2023: My year in reading

 

56 was the number this year. Though I tell myself numbers don't matter, the quality does, I always start with the number. The least it does is give me an indication of the amount of time I spent reading and not scrolling through social media feeds.

So what was my reading like, this year? Some disappointments - no poetry at all (what a shame!) and as with every year, not enough classics or travelogues. But I did discover some awesome writers new to me. And I did read some very good translated Indian writing.

So let me start with my favourites, in no particular order:

Fiction:

Benyamin's Goat Days: Takes the cliche of the Malayali in the Gulf and creates a harrowing, cautionary tale of enslavement. A fresh new voice for me.

Ashapurna Devi's The First Promise: The Bengal Renaissance seen from the ground up. Satyabati is a character for the ages - an independent female voice advocating the breaking of tradition and changing the world around her forever, even as she pays a price too dear.

Abraham Verghese's The Covenant of Water: A riveting intergenerational story of a Mar Thoma family in Kerala. Verghese tells a great story that is so evocative of place and character that you forgive him the obvious weakness in social commentary.

Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five: A devastating book that evokes the inhumanity of war through the eyes of someone who lived through Dresden. It is a masterclass in describing trauma with tenderness and grace.

Jerry Pinto's The Education of Yuri: A coming-of-age story in 1980's Bombay. Brings to life both the city and that college-going phase of life beautifully.

Jhumpa Lahiri's Roman Stories: A set of vignettes set in a Rome fraying at the edges and an Italy that is turning right-wing. It's a superb chronicle of the immigrant experience and the impact of racism on the outsider.

Non-fiction/ Memoir:

Ed Yong's An Immense World: Taught me a new word - Umwelt. Yong takes us on a dazzling journey into the perceptual spaces of the various species inhabiting our world. It's a biology lesson that we have not learnt in any biology class. Totally goose-bumpy stuff.

Annie Dillard's The Writing Life: In gorgeous, gorgeous prose, Dillard sets out a manual for living a writing life. Read it just for the breathtaking writing if nothing else. Dillard was a writer I fell in love with, this year (her Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek is another masterpiece I discovered) and I cannot wait to read more of her.

Annie Ernaux's Happening: Another writer I read for the first time and loved. This one is a stark account of Ernaux's experience of getting pregnant as a college student in Catholic France where abortion is still illegal. Some of the imagery stays with you long after you have finished the book. Exteriors is another book of hers I got to read this year and loved as well.

Ambedkar's Annihilation of Caste: A fiery, ublinkered view of the caste system and an argument for the destruction of the sanctity of the Shastras. A must-read for every right-minded Hindu.

Colin Thubron's The Amur River: Old fashioned travel writing that reminds you that there are still places in the world that retain mystery and that do not feature on the gram.

John Hersey's Hiroshima: In a year when Oppenheimer dominated the headlines, it is essential to read this one. A journalist's account of interviewing six survivors of the bomb, it makes clear what the fallout of nuclear war entails.

Michael Schur's How to be Perfect: Distils the writings of the philosophers from Aristotle to Kant to Sartre to Thich Nhat Hahn to
answer current questions of morality. A smart, witty primer on being good.

There were many more I could have called out. Willa Cather's My Antonia and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth were some American classics I got to, and enjoyed. Svetlana Alexievich continued to dominate my Russian reading with her Boys in Zinc, a shocking account of the 'forgotten' war -the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Janice Pariat's gorgeous writing in Everything the Light Touches makes us question, ever so gently, our received notions of progress and development. This was the year I finally got to Douglas Adams and his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - so very clever and funny. K.R. Meera's Qabar was my introduction to this must-read Malayalam writer and it was an intriguing one. Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun taught me about the Nigerian civil war in the way only great fiction can teach us history. Dederer's Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma asked questions on whether you can really separate the art from the artist. Peter Singer's The Life You Can Save provoked, asking if we were doing enough as individuals to lift people up from the bottom of the pyramid.And Woolever's Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography brought a behind-the-scenes look at one of the most compelling personalities of our times.

What does 2024 have in store for me? Each year I resolve to be more intentional in my reading - more classics, more poetry, more translations. But the heart wants what it wants, resolutions be damned. So perhaps it's best I resolve to just wing it, like I do every year.