As usual, my last year’s reading was split between deliberate explorations and guilty pleasures. The thrillers, murder mysteries, and crime fiction were my airport reading and guilty pleasures, feeding the inner child who grew up on comics and superhero books. But many others were deliberate choices, and those are worthy of reflection.

The deliberate selections reflect my acknowledgment of the limited time I have and the many authors and themes I am yet to explore. These selections also reflect a rebellion against reading patterns and comfort zones, pushing me to explore what is less likely to find a place in my reading list.

Breakneck by Dan Wang was a very deliberate pick and turned out to be one of the best books I have read on China. I have been following Dan Wang and his annual letters (superb expositions of long-form writing that present his layered observations on China) on his blog. This is essential reading for anyone who wants an informed, honest, and insightful commentary on China’s rise as an economic and manufacturing powerhouse.

Ian McEwan and Italo Calvino are two authors who have been on my reading list, and this year I managed to pick one book from each. Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Amsterdam were the two books waiting for me, but I picked up his latest, What We Can Know. The blurb and reviews drew me in. This literary page-turner takes us to a post-climate apocalyptic world and provides commentary from the lens of future generations. It overpowered my hesitation to pick up dystopian fiction (I have read quite a few recently) and this book became my first Ian McEwan book.

I am not sure how I ended up picking Invisible Cities out of the three Italo Calvino books on my reading list. It gives a glimpse of what Calvino can produce, though it is not the typical entry point to his work. Considered a masterpiece for its structure and innovative narration, it is his meditation on modern society and cities, but not the most readable Calvino. Still, there is something quietly powerful about spending time in cities that exist only in language and imagination. I need to read another book by him to know his work better.

I don’t usually read travelogues, but I have read quite a few. What I love about them is how different authors connect with the same places, cultures, and rituals, and how their reflections bring out unique dimensions we often miss. Travelogues often emerge from an immersive interplay between the physical world and an individual’s worldview and experiences. The same roads, buildings, and cities get transformed by the observer’s unique perspective and accumulated experiences. Aatish Taseer’s liminal existence brings that interplay vividly to life in A Return to Self. Gay, born out of wedlock, son of a Hindu journalist and Pakistani politician, anti-establishment (he also authored the controversial Time magazine cover story on our Prime Minister), his liminal positioning entitles him to offer a unique perspective and commentary on Turkey, Spain, Mexico, and obviously India. Interestingly, Invisible Cities can easily be read as a travelogue of cities that don’t exist.

Mother Mary Comes to Me was an automatic inclusion in my list even before the book was released. I grew up immersed in the extraordinary story of a debut author securing half a million pounds for her first book and becoming a celebrity even for those who never read books and had no idea what the Booker Prize was, all before I got my hands on a borrowed copy of The God of Small Things. I witnessed her fame, notoriety, rebellion, and controversies. Her memoir promised to satisfy my curiosity about how that book came to be and what happened to her afterward and to some extent it did.

I also reread Siddhartha after almost two decades. The two decades have changed me, and the context of reading the book has changed. Interestingly, the book itself expands on the changing nature of our experience and the world around us. To paraphrase the saying that you cannot step in the same river twice: you cannot read the same book twice. The book is not the same, and the reader is not the same. The first time I read this book, it was one of the few books with me in the hinterland of a Francophone African nation. Over the years, the book had been reduced to an entry in my reading list. This time it was a deliberate choice, and now I am making a list of books I should reread. We must reread the books that we love (or we hate).

Non-Fiction

  • The Teaching of Ramana Maharishi in His Own Words
  • The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • When Things Fall Apart by Prema Chodron
  • A Return to Self by Aatish Taseer
  • Breakneck by Dan Wang
  • Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy
  • How To Think Life Socrates by Donald J Robertson
  • Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us by Manu Joseph
  • Help by Oliver Burkeman
  • Tiny Experiments by Anne Laure Le Cunff
  • Living Democracy by Tim Hollo

Fiction

  • Invisible Helix by Keigo Higashino
  • Nemesis by Gregg Hurwitz
  • The Final Curtain by Keigo Higashino
  • The Informationist by Taylor Stevens
  • In Too Deep by Lee Child
  • Rock Paper Scissors by Alice Feeney
  • A Spell of Good Things by Ayobami Adebayo
  • The Housemaid by Frieda McFadden
  • The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown
  • Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
  • Naukar Ki Kameez by Vinod Kumar Shukla
  • Pratinidhi Kahaniyan of Uday Prakash
  • Siddhartha by Hermen Hesse
  • What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

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