by putting it alongside Nick Hornby (no offence Nick!) in a year-end list. It is quite simply in a category of its own.
I have no idea if anyone even still reads this thing considering how sporadic my content has been over the past year (though I guess it's always been a matter of fits and starts for me). I have resolved to blog more and write more in 2009 as one of my New Year's Resolutions (I have 10, as to whether I have the courage to post them is another matter... let's see...) but if you should happen to chance across this post, please do comment with any comments or opinions on these books, if you've also read any of them, or any others you care to share or recommend.
So without further ado.
Naguib Mahfouz - Adrift on the Nile
Adrift on the Nile, was lent to me by Marwa
and was the first Mahfouz book that I had the pleasure of being able to read (and only so far, I hope to read more soon, I do have one sitting on my desk at home, also gifted by Marwa, I'm sorry I haven't read it yet) and it was fantastic. In a short novel, Mahfouz effortlessly evokes Nasser's new Egypt, a cast of characters all seemingly drowning in the apathy that took hold of the middle-class/intelligentsia of Egypt at this time.
The congregation meets regularly over the sharing of shisha with hashish in it as they cannot stand the hypocricy and lack of sophistication in the Government of Egypt and modern Egyptian life. They smoke to forget and their conversations prove to be as interesting as anything Tarantino ever wrote. An excellent book and there has also been a film made - Mahfouz in collaboration with the director Hussein Kamal, but it's not easy to get hold of (as it was banned when it was released, in the era of Sadat).
Alain de Botton - Essays in Love
This is not my first time reading
de Botton and I became a fan of his when I read his
Consolations of Philosophy l
ast year. This book was just as accessible and also more substantial because, unlike Consolations, it wasn't attempting to deal with a million things at the same time. It was simply about love, and not just love in all its broad glory but specifically human romantic relationships. In the book, de Botton chronicles an (apparently) fictional relationship and all of its ups and downs, from first meeting to eventual end.
De Botton's analysis of all of the regular emotions that we normally go through in relationships is remarkable and many people will be able to deeply and easily relate to how De Botton thinks and writes. Once again, clever, accessible philosophy from Mr. De Botton. I am impressed.
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
McCarthy's
The Road is a
post-apocalyptic tale describing a journey taken by a father and his young son over a period of several months, across a landscape blasted years before by an unnamed cataclysm that destroyed civilization and, apparently, most life on earth. The novel was awarded the
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2006
James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction.
I found the novel to be utterly gripping, one of those it's-freaking-me-out-but-i-cant-put-it-down page-turners. If we're talking about books in which you get lost and seemingly wake up from a dream with the room spinning around you when you close them, this is certainly one. McCarthy's prose is simple but beautiful and evocative. His post-apocalyptic landscape reeks of a now seemingly inevitable future for our doomed planet. Not for the faint of heart and certainly not a "light read" but utterly amazing.
A film is now in production starring Viggo Mortensen.
Sa'adat Hasan Manto - Black Margins
Though he is very well known in his native Pakistan, along with the rest of the Indian Sub-Continent, Manto does not enjoy such prominence in the West, which is a real shame. Rashna introduced me to him, and Saba later gushed of his brilliance, and after having read the book, I do understand what all the fuss is about.
Manto is a short story writer, and although I have not traditionally been a fan of short stories, he's up there with Jhumpa Lahiri as my favourite short story writer. His shorts are powerful in that they do not beat around any sort of bushes. They go directly to the heart of the matter, and in Manto's case more often than not it's the heart of the bloodshed unleashed during the Partition of India in 1947. Partition was an event of such cataclysmic proportions that it has been written about and discussed countless times and in countless forms. Manto holds his own and has his own place in these after-the-fact discussions and he deserves respect because he does not gloss over the gory details. He does not fall victim to the Indian tendency to selectively forget certain things as it is best to not to bring them up again. The pain, the absurdity and the sheer misery of Partition is all here, fragmented and real.
Rohinton Mistry - A Fine Balance
Another fine lesser known author from the sub-continent,
Rohinton Mistry did not achieve any kind of real fame in the West until this novel was featured on
Oprah's Book Club. Despite this feature, and despite him being easily available at Borders in Austraila, his books arent exactly flying off the shelves which is a real shame.
This is because, A Fine Balance in particular, is exactly the sort of novel that Western audiences would love. It is soaked in the pain, love, life and humanity of India, and of Bombay. Considering how much readers have loved
Shantaram, a similarly sprawling and dramatic, yet immensely accessible, picture of life in Bombay, this book should be a best seller.
What sets Mistry apart from his post-colonial dramatic contemporaries in the sub-continent is his amazing ability to get inside the heads of his protagonists. For example, A Fine Balance has a cast of characters which includes a pair of impoverished lower-caste tailors that hail from a small Indian village. I have never seen an author seemingly understand the impoverished masses of India and the way they think better than Mistry. Mistry humanises them, gives them a role far more prominent than that of porters and cab drivers in Shantaram, they are not merely side-pieces here to amuse the reader while he follows the adventures of the main character, they are real flesh and blood.
Although the novel is set in an unnamed 'city by the sea' it is quite clearly referring to Mistry's hometown of Bombay and is set specifically in the time of
Indira Gandhi's National Emergency. The narrative is rich in the intricacies of Indian life, including that of the
Parsi community, and is heavy in political undertones critical of the Emergency time period and its absurdities. Although many writers have successfully tackled the absurdity and beauty of life in an Indian megaopolis, none have done it quite this well and quite this accessibly. This book is an absolute must read.
Labels: literature
The situation in Mumbai last week has gathered a lot of press and understandably all eyes are on the government of India as to what sort of response they'll be able to come up with. India is a democracy that has a history of kicking out incumbent governments, understandably so most of the country has a skeptical attitude to its politicians but kicking out incumbents in favour of opponents that are just as compromised has never been an effective solution and so the struggle continues.
It would be silly to think that LK Advani's BJP would be any better at dealing with the terrorist threat than Singh & Gandhi's Congress Party. The BJP, if anything, has a history of fanning the flames of terrorism. LK Advani's presence and involvement in the destruction of the Babri mosque in Gujarat in 1992 and the parties
hindutva (roughly translated as Hinduism, it is an ideology of Hindu Nationalism) politics is doing nothing to unite the country or to bring its sizeable muslim minority (120m) in from the cold. Let's be clear, although it has been claimed that the 10 gunmen that terrorised Mumbai were from Pakistan, let us not forget the spate of other bombings that has occurred in India this year. We're talking about Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Delhi, Bangalore, etc... all the work of an local Indian group known as the Indian Mujahideen. This is home-grown terrorism of the worst order and the real danger for India lies not in what comes from across the border but in its own disaffected Muslim population. 120m malcontents with Indian passports is a recipe for a civil war and the BJP's
hindutva (along with their allies like the Shiv Sena) is no solution to it.
On Pakistan, Manmohan Singh has opted for a policy of support for Asif Ali Zardari's democratically-elected government which is most certainly a better option than war. Singh knows that if he were to engage Zardari in a military conflict it would mean Pakistan pulls its troops out of the North-West Frontier Province and the border areas with Afghanistan, given that these are the number one terrorist hotbeds in India, it would not be a wise move for either Pakistan or India at this stage, nor would a costly cross-border war be a good idea in this economic climate. Singh also knows that weakening Zardari's government by undermining it diplomatically will also not do any good, Zardari may be weak but he's India's only real hope in Pakistan at the moment.
Zardari is showing promising signs, his government is finally shutting down the offices of
Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the so-called philanthropic front organisation for the outlawed Lakshar-e-Taiba, the latter being the terrorist outfit supposedly responsible for the Mumbai attacks. However it will take a lot more work to reverse decades of backing by Pakistan's largely independent and powerful military and intelligence services. The problem with Zardari, of course, is that like his compatriot Karzai in Afghanistan, though to a much lesser extent, he is only a civil servant with a position title... not really someone with real power in Pakistan.
India should not expect either that Zardari will agree to hand over Pakistani nationals, whatever they have been accused of, to India. That would be political suicide for Zardari. People in Pakistan are already skeptical of his incredibly friendly (on a historical basis at least) attitude to India, so he is treading a fine line as it is.
It will be interesting to see what the Obama administration will do bolster Zardari and to improve the political situation in Pakistan. Hopefully they will take on a less military approach than the Bush administration and work with the grassroots in the country, bombing the crap out of it will not solve anything. Only improving law & order and governance will. Obama has repeatedly stated that he is looking for an integrated, regional solution to the problem of Afghanistan, Pakistan and India and depending on the way this would be implemented, it sounds like the way to go. Unfortunately it would not be easy as diplomatically relations between these countries are still strained.
But the focus for India should be at home, the Indian Mujahideen are proof of that and although their methods were not so sophisticated and not so brazen as those of Mumbai last week, and though the Government claims to have dismanteld their organisation... they represent the real danger for India. One would expect that there would be a breaking point for the multitudes of largely unedcuated, empoverished and isolated muslims in India... and that breaking point will not be pretty.
Labels: india, pakistan
The National covers the latest round of staggered voting in Kashmir and asks an interesting question. How do we reconcile the voter turnout in Kashmir against the peoples' repeated calls for
azaadi (independence)? The National asks people at the polls with varying results but one man, Mr Bhat, a Patelbagh paddy farmer, hits the nail on the head:
“The mainstream politicians cheat people and among the separatists there are no good leaders,” he said. “[Politicians’] children are studying in another country, in the US, but look at ours — they have no education, no future. What kind of leadership is that?”George Bush has also embarked on
a farewell tour of Iraq, and has two shoes thrown at him by a man at a press conference.
The journalist sitting in the third row jumped up, shouting: “It is the farewell kiss, you dog,” and threw his shoes one after the other towards Mr Bush. Mr al Maliki made a protective gesture towards the US president, who was not hit. The farewell kiss indeed, Bush is touring the country after the surge of around 30,000 troops last year seems to have provided a marked improvement in the security situation. Only time will tell, however, whether a conflict that has claimed the lives of over 4,000 US soldiers and tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraqis (depending on who's estimates you believe) will find a lasting peace any time soon.
Labels: india, iraq, kashmir, world happenings
The Horror of Paulo Coelho
Labels: literature
Top 5 Songs of the Week:
1. Om Shanti Om - Ajab Si
2. Dus - Dus Bahaane
3. Ken Hirai - Aika
4. Бумбокс - Бета-Каротин
5. 周杰倫 - In THe Name of the Father
Top 5 Songs of the Week:
1. Rufus Wainwright - Instant Pleasure
2. Salaam Namaste - Salaam Namaste
3. Fanaa - Chand Sifarsh
4. The Smiths - Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want
5. The Darjeeling Limited - Les Champs Elysees
Labels: music
